Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation

varlet Kerouac and the suffer multiplicationIntroductionJack Kerouac was responsible for spawning the literary movement that became kn stimulate as the outwit generation, a movement not al superstar signifi nookiet to literature, n of all timethe slight star which incorporated music and opthalmic art to chart a personal progression. Kerouac was the overhauler of a literary movement and a focusing of carriage he thought was a passing fad.The basic char affecteristics of Beat argon defined in Kerouacs 1957 novel On the Road, a text edition which was to amaze a virtual gospel for the Beat contemporaries. As the reference of this commandment, Kerouac became kn bear as the King of the Beats. His reaction to this title is documented in an article printed in Playboy, The Origins of the Beat Generation (Journal of Beat Poet Holmes rec t discover ensembles friendship, demolition of Jack Kerouac).The circumstance contract has a range of implications, affording critics of Bea t composition a rich array of ambiguities for their textual analyses. As an adjective, it was most magnificently defined by Allen Ginsberg, a portion of Kerouacs near(a) knit group, as exhausted, at the bottom of the reality, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise, composition the password beat was line of merchandise solelyy used as a musical end stoppage by post-World War II musicians in reference to an soulfulness or tune that was exhausted or downbeat.At the time, America her ego was beat- the country had emerged from the 1930s disaster of economic effect only to find itself entangled in World War II, and having to recognize with threats from the reds and the ominous propositions of McCarthyism. In one striking blow to Kerouac and other Bohemians, a definite link surrounded by smoking and lung advisecer was confirmed in 1953. Kerouacs audience was a disenchanted, self righteous population, an unguided gener ation with no clear direction or idea of what they wanted form life and too powerless and world-weary to go out in wait of the meaning of their existence. Such contri thoors engraft refreshment and salvation in Kerouacs self-stated confusion, corporal most app arently in his definitive novel- On the Road.Kerouacs style, like either of the Beat writers, is defined simply and genuinely easy to recognize. The Beat Generation saw themselves on a quest for beauty and truth, allying themselves with mysticism. The doings themselves were to be streams of consciousness write down freely and not to be adapted or edited Kerouac himself simply stated, if you change it the gig is shot. Poets and novelists of the Beat Generation labelled Kerouac the embodiment of Beat and hailed him as leader of the movement, the King term is perhaps much(prenominal) carefully chosen than it appears, patriarchally loaded as it is. former(a) well-known authors of the Beat Generation include Allen Ginsbe rg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey. 1. Kerouacs Spontaneity and the Beats. spell the title implies supreme spontaneity, Kerouac was never quite as take hold ofly oral as his legend has insisted. His plan was to wee a giant larger-than-life in the tradition of Balzac and Proust, that he never managed to determine a literary technique capable of welding the separate books of his Duluoz chronology into a coherent whole, even if he tried. Ann Charters is the voice behind much of the scathing discussion of Kerouacs overwhelming legend-making aspiration,He couldnt come up with all literary technique to help him fit all the volumes of the Duluoz Legend into one around-the-clock tale. All he could think of was to change the relates in the mixed books derriere to their authorized forms, hoping that this iodin stroke would give sufficient consistency to the disparate books, magically making them fit more smoothly into their larger context as the Dulu oz (Kerouac the Louse) LegendHe wanted the books reissued in a provide edition to make the larger design unmistakeable.To claim that each individual novel is insufficient without integration into the larger context of the legend assumes a really conventional comment of legend. Not only is it linear and coherently chronological, it is to a fault bound by the rules of time that govern macrocosm. Of course thither is no diachronic reason why this should be so. Kerouacs beats create permanent and timeless impressions, and unending rhythms like constitution herself- the beat allow for go on if it is not bound by temporal roleity or rationality, but, like a true legend, circulates and permeates the universal consciousness all the time, for all time. A legend can, after all, be many a(prenominal) things an unauthenticated story from old-fashioned times an allegorical tale of obvious exaggeration or delusion simple fame an explanation accompanying an image or map- and, in music , a composition capable of relating a story- even without lyric.Charters criticisms fall a instruction rapidly. Kerouacs break a course well adheres to each of these versions of the term legend, as if he is unconscious sensely sensitive to the subtle multiplicity of the word, and feels obliged to fulfil the words promise. His deform is carefully designed, and then, he was preoccupied by the mental picture of design- the pre-styling of the free-styling- and perhaps not, then, the freewheeling and careless King of Beats.The assumption of wild abandon fronts to arise from misunderstandings of the term free prose. The free to which Kerouac refers does not, in any way, signify a pass on of visualize. It is, however, rather like Wordsworths spontaneous overflow of sinewy feeling, which creates an impression of experimentation but really represents a highly contrived artifice to transmit the exuberance of inborn speech. Associating Kerouacs particular diction with what he h as called, the unfulfilled linguistic intentions of the British Lake poets, Tytell asserts that Kerouac sought a diction compatible with the vivid and unruly flow of any uncontrollable involuntary thoughts that he had to release.While Kerouac intelligibly hoped that his Spontaneous bop prosody would revolutionize American literature, estimable as Joyce had revolutionized English prose, spontaneous bop has musical implications far more than literary ones. Kerouac and the other Beat writers listened to music as they acetifyed, and bop sure enough applies to the withdraw laid which accompanied their writing, more than anything the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonius Monk.In many slipway Kerouacs literary technique is structured on a fabric of Jazz riffs- the liking for both creation to perfect a deliberate style that does not look deliberate, something which systematically generates an impression of spontaneity. Albert Murray has defined a jazz riff as, a brief musical phrase that is retell, sometimes with truly subtle variations, over the length of a stanza as a chordal pattern follows its normal progressionRiffs al ways seem spontaneous as if they were improvised in the heat of the performance. So much so that riffing is sometimes seen as synonymous with improvisationnot only are riffs as much a part of the akin arrangements and orchestrations as the lead melody, but many consist of nothing more than stock phrases, quotations from the same familiar melody, or even clichs that sightly happen to be popular at the moment.Such is the technical improvisation of Kerouacs prose. De scandalize his declared disinterest in music, Kerouacs writing evidences a profound identification of the construct of music with that of literary whole kit and caboodle. As he states in his Paris critical review interviewAs for my regular English verse, I knocked it off refrain just as a musician has to get out, a jazz musician, his statement within a certain number of bars, and later likens the writers trickery to that of the hornplayer,I formulated the theory of breath as measure, in prose and in verse, never mind what Olson, Charles Olson says, I formulated that theory in 1953 at the request of Burroughs and Ginsberg. Then theres the raciness and license and humour of jazz.In Kerouacs own terms, then, the beat follows the phrasing of the jazz model. In his theory of breath as measure he reveals his acute attention to the sentence- elsewhere denounced- and even acknowledges the control of cadence. His contemporary critics occasionally saw musical rhythm in Kerouac Tallman found a version of sentimental thirties music in The townspeople and the City, where melody rather than a storyline, controls the fit. On the Road, however, demonstrates a issue into bebop, Where the sounds make out BIFF, BOFF, BLIP, BLEEP, BOP, BEEP, CLINCK, ZOWIE Sounds break up. And are replaced by other sounds. The journey is NOW. The taradiddle is a humpty dumpty heap. Such is the condition of NOW.Its impossible to avoid the philosophical and spiritual implications of this kind of anti-chronology. Just as music appears endless, repeatable, circular and circuitous, such is the freedom of writing unshackled to narrative.In Kerouacs novel, fully grown Sur, the message appears to be that since Nature is a part of the self, and to fear it is to fear oneself. The two meanings of Nature become one homo nature is animalistic, and this novel is cautionary to the extent that it shows the dangers of impuissance to acknowledge this.Kerouacs nature/Nature synthesis represents the essence of his Buddhist sympathies, and this in turn relates to the literary theme of tracing a path. It is hard not to demonstrate this author without con savorlessing the mystical with post-modern work on impasses, such as Derridas aporia, and the sand that however far we go we can never ply our selves. It recalls the Buddhist expression, Wherever you go , there you are.I am bewilderning to see a vast Divine Comedy of my own based on Buddha-on a dream I had that people are racing up and the Buddha mountain, is all, and inside the Cave of Reality.The immediacy of his writing adds to the sense of guru-like mysticism in Kerouacs work his work spills out like revelations, if not beats, we certainly get the sensation that he is King of something. The work responds to deconstructive literary theory because of its very currency- it has almost completely evaded the conventional segregation and hierarchy of speech and writing.My work comprises one vast book like Prousts except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a mold bed.Criticism is forced to be perpetually lagging behind the designs and dictates of the author, whilst the works language is seen as a simple fashion towards a denotive end. Language is thereby devalued to the status of an instrument.Barthess statement, it is only through and through the manipulation of the author as the possessor of meaning that textual reality is do obeisant to extra textual reality is almost the antithesis of Kerouac. Kerouacs restoration program also depends on the authors pass oningness to disappear s quietly and conduct meaning, but unparalleledly, Kerouac demands that the hierarchy of the textual and extra-textual be flattened. Not only this, but that the direction of realist discourse be inverted. As Barthes describes it,the author is always supposed to go from signified to signifier, from pettishness to expressionthe critic goes in the other directionthe master of meaningis a divine attributefrom the signified towards the signifier.Clearly Kerouac does not begin with the apparent and consultation its cause. He is the archetypal author, travelling from a writer within himself a passion- towards a grand confection of shape expressive analogies. This critic is not working as an unseen gospeller of truth-in-nature, but uses nature as a space to unveil meaning, that is, to work from the signifier of the word, to the signified of the writing, like a painter signing his own name on the canvas. In fact, Kerouac is suspended between the conditions of observer and recorder. The recorders self is neither ejected nor declared in his writings, but rather encrypted- both in and as the writing. This partly explains the fascination that encrypted and marginalized author figures hold for Kerouac.His own become of suspension and estrangement from easy linguistic categorisation, and from the body of conventional society, is unconsciously articulated in all Kerouacs writings. The very potent agency of unconscious in itself is of course another natural tie, binding this writer to the natural world. When, in Big Sur, he talks of the meandering river/path direct into/out of the picture, he is describing the same path into and out of meaning which he himself treads. As a fugitive of consciousness, he travels from work to signifie r -in the sense of both meaning, and of the workman, the maker of meaning, and his conclusions merge meaning and its maker into a single signifier. As an author, Kerouac functions as a human conduit to bring external reality to textual reality- and is guided in this venture by the original source, the world out-of-door. All this is reinforced, and microcosmically present, in Kerouacs easy sport into and out of the page, into and out of the rythm- all of which implies a certain arbitrariness of the page. This is not carelessness, but save the flip-side of significance. It simply doesnt matter to Kerouac whether a symbol works in one direction or another, the importance is the motion- the action- itself.This is particularly lucid in the ingeminate jazz references in On the Road. The musical analogy for temporal progression is do explicit as Kerouacs fundamental modus operandi. When he describes his unique philosophy of composition, blow as deep as you want to blow, it seems he imagines the writer as a kind of horn-player. He attaches his methodology to a rationale for his bizarre habits of punctuation, Method. No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled with ridiculous colons and timid usually needless commas- but the vigorous space flash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musicians drawing breath between outblown phrases)The words occurring between dashes resemble linguistic entities unaligned with the conventional subject-verb arrangement of English sentences. These linguistic configurations appear to obey a different notion of time to the real world, with its real language. Traditionally, a sentence fixes time by acting as a frame for the former(prenominal)-present-future sequence. The conventional sentence does not allow the motion, flash, and fluctuation of Kerouacs writing ambition. In this way, the musical analogy enables Kerouac to construct a notion of time outside of the temporal constriction of conventional li terature. His work is less poetic, non-linear, and dislocated. A phrase need not refer to the outside world, for it can now begin and end with reference only to its own rhythm- a truly poetic quality, measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech-divisions of the sounds we hear-time and how to note it down (William Carlos Williams). So Kerouacs prose is measured with breath, and timing holds the key to its rendition. As he describes the process,Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-wrds, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of imageOn the Road is an attempt to solve the time/space problems Kerouac is troubled by, but his success is always qualified by what we aptitude term psychoanalytical obstacles. However much he attempts to overrule the order of cause and effect, past and present, this author must remain subject to the government of his own past. His reiterate attempts to pe rfect the form contradict the effort itself, of course- and this is Kerouacs paradox. The more he writes, the more he develops, and the more evident the writers evolution, the more it relates to a chronological dynamic. In the same way that labouring spontaneity foregrounds the labour, and consequently the authors hand, aspiring to tear timeliness through constructing a series of books over years only betrays his inescapable mortality, tying him inextricably to the outside world in evoke of himself.The writing brings to mind the words of art critic, Michael Fried, whose anxiety around the visually present world is everywhere present in his work,a means of evoking an experience of journeying corporeally through space as opposed to besides viewing a world present to eyesight but basically out of reach.It is clear that Kerouacs work is a melancholic writing of narrative i the most literal sense his books create chimeras of invisible historical figures, and in so doing evoke their absence- an absence which inevitably feeds his unfalsifiable claims, and, unfortunately for Kerouac, the claims of unfalsifiability made against him.2. The Beat and the OriginThe life of every Beat Writer is characterized by a prolonged psychic crisis that is finally resolved by means of a sudden vision or insightJames T. Jones, in his book Jack Kerouacs Dulouz Legend The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction, argues forcefully for an Oedipal analysis of Kerouacs work. Grouping the Kerouac texts in the Freudian context, particularly the Oedipus myth, Jones reflects on ways in which Kerouacs depiction of family relationships and by extension, relationships in his personal life and as fictionalized in his prose may be explained through Freud. His look extends to the enduring relationship between Kerouac and his mother, the residual rivalry with his father, sibling rivalry with his older deceased brother Gerard, and eventually a succession of male colleagues. Big Surs alcohol - generate ill at ease(p) breakdown is perceived as being induced by or symptomatic of his catastrophic attachment to his mother and obsession with the psychic tensions induced by the Oedipal family struggle.As Jones writes, Jack Dulouz , suffering from the effects of chronic intoxication and sensing an impending nervous breakdown, seeks refuge at the oceanside cabinunfortunately, like the grove of the Eumenides in Oedipus at Colonus, it is full of reminders of both the cause of his misfortune and the fate that awaits him,The oedipal signifier works in two directions, then, standing outside of time. The Origin supplied by the grove recalls the past and anticipates the future. A visit to the canon in which the breakdown took place, its rumbling surf and endless brook which babbles with life-sustaining noise, and the yawning canyon recall Kerouacs hometown of Lowell. We are reminded of the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, and the couple across the Merrimack River there. Since Ker ouac was introduced to it by his brother Gerard, the site, with its awesome mystical potency, is described with passion. The sounds seem to express, yet just contain, the power of the place as the river pee descend over the long weir, traffic roars in the background. All this combined with the anthropomorphically hilly vista of the grotto itself creates a sense of almost unbearably powerful otherness, an origin in nature now frighteningly alien to the human soul.Kerouacs world in Big Sur may be summarised as the doomed ambition to structure impossible desire. The labour of the carefully constructed Beat pattern is present in the background, as a sort of displaced metaphor for the mental and physical effort of writing. Thus Kerouacs Beat takes the anti-mimetic definition of realism one step further- since writing does not have to relate to what it depicts, it will resist immediacy, but relate in specific and indirect ways to the authors private life. In many ways, Kerouacs enter prise resembles that of a visual artist at least as much as an aural or literary construction. Courbets paintings, for example, operate in a very similar way to Kerouacs works. They share this meta-symbolism, with particular interest in representing origins as water, or indeed as female genitalia- and also aspire to an impossible merging with befogged roots. In Courbets art the impossible merger is one of body and work for Kerouac it is the artifice of language and the unruly inevitability of the natural- taking him as close as anything ever can to his father. An erotics of the word and image is then inevitable, and Kerouac finds one fully-formulated and ready to use, in Freudian psychoanalysis.While studies on Courbet resituate sexual diversion within the (male) painter-beholder, rather than between him and his representations, Jack Kerouac does something subtly different. Through its strain on the writing/experiencing incommensurability, Kerouac resituates sexual difference wit hin the (male) writer/ endorser rather than between the artist and their work. The authorial voice is only seemingly the source of psychoanalytic narrative- in fact the same narrative can be sourced through theoretical channels (backwards into the page) to the writer, and, if we believe him, to the contributor too. It grew exceedingly hot and strangeWe were going though swamps and alongside the highroad at ragged intervals strange Mexicans in tattered rags walked along with machetes suspension system from their rope belts, and some of them cut at the bushes. They all stopped to put on us without expression. Through the tangled bush we occasionally saw thatched huts with African-like bamboo walls, just stick huts. Strange young girls, dark as the moon, stared from mysterious rude doorways,Psychoanalysis corroborates Kerouacs general preoccupation with the fantasy of origination, in the case of Big Sur, the origination as personified in the figure of the father. In this mental imagery from On the Road, the dark girls are linked to the moon, loaded words like thatch and bush are always used alongside machetes and eery expressionlessness. practice session Kerouac like a goya painting or a poem, we can easily recognise the guilty violence involved. Kerouacs unedited unconsciousness reveals his sense of alienation, as the girls who are so strange are like the moon- nature is female- irresistible, unfathomable, untouchable. The flat thatch or low bush of the women is disrupted by the weapons and term of enlistment of the vertical agent of the male machetes. The interference in the body of water is the same- or at least, linguistically symmetrical- to the interference on reality that the act of writing always engenders. If female bodies and contrived spontaneity are references to the origin and the unconscious ambition to merge with the origin then any circumspect writing surface is fetishised as an oedipal object of impossible desire, always disrupted, int erfered with and vitiate by the very desire that defines it.Kerouacs Freudian desire to merge with the source must disturb the way he perceives himself. In fact, it illustrates and literally reflects the way in which we, as readers, percieve ourselves in so far as we are reflections of our origins- how it is only through disturbance that we can become aware of the source. If any reflection were perfect, with no material interference, we would have no way of designed that it was a reflection. Kerouacs tireless autobiography project is not only a non-narcissistic event, but an entirely natural one. In Hegels Aesthetics such self-portraiture is launch as a primal impulse of self-identification. According to Hegel, for man to become self-conscious he must first represent himself to himself, and second,man brings himself beforehand himself by practical activitythis aim he achieves by fixation external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man does thisto strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy the shape of things only an external acknowledgement of himself.Hegel goes on to describe a childs impulse to throw stones into a river there is no reflection involved, none of the self-annihilating narcissism of passive desiring seeing, but a declared primacy of action over seeing. Kerouac is invoked by Hegels wording, the continuity between ordinary action and the action of producing works of art is already implied by the image of the drawing of circles in the surface of the water.These circles are inscriptions of objects on flat planes that require a certain maturity of consciousness to interpret as the effects of a (manual) cause. Here, Kerouacs dormant reference to, and defence of, his own paragon situation as a realist author is very evident. In a later paragraph from Fried the message that the self is best quietly discovered through displaced descriptive acti on is completely inescapable, the effacement of the very conditions of resemblance (the breaking of the mirror-surface of the river) also means that the boys relation to the spreading circles in the water might be described in Flaubertian language as present everywhere but visible nowhere.A sentiment repeated in Kerouacs metrical composition, which breaks the reflective power of water by introducing the contrasting fragment of heat and dryness,Describe fires in riverbottom sand, and the cooking the cooking of hot dogs spitted in whittled sticks over flames of woodfire with grease dropping in smoke to brown and colour the salty hotdogs, and the wine, and the work on the railroad.The desire to identify with the origin, whether through worrying the water, impersonating the father, or labouring to represent oneself to oneself, may always end in action, but it is only ever the action of wrenching open the facture of desire. The impulse to create will always be driven by a lack, and K erouac is most conventionally Realist when he recognises this. Kerouac, after all, is aiming to reorganise an imbalance of power, and to measure up a sense of the monadic other.Philosophically, Kerouacs work is incredibly resistant to the Other, to the point that he scarcely needs the anterior of an audience. In spite of his evident veneration of the Natural, the world beyond that of writing/reading is so unbearable that Fried has trouble imagining it, levelling the differences between interiors and exteriors and converting all mimetic imagery into narratives of action or narratives of material surfaces to be read. To the extent that it is a independent sign-system (and I am arguing it is far more than this) Kerouacs work evacuates the reader and effectively reads itself. It fits Derridas conception of autobiography,My written communication mustremain legible despite the absolute disappearance of every determined addresseefor it to function as writingto be legible. It must be repe atable, iterable, in the absolute absence of the addressee Again, this supported by the assertions of one anonymous online Kerouac archivist,Almost everything he wrote was autobiographical. same Thomas Wolfe, he saw writing as identical with introspection. The word fiction does not really describe his work. It was more like self-directed psychoanalysis, except that his outlook was more religous and tragic than psychological. His books are crowded with his friends, lightly disguised behind new names. Allen Ginsberg, for instance, appears variously as Carlo Marx, Adam Moorad, Irwin Garden, social lionn Levinsky and Alvah Goldbrook. new-fangled in his life, Kerouac even considered publishing a unified edition of all his works, with all the characters representing himself appearing under a single name, Jack Duluoz (French for Jack the Louse).This homogenising impulse, the need to resist difference and integrate everything, drives the rhetorical case which Kerouac makes in an attempt to show that outdoor scenes are actually the same as indoor ones. It is affected spontaneity of language which Fried cites as the participation between the inner and the outer. Indoor and outdoor scenes are treated as having the same character and affect, to the extent that they have a rhythm and no inherent narrative. Kerouacs holistic ambition repeats itself on every level- here the very scene of representation is moulded by the realist theory. The interior and external scenes, like the internal and external levels of a psyche, become one, as they are united in common, necessary pain, of the disfiguring theoretical intervention. Applying psychoanalysis to Kerouac, this does look like an attempt at integrating the repressed inner and outer of the psyche, where the first might be characterised as darkness, depth, recession, primordial instinct, and the past, and the second as light, shallowness, presence, and surface agency.Farewell Sur-Didja ever tell him about water meeting wat er-? O go back to otter- Term-Term-Klerm Kerm-Kurn-Cow-Kow- Cash-Cach-Cluck- Clock-Gomeat sea need be deep I see you Enoch in short anarf in Old Britanny verify yes. Say yes to the sea. Say yes to chaos. Say yes to eternity. Say yes and let it all go. Go, go to the sea. To the waiting open arms of the sea. You and me you and me the sea. Yes. permit us be. There is light.Reflections are also the assertion of the horizontal. In spite of the violence metaphorically wrought, and acknowledged by his writing, Kerouacs work is concerned with empowering the natural within the man. The vigorous negation of comfortable feminine origination in his poetry refuses to allow the implied horizontality of the original sheet of paper to be wholly superseded, and in effect suppressed, by the verticality of the outside world. Psychoanalysis works through poetry subliminally, appealing to the subconscious by encoding itself in visual puns like reflections. 3. Missed Beats Misunderstandings and misnome rsIt has been claimed that, for at least one definition of the word, Kerouac was not a Beat at all. Mayer writes,A keen observer rather than a confident insider, Kerouac never really was a member of the Beats though he was among them from the beginning and as a chronicler cast their emergence into prose. When Daniel Belgrad remarks that Kerouac would attend parties only to sit silently in a corner, listening intently to the multiple conversations and noting them down in his memory, he is in line with a comment by Ginsberg, I guess Kerouac matt-up more like a private solitary Melvillean minnesinger or something. subsurface Kerouac, a biography by Ellis Amburn, develops the oedipal theme in his work, referring notably to his dream-fear of homosexuality. Claiming that Kerouac became a homophobic homoerotic by the early nineteen forties, Amburn insists that in the fifties, while an increase misogyny came to pervade writings like Some of the Dharma, his homophobia was increasing in direc t proportion to his homoerotic activity. , a development which might have been facilitated at least partially by Kerouacs worsening settlement on alcohol.Kerouac is known as the king or the speaker of the beat generation and his writings are probably the most widely read works for anyone studding the beat culture, but there is real evidence that he resisted the title of King, particularly the patriarchal overtones. Even in 1952, hind end Clellon Holmess book Go presents Kerouac as Gene Pasternak, railing against all that free-love stuff, that better-looking bohemianism, between friends. Kerouacs 1958 novel The Subterraneans features a narrator whose sexual hang-ups are barely known to him. Ben Giamo has termed the narrators stance in the novel as a peculiar form of approach/avoidance.The authors avatar in The Subterraneans, is French Canadian. His name is Leo Percepied and it has been appropriated for psychoanalysis. Kurt Mayer claims that as his first name is that of Kerouacs father, and his last, literally translates aspierced foot, the characters name is an obvious Oedipal reference. The characters destiny echoes Jacks, as he abandons pretentions to being middle class, and at long last returns to his mothers house. Jack, of course, always returned to Memre- Gabrielle Kerouac, what Mayer refers to as the only consistent relati