| Introduction, continued |
 |
| 2. Kerouac's living mix
of voices |
| In Kerouac's writing, to an
extreme degree, there is no sure hierarchy, no secure
omniscient, non-participatory position from which the
events can be viewed 'objectively'. Contending voices
co-exist, without subordination. What results is a dialogue,
not a dialectic, because no final synthesis emerges.24
The use of an unreliable narrator in Kerouac is crucial
to establishing this sort of unresolved open interplay
- and so central to Kerouac's exploration of the issue
of authenticity. And, in turn, this exploration is subject
to constant, radical, evolving experimentation. |
| Two passages from each end of his writing
career, one from Visions of Cody, composed in the
early 1950s, the other, from Big Sur, written in
1961, can exemplify this: |
 |
OF COURSE WE CAN'T POSSIBLY conceive of ruining your
weekend but could you possibly leave the machine under
my tree or I'll flip my wig. |
| |
LADY GODIVA. (clad) They knocked me out on a
stone of hemp the other-AT THIS POINT IN HIS DREAM DULUOZ
WOKE UP and recall-though admitting the blue blur of that-Duluoz
woke, recalled that he hadn't seen his father for the
longest of times and that possibly he must be dead just
as real as death. "Well then," he thought, leaning
on the boxcar down the edges of which ran the stain of
his sperm, "if I'm to be bat-eyed in the night for
no other reason" -or in whichever way he must, then,
have phrased his thoughts, being nineteen ears or years
(not corn) old and . . . . Well, you see, I hung myself
up. Duluoz. . . . (VC, 253) |
| |
The church is blowing a sad windblown "Kathleen"
on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone
and goopy ... groaning most of all because I'd ruined
my "secret return" to San Francisco by getting
silly drunk ... Lorenz Monsanto and I'd exchanged huge
letters outlining how I would sneak in quietly ... -But
instead I've bounced drunk into his City Lights bookshop
at the height of Saturday night business ... and 't'all
ends up a roaring drunk in all the famous bars the bloody
"King of the Beatniks" is back in town ... Lorenzo
is supposed to pick me up at my "secret" skid
row hotel ... but when he calls for me there's no answer
... -So says to himself "I'll pick him up next weekend,
I guess he wants to drink for a week ... " so off
he drives to his Big Sur cabin without me thinking he's
doing the right thing but my God when I wake up, ... I've
hit the end of the trail ... -It's the first trip I've
taken away from home ... since the publication of "Road"
the book that "made me famous" and in fact so
much so I've been driven mad for three years by endless
telegrams, phonecalls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters,
snoopers (a big voice saying in my basement window as
I prepare to write a story: -ARE YOU BUSY?) ... . (BS,
3-4) |
| What is significant in both
passages is the clear establishment of a dialogue between
different 'voices' - both implied and explicit. In Visions
of Cody this takes the form of a coruscating cacophony:
Godiva's dramatic monologue (in a dream) is interrupted
by the voice of a third person narrator, who records the
voice of the nineteen-year-old Duluoz, only for this to
be interrupted by a first-person narrator who almost immediately
gives way again to the third-person narrator. And since
Visions of Cody is narrated overall by Duluoz,
yet further disturbance arises because he disconcertingly
casts himself temporarily as a third-person narrator,
so drawing attention to the work's fictional structure.
All this is criss-crossed by a rapid switching of linguistic
registers (formal/informal; archaic/1950s slang). Accompanying
this is a constant anxiety over authenticity and authority:
'though admitting the blue blur of that- ... or in whichever
way he must, then, have phrased his thoughts'. There is
also a constant shift between different parodic devices
- the querulous tone of an intellectual writing to a friend
at the start, or of the inflated grandiosity of the adolescent
Duluoz. Voices double, triple, quadruple. |
| In Big Sur the 'mix of voices' is
less frenetic, though still pronounced enough within the
narrator's ambivalent account: Roman Catholicism, resounding
in the church bells; Duluoz and Monsanto in their letters;
media hype surrounding the Beats; Monsanto's thoughts
when he is faced with a comatose Duluoz; the rowdy yells
of an invading Beat aficionado. What we hear in both extracts
are contending voices, accentuated by a failure to mark
them systematically (inverted commas are inconsistently
used). These contentions occur most violently inside Duluoz's
own narrative voice, as it argues with itself about his
behavior (criticizing, excusing, self-justifying).25
This combines with tense shifts, from present to past
tense and back again, to turn these passages into a dramatization
of 'internal contradictions' in Duluoz, gripped by anxiety
about his life and times. |
| In sum, both extracts are good illustrations
of Kerouac's living mix of voices, but of different sorts.
In Visions of Cody the focus falls on the issue
of authenticity and its unattainability, and this matches
the radical decentering generated by the extreme oscillation
between split voices, each fleetingly established and
rapidly abandoned. Radical openness of interpretation
is foregounded. In Big Sur the dialogue (the contention)
is located more conservatively within the narrative voice:
the stress falls upon a first-person narrator and his
more centered response to others' implied words,26
be they those of Roman Catholicism, Monsanto, or of the
media: he comes across relatively stably as a narcissistic
writer, gripped by his own celebrity and self-doubt. In
this way it is more-or-less representative of Kerouac's
later first-person narrator's self-divided double voice.
|
| The contrast is, I think, clear between
the extreme fragmentation of narrative in Visions
and the more centered divisions of Big Sur. Between
the two, a discernible change exists. Visions of Cody's
highly experimental form sets it somewhat apart from Kerouac's
later fiction, but its violent contention is not unrepresentative
of his fiction of the period 1950 to 1956, centering as
this repeatedly does upon a crisis of confidence concerning
what I shall call 'author-ity': the extent to which
the narrator-as-storyteller, the story's 'author', can
exercise authenticity in depicting his story. This means,
of course, that the narrator's own reliability comes under
the most fundamental challenge. As Kerouac's writing moves
further from what I see as the pivotal events of the immediate
post-war years, however, and as his fame rises, the extraordinary
medley of narrative styles and strategies to be found
in Visions of Cody when exploring 'author-ity'
give way to a greater concentration on just one aspect
of such constant narrative self-questioning: the unresolved
calling into doubt of the narrator's reliability and the
double-voiced divisions that result. |
| This is not to say a divided double voice
is not found in Visions of Cody. It surely is.
Near Visions of Cody's end, Duluoz's friend Irwin
Garden accuses Duluoz and Cody, of 'being cruel to girls
on purpose'. This accusation is not only as a retrospective
commentary on Duluoz's behavior, it is also never fully
answered. Duluoz implicitly protests, 'Irwin accused the
whole lot ... me included', but his protest is oblique
and unsubstantiated; the issue of Duluoz's 'cruelty' is
left unresolved (VC, 394). It is this sort of divided
self-questioning, focusing more upon the narrator's unreliability,
that becomes the dominant mode of narration after 1956;
the passage from Big Sur epitomizes this. The point
is that in Visions of Cody this is only a small
part of the open-ended contention its dialogues set up.
|
|
A change can be detected. Kerouac's generation of unresolved
narrative dialogues initially revolves around the issue
of authenticity and its relationship to author-ity:
the narrative splits apart over this; a free play of voices
exists. But his writing then modulates into more centered
and self-regarding explorations. Narcissistic self-confession
becomes increasingly central. The living mix of voices
comes to saturate the narratives less. However, whilst
no longer split apart, Kerouac's novels remain divided
- double-voiced - in their first principle. Kerouac's
writing is always, in John Clellon Holmes' words, 'freely
contradictory',27
whilst, paradoxically, struggling to contain these contradictions.
No sure means of arbitration is provided. So we are left
deeply unsure as to whether Duluoz in Vanity of Duluoz
is 'sensitive' or 'a big pain in the you-know-what', or
whether Duluoz in Visions of Cody is 'cruel to
girls on purpose'. Kerouac's fiction is recurrently left
unstable in this fashion. |
| Kerouac's representation of 'madness' is
particularly pertinent. Conventionally, impugning a character's
sanity is a means of fundamentally undermining the narrator's
viewpoint, generating a mistrust of his narrative tout
court. In Kerouac's writing, as in Dostoyevsky's,
no such certainty exists. 'Madness' as a category keeps
shifting. The voice of the 'madman' is just another contending
voice. When, in On the Road, the narrator, Sal,
writes 'the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones
who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved' (OR,
8), his viewpoint has already been established as unreliable.
Doubts exist about Sal's authority, and this complicates
any reaction to his talk of 'madness'. But, even more
disconcertingly, the novel makes the reader well aware
that 'madness' is a term of approbation - in the argot
of the narrator's sub-group, to be 'mad' is to be inspired
and inspirational. Put baldly: the answer to the question
'are Sal's mad ones mentally unstable as well
as madly inspired?' must be 'yes and no'. There
is no stable hierarchy, no clear centering, no sure source
of author-ity, beyond what happens next. In the
same way, Dostoyevsky's 'madmen' cannot be simply dismissed.
Kerouac deliberately takes up the Dostoyevskean 'mad saint'
in his writings, which certainly explains why he was so
excited to have Robert Giroux comment to him that On
the Road was 'just like Do[s]toevski'.28
|
| Kerouac, to set up this sort of interplay
of contending voices, exploits language's inherent propensity
to develop multiple meanings, as word-meanings shift in
their transfer from one context to another.29
Kerouac's characters recurrently employ words with context-specific
meanings or use context-specific neologisms. The central
importance of On the Road to the development of
Kerouac's oeuvre centers on the way that early drafts
of this text introduce attempts to create a style which
can convey such context-bound meaning-negotiations. On
the Road therefore modulates between a relatively
conventional colloquial American style, though one always
lightly laced with hip slang, and passages where hip talk
predominates. Warren Tallman, in his essay 'Kerouac's
Sound', has best defined the qualities of hip talk which
make this careful deployment stylistically significant:
'Hip talk ... is in fact ... a language art ... . The
words are compact, mostly monosyllabic, athletic ... sensitive
to the nuances and possibilities ... of [the] always threatened
moment'.30
These moments in On the Road when a free-wheeling
hip talk predominates can only be negotiated by comprehending
the nuances lent them by the social exchanges that define
them.
|
| This peculiar contextual immediacy of hip-language
in turn conditions the whole style in which these passages
are written. Take, for example, this passage describing
Dean Moriarty's 'digging' of a jazz solo, |
| |
his face lowered to the bell of the horn, clapping his
hands, pouring sweat on the man's keys, and the man noticed
and laughed in his horn a long quivering crazy
laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked
and rocked; and finally the tenorman decided to
blow his top and crouched down and held a note in
high C for a long time as everything else crashed along
and the cries increased ... . Dean was in a trance. The
tenorman's eyes were fixed straight on him; he had a madman
who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand
more and much more than there was, and they began dueling
for this; everything came out of the horn, no more phrases,
just cries, cries, "Baugh" and down to "Beep!"
and up to "EEEEE!" and down to clinkers and
over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything
... and finally he ... gave up and everybody pushed around
and yelled, "Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!"
(OR, 197-8; my emphases) |
| To take just one of the phrases I have emphasized,
'blow his top' has a shifting meaning: blow his top note;
and/or let off steam from a safety valve; and/or draw
on a species of rage in order to rise to Dean's challenge
in the 'duel'. No single, stable reading can be settled
upon. Instead, systematic ambiguity exists. So when Dean
explains, a few pages later, how the tenorman had '"IT"',
the meaning of 'it' in turn can only be defined by the
relationship of Dean's speech-style to events. His language
is inescapably context-specific. In Kerouac's most fluid
writing this in turn leads to language breakdown as the
narrator strives for and fails to attain author-ity.
In this case, the moments in the jazz-solo where words
give way to sound, "Baugh ... EEEEE!", are points
where the search for authenticity transgresses beyond
the limits of language (something that Visions of Cody,
Old Angel Midnight, and, much less concertedly, his
other writing will also do). |
| Kerouac's fiction in this way exemplifies
the way language inevitably generates meaning-proliferation
- but, again, a visible gradation exists to the extent
to which this is done. Visions of Cody celebrates
violently, disconcertingly, the release of endless language-play
and a resulting sense of exuberant anxiety. In later writings,
such as Big Sur, as the focus falls more conservatively
on the double-voiced unreliable narrator, anxiety over
meaning becomes more narcissistically located in disputes
between the narrators and others, rather than in language.
All his books treat with the problem of author-ity,
but where at the beginning the focus falls upon the authenticity
of writing (a debilitating ontological debate), the later
works, less ambitiously, but more coherently, concentrate
on the problem of personal authenticity.31
It must to be stressed, though, that a simple progression
is not present: the overlap between works is very substantial,
as my study will show. The extent to which language and
writing are called into doubt can even vary within texts;
for example, in Desolation Angels 'Desolation in
Solitude' (written rather earlier) is more openly heteroglossic
than the rest of the book. |
| Nevertheless, some sort of development can
be identified, and this can be related to the evolving
historical conditions in which Kerouac was writing,32
and the way these interlock with his personal history
as a writer increasingly taken up and celebrated as a
Beat writer. The particular socio-historical context of
Kerouac's childhood, adolescence and young manhood bear
down upon his writing. It therefore becomes necessary
for me to explore the particular historical moment in
which Kerouac was growing up and pursuing a career as
a writer: roughly speaking, the four and a half decades
ending in his death in 1969. During this period the United
States underwent a process of significant socio-economic
adjustment - a process deeply affecting the Massachusetts
French Canadian community which Kerouac was on the point
of leaving as he launched his writing career. In the discussion
to be found in Chapter One, I will interweave the two
processes - national and local. I will then proceed to
a chronological exploration of each of Kerouac's novels,
in the book's remaining chapters. |
|
|
| Footnotes |
I
am bringing my analysis at this point into close alignment
with that of Mikhail Bakhtin in his Problems of
Dostoevsky's Poetics. Bakhtin's discussion of
narrative voice, or 'skaz', represents the
narrative voice as always in dialogue with itself
- to a greater or lesser extent (the term 'skaz' is
untranslatable, and centers upon 'an orientation towards
oral speech - see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of
Dostoevsky's Poetics, 1963, ed. and trans. by
Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984, p. 191; see also Bakhtin, The Dialogic
Imagination, passim). This allies the first-person
narrative to a general propensity in fiction, which
again can be more or less pronounced. On page 209
of Problems, for example, Bakhtin analyzes
a paragraph taken from Dostoyevsky's 'Poor Folk' (1846,
rpt. in Poor Folk and Other Stories, trans.
David McDuff, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, pp. 46-47).
Bakhtin's objective is to demonstrate how a dialogue
exists in the words, taken from Poor Folk's
'Letter of June 12' written by the character Makar
Dievushkin. This dialogue involves Barbara Alexievna
(the letter's recipient), but it also takes in his
critic, Evstafi Ivanovitch, his colleagues and superiors
at work, and - most significantly - the self-divided
narrator himself. This complex set of dialogues is,
for Bakhtin, typical of the narratives of Dostoyevsky,
which are seen as being infused with this sort of
'dialogic' interplay; dialogues occur within an individual's
discourse or between different characters' discourses:
'Dostoevsky's novel is dialogic. It is constructed
not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing
other consciousnesses as objects into itself, but
as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses,
none of which entirely becomes an object for the other;
this interaction provides no support for the viewer
who would objectify an entire event according to some
ordinary monologic category (thematically, lyrically
or cognitively) - and this consequently makes the
viewer also a participant. Not only does the novel
give no firm support outside the rupture-prone world
of dialogue for a third, monologically all-encompassing
consciousness - but on the contrary, everything in
the novel is structured to make dialogic opposition
inescapable. ... non-participating 'third persons'
are not represented in any way. There is no place
for them, compositionally or in the larger meaning
of the work' (Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's
Poetics, 1963, p. 18). The effect is dialogic
because 'a plurality of independent and unmerged voices'
exists, without 'subordination' (pp. 6-7). Importantly,
what results is not a dialectic, because no (final)
synthesis exists (Caryl Emerson, 'Introduction', ibid.,
p. xxxii). Instead, unresolved dialogues are set up:
between viewpoints and/or characters, that have a
'simultaneous coexistence': 'The stubborn urge to
see everything as coexisting, to perceive and show
all things side by side and simultaneous, as if they
existed in space and not in time, leads Dostoevsky
to dramatize, in space, even internal contradictions
and internal stages in the development of a single
person - forcing a character to converse with his
own double, with the devil, with his alter ego, with
his own caricature' (pp. 78, 32). I have generally
avoided the term 'dialogism', distinguishing instead
between open-ended dialogues and split-voiced narratives
on the one hand and double-voiced narratives on the
other, the former depending more upon an unstable
'plurality', the latter more centered on the (more
stable) skaz of a narrator's confession.
I am paraphrasing Bakhtin, ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., p. 195.
John Clellon Holmes, 'The Great Rememberer', Representative
Men: The Biographical Essays, Fayette: University
of Arkansas Press, 1988, p. 116. Jack Kerouac, reporting
Giroux's words, as reported in Beat Scene No.
29, n.d. [1996], p. 5.
There is, in Bakhtin's phrase, 'an inherent dialogism
of the word', Problems, p. 202. See also his
discussion of heteroglossia in 'Discourse in the Novel',
1934-5, rpt. in The Dialogic Imagination. As
he puts it: 'the word is not a material thing, but
rather the eternally mobile, eternally fickle medium
of dialogic interaction', because 'The word enters
[a member of a speaking collective's] context from
another context, permeated with the interpretations
of others', Problems, p. 202.
Warren Tallman, 'Kerouac's Sound', Evergreen Review,
Vol. 4 No. 11 (Jan.-Feb. 1960), p. 156.
Of course, as Bakhtin argues, even a highly monologic
text cannot entirely fix its own reading, since language
is inevitably heteroglossic. Bakhtin can in this way
be linked to post-structuralist theory, and to the
writing of Bathes in particular. See, for example,
Barthes, S/Z (1070; rpt., trans. Richard Miller, New
York: Hill and Wang).
This
line of argument is countenanced by Bakhtin, for he
takes the view that the sort of choice made by an
author concerning the extent to which dialogism or
monologism is deployed is not entirely free. Within
the European and American novel, there exists a generic
propensity to construct hierarchies, as the conventional
first-person bildungsroman particularly well illustrates
(in privileging the narrator-as-storyteller over the
narrator-as-protagonist). However, Bakhtin cautions,
'By no means all historical situations permit the
ultimate semantic authority of the creator to be expressed
without mediation in direct, unrefracted, unconditional
authorial discourse' (Bakhtin, Problems, p.
202). The implications of this rider are enormous.
Bakhtin's claim is that in certain historical situations
monologism will - perhaps usually - be the
dominant narrative mode, whilst in others, dialogism
will be favored, or even necessitated. Bakhtin therefore
examines Dostoyevsky's particular historical situation,
which he saw as favoring Dostoyevsky's adoption of
dialogism in his novels.
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