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Abstract
In 1966, eight years after On the Road first appeared, Jack Kerouac published an autobiographical novella, Satori in Paris, based on a journey he took to France. The purpose of his trip, Kerouac writes, was the search for his “ancestors’ home town” (Satori 42). Originally from a French-Canadian community in Massachusetts and a native French speaker, Kerouac narrates in Satori in Paris an attempted return to his roots. Ultimately unable to locate the ancestral Breton home, however, the narrator finds satori, or enlightenment, elsewhere. As Hassan Melehy has argued, the impossibility of reconnecting with ancestry illustrates the “failure of rootedness” itself (150).
Recent scholarship examines Kerouac’s multilingualism and the thematics of roots, exile, and displacement which permeate his fictional work. In this article, I focus on the intersection of Kerouac’s work and Youenn Gwernig’s Citation1982 Breton novel, La Grande Tribu. Kerouac was, for Gwernig, both a literary model and a friend. This article argues that La Grande Tribu inscribes the narrative of Breton cultural and geographic exile in the aesthetics of the Beat movement and, in doing so, provides transnational resonance to the crisis of Breton identity in the late twentieth century.
Notes
1 The Kerouac-Gwernig correspondence, provided by Gwernig’s daughter, Annaïg Baillard-Gwernig, is published in René Tanguy’s 2016 book of photographs, Sad Paradise. Unless otherwise noted, the letters are quoted in the original English.
2 See Melehy, Ch. 5 for a discussion of scholarship on Kerouac’s Breton roots.
3 See Melehy, p. 15.
4 See Williams, Heather. “‘Séparisanisme’ or Internal Colonialism.” Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, edited by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy. Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 102–111; Williams (2007), pp. 125–154; and Calin (Citation1997), p. 236.
5 See Gorgiard, Ronan. L’Étonnante scène musicale bretonne. Plomelin, Éditions Palantines, 2008.
6 Kenneth E. Nilsen (Citation2006) estimates that approximately 20,000 Breton speakers lived in New York City in the late twentieth century. Many of them worked in restaurant and hotel trades (384). The non-profit organization Breizh Amerika collects oral histories from Breton immigrants to New York, some of which can be found on the page “Breton USA History” of their website: https://www.breizh-amerika.com/history.html (accessed 27 Aug. 2018).
7 In the original, “Les poissons de la mer parlent Breton.”
8 Gwernig includes some French in his letters: “Embrasse bien Mémère pour moué,” (April 27, 1968; Tanguy 148) and “toute cette marde de toursistes partout” (July 3, 1967; 95). The letters indicate, both here and elsewhere, that Gwernig had met Kerouac’s mother and got along with her quite well.
9 For instance, Kerouac concludes a letter dated June 29, 1967, “Klanv Kemper keaz feiz … Feiz ha breiz” (Tanguy 94). Kemper is the Breton word for the town of Quimper, and feiz ha breiz, an expression meaning “Faith and Brittany.” The rest is word play with sounds from the Breton language.
10 Letter dated March 5, 1967.
11 Kerouac’s sentence reads, “(You shoulda seen that Quebec bar girl who called me ‘L’Ange’)” (October 4, 1967; Tanguy 121).
12 All translations from Gwernig’s La Grande Tribu are my own.
13 The original reads, “les vagues brouillons de la saga de mon peuple” (Gwernig 300).
14 The original reads, “Dans le temps même où je rentrais vraiment dans mon vrai pays, dans le temps même où je retrouvais le chant profond et la mémoire de la Bretagne, la Bretagne, comme frappe d’amnésie, s’était éloignée de moi. Et je restais là, stupide, perdu, abandonné, tandis que le sol, ma terre, littéralement se dérobait sous moi” (Gwernig 181).
15 See Calin (Citation2000), pp. 273–281.
16 See Introduction in Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree. Michigan UP, 2016.
17 See de Saussure, p. 158 for more on debates on Breton language politics.
18 See Gwernig, pp. 23, 96, 100, 159.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Annie de Saussure
Annie de Saussure, Assistant Professor of French at Lafayette College, received her PhD in French from Yale University. Her book, Race, Radio and the Republic: Decolonization on the French Airwaves from 1960–1985, explores the intersections between relevant discourses of decolonization in Francophone literature and film and radio broadcasting. She examines the role of radio in both shaping and stifling postcolonial discourse during the years following the decolonization of the former French Empire. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Western Society for French History (2014), and her research on Breton authors Michel Le Bris and Paol Keineg is forthcoming in Nottingham French Studies and French Cultural Studies.