Preplitanja zatvorenih i otvorenih prostora u romanima Džeka Keruaka
THE INTERTWINING OF CLOSED AND OPEN SPACES IN THE NOVELS OF JACK KEROUAC

Summary/Abstract: Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969) is one of many American writers whose conspicuously mythologized and romanticized life story/biography on the one hand, and the fame of one work of art on the other, have succeeded in overwhelming his reputation to such an extent that his wider readership recognize him, almost exclusively, as the most prominent representative of the so-called Beat Generation, the author of On the Road (1957), and the man whose life ended too soon due to alcohol-induced health complications. Thus, from the very onset, Kerouac seems to be enclosed within the space of a few labels, narrowed down to a couple of bullet points, which can by no means be considered a slight contribution to the field of American literature at large. Whenever reading openly autobiographical fictional works, we encounter the problem of differentiating between the literary text itself and outside-thetext interferences. Kerouac’s fiction ought to be read more closely, since it had been, in fact, quite consistent. Even his 1968 appearance on the TV show Firing Line with William Buckley Jr., a year before his death, serves to show Kerouac’s viewpoints, which had been disclosed so many times before, including his argument that his novels do not intend to intersect with politics in any way. Even in a state of great inebriation, he manages to tackle the issues that had resonated with him his entire life. His public performances had never been conducive to favorable interpretations of his works. Moreover, leaving aside the enormous success of his novel On the Road, his works had regularly been confronted with fierce criticism. Hailed as ’the King of Beatniks’ against his own will, Kerouac showed contempt for what he thought to be a misreading of his most famous novel – let us not forget the fact that he had been painstakingly rewriting it for seven years! Having read John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1906 – 1921), Kerouac strove to write one single Proust-like book, a series of novels which would be interlinked by the legend of his own life, the story of a character named Duluoz, in the vein of Thomas Woolfe, a writer whom he had long admired, and whom he then wanted to stay away from, obsessed by a desire to find his own voice. To this end, he maintains that Thomas Woolfe is a great surge of American heaven and hell which opened his eyes to America as a subject per se. Nevertheless, Kerouac did manage to write a number of books which do not follow the chronological order of his life experiences, but rather make a choice of the facts in the process of self-representation, and thus create the interpretation of his own life, as autobiography in its wider sense unmistakably and always does. Kerouac reveals that emotions are essential to art, as opposed to cunning and the concealment of emotions. He also explains that he writes true stories about the world, and that, when we discard all the simple facts of real-life people, we are left with fiction, dreaming in leisure. As a result, his readers embark on the terrain of a dichotomy between closed and open, in fact on the terrain of autopoetical statements about memory, faith and writing, and the ironic interweaving of binary oppositions, among which we find I – others, inner – outer and truth – fiction. Some of the crucial ideas for the understanding of Kerouac’s Weltanschauung can already be found in the titles of his works (being on the road, bumming, loneliness, desolation, vanity), as much as we need to pay heed to his use of anthroponyms and toponyms. Two things need special attention: for one, Kerouac’s novels are reliant on first-person narratives, i.e. a first-person experiential perspective which does belong to a fictionalized world of characters; for the other, bearing in mind the conditional classification of novels made by Wolfgang Kaiser and Franz Karl Stanzel, Kerouac’s novels could be labelled as novels of place, for the plurality of places where the novels’ events happen, the places that yield their own meanings as separate episodes and portions of the world, where a novel’s ending is often dependent on a character’s return to the place he initially starts his journey from. Apart from his fiction and numerous edited documentaries which survive him, Kerouac’s letters which he shared with his family, friends and other writers, edited by different editors and literary critics, prove invaluable in the interpretation of his poetics. Kerouac and his novels can be epitomized by means of one key metaphor: being-on-the-road, a kind of not-here-not-there beingness, the elusiveness of a spatial position, a forever temporary dwelling, an essential unbelonging to any single place, an immense unfetteredness. Still, things with Kerouac are to be carefully considered, since Kerouac’s travels are marked by a constant inner duality, a need to come back home, to his mother and the memory of his prematurely dead brother Gerard, and not only in a psychoanalytical sense. Hereby, we propose that Kerouac is imprisoned within his own inwardness and dividedness, manifested by an incessant shift of geographically marked spaces. Kerouac yearns to grasp not only the whole of postwar America, notably his hometown Lowell, New York, San Francisco and California, but also Mexico, Morocco, Europe, London and Paris. Consequently, readers come across various binaries (East – West, city – woods/mountain, house/home – means of transport, predominantly cars, trains and ships), in addition to the very processes of walking, wandering/bumming and hitchhiking. Kerouac’s geography turns out to be an extraordinarily fluid category. Taking into account the fact that the notion of melancholy is rather unstable and elastic, it makes sense that Kerouac’s wanderings be linked to alternate feelings of Freudian mourning and melancholia, where the feelings of hopelessness, surrender and meaninglessness are interwoven with a full acceptance of one’s own mortality. To this end, Espen Hammer’s study on the so-called inner darkness (2004), which follows the development of melancholy through history and across different literary fiction, seems easily applicable to Kerouac’s understanding of his own position in the world. The themes and motifs of the loss of illusions, failure and the various planes of estrangement from the rest of the society overlap with an all-embracing pensive mood, dream-like states, an intensive turn towards imagined worlds, and extreme privacy. In modern times, as Hammer convinces us, the motif of roaming and traveling becomes a popular expression of nihilistic melancholy: a man belongs nowhere and is always on the move – the only thing he can do is wander around the limbo of his absence. As if in perfect correlation with this standpoint, Kerouac increasingly reaches for his inner spaces, which are an expression of absence, frequently at those very moments when he is literally surrounded by a large group of people. Moreover, Kerouac spends most of his life in Dionysiac states of inebriation, intoxication, ecstasy, annulment and self-destruction. The feeling of standing still gets transformed into a feeling of obstruction, in which the past becomes destiny, the future nothingness, and so Kerouac’s life gets easily associated with not only Georges Bataille’s idea of Dionysiac transgression, but the memory as an individual symbol of melancholy as well. One of the main protagonists of almost all Kerouac’s novels is an epitome of an idealized American bum, inspired by a real-life friend Neal Cassady, who, according to his own words, lived in the rather extraordinary circumstances of the jobless dregs of society, forever hungry, but equally transfixed by life, searching for a multitude of wonders in the jungles of the West, wandering around in a state of mesmerized somnabulism, a singular kind of fast, reckless travel, and an obsessive fascination with play. Cassady’s unique persona, disclosed in his posthumous The First Third and Other Writings (1971), managed to completely spellbind Kerouac, together with his acceleration of time, the fevered sense of living, and many heterogeneous inner spaces that exteriorized in such captivating ways. In fact, the idea to write On the Road was directly sparked by Cassady’s San Francisco letter of December 17, 1950. What is most relevant in the fascinating narrative of Kerouac and Cassady’s relationship is that Jack seems to have been an altogether different man from Neal: Cassady lived what Kerouc wrote, and they still ended up experiencing many things together. Yet, vast and dark walls of isolation rose incessantly around both of them, lying parallel to the protagonist’s outlook in Woolfe’s story “God’s Lonely Man”, the character who claims to know loneliness best. Kerouac’s novels show a constant alternation of the thirst for a Thoreauesque beingness in nature, where one whole world is built far away from people, in close proximity to the stars, the Sun and the Moon, where solitude keeps the best company. According to Joyce Johnson, Kerouac had come to the point of agony where he could neither be with people nor stay alone. Writing kept him from doubts and failures. His status as an evenly loved and despised author seems to have made him into a Beatnik legend before he managed to explain to the world who he really was. Kerouac has come to epitomize the epithet that Yeats uses to describe the Modernist writer – a man helpless before the contents of his own mind. Kerouac’s fantasy of becoming a recluse who would write somewhere in the woods had been recurrently coming back to him, and went hand-in-hand with his nostalgia for the pulsating America, the country that was going through a number of changes at the time. In this way, Kerouac does not find peace anywhere for long. In the letter of August 13, 1957, Joyce Johnson aptly tells him: “I just wish you’d find some place in the world where there’s some comfort for you and where whatever demon it is that pursues you from city to city can’t find you”. Paradoxically enough, Kerouac feels like an ousider in the balloon of fame he finds himself in, a prisoner of the Beatnik reputation, trivialized by the media and susceptible to easy imitation. What is more, he increasingly started to believe that being alone could cure him and disperse the public belief that his life was synonymous with nomadic rootlessness and the high-voltage life represented in the majority of his novels. Not all cities are the same for Kerouac, though. He feels that people in the South (Florida) are dead, in contrast to New York which he finds to be full of electric vibrations. Kerouac would go to New York every time he wished to inhale life and see his friends, trying not to bring them home to his mother, the only place he went to over and over again so that he could write and drink in peace, where his manuscripts would be created at a brisk pace, until even that atmosphere would start to suffocate him. Kerouac’s understanding of spontaneous prose and the overflowing stream of words stands for his wish to grasp a particular ecstasy of mind, which is why he drank more and more heavily, even if he did maintain control over his writing style. Somehow, Kerouac could not manage to find salvation within himself, that composite closed space laced with, above anything else, feelings of unbelonging to the American culture – his mother tongue was a French dialect joual – his upbringing in the strong spirit of Catholicism and his gradual shift to Buddhism, as well as feelings of pain, doubt, a need for total freedom independent of external factors, people or geographically marked places. Whatever he would do, wherever he would go, he could no longer reach that climactic level of creativity of his 1955–1957 period. The reader of Kerouac’s novels feels that they are in one closed book, where you feel dizzy from constant movements, scattered images and disparate spaces. It comes as no surprise that Kerouac desparately wanted to write down every image, every memory, every experience, to show the America that had ceased to be. In this respect, the American West seemed truer to him than the East coast. In fact, the new world he was looking for seemed to be lying everywhere – the only thing he needed to do was to take a less traveled road, as Ann Douglas maintains. His true road was a spiritual path towards the inside, where journeys are transformative experiences, and, to a great extent, pilgrimages. However, Kerouac’s pilgrimage neither has a starting point nor a fixed destination. He travels for the sake of traveling itself. This element of decentralization of his so-called counterculture is not coincidental, but constitutive. Moreover, the very mental openness implied in longer journeys is in perfect tune with the concept of rootlessness and change as the biggest truth in Mahajana Buddhism which Kerouac increasingly started to feel close to. This way, Kerouac does not forsake the closed space of his mind, despite always being on the road, and projects himself onto various localities. As Willis Barnstone holds, Kerouac is not an arriver, but a walker. Kerouac’s travel map greatly contributed to the formation of 1960s American cultural mythologies. The Beat generation chooses to focus on what is spontaneous, open, organic, a process, a moment, paradox, improvization, and alternative states of mind, as opposed to anything rigid, closed, pre-planned, linear or traditional. The highway is, in fact, a double metaphor: a sign which unites the American continent, but which simultaneously decentralizes its subjects, as Roy Kozlovsky asserts. To drive fast means to opt for the spatial over the social/societal, the car as a means of self-expression, and a particular kind of masculinity, rather than a status symbol. The highway and the city are kindred open spaces, antipodes to a family closed life. Traditionally, home is a feminine space, while the car embodies a space of male bonding disentangled from family shackles and norms. Kerouac’s fictionalized male outsiders, exiled and mobile, enchanted by movement itself as well as goallessness with no promises and commitment, support the American mythology of deviant and ambivalent behaviour. All in all, Kerouac’s nomadic lifestyle epitomizes placelessness and existence with no limits, where one road never ends, where there is a Whitmanian understanding of the West as one giant space with multiple possibilities. Jack Kerouac remains a lonesome traveler, for the most part enclosed within his own mind, a writer of a particular lyric responsiveness to soul and language matters.

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