On the Road to Lost Fathers: Jack Kerouac in a Lacanian Perspective

Abstract

This book is a modest attempt to bring close the apparently incompatible worlds of the Beat Generation writer, Jack Kerouac, and the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, with a view to finding points of convergence between the standpoints which at first glance could be easily recognized as mutually exclusive. The existing body of Kerouac studies already includes the use of psychoanalytic theories, which is as much beneficial as problematic. Having adopted classical Freudian way of psychoanalytic interpretation, many scholars fell into the trap of either providing a now longtime-discredited psychobiography or offering a mosaic treatment of the subject matter. The book is the response to a call for a more comprehensive psychoanalytic reading of Kerouac’s oeuvre which would make use of modern psychoanalytic theories. As arguably the most pertinent and developed form of psychoanalytic literary criticism up to date, the Lacanian body of work fits perfectly well to serve such task. The introductory chapters of the monograph first investigate the major events of and the rationale behind the development of psychoanalytic thought on the American soil to further discuss key terms in the Lacanian thought and delve into the intricacies of spontaneous text production and text processing in the fields of Lacanian psychoanalytic practice and Beat poetics. The closing parts of the book aim at a close Lacanian reading of selected novels by Jack Kerouac. As this study attempts to demonstrate, despite the diversities in their idioms, discourses, and milieux, Kerouac and Lacan might be considered silent partners in a number of ways. First, Lacan helps to better understand Kerouac’s turning away from the American clinic. Also, the psychoanalyst’s reflections on spontaneous free-association – the key to the unconscious desire and identifications –prove its correspondence to Kerouac’s (as well as other Beats’) literary tactics. Finally, the Lacanian thought helps one to notice and highlight the problematic status of the (symbolic) father figure in the American writer’s oeuvre.