Yannis Livadas:
The sardonic pilgrimage of Jack Kerouac
The
works of Jack Kerouac constitute a rich branch of the American literary
tradition, which through the craftiness of such important writers, like Kerouac
himself, managed to escape the subsidence in the swamp of intellectual,
expressional, pompousness. Ergo, Jack Kerouac’s books do not amount to a
shadowy and somehow pointless incident that merely supported the matured
American “underground”; which had worn away with a more dramatic intensity than
the one through which it was constructed in late ‘50s. Jack Kerouac was a
unique experimentalist, a writer on the verge, and he is increasingly
recognized as one among the very best in the century.
After
the termination of countless, equally essential and meaningless, frictions of
modern and postmodern literature; the works of the Beat writers are nowadays
widely considered as the most influential phenomenon of the twentieth century,
overshadowing the Lost Generation and that versatile stream of American postmodernism.
Whether this distinction is infused into one broader misconceived idea of
literary backlash, or to what extent this same distinction is purely a
postmodern one, is something that would require an extra period of intense
investigation in order to be conclusive. The influence and the uniqueness of
Jack Kerouac, however, in what is called Beat and postmodern literature is
undoubtedly fundamental, integral.
Jack
Kerouac overtook with summary yet confident procedures the myopic nature of the
discordant aesthetic aspirations, the extensive
imbroglio that American culture was burrowing through in the ‘40s, the
‘50s and, mainly, the ‘60s, providing the most expansive and transparent
literary language since Walt Whitman.
To
the many previously unpublished works of Jack Kerouac appearing lately in
consecutive editions—with admittedly uneven importance—is now added the
excellent La vie est d’hommage
(Boréal 2016). This new volume gathers the original French writings of Jack
Kerouac. Kerouac readers already knew of his fondness for peppering his novels
with French sentences, the patois of his French-Canadian family in New England,
but since the opening of the Kerouac Archive in 2006, part of the Henry W. and
Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature of the New York
Public Library, we are now aware that Kerouac had also composed and filed away
many French texts. Only now had authorization been given to publish the whole
in their original, experimental form.
With
the blessing of the Kerouac Estate, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, professor of
literature at the University of Pennsylvania, has transcribed, reconstructed,
and gathered these texts directly from the manuscripts. In order to present
these French texts in their entirety, this book was thus took several years in
the making. As Jean-Christophe Cloutier explains in his introduction, “Les
Travaux de Jean-Louis Kérouac,” the French texts are greater in number and size
than had been previously believed. Kerouac toiled over and revised these texts,
yet never showed them to anyone during his lifetime. They also share an
essential bond with Kerouac’s published works in English, shedding new light on
his creative process by demonstrating the central role French played in his
Kerouac’s poetics. As a whole, this volume reveals to readers new adventures in
the Duluoz Legend, and underscore the extraordinary refinement Kerouac had when
he wrote in his mother tongue, the language he used to give voice to the truth
behind his status as the uprooted son of Québécois immigrants ensnared by the
assimilative forces of the United States. At the same time, coming to English
via French, jazz, and the greater polyphony of the continent, gave Kerouac the
secret freedom to undertake one of the most significant revolutions in postwar
American letters. Being influentially aware of the creative spirit and the
significance of these texts, Jean-Christophe Cloutier took care to provide us
with such a valuable gift.
The
volume contains sixteen texts. The first part of which consists of works of
fiction, including two novellas and many short stories including “On the Road
écrit en français” (On the Road written in French). The second part gathers
short pieces of non-fiction including letters, notes, and commentaries—notably
one on Louis-Ferdinand Céline written in impeccable standard French.
Later
this year, a new American volume of previously unpublished works by Kerouac
will be released by the Library of America entitled The Unknown Kerouac: Unpublished, Rare & Newly Translated Writings.
Among other long sought-after texts like Memory
Babe and Kerouac’s 1951 Journal, the volume will include English
translations of the two French novellas, La
nuit est ma femme [The Night is My Woman], and Sur le chemin [On the Road: Old Bull in the Bowery]. Enjoying a
much wider release around the world than the French-language book (alas,
limited to Canada), The Unknown Kerouac is
edited by Todd Tietchen—who had previously edited Kerouac’s The Haunted Life and the Library of
America volume gathering Visions of Cody,
Visions of Gerard, and Big Sur—and
the translations are by Jean-Christophe Cloutier.
Jack
Kerouac was without doubt one of the most melancholic and analytical observer
of his time; and one of the most innovative. He was also one of the very few
writers who purified the ardent wave of new literature from the consequences of
the ideological and aesthetic moralism; although nowadays both have been
resurrected into world literature, more or less transforming it into a
coincidental and inorganic externalization.
Kerouac
did not think, nor wrote, in a positive
way; and above all he was not, in contradiction to most of the writers of his
time, so ignorant as to believe that reality was merely an affordable ambit in
which we gain access to leave the relics of our common pain. Moreover, Kerouac
did not write a single book in which he didn’t undermine the fullness and
completion of the modern living conditions and thought.
After
all, what is left for us to achieve, through the ecstatic and unparalleled
literary saga of Jack Kerouac, is “the unspeakable visions of the individual”.
Paris, June 2016