"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.