"“This is the End”. Big Sur de Jack Kerouac, ou la frontière de l’errance"
Résumé
This paper questions Kerouac’s influence in San Francisco and conversely San Francisco’s role in his work (San Francisco Blues, The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, On the Road, “The Railroad Earth”, Visions of Cody and Big Sur, as the city significantly marks each step in his artistic and stylistic development, in his writing of his American odyssey. Isolating the images Kerouac associated with San Francisco has brought to light one of its major characteristics – the city as threshold and last frontier. I shall then see how Kerouac writes and perceives San Francisco as a liminal space, thus developing two isotopes – the threshold and the border. Points of departure and arrival of a dialectics of construction and destruction underlying Kerouac’s artistic project known as The Duluoz Legend, On the Road and Big Sur will then be read as threshold novels and serve as borders structuring a poetics of liminality.
Focus will be placed firstly on the images of San Francisco to account for what they crystallize in Kerouac’s imagination, highlighting thus his peculiar vision of that liminal space; and secondly, on how the city frames and voices the various stages of the construction of the Legend and of Kerouac’s stylistic development. Eventually, I will dwell on Big Sur, a pivotal novel shaping the last stage of Kerouac’s deconstruction of the Western myth, and of the image “On the Road” promoted of him. As a place in the margins of San Francisco, Big Sur will be conceived as the last frontier, as a series of liminal spaces that are going to allow Duluoz, Kerouac’s alter-ego, to regain his central place, and to get rid of the burden of his role as “King of the Beats.” Composed on the Big Sur shores, the poem Sea : sound of the pacific ocean at Big Sur serves as a coda to the novel, traces the last stage of Kerouac’s Western poetics and voices his poetics of the road’s limits.