« L’ombre de Jack Kerouac sur le roman québécois contemporain: influence, filiation, rejet? »
Résumé
This paper aims at analysing the evolution of Kerouac's influence as a literary and cultural icon on the contemporary French-Canadian literary scene. In fact, since the 1970s, American writer Jack Kerouac has largely been a subject of recognition and filiation among contemporary Quebec writers such as Victor-Levy Beaulieu, Jacques Godbout, Jacques Poulin, Guillaume Vigneault, Jacques Renaud, Gilles Archambault to name but a few.
It examines Kerouac's heritage on the contemporary Quebec literary scene, streching from the 1970s to the present days, considering both Kerouac's French Canadian heritage and Kerouac's vision of America or rather of Americanness.
First, it looks back at the 1970s in Quebec to show how it was a crucial turning point in the reappropriation of Kerouac's literary and cultural figure (as the son of French Canadian immigrant to the USA) by the 1960s-1970s Quebec writers who saw in him a symbol of the survival of French culture, of French displacement and of the quest for French American identity on the North American continent (Jack Kerouac, a Chicken Essay by Victor-Levy Beaulieu; Wolkswagen Blues by Jacques Poulin; Le voyageur distrait by Gilles Archambault; Une histoire américaine and Salut Galarneau! by Jacques Godbout, etc.).
Second, this paper looks closer into the new generation of Quebec writers who walk in Jack Kerouac's footsteps not so much as their predecessors for his French Canadian origins but rather for what he stands for in American literature: a symbol of wandering and of Americanness (Chercher le vent by Guillaume Vigneault) and a representative of bop prosody and spontenous writing (Lucien Francoeur).
This study is, of course, considering to a large extent the everlasting influence of Jack Kerouac's identity at the crossroads of many Northern American cultures but also the considerable influence of his mythic road book, On the Road, in the construction of this icon figure of Jack Kerouac as the gardian angel of Quebec's Americanness.