Un Homme Grand: Jack Kerouac at the Crossroads of Many Cultures

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute in Toronto.

America exerts a strange fascination over Quebec. Pop star Richard
Séguin’s recent album Journée d’Amérique is filled with
reflections on the culture to the south. None is more poignant than his
song “L’Ange vagabond,” the vision of a transplanted Quebecker who
became more American than the Americans—the father of the Beat
Generation, Jack Kerouac: “Au bout de ta peine / Comme un requiem / On
the road again. . . .” A recent gathering at Quebec City celebrated
the life and work of Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac; Un Homme Grand
presents 19 of its conference papers, some in English and some in
French.

This is not the usual compilation of papers, for, as French critic Yves
Le Pellec puts it, the work of Kerouac “does not encourage the
distance necessary for analysis” (my translation). Rather, the
contents of this book include biographical memoirs, exposés of
Kerouac’s sex life and alcoholism, prose poems inspired by his
ecstatic style in works such as On the Road, peeps at his Oedipal side,
accounts of his continuing influence on the young in France and Italy,
and only here and there a standard scholarly analysis—which, by
contrast, seems almost from another planet.

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg recounts both Kerouac’s sexual grossities
and, in the same paper, the fine points of his Buddhism; Cliff Anderson
narrates several weeks of drinking bouts he shared with the author; in
lurid detail Josée Yvon probes Kerouac’s sexuality and bisexuality;
in a breathless rush of America-worship poet Lucien Francoeur exalts
Kerouac as a “grand dieu des routes.”

On the more reflective side, Eric Waddell analyzes the interplay of
Kerouac’s Quebec roots and his American environment; Pierre Anctil
examines the vestigial character of the passages Kerouac wrote in his
first language, French; Franco-American Roger Brunelle details
Kerouac’s almost entirely French childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts;
and Fernan Carriиre analyzes Kerouac’s life and work as a paradigm of
Quebec as a whole in relation to America. At the very end, Lise
Bissonnette, now editor of Le Devoir, elegantly discounts the opposite
myths of Quebec and America, in her image of both peoples as from the
same magma. She and most of the other participants reflect the
universality of Kerouac’s appeal.