From Kerouac back to Thoreau: The Pull towards Nature, a Revolt against Culture?

Year 2022, Issue: 57, 53 - 70, 14.06.2023

Tanguy Harma

Abstract

Many of Jack Kerouac’s road novels stage a retreat into the
wild that typifies an irrepressible urge towards natural phenomena, an
urge which closely resonates with the works of Henry David Thoreau
a century earlier. In Kerouac’s Big Sur (1962) and in Thoreau’s Walden
(1854), nature is envisaged as a safe haven from the sociohistorical
forces of oppression that shape modern existence, but also – more
romantically – as a gateway to spiritual insights that affords the
possibility for transcendence. Highlighting a series of analogies on the
narrative, aesthetic and ontological planes between the two novels, the
article goes on to show that this tropism towards nature simultaneously
involves a process of disengagement from the cultural predicament
of modern America; for Thoreau this meant the industrial revolution,
for Kerouac the post-war quagmire. Reinterpreted as a romantic form
of the revolt, this paper argues that this disengagement promotes a
deliberate alienation from the social world that blurs the line between
the quest for transcendence and the solipsistic condition.

Keywords

Beat Literature, American Transcendentalism, American Romanticism, Disengagement, Alienation

References

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