One hundred years after his birth, Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) is one of the most highly regarded US authors worldwide. Nonetheless, in his home country he still has a reputation as a drugged-out hack. But as Steven Belletto and Hassan Melehy have recently shown, much of this impression of Kerouac and the Beat Generation stems from early critical responses, when journalists and academics were eager to find fault with a group of writers who openly rejected dominant sexual morality and values of economic success. The ensuing “Beatnik” caricature entailed a view of these authors’ literary experiments—rooted in the work of such precursors as Rimbaud, Proust, Joyce, and the Surrealists—as unschooled clumsiness.
Kerouac especially continues to bear the brunt of academic and journalistic scorn for his “spontaneous prose.” But in this practice of writing quickly with minimal revision, he took inspiration from the power of improvisational jazz to remake traditional forms and hence enable the expression of previously unheard voices. One of Kerouac’s stated interests was to reveal the everyday experiences of Franco-Americans: between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 inhabitants of Québec came to the US, often meeting an unfriendly reception. Hailing from the large Francophone community of Lowell, Massaschusetts, Kerouac was keenly aware of the migration. As Melehy has shown, a key motive for his literary experiments was to bring English, his adopted language, into contact with French, his native language. More broadly, he sought to open Anglophone American literature to perspectives that it culturally and linguistically excluded. In On the Road (1957), the road figures migration, leading to encounters with a range of communities in the US and Mexico.
One of the most significant factors in the critical reassessment of Kerouac is his multilingualism. In most of his novels his first-person narrator is a Franco-American who speaks to himself and close family members in French. Kerouac uses a combination of phonetic and archaic spellings to foreground the orality of Québécois French as spoken in Massachusetts, as well as the language’s spatial and temporal distance from metropolitan French. These passages are usually accompanied by English translations that diminish their foreignness, conveying the sense that his people were cast adrift following the eighteenth-century annexation of New France to Great Britain. When the Kerouac Papers, housed in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature, were opened to the public in 2006, researchers began studying his extensive French-language writings, including two novellas, La Nuit est ma femme (The Night is My Woman) (1951) and Sur le chemin (On the Road (1952).
A major factor in this broader understanding of Kerouac is the shift in literary studies to multilingual approaches, a shift recognized in the Presidential Theme of the year that coincides with the centennial of his birth. The three papers in this special session make a strong contribution to this theme. Susan Pinette addresses the history of Kerouac’s reception as a major Québécois author: she discusses two conferences on Kerouac that took place in 1987, both marking the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road, one at the University of Maine at Orono, the first center of Franco-American studies in the US, and the other in Québec City. Taken together, these events presented Kerouac as an exemplary translingual, transnational North American author. Jean-Christophe Cloutier brings his award-winning work in archive studies to bear on Kerouac’s translingual identity. As the editor of the previously unpublished French-language texts, Cloutier discusses the work of piecing together Sur le chemin from Kerouac’s own meticulously kept archive. Cloutier demonstrates that the translingualism of Kerouac’s creative process is reflected in the very textuality of his notebook manuscripts. Peggy Pacini builds on Cloutier’s groundbreaking work: beginning with the paradox of Kerouac’s archive, texts he wrote in order to reveal his true self that he then stored out of public view, she explores the ways that translingual and transnational identity haunts the entirety of Kerouac’s autofictional oeuvre, known as the Duluoz Legend because of their most frequent narrator-protagonist, Jack Duluoz. She connects Kerouac’s own archival practice with the genealogical research he did later in life, digging through archives to further his sense of identity.
After each presenter speaks for seventeen minutes, the presider will open the session to questions from the audience.