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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2014

“Visions of Tangiers: Kerouac’s Song of Oriental experience”

Résumé

1957 is a turning point in Kerouac’s career. In mid-January he signed and finalized On the Road contract with Viking while writing Book one of Desolation Angels. Most of the Duluoz Legend had already been written when, full of great expectations, he sailed to Tangier on-board the S.S. Slovenia on February 14 to join Burroughs and help him on the Naked Lunch manuscript. Hugh Harter, in Tangier and All That, calls Tangier an “artistic catalyst”. The question this paper raises is whether the Moroccan city has been for Kerouac that “artistic catalyst” Harter suggests as his contribution to that Tangerian literature from American writers is scant. If the Tangier experience will not be as positive and as fulfilling for Kerouac as for the rest of the Beat group who travelled and stayed there, the literature he produced on Tangier was definitely a distinctive, fertile and revealing one (no matter what was revealed) as the letters, short stories, novels or interviews testify. I first confront Kerouac’s biographers’ report with Kerouac's own Tangier narrative and letters to try to see how they all cohered (a selection of letters published in Charters’ Selected letters 1957-1969 and Johnson’s Door Wide Open). Then look at the seven poems published in Book of Sketches and Pomes all Sizes and the comparative experiences reported in "Big Trip to Europe" and chapters 50 to 59 of Desolation Angels. If these two narratives provide two versions of the same experience, resorting to a common exercise in the Legend, i.e. books and narratives overlapping time frames, they also partake of two different writing time frames and drive. Since the Tangier experience doesn’t have in the Duluoz Legend any existence of its own, and is included in larger experiences and volumes about traveling and passing through, this paper examines how all these cohered within the entire Legend and the terminology and world vision Kerouac had already fashioned. It considers and interprets Kerouac’s visions of Tangier and his journey to Tangier as many thresholds or liminal moments that eventually culminate into another rite of passage in his Beat Generation experience. Within the framework of the Legend and of Kerouac’s cosmology and imagery, this paper addresses what has been challenged in Kerouac Tangier experience, how his encounter with the city is translated in his narrative and poems and what echoes the reality he is confronted to in Tangier generates. It returns on the various passing through experiences as described in Kerouac’s and Duluoz’ journeys to Tangier and sees how these have brought the narrators many revelations concerning their art and vision of the world, always confronting them to a sense of lost innocence and the imperative to get along, move along their spiritual, artistic and traveling quest.
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Dates et versions

hal-03453041 , version 1 (27-11-2021)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03453041 , version 1

Citer

Peggy Pacini. “Visions of Tangiers: Kerouac’s Song of Oriental experience”. European Beat Studies Network 3rd Annual Conference, Oliver Harris; Polina Mackay; Khalid Amine; Raven See, Nov 2014, Tangier, Morocco. ⟨hal-03453041⟩

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