https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/the-sardonic-pilgrimage-of-jack-kerouac
As a whole, this volume reveals to the readers a new adventure in the
Duluoz Legend, as well as the extraordinary refinement Kerouac
demonstrated when writing in his mother tongue. It is 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 him the secret freedom to
undertake one of the most significant revolutions in postwar American
letters. Jean-Christophe Cloutier, being acutely aware of the creative
spirit and the significance of these texts, has provided us with a very
valuable gift.
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 swamp of
intellectual, expressional, pompousness. Ergo, the books of Jack Kerouac
do not compose a shadowy and somehow pointless incident, merely
supporting the matured American “underground” which wore away with a
more dramatic intensity than the one through which it was constructed in
late 1950s. Jack Kerouac was a unique experimentalist, a writer on the
verge, and he continues to be one, among the very best.
After the termination of countless, equally essential and
meaningless, frictions of modern and postmodern literature, the work of
the Beat writers is nowadays widely considered as the most influential
literary phenomenon of the twentieth century. The Beat movement
overshadowed the Lost Generation and the 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 needs an extra
period of intense investigation in order to be conclusive. However, the
influence and the uniqueness of Jack Kerouac in 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 the ‘40s, the ‘50s
and, mainly, the ‘60s. He provided the most expansive and transparent
literary language since Walt Whitman.
To
the consecutive editions of many previously unpublished works of Jack
Kerouac which appear lately, which bring to light either important or
lesser texts, is added the excellent La vie est d’hommage
(Boreal 2016). This volume gathers original French writings of Jack
Kerouac. Kerouac’s readers already knew of his fondness for peppering
his novels with French sentences, the patois of his French-Canadian
family in New England.
After the opening in 2006 of the Kerouac archive (part of the Henry
W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at
the New York Public Library) we became aware that Kerouac had written
and filed away many French texts. However, only recently has
authorization been given to publish the whole of them in their original
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. It took several years in order to present these French
texts in their entirety. 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 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.
The
volume contains sixteen texts. The first part 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. This volume will be
published in the USA, under the care of the publications of the American
Library, edited by Todd Tietchen and translated by Jean-Christophe
Cloutier, under the title The Unknown Kerouac: Unpublished, Rare & Newly Translated Writings.
Jack Kerouac was, without doubt, one of the most melancholic and
analytical viewers 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. Nowadays both reappear into world literature, trying to
transform it to a coincidental and inorganic externalization.
Kerouac did not think nor write in a positive way, and above all was
not — in contradiction to most of the writers of his time –so ignorant
as to believe that reality is only a quite affordable ambit in which we
gain access to leave the relics of our common pain. Furthermore, 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