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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

“Haunted Voice / Haunting Voices: It’s All a Matter of Archives and Heritage—Jack Kerouac and His Legend”

Résumé

In his preface to La Vie est d’Hommage (2016), Cloutier writes that the openings of the Kerouac papers at the New York Public Library in 2006 helped uncover a series of unpublished works in French and shattered the myth of spontaneous writing his prose is associated to. What’s more of interest in Cloutier’s editing stance is his desire to make sense of an underlying paradox in Kerouac’s relationship to his mother tongue: i.e., digging into it, sucking its very marrow to reveal himself while burying his texts written in French in stored folders. What lied at the inception of Cloutier’s research and drive is a paradox which lays bare the very question of the archive and of archiving. My paper will precisely address the question of the archive and of archiving in Jack Kerouac’s writing process and in the construction of his legend/Duluoz Legend. Central to that question is first and foremost the issue of French language and writing, a haunted voice that Kerouac, as Cloutier aptly points out, decides to store in archives. Yet, the issue of archiving the language is far more complex than that in The Duluoz Legend and its proustian drive, it proceeds by a threefold perspective: burying or storing in personal archives, digging into ancestral archives, and eventually becoming ones’ own archivist. This paper will try to show how archiving, while partaking in Kerouac’s lifelong quest for a lineage and identity at the crossroads of cultures and languages, both Franco and American, is also what is structuring and characterizing the Legend on a formal, topical and linguistic level. Draw from a more developed project on archiving in Jack Kerouac, this paper will tackle how this dialectics of haunting and haunted voice allows contemporary 21th c. readership and critics to question Kerouac’s complex archiving gesture.

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Dates et versions

hal-03607025 , version 1 (12-03-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03607025 , version 1

Citer

Peggy Pacini. “Haunted Voice / Haunting Voices: It’s All a Matter of Archives and Heritage—Jack Kerouac and His Legend”. MLA 2022 Convention, Jan 2022, Washington, United States. ⟨hal-03607025⟩
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