The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s Appropriations of Modern Literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux by Véronique Lane (review)

The turn toward comparative and transnational approaches in Beat Studies has been underway for some time now, yet it is surprising how little attention has been paid to French influence on the Beats. Writers like William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac openly acknowledged their debt to the modern French tradition, but the field has tended to overlook these connections, focusing almost exclusively on their sojourn in Paris at the Beat Hotel. Véronique Lane’s book, The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation, brilliantly addresses this lack. Through a series of astute readings, Lane puts Beat texts, drafts, and journals into a productive dialogue with the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Guillaume Apollinaire, St.-John Perse, Antonin Artaud, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, and Henri Michaux in order to offer an essential account of their importance to Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Lane ultimately argues that modern French literature is crucial to understanding how these three Beats developed both their aesthetic and their anticonformist stance.

Lane begins with a discussion of an often overlooked early collaboration between Burroughs and Kerouac: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Lane focuses on the figure of Rimbaud, revealing that while Kerouac’s interest in the writer is the more avowedly literary, Burroughs, by contrast, rejects Kerouac’s (and Ginsberg’s) romantic identification with the young Rimbaud and instead embraces the latter Rimbaud who fled into Africa. This bifurcation allows Lane to discuss Kerouac’s understudied reworking of the novel in I Wish I Were You as well as to deftly connect Burroughs’ Rimbaud to his cutup method, providing interesting readings along the way. According to Lane, “The comparison between Hippos and I Wish I Were You is most compelling for how it illuminates the distinct, indeed the diametrically opposed attitudes of Burroughs and Kerouac towards literature as an idea and, crucially mediated through French culture, towards writing as a practice” (28). Lane’s analysis does more than just fill a lacuna in the scholarship—it provides a new lens for thinking about Kerouac and Burroughs’ work.

Lane’s comparative readings also pay dividends when the author addresses another French touchstone for the Beats: Céline. Through insightful readings of Kerouac’s journals, Lane demonstrates the hold Céline and his work had on Kerouac’s development. Looking specifically at On the Road, Lane argues that although Kerouac’s novel and Journey to the End of the Night share “deep humanist values,” in the end “it is in fact the narrative structure and existential quality of Céline’s Journey that Kerouac transposed in On the Road” (58). Lane goes on to contrast this with another non-French touchstone for Kerouac, Dostoevsky, who Lane sees as providing a counterpoint to Céline’s pessimism. Through an insightful reading of Deleuze on Proust, Lane demonstrates that Kerouac was more concerned with capturing time as it unfolds than with writing the sort of “involuntary memory” typically associated with Proust. Lane covers quite a bit of ground, and at times could perhaps have explicated some points in more detail. Nevertheless, The French Genealogy addresses a host of influences that have been mentioned before in the criticism but have never been extensively discussed, and certainly have not appeared together in a comparative analysis.

Citing a lack of paratextual evidence, Lane declines to elaborate on Burroughs’ relationship to Céline, opting instead to “pursue the seemingly less promising cases of André Gide and Jean Cocteau, who each have a small but pregnant textual presence in Burroughs’ early work” (95). Lane argues that for a homosexual heroin addict who had recently shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, “Gide and Cocteau mediated for Burroughs a deeply problematic relation of life to literature” (96). As insightful as...