Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction (review)

Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend, a comprehensive study of Kerouac’s fictional universe, examines the development of Kerouac’s use of the Oedipal theme in each work to argue that Kerouac’s fiction, nonfiction (Some of the Dharma), and even poetry are best understood as parts adding up synergistically to a more comprehensive, mythically organized, whole. Jones is successful in demonstrating that Kerouac’s writing is organized by his aim to produce a Joycean or Faulknerian story that exceeds the covers of any one book. This study expresses clearly its strong case in support of the primary wish of Kerouac scholars such as Jones, Regina Weinreich, Ann Charters, and Tim Hunt, namely, that Kerouac’s work (and not just his legend) move “surely towards an accepted place in the canon of American literature” (32). That is to say, Kerouac certainly intended his parts to add up to a magisterial whole, and a clear understanding of this intention certainly helps one read with insight, but whether this intention fully succeeds is another question.

The dream of an omninovel of this sort has animated a number of U.S. writers in the postwar period. In each case the writer takes material conventionally understood as marginal to attempt, by establishing mythic resonance, to convince readers that the material is central: “As Beat poet Gary Snyder once observed of his friend, ‘When he talked about his great novel that he was writing, it was like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a collection of stories which sketched the view of the times. And he saw himself on the scale of the mythographer’” (30–31). Snyder’s comment directs readers outward from Kerouac’s biography, and Jones and like-minded scholars also seek to go beyond the legend of Kerouac. The psychoanalytic framework that Jones establishes for his study is well-suited to discussing Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” (which Jones compares, in its methods and effects on readers, to psychoanalytic dialogue), but the framework also requires Jones to stay close to the biographical material that has been central to most Kerouac criticism.

The book is largely a brief from the defense written in response to an implied prosecutor who would dismiss Kerouac for being interesting as a personality but not as a writer. By discussing the texts not in the order of composition but according to the presumed chronology of the Duluoz story, Jones emphasizes the aesthetic form of the oeuvre a bit more and the biographical parallels a bit less, but readers are nonetheless struck by the ways in which the Duluoz story seems to function, and not always to good artistic effect, as the cast to hold together a broken life. We do not put together Joyce’s Dublin or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county out of sympathy for the author; generally speaking, we are drawn into the details of street names and accountants’ ledgers because we have forgotten about the author.

For those who have decided to travel to Kerouac territory, Jones’s study will make an excellent guidebook.