Travels and Fictions in Jack Kerouac. An Ethnography of the Franco-americanity?
Using the definition that Jack Kerouac gave himself, (« Je ne suis pas un“beat” mais un mystique catholique étrange, solitaire et fou... »), the author reads the immense work of « Ti-Jean », by Lowell, as if it was proposing, through an ethno-fiction, the imaginary production of the founding myth of the Canuck lineage, of the genealogical chronology of the migration of the Kerouacs, from Brittany to the United States passing through Quebec, and of the difficult Americanization of a working-class, catholic and French-speaking family in one of the « Little Canadas » of the United States. The article demonstrates that the image of « Beatnik » does not do justice to the extraordinary literary creativity of that writer who invented an automatic style of writing, unknown before him, which put in words the spirit of a whole epoch in one of the « great American novels » of the 20th century and which rewrote a new version of American travelling-mythology. The imaginary world of Kerouac was that of an inner exploration, as for Walt Whitman, that of excess in wandering, in a descent in self to the point of madness and death in alcohol, and finally, that of compulsive reflection on the hybrid identity of the Franco-Americans in an Amerindian America. The author shows that, for a few years, the Franco-American legend of the Duluoz was the myth of the American people.