| Review |
| "At one point in Kerouac's Tristessa,
the narrator confesses, "I'm a liar!" Such self-conscious
unreliability, R.J. Ellis argues, percolates through Kerouac's
work, which "explore[s] the unfinished, rapidly evolving
realities of postwar America" in texts of "open
ended unresolvedness." |
| "Examining Kerouac's fourteen novels (as well
as "The Railroad Earth" and Old Angel Midnight)
in their order of composition, Ellis distinguishes three
places in Kerouac's career. In the first (The Town
and the City through Doctor Sax), increasingly
radical narrative innovations, including the deployment
of "a living mix of contending voices" and a
rejection of linearity, reach a climax with Visions
of Cody. Phase two (Maggie Cassidy to Old
Angel Midnight) foregrounds "double-voiced"
narrators "urgently debating with themselves about
their own reliability." Phase three (The Dharma
Bums to Pie) represents the newly crowned king
of the beats in decline as "open-ended multi-vocalism"
and double-voiced narration both fade, the narrative voice
more 'single' and less alert to unreliability, however
the resulting narrative proves to be.
|
| "Irresolute, internally conflicted texts are,
Ellis argues, Kerouac's response to the unsettled times
through which he lived and about which he wrote. In the
fluidity and "socio-cultural breakdown" of post-World
War II consumer capitalism in the United States, issues
of race and ethnicity and of class and sexuality cannot
be resolved but only probed and destabilised, while the
notion of a coherent identity gives way to "the portrayal
of disparate identities."
|
| "Ellis makes a number of provocative points
throughout. He is particularly convincing when showing
how Kerouac's narrators reveal homosexual tendencies they
can neither confront nor ignore, and how their desires
are implicated in the ideology of the dominant culture.
His reading of Tristessa as a meditation upon ethnicity
and race that "explores the interface between love,
sexual attraction and economics" is subtle and helpful,
as is his reading of Big Sur as a depiction of
"the psychological cul-de-sac that remains"
after On the Road discovers "the Wet Coast
as 'the end of America.'" Again, his comments on
Pie as "an interlocking network of repressive
lines" (Mason-Dixon, Iron Curtain, factory production
lines) ought to interest readers of Thomas Pynchon, a
self-professed admired of Kerouac. |
| "Liar! Liar! is an ambitious, wide-ranging study.
Ellis is an excellent close reader, careful in passing
judgements, conversant with earlier scholarship, and unpretentiously
comfortable with contemporary theory. If occasionally
as "clogged and dense" as Ellis sometimes finds
Visions of Cody, Liar! Liar! is likewise a book from which
to learn." |
|
|
