The American Orient

While Kerouac’s text focuses on negotiation and legitimization of Beat cultural miscegenation, William S. Burroughs’s works seem more sensitive to the inescapable relations of power structuring human interaction. Burroughs’ “algebra of need” presents an apotheosis of Beat social critique, utilizing intimate knowledge of junk economics to articulate a vision of capitalism that binds humans to systems of supply and demand, devaluing and degrading the individual. He theorizes a systematic manufacture of dependence afflicting both consumer and perpetrator, whose own need for power and control is never satiated. As commodification dominates ever-expanding arenas of social life, superseding economics to encompass sexual and psychological mechanisms of biopower, these “viral” control systems are internalized to become self-replicating impulses regardless of agents’ intentions (Johnson 108-109). Burroughs emphasizes the self-destructive quality of capitalism, but throughout his works he offers few viable alternatives for an individual to dismantle this “algebra of need.” Burroughs’ experimentation with styles of cutup and fold-in suggests a linguistic antagonism to discourses of Modernity, but in the earlier stages of his writing career he relies on self-discovery through the anti-Modern.

Desire for escape undergirds Burroughs’ excursions into Mexico, South America, and North Africa during the end of the 1940’s, and the style and tenor of his narratives. Similar to Kerouac’s DuLouz Legend, Burroughs chronicles his personal experiences through his literary self-reflection Lee, introduced in his first publication Junky. Burroughs’ 1953 Queer presents Lee in a state no longer sutured by junk, embodying a fragmented subjectivity desperately in search of stabilization through intimate contact with racial Others. Recounting Lee’s quest for a lover in numerous avatars of American Indian boys and the figure of Allerton, Burroughs maps his subjective expedition using rhetorical devices known as “routines,” which enable him to traverse vast spaces and temporalities in what some scholars have interpreted as a “politics of establishing nonsystematic connections, an antisystem that would not be trapped in the rigid formations of the state, the unconscious, or language” (Vrbancic 313). However, Lee’s desires to procure the affections of Indian boys and possess Allerton through financial coercion reflect an inability to escape this “algebra of need.” Burroughs’ acute awareness of this relation precludes anti-hierarchical representations suggested by postmodern readings of Queer. While he seeks refuge in a psychic zone unbound by the space-time of Modernity, the presence of capitalist machinery in the landscape of Central and South America—and the “viral” mechanisms of control inextricably dwelling in his own subjectivity—integrally structure this cartography of an American Orient.

In the introduction to Queer Burroughs explains his expatriation from America as a move to avoid narcotics charges. He travels to Mexico, which he describes as “basically an Oriental culture”—an anarchic space “with the special chaos of a dream”—marked by corrupt officials, accessible heroin, senseless violence, and young men unabashedly holding hands in public (Burroughs VII). An inexpensive Mexican livelihood was covered by his monthly allowance of seventy-five dollars from the G.I. Bill, which also funded Burroughs’ courses in Mayan and Mexican archaeology at Mexico City College. Yet his scholarly aspirations seem to be secondary to a major focus of his representations:

Boys in from the country in spotless white linen and rope sandals, with faces of burnished copper and fierce innocent black eyes, like exotic animals, of a dazzling sexless beauty. Here is a boy with sharp features and black skin, smelling of vanilla, a gardenia behind his ear. (Burroughs X)

Burroughs’ consumption of this image subsequent to a dosage of junk renders him surmounted with sensations of sublimity and a wafting sweet perfume. He mobilizes signifiers of visual contrast to fetishize physical alterity and gaze these boys as striking features of a natural Mexican tableau. Throughout Lee’s quest, his subjective space is populated by carefree Indian boys embodying anti-Modern, but his corporeal relations involve economic exchanges triggering violent impulses to dominate racial Others.

Lee is not alone in his self-exile from restrictive American morality. The first half of the book is set around a handful of bars patronized by fellow expatriates, each forming distinct social worlds of its own space-time: the Chimu Bar frequented by gay Mexicans; the Green Lantern populated with effeminate gay men; Lola’s, a “waiting room” catering to G.I. students with “neither past nor future”; and the Ship Ahoy existing on “borrowed time,” where Lee spends many of his hours seeking communication and contact (Burroughs 18-20). Lee’s conversations with fellow queer expatriates illustrate a sentiment of marginality driving these men to seek sexual gratification in Mexico. Yet this desire is actualized through American capital and undergirded by a need to affirm masculinity through symbolic forms of violence.

The oil rig routine encapsulates the gendered penetration of capitalist machinery in Burroughs’ cartography of anti-Modern. He emphasizes the proximity of American agents in the exploitation of Mexico’s natural resources, describing attempts to drill an oil well in an area where “you could almost spit over into Tex-Mex where I got my hundred acre cotton farm” (Burroughs 29). Critiquing Modern means of representing and enumerating space, Lee describes an American oil man with “the calling” who buys leases from the land’s inhabitants, and enlists support from a bank president “accustomed to dealing in facts and figures,” for whom he “gets out his maps, a huge bundle of maps as big as carpets” (Burroughs 31). Lee mocks the utility of scientific discourse through a geologist “who talks some gibberish about faults and seepage and intrusions and shale and sand, and selects some place, more or less at random, to start drilling” (Burroughs 31). Burroughs clearly disparages the purported ability of maps to perfectly represent a territory, prompting postmodern scholars such as Mario Vrbancic to suggest that Burroughs’ cartography is delineated by nomadic thoughts forming “unregulated networks in which any element may be connected with any other; they have no privileged point of entry, no intrinsic hierarchy” (Vrbancic 325). However, Lee highlights the penetrative symbolism of oil drilling, describing the driller as an overtly masculine American who upon examining the prospective site says, “some holes got lubrication, and some is dry as a whore’s cunt on Sunday morning” (32). This survey of a gendered Mexican landscape penetrated by Americans satiating an “algebra of need” for oil parallels the material privilege enabling Lee’s quest for contact, and the discursive power reproducing these representations through Burrough’s gaze.

Against this juxtaposition of alienated queer expatriates and prepubescent Mexican sex workers Lee locates a lover in the “delicate and exotic and Oriental” Allerton (Burroughs 16). Failing to initially draw Allerton with maladroit indications of attraction, Lee resorts to sleeping with a young boy from the Chimu Bar. Lee tries to ascertain Allerton’s sexual interests by proxy, buying a lottery ticket from a Mexican boy and commenting “Come back in five years and make an easy ten pesos” to gauge Allerton’s reaction (Burroughs 39). Through routines Lee gains Allerton’s attention, while presenting the reader with complex semiotic networks structured by class, race, sexuality, and violence. Conversing with Allerton, Lee begins to recount an incident where a Jewish man was caught in the airport smuggling gold bullion into Cuba. This elicits an anecdote about a Jewish revolt under the Romans, when “she-Jews” performed “strip teases with Roman intestines” (Burroughs 51). Entrails trigger a description of Lee’s friend Reggie, who worked for the British Intelligence:

Lost his ass and ten feet of lower intestine in the service. Lived for years disguised as an Arab boy known only as ‘Number 69’ at headquarters. That was wishful thinking, though, because the Arabs are strictly one way. Well, a rare Oriental disease set in, and poor Reggie lost the bulk of his tripes. For God and country, what? (Burroughs 51)

Lee’s routine traverses vast spatial and temporal regions using metonymic links to draw a subjective cartography unbound by a fixed locality and sequential flow (Vrbancic 323). The threads connecting this routine communicate the complexity of sexual attraction to racial Others precisely because of a relationship of domination. Anti-Semitic descriptions of the gold smuggler connote racially-tinged contempt for the “algebra of need,” linking an expression of the terrifying power of sexuality embodied by she-Jews, to a final vignette of a British soldier gutted by war and reduced to an emasculated prostitute dominated by Arabian men. Lee foreshadows subsequent routines with this relatively tame example, and is able to pique Allerton’s interest through these performances.

While open to sexual experimentation, Allerton’s “curious detachment, the impersonal calm of an animal or child” evinces an asymmetry of emotional investment that dooms this relationship (Burroughs 44). Lee’s coercive attempts to retain Allerton’s presence exacerbate this fate, such as when he proposes to buy his camera from the pawn shop, establishing the precedent for a relationship bordering prostitution. Allerton is aware of the threat posed to his independence and temporarily dismisses Lee’s advances, rather cultivating a heterosexual identity by playing chess with a woman named Mary.

Lee’s interest in patterns of behavior prompts him to buy a book on chess, which “rules out the element of chance and approaches elimination of the unpredictable human factor” (Burroughs 63). A space cleaved by perpendicular lines into uniform squares of black and white binary oppositions, Burroughs’ chess board represents a constrictive blueprint for gender and sexuality that he can purportedly escape by “cruis[ing] into space, without the temporal encrustation of history, of temporal subjugation” (Vrbancic 314). Drawing near Allerton and Mary’s habitual game of chess, Lee’s routine submits the historical development of chess to a subjective causation reflective of his flippant defiance to Modernity, but tainted by Orientalist discourse. Attributing its origin to the Arabs (it actually originated in India) when chess was essentially a sitting content, Lee recounts its changes during the Baroque period when the “practice of harrying your opponent with some annoying mannerism came into general use” (Burroughs 65). Lee’s narrative humorously mirrors his own disruptive behavior, achieving the objective of perturbing Mary. Beyond the chess board’s suggestion of binary gender roles, the martial maneuvers of the game take on allegorical significance as he describes a 1917 chess match at Baghdad featuring Arab, German, and Italian chess masters. By this point Allerton and Mary have left, but Lee’s routine has established the semiotic groundwork to explore his hypocritical stance towards the objects of his need.

Burroughs’ Corn Hole Gus’s Used-Slave Lot routine starts with Lee’s decision to desert his position as aide-de-camp under command of the sexually exploitative General Von Klutch. His nightly experience of forced sodomy signifies a perverse physical and psychological domination that Lee is not willing to withstand, but more than willing to inflict on Others. Lee sets out on a caravan with his paramour Abdul until his partner contracts a debilitating disease, when Lee remorsefully has to abandon him since he “Lost his looks completely, you understand” (Burroughs 67). Alluding to the image-driven quality of consumer subjectivity produced by the “algebra of need,” Burroughs elaborates this conceit as Lee’s bartering with a Dutch merchant produces a defective slave boy:

the Lulu-Effendi was showing sings of wear even before I hit Timbuktu, and I decided to trade him in on a straight Bedouin model. The crossbreeds make a good appearance, but they don’t hold up. In Timbuktu I went to Corn Hole Gus’s Used-Slave Lot to see what he could do for me on a trade-in. (Burroughs 67)

Lee’s calculated treatment of slave boys expresses the human devaluation resulting from commodification of social life, in this case drawing a parallel to the automobile business. The “algebra of need” afflicts capitalist perpetrators with an obsessive obligation to politically and economically subjugate oil-bearing areas such as those mapped by Lee’s subjective, while manufacturing an intense desire in consumers to purchase a car, a critical indicator of American cultural capital. Gus tries to sell “Sahib Lee” “a one-hundred percent desert-bred Bedouin with a pedigree goes straight back to the Prophet,” but Lee’s acute awareness of Gus’s “Scotch-tape and household-cement reconditioned jobs” impels him to haggle with the salesman (Burroughs 68-9). Rhetorical exchanges of haggling highlight correlations between the economic value of the slave boy and indicators of quality such as youth, ethnicity, sexual experience, and physical endurance. Burroughs’ social critique of Modernity is unmercifully incisive and darkly humorous, but drawing on a corpus of representations popularized by Romantic literary icons such as Samuel Beckford and Lord Byron, he contributes discursive currency to wildly skewed visions of an Orient populated by diverse slave boys waiting for possession by alienated Western artists. Burroughs recognizes his complicity in the politico-economic subjugation of racial Others, but this does not undercut the discursive power of his gaze as he imposes semiotic structures of anti-Modern onto this Orient. In bondage to Lee’s subjectivity and quantifying systems of supply and demand bound for diminishing returns, these boys are degraded into faceless, voiceless subhuman figures.

After this subjective dreamscape, Lee contemplates how to compel Allerton’s companionship. Initially he considers purchasing a share in the Ship Ahoy where Allerton had compiled an exorbitant debt, but he scales down his scheme to a financial agreement in which Allerton will accompany Lee on a trip to South America free of charge, but is obligated to perform sexual favors twice a week. Lee’s plan is to locate Yage, a plant used by South American medicine men to induce telepathy, which Lee theorizes has been used by Mayan priests to institute forced labor for peasants, and is currently being tested by the Russian and American governments: “Automatic obedience, synthetic schizophrenia, mass-produced to order. That is the Russian dream, and America is not far behind. The bureaucrats of both countries want the same thing: Control. The superego, the controlling agency, gone cancerous and berserk” (Burroughs 91). The metaphor of Yage reflects Lee’s attempts to modify Allerton’s sexual behavior, but also principally functions as groundwork for Burroughs to further map his American Orient.

Allerton’s grudging acceptance of their financial contract renders him coldly detached in their sexual activities, prompting Lee to explore South American gay bars in search for a lover among Indian boys. Observing a group of boys who to put on a sexually explicit performance seemingly to intrigue or mock him, Lee is overcome with an aching desire for anti-Modern. Shifting from a corporeal to subjective plane, Lee imagines a deserted house stripped of its roof and overgrown with weeds and vines, where these boys affectionately please him without the compulsion of money. Burroughs articulates a vision of his ideal anti-Modern space-time “He lived on the river and ran things to please himself. He grew his own weed and poppies and cocaine, and he had a young native boy for an all-purpose servant. Boats were moored in the dirty river. Great masses of water hyacinth floated by” (Burroughs 97). Yet Lee’s fantasy collapses as his South American cartography is penetrated by the “algebra of need.” Lee observes Americans wearing luxurious suits talking about purchases of South American territory, and he jokingly engages in a prospective deal to start a head-shrinking factory. Approaching the end of his trip in Puyo, the jungles are silent because Indians have used money earned from the Shell Company to buy guns with which to expedite their hunting. He examines the “prefabricated bungalows of Shell Mara. The Shell Company had spent two years and twenty million dollars, found no oil and pulled out” (Burroughs 111). Alluding to the oil rig routine presented early in Queer Burroughs completes his cartography where he began, but with a sense of defeat because of his inability to find the anti-Modern anywhere other than his subjective plane.

The epilogue to Queer describes the hostile resistance faced by Lee in his attempts to photograph natives of Panama. He remarks, “There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit” (Burroughs 124). Burroughs possesses an acute awareness of the privilege he wields as the gazing artist, and the power inherent in his representations of anti-Modern. Kerouac and Burroughs consumed racial Others’ cultural products to stimulate an American renaissance and formulate social critiques enacted through anti-Modern discursive strategies. Yet with Modernity as the referent of all their discontents and dissent they fail to offer much resistance, but rather observe its hegemony further manifest itself. As their failures to find lasting intimate contact and communication with racial Others allegorize, their privileged social perspectives render them a dominating force that distorts their subjects by constructing an artificial aura of allure around suffering.

Works Cited

Burroughs, William S. Queer. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.

Johnston, Allan. “Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation.” College Literature 32.2 (2005): 103-126.

Vrbancic, Mario. “Burroughs’s Phanatasmic Maps.” New Literary History. 36 (2005): 313-326.

"The Talking Class"

Efforts to understand the Other stimulate innovation and offer the beholder means for cultural critique. Yet inextricably located within a historical relationship of oppression, in complex ways the artist’s gaze unwittingly reproduces dominant discourses of alterity. In the American context, the literary movement known as the Beat generation epitomizes the contradictions of cultural miscegenation, particularly Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. This works centers on a quest of self discovery, presenting the negotiation of an American “Beat” identity that enables Kerouac to claim the cultural products of racial Others. While denuding the privilege enabling the Beats to undertake an American renaissance, and admirably interrogating the limitations of communication and representation, this text nonetheless exemplifies functions of power rooted within its rhetorical structure. Equipped with new idioms gained from racial Others, Kerouac’s spontaneous prose is employed to wage a discursive battle against Modernity. The anti-Modern semiotics structuring this text fails to accomplish the desired resistance, but rather by rendering Modernity the fulcrum around which all else revolves, the Beats incorporate racial Others into a doomed dialectic that ultimately affirms Modern hegemony.

Anti-Modern American subcultures such as the Beats were distinct responses to social reorganizations after World War II: shifts in capitalist modes of production towards consumerism, the consolidation of the military-industrial complex, and state propagation of Cold War anxiety. These structural changes catalyzed shifts from an ethos of frugal self-sufficiency to a notion that freedom and identity should be performed through modes of conspicuous consumption, reinforcing stringent notions of gender roles, and inculcating disinclination towards social critique (Johnson 105-106). Coupled with rising standards of living, the coercive homogenization of 1950’s America was rendered desirable by a sense of increased affluence for public. Political and economic trends of the 1950’s centralized American society according to a means-ends rationalism that prized enumerative objective efficiency over subjective desires, resulting in a commodification of social reality and the reduction of human beings to conduits for production and consumption (Johnson 106-107). Alienated individuals desiring escape from mechanisms of control perceived to be the excesses of Western rationalism, Kerouac gazes racial Others through a lens of romantic primitivism to construct alternative social spaces of anti-Modern.

Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Subterraneans juxtaposes the writer Leo Percepied’s encounters with a budding San Francisco underground community dubbed the subterraneans, against his short-lived, rapturous romance with Mardou, a subterranean woman of African American and Native American ethnicity. A self-proclaimed “bop writer,” Kerouac composes his narrative in conscious emulation of jazz, positioning him in historical relationship of cultural appropriation well charted by Amiri Baraka’s “Jazz and the White Critic.” Baraka interacted with the Beats in the racially diverse bohemia of 1950’s Greenwich Village, but became estranged by stark contrasts between artistic ideals and a social reality of slumming marked by white privilege. He describes the discursive power inherent in white critics’ attempts to deride, formalize, and institutionalize jazz against standards of Western musical forms. He also discusses white jazz musicians’ appropriation of this “secret” form: “The white musician’s commitment to jazz, the ultimate concern, proposed that the sub-cultural attitudes that produced the music as a profound expression of human feelings, could be learned and need not be passed on as a secret blood rite” (Baraka 13). Baraka’s perceptive commentary elucidates the motivation for Leo’s attraction to jazz and racial Others:

…up on the stand Bird Parker with solemn eyes who’d been busted fairly recently and had now returned to a kind of bop dead Frisco but had just discovered or been told about the Red Drum, the great new generation gang wailing and gathering there, so here he was on the stand, examining them with his eyes as he blew his now-settled-down-into-regulated-design ‘crazy’ notes… (Kerouac 13)

Suffering as a source of wisdom, inspiration, and exuberance is an innate condition of Parker’s saintly sacrifice. As a white writer whose dynamism has been asphyxiated by the artifice of Modern language, Kerouac believes he can revive his humanity by discarding unnecessary punctuation marks in favor of “the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)” (Kerouac, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose 484). Yet as Baraka asserts, this sentiment is tainted by “Nostalgia, lack of understanding or failure to see the validity of redefined emotional statements which reflect the changing psyche of the Negro in opposition to what the critic might think the Negro ought to feel” (Baraka 19). In this passage Leo’s egocentric perspective denies Parker any sense of agency or history. His existence is defined solely in relation to “the great new generation gang,” performing at the Red Drum to deliver subterraneans from Modernity through his soulful music. Leo’s attention to eye contact with Parker signifies an imagined personal connection between the two: “directly into my eye looking to search if really I was that great writer I thought myself to be” (Kerouac 13). As a fellow artist, Leo’s emotional investment in Parker as a symbol of the tormented outsider does not reflect Kerouac’s understanding of Others as much as his self-representation and the negotiation of his American and Beat identity.

Leo cannot incorporate himself smoothly within intellectual circles such as the subterranean collective, plagued by a sense of social dislocation stemming from his own ethnic background. Leo’s upbringing as a working-class French-Canadian immigrant structures his self-representation as an outsider, impelling his anxious defense of hetero-normative masculinity and fetishization of race:

…confession after confession, I am a Canuck, I could not speak English till I was 5 or 6, at 16 I spoke with a halting accent and was a big blue baby in school though varsity basket-ball later and if not for that no one would have noticed I could cope in any way with the world… (Kerouac 3)

Alterity is a crucial sentiment undergirding Kerouac’s “mythology of self” as chronicled in the Dulouz Legend, Kerouac’s canon of fictionalized autobiographies. Kerouac’s ancestral narrative consists of a union between European colonists and Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians of Canada, with a point of origin in his French ancestor Baron Alexandre Louis Lebreis de Kerouac, who was allotted land in Canada and married an Iroquois princess (Nicholls 526). Kerouac manages his alterity by constructing a mythology of origin that legitimizes his adoption of African American and Native American racial qualities. He attempts to reclaim this ancestral past through possessing an avatar of his female progenitor: Mardou.

Leo’s wild oscillation between affection and revulsion towards Mardou exemplify a gulf between Leo’s love of the individual and the symbol he has constructed her to represent. Listening to Mardou “formed just the background for thoughts about Negroes and Indians and America in general but with all the overtones of ‘new generation’ and other historical concerns in which she was now swirled just like all of us in the Wig and Europe Sadness of us all” (Kerouac 20). Leo’s representations of Mardou mobilize tropes of temporality symbolized by progenitors. Leo feels a personal affinity towards Mardou’s “Cherokee-halfbreed hobo father”, while she symbolizes the generative, maternal essence of racial Others. Kerouac’s fantasy of an intimate link to America through his ancestral Indian matriarch is found in the form of Mardou:

…in Mardou’s eyes now the eventual Kingdom of Inca Maya and vast Azteca shining of gold snake and temples as noble as greek, Egypt, the long sleek crack jaws and flattened noses of Mongolian geniuses creating arts in temple rooms and the leap of their jaws to speak, till the Cortez Spaniards, the Pizarro weary old-world sissified pantalooned Dutch bums came smashing canebrake in savannahs to find shining cities of Indian Eyes high, landscaped, boulevarded, ritualled, heralded, beflagged in that selfsame New World Sun the beating heart held up to it… (Kerouac 25)

This passage graphically illustrates Kerouac’s reliance on contemporary anthropological discourse. His emphasis of Mardou’s Mongoloid features alludes to theories of Native American migration over the Bering Strait circulating since the 1930s. Kerouac does not cite this knowledge for analytical clarity, but utilizes elements of romantic primitivism to formulate a problematic critique of Modernity. Countering the assumption of pre-Columbian barbarism, Leo venerates the artistry and architectural capabilities of the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs in lyrical flows unbound by arbitrary punctuation marks, comparing them to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (whose name he intentionally de-capitalizes). On the other hand, Leo’s descriptions of European colonists are marked by disruptive commas, and emasculating descriptors connoting disconnect from harmony with nature. Kerouac conflates cultures of vastly distinct temporal and geographic settings into an idealized motley mosaic; he refashions diverse historical trajectories into a uniform clash of civilizations between the organic vitality of racial Others and the penetrating sterility of Modernity.

Leo loves Mardou as an embodiment of indigenous American cultures, through possession of whom he may negotiate and legitimate his conflicted identity. Yet once Leo has obtained Mardou, his idealization of suffering triggers behaviors to distance himself and expedite heartbreak. He increasingly focuses on Mardou’s physical alterity—the visual contrast of cotton tufts in the kinks of her hair, or the “…stubble-like quality of the pubic, which was Negroid and therefore rougher…” (Kerouac 76). The second part of The Subterraneans centers on the contradictions inherent in Leo’s negotiation of identity:

Doubts, therefore, of, well, Mardou’s Negro…like it would preclude completely the possibility of living in the South, like in that Faulknerian pillar homestead in the Old Grandad moonlight I’d so long envisioned for myself…what would they say if my mansion lady wife was a black Cherokee, it would cut my life in half, and all such sundry awful American as if to say white ambition thoughts or white daydreams. (Kerouac 45)

Kerouac’s identity involves a careful negotiation between a central whiteness and a sense of marginality driving him to seek spiritual rehabilitation through the existential joy embodied by victimized racial Others. His aspiration of a “Faulknerian pillar homestead” is fraught with irony because it is an unobtainable ideal in light of his French-Canadian working-class background. This desire uncovers a facet of Kerouac’s social identity which, despite all his derision of Western over-civilization, still seeks acceptance and security from the normative ideals of whiteness. Leo may never obtain this fantasy, yet neither is he willing to seriously risk his allegiance to whiteness by wholeheartedly pursuing a relationship with Mardou.
As the novel proceeds to its preordained conclusion, Leo’s descriptions of Mardou begin to consistently exhibit a paranoid fear that she harbors malignant intent to physically or symbolically harm him: “…she was really a thief of some sort and therefore was out to steal my heart, my white man heart, a Negress sneaking in the world sneaking the holy white men for sacrificial rituals later when they’ll be roasted and roiled…” (Kerouac 49). The practices and qualities of racial Others’ that Leo had hitherto perceived as instances of organic vitality are now inverted to construct an image of a threateningly wanton Jezebel. In public Leo displaces his hostility onto Mexican and black prostitutes who solicit on the streets of San Francisco, claiming they are only out to exploit men by capitalizing on their desires—loosely veiled implications of Mardou’s supposed malevolence.

Leo starts to contemplate Mardou’s experience from outside his own narrow perspective only after alienating and negating her love. Mardou disconnects herself from Leo because she is no longer able to endure his tirades of symbolic violence. Encouraged by Leo to pursue a relationship with a subterranean paramour named Yuri, Mardou still cannot escape Leo’s predilection to objectify her into a symbol: “‘What are you talking about in there, bop? Don’t tell him [Yuri] anything about music.’—(Let him find out for himself! I say to myself pettishly)—I’m the bop writer!” (Kerouac 98). Ultimately it is abundantly clear that Kerouac’s possession of Mardou does not amount to a sincere emotional bond of love, as much as a trophy evincing the authenticity of his Beat identity. The resistance posed by his dissident rhetorical strategies is dubious, but the discursive power wielded by Kerouac’s position as a member of the “Talking Class” ensures the replication of the romanticized racism structuring his narrative.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. “Jazz and the White Critic.” Black Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.

Kerouac, Jack. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking, 1992.

Kerouac, Jack. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove Press, 1981.

Nicholls, Brendon. “The Melting Pot that Boiled Over: Racial Fetishism and the Lingua Franca of Jack Kerouac’s Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies. 49.3 (2003): 525-549.

Notes from Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

Some motifs we should consider as we move forward:

The origin (or myth thereof) vs. the Mask

F: "...there is 'something altogether different' behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemiel fashion from alien forms."

Teleological metahistory as presumed by Christianity (Eden, the garden) vs. a history dependent upon discontinuities, accidents, emergent and lost strands

F: "...to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations -- or conversely, the complete reversals -- the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents."

The mind vs. the body

F: "The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissaciated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration."

As genealogists of "hip," what tools shall we bring with us?

-- disclaiming the existence of a single, essential Origin
-- avoiding teleological explanations
-- accepting that reality is constructed
-- being meticulous as we track the different shifts and movements of "hip"
-- understanding our own role in writing history by being self-reflexive in our approach
-- emphasizing fragmentation, rupture, story instead of truth

Some possible directions:

-- interactive media
-- scrapbooking
-- a Benjaminian "arcades project"

Spot of Time

The folk and blues musician Feral Foster, known to me as Matt Sturcken, sings narratives to negotiate his position within the dialectic of privileged intellectuals and displaced working classes termed gentrification. His music addresses historical rhythms structuring the terrain of desire embodied by New York.

Matt strives to disengage his body from capitalist relations of production and exchange, yet his practices epitomize pragmatism in conversation with neoliberal capitalism. Dropping out of Hunter College despite a full scholarship, he forsakes academic discourse to sing the “earthy” language of folk. The labor of busking is one form of his intransigence. Accepting recompense for his musical service, Matt offers his art for public consumption. He relies on the material and moral support of his urban kin. He and his friends sustain their lifestyle by capitalizing on their art, engaging in service labor, and renting residences in neighborhoods such as Ocean Hill, Brooklyn or Long Island City, Queens. The bulk of Matt’s livelihood is supported by the weekly Roots ‘n Ruckus music show he organizes in partnership with The Village Ma restaurant on Macdougal Street. Roots ‘n Ruckus constitutes a soapbox to disseminate the voices of diverse New York folk musicians.

Interpreting the palimpsest of low-income neighborhoods to produce his songs, I initially ascribed Matt as a hipster. I define the hipster as one who valorizes deprivation and romanticizes the subaltern, while embodying a gaze complicit with the machinery of his beloved’s displacement. Yet upon closer inspection I recognized the subtlety of his work, for example, his song “Where to Draw the Line”:

Life ain’t it crooked, man, ain’t it strange
Spend it all on anticipation, never get no change
You can bet, you can gamble, you’re bound to lose it all.
Sound of the sweet, the cream of the crop,
While love only one.
If you’ve got something to say,
I’ve made up my mind.
I’ve been wondering where to draw the line. (Feral Foster)

Matt uses the metaphor of cartography to express the functions of his gaze, delimiting a sublime threshold. An asymptotic trajectory of desire for change is barred from realization by structures of loss and lack. Matt addresses the exploitation constituting reality in relation to his own intellectual labor:

There’s an art show way up in the Boogie Down. That’s right tonight.
Tell all your friends to So Bro and we’re gonna turn this place around.
But Lisa of Mott Haven has a daughter the age of four.
Her daughter will be slain tonight by a bullet through her floor.
But Lisa won’t cry, Lisa won’t weep, she won’t live in fright.
Lisa there’s free cheese, there’s free wine, in your home tonight. (Feral Foster)

The antique parchment of Matt’s cartography is engraved with oppositions and inversions of space as he maps a calculated migration of hipsters. When Lisa’s child is murdered by a stray bullet from beneath her feet, the redemptive function of her suppuration is inhibited and overshadowed by the freedom to consume. Matt locates himself through self-critical play with history, drawing on the space of Mott Haven to contextualize his position within processes of gentrification.

Mott Haven was founded in 1850 as an industrial village by the developer Jordan L. Mott who owned the nearby iron works. As elevated railways brought waves of German, Jewish and Italian immigrants through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the neighborhood became vibrant with elegant row-houses and a thriving piano manufacturing industry. The affluent working and middle class immigrant neighborhood declined following World War II when heavy industry diminished and old residencies were demolished in slum clearance programs, displaced with low income public housing concentrating black and Puerto Rican residents. When Matt apprehends the space, he sees vacant lots and abandoned buildings, a fact he reads through a nostalgic lens:

It was June 6th 1944.
A lonesome migrant finds himself again at war.
And he left his home fifteen years ago,
Only to find himself back home.
Wandering around the place he was a boy,
He’s tired of being a …
Only to find his long lost love in the brothel he stayed last night.
Now he’s been wondering where to draw the line. (Feral Foster)

The meandering path—leading away from, and back towards, the home—reflects cyclic rhythms restructuring Mott Haven. Matt locates his avatar in historical coordinates of urban transformation to address a dialectic in which present concerns are articulated through an imagined past. Finding his beloved possessed by an exploitative system of relations, the migrant wonders “where to draw the line.”