“Roots always Precede Routes: On the Road, Through a Glass Darkly”
Résumé
When one thinks of On the Road's treatment of ethnicity and race, one hardly expects to be tackling the French Canadian invisible presence as the guiding line for the novel's draft and themes. And yet, Kerouac's ethnic background deserves being considered to approach the writing and thematic development of this road picaresque. On the Road is nothing but a projection of Kerouac's development of his American identity crisis, which he questions through the triad the father/the son/space, geography (America). As a matter of fact, the novel mirrors the author's problematics regarding his identity at the crossroads of many American cultures ― a crisis itself at the core of the famous meditation upon the great ethnic question and the cauldron of the American character: "What is an American"?
This paper aims at offering an ethnic reading of the novel from the point of view of Kerouac's French Canadian culture, and at bringing to the surface a whole palimpsestic French Canadian text which is part of a traveling heritage but which also calls for self-location on the North American continent, as well as for discovering one's roots out of this French Canadian transcontinental North American predicament. Therefore, it is mostly from a cultural and historical point of view that the French Canadian ethnic issue is considered here.
If in his road novels, and most particularly in On the Road, Kerouac tried to map American restlessness and wandering, he explores more than roads and territories, as the incipit of the novel suggests. Sal Paradise's journey across America is clearly heralded as a potential way out of a situation of aporia and presented as a rebirth. It is on the conditions and meaning of this rebirth that focus will be placed since it is obvious that Sal Paradise's rebirth is staged through the mapping of American historical and cultural origins. In trying to map American restlessness and nomadism, Kerouac loses himself in an exile that is to lead him, through a study in American ethnogenesis, into becoming the archeologist of his own lineage. What will then be developed is what the Canadian author, Clark Blaise, described in “Latin Americans of the North” as "the restless in my father and in me," as well as its geographic origin — Québec — and the geographic identification of Canada as a territory of reference. Let it be reminded that Jack Kerouac once defined himself as "a North American exile in North America" and no doubt the very 1957 edition of On the Road testifies to it. What is it then that the novel suggests about the roots of the various road trips Sal Paradise, Kerouac's alter-ego in the novel, makes across the North American continent, about his Ulysses syndrome?
First and foremost, the paper looks at Sal Paradise's various trips across the United States in relation to Clifford's argument that roots always precede routes, thus questioning the protagonist's impulse to move in the light of a French Canadian ethnic tradition. This reading of On the Road is largely inspired by William Boelhower’s researches on ethnic literature as well as by the group of Québec geographers led by Dean Louder and their studies of the French Canadian tradition of motion and nomadism. However, to be able to read the 1957 edition of On the Road in such a light implies contextualising this French Canadian mobility in terms of race, ethnicity and diasporic migration and consider the French Canadian community as a community scattered across the North American continent from a center of diffusion that is the Saint Lawrence River area.
Doing so gives further understanding of the very concept of invisible ethnicity as applied to the French Canadian community in the United States, as well as this potential French Canadian heritage in mobility, homelessness and self-location that is unveiled bya whole subtext in On the Road. Hence, understanding Sal Paradise's quest is first understanding Paradise's alter ego's floating identity and, most of all, understanding it both as free but also as unstable, looking for itself through a glass darkly. Reading On the Road in a continental literary context eventually also allows insight into the author's desire for America as well as his desire to write his own American novel (his "endless poem") as an alternative means to anchor his roots.
Secondly, the paper isolates and analyzes the concept of motion in relation to the novel's treatment of the American myth. If, then, motion/mobility is perceived as a means of resisting the concepts of family and home, the novel would then sets mobility as the quest for an absence: a fartherland/homeland, in its etymological meaning of "the land of the father".
Eventually, more than a picaresque novel, the writing of On the Road can be read as an attempt to exhaust the American continent, one articulated around the archeology of the belly of the Northern American continent. Writing thus filters the underground layers of contemporary America to find the howl, that prenatal groan. The writing and exploration of the land in the novel is therefore analyzed through an archeological lens.