Notes
265 CdiZh . Dionysus Descends . Ironically Wolfe told his editor that Of Time and the River was flawed by his mode of working, which consisted of writing as frenetically as possible for extended periods and then assembling the results into narrative form (Donald –). . Burroughs, whose fictions turn on the social uses of ecstasy, was entranced by the rural Marabout orders of Moroccan Sufism and their ritual celebrations of the goat god, Bou Jaloud, a survival of the Persian Dionysus cults and Pan himself, according to Brion Gysin. “Musicians are magicians in Morocco,” writes Burroughs of his experience in , when Ornette Coleman journeyed to the Riff foothills to record with the Master Musicians of the Jajouka (“Face to Face”). Visiting Burroughs in Tangier in spring , Kerouac writes excitedly of this “strange wild Arab town—old as Time” and of Berber mountain herdsman and “nighted drums” at Ramadan: “All the Arabs play flutes from am till pm the next day, and feast in between. . . . I’ve really absorbed all there is in Morocco” (SL, II –). . Whereas Céline proposed that “reason died in . . . after that everybody began to rave” (North ), Mina Loy’s record of a “crisis in consciousness” the same year () preempted Lawrence’s dating of western implosion in Kangaroo: It was in the old world ended. In the winter – the spirit of old London collapsed; the city, in some way, perished, perished from being the heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors. The integrity of London collapsed and the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice. () . See Gary Snyder: Class-structured civilized society is a kind of mass-ego. To transcend the ego is to go beyond society as well. “Beyond” there lies, inwardly, the unconscious . Outwardly, the equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness: both of these terms meet, one step even farther on, as one. . . . [I]t is necessary to lookexhaustivelyintothenegativeanddemonicpotentialsoftheunconscious, andbyrecognizingthesepowers—symbolicallyactingthemout—onereleases himself from these forces. By this profound exorcism and ritual drama, the Great Subculture destroys the one credible claim of Church and State to a necessary function. (Earth ) . Mottram draws attention to Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, which presents the emblems of domestic settlement—parents, law, local police, wives—and turns on the familiar instruments of American middle-class life: telephones, guns, alcohol, and, most vitally, cars, which are used by the teenage protagonists in a twentieth-century jousting tournament (Blood ). . Whereas Mussolini prided himself on his sunlit, shirtless skiing and posed for photographers in the saddles of motorbikes and horses and in airplane cockpits , Malcolm Campbell’s “Bluebird” broke the world land-speed record sporting fascist colors. The cult of speed also animated Henry Williamson’s self-projection as fascist and literary man of action. His Goodbye West Country echoes the spirit of On the Road, packed with tales of racing through England and Germany in his open roadster, “The Silver Eagle.” To Valentine Cunningham this is “the classic fascist passage: the heroic union of speed-merchants and tough guys craved by all fascist leaders and actually achieved by Moseley—who made much of the jockey, the (woman) speedway star, the boxer, in his Union” (). . “The Too Huge World” . “The book’s flood of language,” Kerouac continues, is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity. If Wyn or Carl insist on cutting it up to make the “story” more intelligible I’ll refuse; and offer them another book which I’ll commence writing at once, because now I know where I’m headed. . . . If necessary, change title to Visions of Neal or somethin, and I write new Road for Wyn. (SL, I –) The issue of textual interweaving emerges during Kerouac’s TV debut on the Steve Allen Show in , in which he reads from a manuscript concealed behind a copy of Road and combines its conclusion with the unpublished Cody’s. . Fabulous Artifice . Playful references to Finnegans Wake also appear throughout Book of Blues, as, for example, in the “wife & ” section of “Richmond Hill Blues”: Little Cathy gladdy with sun cheeks beeted Jamie hiding hugging her knees Mother Earwicker solemn, notes to pages 43–80 266 lovely, flesh legs white. () . See Barry Miles: Kerouac resolutely and somewhat petulantly remained in a hermetic little literary corner of his own making. . . . [W]riting his slightly fictionalized journals . . . he attempts no heroic or adult themes. There is no story. . . . As memoirs, his books are also...
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