| Introduction, continued |
 |
| 1. Kerouac, Proust, Dostoyevsky
and Kerouac's Unreliable Narrators |
| To describe 'The Railroad Earth'
as a 'short story' and by implication as fiction is in
itself contentious, since it is usually read as an autobiographical
memoir of a period in Kerouac's life when he was working
on the Southern Pacific Railroad. My study of 'The Railroad
Earth' deliberately chooses to emphasize its fictionality,
and not to consider how accurate it is as an account of
that period of his life. The reason for this resides in
my overall approach. I shall examine the novels of Kerouac
as, exactly, novels - with little or no reference
to Kerouac's biography, except in one respect: my concern
is to historicize his writings. That is to say, I place
them in their general historical context, the post-war
history of America, and in important respects in their
particular context, Kerouac's precise social identity.
To this extent, some biographical reference is necessary.
However, no close correlation is drawn between events
in Kerouac's life and the events represented in his novels.
This last task has been often undertaken in the past by
other critics - perhaps too unremittingly - though such
biographical exegesis will surely continue to appear.5
This study seeks to help to redress the balance, by focusing
resolutely on the novels (and the novellas) as individual
works of prose fiction, however much they may, as 'true-story
novels', also span the terrain between fiction on the
one hand and autobiography on the other.6
|
| Tying Kerouac's writings back to events
in his life can easily be done, it is true. Indeed, his
fiction covers almost all of the events that occurred
in his life. But this approach over-emphasizes the autobiographical
continuities between his works, at the expense of focusing
on his inventiveness in devising narrative experiments
that could effectively treat with and analyze the crucial
social and cultural dilemmas and contradictions of his
time. The sheer variety of writing styles and forms encompassed
by (successively) The Town and the City, On the Road,
Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, 'The
Railroad Earth', The Subterraneans, Visions of Gerard,
Tristessa and Old Angel Midnight is so striking
that it deserves study in its own right, rather than insistently
being displaced by a search for autobiographical coordinates.
|
| Central to this approach is an exploration
of the narrative structures of Kerouac's novels. I do
not intend the result to be a full-blown narratological
study, but I do want to focus on one particular narrative
device central to his technique. This is the deployment
of an unreliable narrator. By this, at the most simple
level, I mean a first-person narrator who provides an
account of his past life which the reader is led to understand
is not wholly dependable. |
| In Kerouac's writing, this unreliability
is a combination of two aspects of the narrator (who is
always male). On the one hand, his past unreliability
(as he 'was') and on the other his verdict on this past
self and any continuing unreliability still exhibited.
Various labels have been applied to these two aspects
of the narrator: his past self, a protagonist in the story
and his present self, the narrator telling the story.7
No labels seem wholly satisfactory, not least because
each lacks the advantage of being self-explanatory. I
have therefore chosen to employ self-explanatory terms,
if slightly cumbersome ones: 'the narrator-as-storyteller'
(the narrator presently 'telling' the story to the reader)
and 'the narrator-as-protagonist' (the narrator as he
was in the past, a protagonist in the story the narrator
is 'now' telling). Between them is generated each book's
'narrative voice'. |
| Kerouac diverges sharply from the normative
arrangement of this voice in the English and American
novel, in which the narrator-as-protagonist is considered
to have been less than wholly reliable by the narrator-as-storyteller,
who has grown into reliability. This arrangement sets
up a clear hierarchy: the reliability of the narrator-as-storyteller
has been privileged over that of the narrator-as-protagonist,
who is now seen by both narrator-as-storyteller and reader
as unreliable.8
In Kerouac's writing, this hierarchy breaks down. Instead,
the narrator-as-storyteller is represented as of uncertain
reliability, often just as much as the narrator-as-protagonist.
Indeed, Kerouac's narrator-as-storyteller constantly identifies
himself as unreliable. The narrative voice is therefore
doubly divided. By creating such a divided narrator-as-storyteller,
Kerouac deprives his narratives of any sure bildungsroman
structure. The status of his narrators is left problematic,
preventing them from safely adjudicating between dialogues
set up between contending voices, either in their own
reflections or those of others. |
| Kerouac particularly derived this deployment
of problematized, double-voiced narrators from the deep
influence on his writing of the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky
and Marcel Proust. Both make spectacular use of unreliable
first-person narrators in their writing - Dostoyevsky
regularly, and in particular in Notes from the Underground
and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Proust throughout
his A la recherche du temps perdu. Kerouac read
Dostoyevsky extensively over a long period of time, and
constantly read Proust as well.9
|
| Proust's narrator, Marcel, shows considerable
unreliability as a protagonist. At several points, Marcel,
the narrator-as-storyteller, ruminates on his past mental
state. For example, in 'A Budding Grove' he reflects on
the way that an acquaintance, M. de Norpois, when talking
to Marcel-as-protagonist, is unaware that he is 'talking
to a lunatic'.10
It is this sort of verdict that might 'explain' how Marcel
can resolve to leave Albertine and yet, equally suddenly,
resolve to marry her: '"I'm afraid you'll think me
very changeable"'.11
But this 'lunacy' also plainly impacts upon our
perception of the narrator-as-storyteller, as when Marcel
informs us that: |
|
|
My words therefore did not in the least
reflect my feelings. If the reader has no more than a
faint impression of these, that is because, as narrator,
I expose my feelings to him at the same time as I repeat
my words. But if I concealed the former and he were acquainted
only with the latter, my actions, so little in keeping
with them, would so often give him the impression of strange
reversals that he would think me more or less mad.12 |
| This plaintive assertion that Marcel's fluctuating
behavior is ultimately justifiable does not wholly
reassure us about his reliability, as he 'now' tells his
story. This doubt is accentuated when Marcel informs us,
in the next chapter, that he is quite unable to 'find
some ... well-informed narrator' though 'undoubtedly he
exists'.13
The 'well-informed' ideal narrator is, of course, Proust
himself, who could solve the riddle of Marcel's perverse
behavior. But Proust never is 'found', and we as readers
are left to reflect on the degrees of prevarication, evasion
and repression that exist in Marcel's narrative. |
| Proust's narrator's past behavior has been
so extraordinary that we are left unsure of how reliable
Marcel-as-storyteller presently is - in particular about
his sexual orientation. There is a curious lassitude about
Marcel's relations with women, and an almost obsessive
interest in his homosexual companions. A residue of doubt
persists concerning such a narrator, who is revealed as
plainly flawed in the past, as a protagonist, and circumstantially
implicated in the present, as he tells his story. Thus,
when he abjures himself, 'The writer must not be indignant
if the invert [homosexual] who reads his book gives to
his heroines a masculine countenance', this is intended
to be taken ironically.14
|
| Dostoyevsky also deploys unreliable narrators
- even more plainly so. They recurrently arraign themselves
for this shortcoming. In The Dream of a Ridiculous
Man the narrator starts by accusing himself of being
ridiculous: 'I am a ridiculous man'.15
He also immediately reveals that others around him 'call
me a madman'. This uncertainty colors our reading of the
text. Similarly, Notes from the Underground commences
with a self-denunciation by the narrator: 'I'm a sick
man . . . a mean man. There's nothing attractive about
me. ... Moreover, I'm morbidly superstitious'.16
Almost immediately, too, this narrator goes on to admit
that, even in the first few paragraphs, he has been lying:
'I was lying just now when I said I used to be a nasty
official'.17
The consequent mistrust that is created in the reader
generates a deep-rooted uncertainty about the narrator-as-storyteller's
reliability. |
| The first book by Dostoyevsky that Kerouac
read was Notes from the Underground, with its narrator's
startling self-denunciation.18
Kerouac takes up this device of the unreliable first-person
narrator, and in particular the extreme version of this
found in many of Dostoyevsky's novels. Whilst his first
novel, The Town and the City is a third-person
narrative, virtually all the other fictions he wrote,
from On the Road onwards, are first-person narratives.
And, almost from start to finish (perhaps Pic is
an exception), Kerouac creates unreliable first-person
narrators: Sal in On the Road, Jack in 'The Railroad
Earth' and Tristessa, Jack Duluoz in Maggie
Cassidy, Desolation Angels, Big Sur and Vanity
of Duluoz, Ray in The Dharma Bums, Leo in The
Subterraneans - all emerge as less than wholly reliable
narrators-as-storytellers. |
| Within this recurrent device, modulations
also emerge. At first, Kerouac's narrators rapidly become
more and more overtly and self-questioningly unreliable
and their voices more divided: Percepied in The Subterraneans
and Jack Duluoz in Tristessa provide particularly
dramatic examples of this split: the double voice has
far more than two aspects to its ambivalence. Subsequently,
in later writings, this oscillating split voice tends
to give way to a more documentary and less obviously fragmented
double voice. This progression towards a more unified
narrator may not always be consistent: in Big Sur,
the reader is left thoroughly unsure about the veracity
of what she has been told and well aware that the narrator-as-protagonist's
delirium tremens and its accompanying hallucinations are
only partly understood by the narrator-as-storyteller,
still gripped by alcoholism. But it is still, overall,
a voice concerted enough to be tracked as that of some
kind of double-voiced guide. |
| It is not that Kerouac's narrator-as-storytellers
are wholly unreliable. Rather, they are always striving
for reliability, but always falling short, always (re-)discovering
their enduring unreliability. As Proust's skepticism made
clear to Kerouac, reliability is an elusive impossibility:
'this book [A la recherche] is a novel. At least
it deviates least from the novel form. There is a Monsieur
who narrates and who says "I" ... characters
... are prepared in such a way that what they do in the
second [volume] is exactly the opposite of what one would
expect in the first'.19
Dostoyevsky, too, led Kerouac in this direction. For example,
in the case of both The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
and Vanity of Duluoz, the narrator is struggling
to be as truthful and accurate as he can. Kerouac is following
in the footsteps of Dostoyevsky by creating an oscillating,
unstable, decentered portrait of the narrator, generated
by the narrator's own prevarication and 'immature' delinquency.
Both Kerouac's and Dostoyevsky's narrators can be regarded
as 'adult delinquents' (in Paul Goodman's 1960 phrase).20
Compare, for example, these two passages: |
| |
I'm a ridiculous man. Now they call me a madman. That
would be a promotion if I weren't just as ridiculous as
before in their eyes. But it no longer makes me angry.
I find them all nice now, even when they laugh at me-indeed,
if they do, they're somehow particularly dear to me. I'd
even laugh with them-not really at myself but out of sheer
love for them-if looking at them didn't make me so sad.
Sad, because they don't know the truth, while I do. Ah,
it's so hard to be the only one to know the truth! But
they won't understand it.21 |
| |
All right, wifey, maybe I'm a big pain in the you-know-what
but after I've given you a recitation of the troubles
I had to go through to make good in America ... and although
I also know everybody in the world's had his own troubles,
you'll understand that my particular form of anguish comes
from being too sensitive to all the lunkheads I had to
deal with just so I could get to be ... a W R I T E R
whose very "success," far from being a happy
triumph as of old, was the sign of doom ... . (VD, 7) |
| In both passages we are rendered unsure
as to the amount of trust to bestow on these narrators:
does Dostoyevsky's 'ridiculous man' know 'the truth'?
does the 'pain in the you-know-what', Duluoz, really have
a problem in being 'too sensitive' in his response to
those he labels 'lunkheads'? These questions are quite
simply unanswerable. Significantly, in both cases, the
very titles of the books undercut the narrator's pretensions:
Dostoyevsky's 'hero' is 'ridiculous', Kerouac's Duluoz
is afflicted with 'vanity'. |
| Plainly both narrators are striving to be
truthful, but this co-exists with a further recognition
- that it lies beyond the capacity of any individual to
be wholly authoritative. The narrators' partiality becomes
apparent, their self-confessions highlight this, and so
undermine the reader's confidence in first-person fiction's
customary narrative hierarchy, in which some form of centering
is provided. Instead an interplay with this normative
expectation is established - an interplay particularly
explored by many modernist writers, tracing the footsteps
of Dostoyevsky and Proust. A close, skeptical engagement
with the narrative must follow. Kerouac's adoption of
this strategy is particularly radical, and the consequent
skepticism particularly intense. Kerouac sets up an open-ended
dialogue between the reader and the self-divided narrative
that results, rooted in negotiating between the different
characters' interactions with the narrator-as-protagonist,
the perspective of the narrator-as-storyteller, and the
reader's own, evolving perspective on these.22
The narrator's unreliability becomes not just a matter
of trust, a matter of the integrity of the writing subject,
but also an issue concerning meaning in narrative and
an attack on the whole idea of authenticity. An unstable
paradox comes to reside at the core of Kerouac's writing:
his American heroes' quasi-existential search for authentic
consciousness, taking them outside of any usual sphere
of behavior, is set against a counter recognition of authenticity's
inevitable inaccessibility, setting his fictional narrators
formally at odds with themselves. |
| This lies at the heart of a crises of confidence
about writing found in Visions of Cody and Old
Angel Midnight, and can be related to a debate in
Proust's writing: 'Thus it can be only after one has recognized,
not without some tentative stumblings, the ... errors
of one's first impression that one can arrive at an exact
knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge
to be ever possible. But it is not; for while our original
impression of him undergoes correction, the person himself
... changes ... we think that we have caught him, he shifts'.23
At his most extreme, Kerouac takes up this Bergsonian
formulation and collapses the process. It implodes: 'original
impression', 'tentative stumblings', 'correction' and
'shifts' all happen in the self-same moment - in the volatile,
disturbing atmosphere generated in his texts. The impossibility
of 'authenticity' is thereby brought to the fore in an
instant. There is no sense of a stable narrative center
in Kerouac's writing. |
|
|
| Footnotes |
See
Nicosia, Memory Babe, Clark, Jack Kerouac
and Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac,
the Beat Generation and America, New York: McGraw
Hill, 1979. Most recently, Barry Miles' Jack Kerouac:
King of the Beats: A Portrait, London: Virgin
Publishing, 1998, and Ellis Amburn's Subterranean
Kerouac, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, have
been published. Both books emphasize Kerouac's homosexual
propensities within his general bisexuality. Both
were published too late to be fully incorporated in
this study. Though they complement my approach in
important ways, I feel their emphases on sexual orientation
are rather too unremitting.
Ann Charters, 'Introduction',
Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac, 1940-1956,
Ann Charters, ed., Viking Penguin, 1995, p. xxiii
See Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan,
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, New
York: Methuen, pp. 100-105 and passim. I have tried
in this study not to clog up my argument with too
many technical distinctions. In particular, I have
avoided the word 'diegetic' and its descendants ('non-diegetic',
'extradiegetic', 'intradiegetic', etc.). The narrative
poetics of unreliability that Kerouac employs frequently
generate non-diegetic implications; however I believe
I have defined these adequately without recourse to
this term. I accept that the Platonic distinction
between 'mimesis' and 'diegesis' in narrative is important,
and this underlies my argument that Kerouac's narrators
repeatedly fracture the completeness of their monologue's
mimetic illusionism.
Catherine Belsey, Critical
Practice, London; Methuen, 1980, pp. 70ff. Since
Kerouac's narrators are all male, I will use the pronoun
'he' when referring to the unreliable narrator. To
compensate for this, I will always use the adjective
'she' to refer to 'the reader'.
See Nicosia, pp. 92-453;
Clark, pp. 50-127.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance
of Things Past: 1, trans. C. K. Moncrieff and
Terence Kilmartin, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, p.
514.
Proust, Remembrance
of Things Past: 2, p. 1167.
Proust, Remembrance
of Things Past: 3, p. 354.
Ibid., pp. 561-2
Ibid., p. 948.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man', 1877, rpt. in Notes
from the Underground and Other Stories, trans.
Andrew R. MacAndrew, New York: Signet, 1961, p. 201.
Dostoyevsky, 'Notes
from the Underground', 1864, rpt. in Notes from
the Underground
Ibid., p. 91
Nicosia, p. 92.
Marcel Proust, 'Letter
to René Blum, Feb. 3 1913, quoted in William
Sansom, Proust, London: Thames and Hudson,
1973, p. 86.,br> 20. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd,
1960, rpt. London: Victor Gollancz, 1961, p. 197.
Dostoyevsky, 'Notes
form the Underground', p. 204.
Warren French takes
a different line, suggesting that Kerouac's 'marathon
typing sessions' were 'in part attributable to the
determination of the "voice" in control
to get its piece said while it remained dominant':
Jack Kerouac, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986, p.
28.
Proust, Remembrance
of Things Past: 1, p. 934.
Up | Down | Top | Bottom |
|
|
