"Mad to Talk, Mad to Be Saved": Jack Kerouac, Soviet Psychology, and the Cold War Confessional Self

"One fast move or I'm gone," exclaims Jack Duluoz, the narrator of Jack Kerouac's 1962 novel Big Sur, "gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you cant [sic] learn in school."¹ This refrain, which Duluoz repeats throughout his three-week stay at his friend's cabin in Big Sur, is the first hint of the narrator's coming psychological breakdown. It is also the first hint of the author's own breakdown. Published at the height of his fame, Big Sur marked a pivotal moment in Keroauc's personal development—from his abandonment of his Buddhist studies to his forswearing of his prior Beat lifestyle and his quick descent into alcoholism. The novel also marked a turning point in his poetic development, as Kerouac began not only to question the youthful escapades that had made him so famous but also to question his quest to translate those events into literary form. Although the publication of On the Road in 1957 established Kerouac as the progenitor of a new form of confessional prose, he had ironically begun to question to value of language itself—either in the form of everyday discourse or poetry. Indeed, Kerouac drastically curtailed his literary output after 1957, writing only a few more novels at the request of his publishers and some small volumes of poetry, a stark contrast to his prodigious output just a few years prior. In many ways, Big Sur traces Kerouac's growing discomfort with language: it is a novel that narrates the futility (and danger) of writing itself. Words, which had once flowed so freely from Kerouac's typewriter, were now seen as futile attempts to communicate truths that were inexpressible.

But more important, language had become for Kerouac a prison, both personal and political, and Big Sur reflects his ruminations on its complicated nature. Dealing with the trappings of literary fame and struggling with alcoholism, the narrator Jack Duluoz hopes that he can find salvation while isolated in the woods. His mantra—"one fast move or I'm gone"—reflects his troubled state. But his hope that he will find spiritual enlightenment is quickly dashed when Duluoz realizes, even during his initial trek to his cabin, that "something [is] wrong somehow" (9). Duluoz's failure is caused not only by the flood of illicit desires that interrupt his meditations, but by the endless stream of words that dance in his head. In part, Duluoz's frustration with language stems from the fact that it does not seem to match up adequately to phenomenal experience or possess the capacity to express spiritual ideas. "And as far as I can see," explains Duluoz, "the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words" (35). For Duluoz, there is no return to a state of Edenic innocence prior to the confusion of tongues after Babel in which one single language represented the created world.

Instead, language is revealed as merely an inadequate means of communication predicated upon the exchange of clichéd phrases and concepts. As Duluoz realizes, any system of language both gives rise to patterned associations of thought that limit the range of possibilities in the natural world, and also serves as a tool of psychological entrapment. Language is now seen as insidious—reshaping desire according to social norms, limiting forms of expression, and standardizing thought itself. Throughout his stay, Duluoz chastises himself for his naïveté: "All summer you were sitting here writing the so called sound of the waves not realizing how deadly serious our life and doom is, you fool . . . dont [sic] you realize you've been using words as a happy game" (182). Language, Duluoz comes to argue, is a form of alienation and therefore domination. He realizes that there is only one option. "Books, shmooks," he explains, "this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I'll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth" (211...