Ruxandra Cesereanu
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Homo Viator in Transition
Travelling through and with Céline, Nabokov, Kerouak
Abstract: The characters in the three novels (Voyage au bout de la nuit, Lolita and On the Road) analysed in this essay willingly put themselves in the position of a picaro. This allows them to taste the world, but also to isolate themselves preventively from it. They adopt a raisonneur strategy, as they discover that time can be more easily controlled through narrativity. Some of the characters develop different theories related to temporality in order to justify their condition of frenetic wanderers. Throughout their journeys, their greatest acts of defiance are against Time: their struggle is to find the way in which time can be manipulated so that they might sublimate their despair and solitude.
Keywords: Ferdinand Céline, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouak, initiation voyage, self-discovery
At the end of an initiation journey, what is almost always to be found is physical death, psychical death or, on the contrary, rebirth. Whether it is a maturity ritual or a rite of passage, whether it looks for a solution to a crisis, the search or questa is constantly to be found even when the journey seems, or really is, gratuitous, considering that its main effect is that of catharsis (in social, political, human, or aesthetic terms). The pilgrimage towards something else need not be religious: the search for self-discovery can also become a form of religion or alchemy, since one changes or is partially altered along the way. Nevertheless, the journey is not always a gate towards the Unknown. It may be so for Bardamu, the picaro-hero from Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), Louis–Ferdinand Céline’s masterpiece. However, in the case of Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), or in that of the hipsters from Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957), the Unknown is represented by the characters themselves: they are the Unknown! Let me conclude this brief introduction with one more remark: a journey produces an alteration of the self for the sole purpose that, in the end, in principle, self-discovery should come about. In the modern novel of the twentieth century, or at least in these three novels of which I give a panoramic view here, this does not happen; on the contrary, the journey consecrates the disintegration of the self, its decomposition.
After having experienced the humanity of an asylum of alienated people who cannot mentally stand the massacres inherent to a France devastated by the First World War, which initiates soldiers into the structure of an arborescent slaughter-house-like world, Bardamu becomes a rootless individual: he is left at the mercy of hazard and, therefore, ready to embark on initiatory journeys which might enable him to mature, but also to taste life like a gourmet. Lola is the one who captivates his attention in order to theoretically familiarize him with New York. But even before the promised and promising America, France itself appears like a huge, branched map, where one who is bereft of honour and of a country (even prior to leaving it) finds enough space to roam about and become a homo viator, untied from domestic spaces, from territories, freed from the geography of his homeland or that of Paris, and actually feeling unchained from the entire geography of a sick Europe. Bardamu perceives the old continent as psychically and morally gangrened, as well as physically ruined by the war. His first journey will therefore take him to the tropics, to Africa, which will nevertheless prove to be as infernal as Europe: the steam boat is transformed into a furnace, while sweat and rottenness become facts hierarchically ranked as consciousness. The lucidity of rottenness is eating up Bardamu, who is a transitory, unfinished being, always on the verge of transformation because he is always available and approachable. The infernal sailing boat on the oceanic Styx acerbically awakens the travellers’ instincts: human beings grow enraged and break loose, catalysed by the alcohol which is the only solution for resisting the furnace. Bardamu becomes the raisonneur of this ragged and dehumanised world, which suppurates morally and is biologically, not merely existentially, nauseating. The travellers on the sailing boat are perceived as bodily carriers of the dejections in which they bask, “bags of larvae”, withered, depraved beings, fermenting in their own juices, as well as in their frustrations and resentments. On the shore, terrestrial life is by no means more dignified or celestial: a French colony in Africa and a miserable company mean perspiration, corruption, boredom, animalisation, exhaustion, paludism, and bafflement. Time has no limits here; instead, the space is condensed, tormented by scorching heat and fever. Sickened by Africa too, Bardamu escapes to America (on a sailing boat, how else?), reaching the famous New York, which shocks him by its urbane verticality. If European cities (not to mention the African territories) are horizontal and inductive of “dead faint”, New York is a phallic and even priapic citadel. Bardamu begins his career by picking fleas from the heads of quarantined immigrants, emerging thus as a real picaro. Afterwards, however, he succeeds in getting initiated in the big city, which teems with an infinite variety of spicy women and subterranean latrines. The character’s perception combines the libidinal element with the scatological one, in a manner that is characteristic, in fact, of Céline’s style. New York is a city shaken by the subway; it is hectic and, in this physical sense, chock-full of people, smeared by reeks and breaths, by luxurious shops, but also by hovels: an alchemical city which may be fascinating, but it is just as repelling. At a certain point, Bardamu defines the metropolis as a “failed fair” – but he calls it thus only because he does not fit in it. Since he feels rejected by the great city, Bardamu migrates to Detroit, an industrial city, mildening thus his perception of America with the help of the prostitute Molly, the only human being who accepts Bardamu the way he is, a homo viator in transition between worlds, who is unable to find himself, who wavers between his soldier-like condition in the war of yore and the peace that has not brought him serenity. After his American trek, Bardamu returns to Paris, a city built on a cloaca: the Seine. Even at home, his point of origin, there is no perfection or comfort, the world is still flawed and disfigured. Bardamu’s revelation is in fact that of Prince Siddhartha’s before becoming Buddha: life and the world mean sickness, madness, death, pestilence, and wickedness. As a doctor on the outskirts of Paris, Bardamu has access to the entire variety of terrestrial evil, but his condition of a raisonneur on human misery finally helps him mature through ritual lessons on the vanity of vanities.
Unlike Céline’s character, but also unlike Kerouac’s hipsters, Humbert Humbert, Nabokov’s character from Lolita, is a sophisticated intellectual who is also carried along journeys, although for altogether different reasons. His is neither a cognitive, nor an ontological deviation, but a phantasmal one: the phantasm that haunts him up to a certain moment is that of a little girl whom he loved during his childhood and who died. This phantasm of the past will be released in an exclusively corporeal manner through the nymphet Lolita, the perverse girl who takes the place of the dead one. Clandestinely wandering through America together with Lolita, Humbert Humbert is looking for himself, but he is especially looking for Love, even if the first part of this quest is excessively salacious. America presents itself during the journey through aphrodisiacal or, on the contrary, inhibiting landscapes, and particularly through the dwelling and copulating spaces that it offers to the 40-year-old man and his 13-year-old mistress. Humbert Humbert’s sole interest is in finding the adequate sensual space: hotels, motels, chalets, villas, small houses, manors, or inns. Crisscrossed by these travellers, America becomes a no man’s land which stimulates sexuality, through its luring, intimate, and promiscuous spatiality or, conversely, through its airy and luxurious venues. Besides this America of copulating spaces, there is, in parallel, another America, that of advertisements, of huge billboards, which mechanically transform Lolita into an addict of the consumerist society and which prompt her to financially exploit Humbert Humbert. This anti-intellectual straying is, however, convenient for the adult man because it distracts his attention from his chivalric failure of finding Love with capital letters. The drug effect induced by sexuality and corporality lowers him to the only accessible type of love: carnal love. At the same time, the journey is interspersed with points of attraction – infantile mirages or luxurious landmarks – meant to seduce capricious Lolita. Humbert Humbert understands that he must make the most of America’s geography so that he can recreate for the perverse little girl a world filtered through the category of “interesting”. If the hedonistic man reacts aesthetically to the landscapes they explore, Lolita is indifferent or even aggressed by them. Strangely or not, Humbert Humbert rediscovers the promise of paradise in the American landscape, aware though he might be of the futility inherent in beauty. Fragments from Claude Lorrain’s landscapes or from El Greco’s horizons haunt him as if he were a professional aesthete. But the almost priapic male, who is incessantly stimulated by Lolita’s charms, overshadows the subtle intellectual. Visually recycling America from the green of the forests to the scarlet of the desert, Humbert Humbert rediscovers beauty through something other than sensuality. However, it is too late: his sensual addiction to Lolita has already become redundant. Aware that he is a sexual criminal, he realises the madness and the delirium of his journey, but he allows himself to get swallowed up by it as if it were a protective womb whose entangled maps might distract him from his own perversion. A tourist and an aesthete, Humbert Humbert is, because of Lolita, also an insatiable and inexhaustible lubric tourist, addicted to “constant sexual exercises”, as he himself declares. He scours America peeling like a voyeur the layers of all the cultures that make up this horizontal Babel Tower, with all its races, traditions and histories that create a mosaic country. Humbert Humbert’s journey with Lolita is one of the few sophisticated and concentrated tourist guides to a mental America, a country combining a tumult of picturesque peculiarities, mixed with taboos, prejudices, commonplaces, and desuetude, but also boasting a weary cosmopolitism pigmented with hitch-hikers, bikers, truck drivers, etc. Projecting in Lolita a perverted Alice, Humbert Humbert wants to offer her Wonderland. She nonetheless lacks in refinement, is indifferent to the elite culture, and vulgarly indulges in sampling the consumerist American society offered on a silver plate to a plebeian being. For Lolita the journey has no touch of knowledge or of self-knowledge: she knows who she is. Only Humbert Humbert doubts his own self. A few years after Lolita abandoned him, he no longer theorizes about his former journey with the pervert little girl as if it were a supreme, accomplished act, but perceives his wandering of yore as a form of desecrating America, maculated by the “trail of slobber” left by a sexually insatiable adult and by a wanton little girl.
A second American journey – an infernal one – will be undertaken some years later: in fact Lolita will abandon Humbert Humbert, choosing another adult, a grotesque pervert. For the nymphet who is already acquainted with partner exchange strategies, this journey will open the door through which she can run away from her former erotic master. The latter will remain a poor being in transition, becoming, under the stress of circumstances, a homo viator, doomed never to find an end to his identity. Finally, a third American journey will be in search for a fugitive Lolita. So as to forget his sexual addiction induced by the little girl, Humbert Humbert travels across America for two years in an attempt to lose track of time, to forget about his fixation, or, on the contrary, to revive it. The wandering journey of this motorist picaro seems the only alternative to a mental asylum. During this period, he has the revelation of a theory of perceptual time, which creates a continuous link between the storable future and the stored past. It is, in fact, a form of conceptualising Lolita and their two actual journeys, precisely so that Humbert Humbert might eventually attach meaning to his identity. However much he might have tried to resist this, his journey or journeys have only enabled him to build Lolita into a mystical idol.
In Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, the journeys revolve around two characters: their initiator, Dean Moriarty, and their narrator, Sal Paradise. These journeys signify gratuitousness and beatitude and pertain to the beat feeling. What Kerouac describes in his novel, through the voyages that explore America from East to West and vice versa, is the birth of a generation, that of the beatniks. Not in vain are the characters in his novel illustrations of some renowned members of the above-mentioned generation, foremost among which are William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac himself. If Dean Moriarty is the initiator of life on the road, it is because he is an exotic being, a catalyst for this type of experience, since he is a child born on the road. On the contrary, Sal Paradise, the narrator of the American routes, is not a strange being, but a raisonneur with an epic appetite, who has the revelation that the human being’s noble function within time is movement, as he explains it.
America and, especially, the way westwards become in the novel a Terra Incognita and the land of all possibilities, a delicious, alluring no man’s land, a paradise in motion. However, traversing it is more difficult than it seems at first. The paradise these characters yearn after is not exclusively solar: it is unstable, ineffable, stained and stainable. The means of reaching this Western paradise or the Eastern inferno are three: by the official bus, by hitchhiking or by car (either owned or rented). Whichever the case, wandering amounts to a continuous existential tumult that, willy-nilly, has cognitive connotations too. When hitchhiking, the travellers turn the journey into a narrative, which sums up all kinds of drivers’ stories. These drivers are full of narrativity and accept hitchhikers only so that they can empty their bags crammed with life stories. At other times, those who narrate are the hitchhikers themselves, who, through their stories, boycott the monotony of the trip. Both are like epic pawns on a mobile chessboard. Between these stories and the fatigue inherent in the trip, far-away towns glimpsed at night are like guiding stars towards the Messiah for these traveller-magi. Kerouac’s wandering “magi” (who are, most obviously, picaro-heroes as well) nevertheless become psychedelic “magi”. Too young to be wise, they reach knowledge not through sagacity, but through aimless, gratuitous wandering, and sometimes through the aid of stimuli such as alcohol and drugs. Kerouac’s hipsters are strangers not only to the others (the inhabitants of the cities that they drive through), but also to themselves: taking the road from East to West also signifies form of self-knowledge, albeit an unconscious one. America’s East is the past, America’s West is the future, and that is why the present becomes transitory.
The journey is only partially gratuitous: in fact it compensates for existential spleen, boredom and aboulia. To grow old, any young man should overcome boredom, which could mean that he has acquired a minimum amount of world knowledge. Journeys are such means of overcoming boredom and of acquiring knowledge. They imply epic power and play: the ludic element is essential, even if at times it is backed by je m’en fichism. Then, it is important for the voyage not to have a precise, targeted destination: it can end anywhere or nowhere. That cities like Denver, Frisco (San Francisco), L. A. or New York should occasionally become fixed destinations is only by chance: such obligatory stops pertain to the quest for paradise, which these characters may abuse and become expelled from. In general, however, the hipsters’ journey from On the Road means exactly getting nowhere, roving about places. A penniless viveur’s hedonistic roving rather than an illicit, criminal loitering. Blah-blah-ing in the air is one of these pre-hippies’ pleasures; drinking whiskey is another, and getting acquainted with pretty girls and nice boys a third. Last but not least, the journey is also tasted for its picturesque routes. At its end, if there is one, life becomes a Dionysian vertigo adapted to the hipsters’ times (drugs, alcohol, women, madness), its climax being the party, the brawl, the orgy of frenetic wanderers.
Why do Kerouac’s pre-hippies wander programmatically? Because they have nothing to lose and because the American landscape, the big rivers (such as the Mississippi, for instance), the diverse cities (perceived, at times, as real deities) seem to stand for the entire world in a nutshell. Their journeys are a form of accepted madness, of something different from the banal reality. They anoint the wandering hipsters as alter individuals, crowning them with a special form of knowledge: the knowledge that comes from movement, as theorized by Sal Paradise. The travelling adventure stimulates their senses and intellect, renders life interesting, fills it with the stories gathered on the road, either from drivers met by chance, or from other venturesome hitchhikers. But even the pre-hippie travellers relish telling stories. The journey signifies exuberance and the naïve enjoyment of simple things: travellers might seem to be incorrigible fools, but they are the only individuals who can master Time and escape its grip. This is in fact the initiatory logic of the novel On the Road. After the most extravagant and reckless voyage, the one to Mexico, after a slow-motion Dionysian orgy adapted to the hipsters’ requirements, Sal Paradise will be healed for good and will become a lucid inhabitant of New York City. Like for Bardamu, his initiation ends after many detours and meandering journeys.
What is there to be noticed in the three novels briefly analysed in this essay from the viewpoint of the wandering hero theme? That the characters (including the refined intellectual Humbert Humbert) willingly put themselves in the position of a picaro, since this allows them to taste the world, but also to isolate themselves preventively from it. That they adopt a raissoneur strategy, as they discover that time can be more easily controlled through narrativity. Because of this, both Humbert Humbert from Lolita and the hipsters from On the Road develop different theories related to temporality in order to justify their condition of frenetic wanderers. This is not, however, the case of Bardamu (initiated only under the stress of circumstances in variations on the theme of vanitas vanitatum). Throughout their journeys, their greatest acts of defiance are against Time: their struggle is to find the way in which time can be manipulated so that they might sublimate their despair and solitude.
Bibliography
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2. Julian W Connoly (ed.), Nabokov and his fiction: new perspectives, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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