Ovidiu Mircean

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Erranze pirandelliane nella narrativa di Paul Auster

Appunti per una speculazione

Abstract: The study is meant to propose a comparative approach between Luigi Pirandello’s characters (Mattia Pascal, the six characters searching for an author) and the postmodern dispersive interiority enacted in Paul Auster’s narrative. The arguments take into account both the thematic coincidences, (the existence as a perpetual metamorphosis of the surface, the inner world as simulacrum) and the stylistic techniques that aim to create a continuum between the world of the reader and the different levels of the textual reality (metalepsis, trompe l’oeil).

Keywords: Paul Auster, Luigi Pirandello, “postmodern identity”, simulacra, “trompe l’oeil”

In una lettera di 31 dicembre 1886 Pirandello scrive alla sorella Lina:

“quando tu, in una parola, vivrai senza la vita, penserai senza un pensiero, sentirai senza cuore, allora tu non saprai che fare, sarai un viandante senza casa, un uccello senza nido. Io sono cosi.[1]”

I segni di una crisi che accade nella vita dello scrittore poco dopo il matrimonio e lo spostamento della giovane famiglia a Roma si accentuano nelle lettere successive, per descrivere i sintomi di una estraniazione traumatica: “chi ha capito il gioco – scrive Pirandello anticipando con qualche anno i paradossi dell’Umorismo, – non riesce più ad ingannarsi, ma chi non riesce più a ingannarsi non può più prendere ne gusto ne piacere alla vita. Cosi è.[2]” La crisi delle verità metafisiche tradizionali, che scoperta, impedisce al soggetto di porsi un ideale e implicitamente, la dissoluzione delle credenze tradizionali nel finalismo antropologico, sono rispecchiate, secondo la dimostrazione ormai classica di Claudio Vicentini (L’estetica di Pirandello) nell’opposizione pirandelliana fra la fede illusoria ma vitale e la ragione vera, ma mortale. L’erranza pirandelliana, “il viandante senza casa”, per cittare la testimonianza di sopra, nasce a causa dell’impossibilità di appropriarsi una concezione coerente del mondo, un tipo di assenza di significato che lo rende vulnerabile a deformazioni diverse, e sopratutto alle rappresentazioni altrui. I sei personaggi che cercano l’autore stanno infatti provando di conquistare la propria realtà tramite una rappresentazione teatrale, un racconto che possa ricostruire la loro forma, la loro memoria persa, oppure, addiritura, la loro troppo fragile identità. Se il mondo trova la propria realtà nella rappresentazione, la prospettiva personale, l’interpretazione, hanno la forza di rendere l’oggetto vivente. In questo tipo di concessione, un individuo acquista realtà nella prospettiva della persona che lo conosce e la perde quando essa scomparre. Nelle novelle e in alcuni romanzi del nostro, la funzione creativa dello sguardo, trasforma quasi, secondo Massimo Fusillo[3], la vita quotidiana in una fantasmagoria meccanica, tanto che l’autore stesso finisce per satirizzare questa prospettiva in Notizie del mondo, quando spiega che si piange per il morto perche “ il morto non può più dare a voi una realtà[4]”. L’esistenza postuma di Mattia Pascal mette in atto lo stesso conflitto, la stessa impossibilità del personaggio di assumere un ruolo sociale, una forma per lo sguardo dei viventi, senza di cui, il protagonista rimasto senza casa, senza nome, senza identità oppure con due identità postume, è condannato a ripetere in qualche modo lo scenario biografico dell’ebbreo errante.

Paradossalmente, questa esistenza nell’ordine del simulacro, della superficie imagistica, dell’illusione collettiva tipica per i caratteri pirandelliani non si accenna quasi mai nei romanzi contemporanei dedicati al tema. Nei nuovi canoni abbastanza relativizzanti, prendono un rilievo senza precedente nella tradizione letteraria, gli scrittori dell’erranza formale, i maestri della digressione, Cervantes, Lawrence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, alcuni decadenti che teorizzano esplicitamente lo stile e la forma, però, manca un simile ricupero al livello tematico, e una rilettura dei testi classici dedicati ai soggetti ormai rivendicati dalle teorie postmoderne[5]. Fra gli antenati dei protagonisti postmoderni che si perdono in erranze anonime, cancellando le proprie orme non è quasi mai riccordato Mattia Pascal e la sua biografia finzionale.

Fanno eccezione, in questo contesto i romanzi del prosatore americano Paul Auster, che riprendono in chiave postmoderna, senza dichiarare mai esplicitamente la fonte, alcune suggestioni delle problematiche pirandelliane. Il suo romanzo più famoso, The New York Trilogy mette in trama la macchina narrativa di un romanzo giallo classico, in cui, però, tutte le catene della ricerca poliziesca portano verso un unico sospetto, l’autore stesso, colui che ha catturato in una forma fatale e criminale i propri personaggi. Il protagonista David Quinn, che ha in comune con Don Quijote le iniziali, parte in una folle inchiesta per scoprire l’unico strumento che possa usurpare l’onnipotenza dell’autore Paul Auster, cioè, la lingua perfetta, la lingua della creazione del mondo. La ricerca mette in rilievo non soltanto il problema della crisi del linguaggio, ma anche quella della rappresentazione, della correlazione persa fra forma e significato. “He arrived in a neverland of fragments, a plan of wordless things and thingless words.[6]” Perciò, il protagonista decide che l’unica soluzione possible sia mettere in scena la propria morte e impersonare da quel momento in poi, Paul Auster stesso. Nelle convenzioni finzionali del romanzo The New York Trilogy, il carattere creativo della rappresentazione si scatena e il protagonista in cerca dell’autore una volta immedesimato nei panni di Paul Auster diventa non soltanto l’autore di sè stesso, ma anche il narratore demiurgico del mondo in cui abita. Però la soluzione richiede la perdita assoluta della sua identità, la cancellazione della memoria, delle sue origini, e delle radici. “He was Paul Auster now, and with each step he took, he tried to fit more comfortably into the structures of that transformation. Auster was no more than a name for him, a mask without content. To be Auster meant being a man with no interior, a man with no thoughts. […] Listen to me. My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name.[7]” La struttura del mondo finzionale si reca al labirinto di specchi delle Avventure di Alice di Lewis Carroll e la macchina narrativa scatena una confusione dei livelli della realtà che confronta la problematica di una ontologia debole del personaggio letterario.

Il gioco testuale che scioglie le convenzioni epiche classiche per integrare dentro il primo mondo diegetico un altro secondario, viene definito da Brian Mchale nel suo libro Postmodernist Fiction[8], come “trompe l’oeil letterario”, cioè la strategia metalepsica di creare una realtà variabile in cui due diversi livelli del testo sono successivamente dinunciati in quanto illusori. Ripresa dai discorsi antici di giuresprudenza, la metaleps[9]i (derivata dal greco meta-, fra, dopo, secondo, e lambanein, prendere) disegna la contaminazione e l’intersezione fra diversi livelli di una struttura gerarchica. Di solito, il racconto messo i cornice rispetta la distinzione fra il livello della narrazione e quello degli eventi narrati, però la metalepsi riesce a produrre un cortocircuito fra questi livelli. In un racconto di Julio Cortazar, per esempio, La continuità dei parchi, il lettore di un romanzo viene assassinato addiritura dal personaggio del romanzo che sta leggendo. Una simile trasgressione narrativa potrebe essere definita “metalepsi letteraria”: l’intrusione nel mondo narrato del narratore estradiegetico. Al contrario delle micronarrazioni incorniciate, che spesso esplicitano il mondo da dove derivano, le metalepsi ripropongono tutti i livelli del testo nel momento presente dell’atto narrante, per cancellare i confini fra il mondo del narratore e quello del racconto, oppure, nei casi estremi, fra la finzione e la realtà. Secondo Patrick Mauries[10], la poetica specifica nascosta dietro la technica pitturale “trompe l’oeil” verte una negazione dell’immagine e della pittura stessa. L’illusione che svela la propria verità ingannando, l’immagine che mira alla propria natura si costruisce tramite una focalizzazione diretta sul limite, sulla cornice. Una cosa che esiste “in para” non è soltanto allo stesso tempo al di qua e al di là del confine che separa il mondo interno da quello esterno, ma proprio la frontiera stessa, lo schermo che costituisce una membrana permeabile fra dentro e fuori. Per non rovinare il suo effetto, bisogna collocare un trompe l’oeil autentico in uno spazio addatto; proprio per questo gli spazi dove viene messo un simile quadro sono definite da una certa pitturalità: i canti nascosti, le nicchie, le ogive. Gli oggetti, la composizione di un trompe l’oeil saranno sempre circoscritti; non potranno mai essere autosufficenti perchè non devono contraddire le leggi dello spazio esterno. Il suo spazio interno è definito soltanto in relazione con questo contesto, contaminandolo[11]. La cornice diventa invisibile e lo spazio interno della tella diventa una cornice per l’effetto creato dalla zona di confine fra l’interiore e l’esteriore dell’illusione artistica. Nella narrativa questo effetto riesce, secondo la stessa demostrazione di Brian McHale, di spostare la discussione dal campo della crisi gnoseologica moderna a quello più complesso dell’ontologia postmoderna e dei suoi simulacri.

Un primo legame fra il drammaturgo italiano e l’estetica del personaggio postmoderno, la sua interiorità sradicata e fondamentalmente errante, è già ovvia nei suoi scritti di carattere autobiografico, ma anche nei saggi in cui si affermano i primi principi di poetica drammatica. La relazione di parentela fra la poetica pirandelliana e la teoria della metalepsi narrativa è più che ovvia, fin dal primo articolo che il nostro dedica alla creazione drammatica[12] e al tema del personaggio dialogico. Inoltre, è conosciuta l’avversione del nostro contro il dramma del tempo ispirato dai soggetti storici, e la sua proposta alternativa di un dialogo drammatico che possa contenere tutto il sottostratto narrativo. L’esempio che offre è una storia presa da un poema di Heinrich Heine dove il trovatore Jaufrè Rudel e la sua donna Melisanda ogni notte si svegliano e insieme ad altre figure ricamate nelle tappezzerie del castello di Baya, scendono dall’immagine e camminano nella grande sala del palazzo. Così, sostiene Pirandello, i personaggi dovrebbero staccarsi vivi dalle pagine scritte, per acquistare vita. In altre parole, il personaggio dovrebbe assumere il suo ruolo di costruzione finzionale nel mondo dei vivi e quello di essere reale nel proprio mondo. La sua esistenza sarebbe una spezzata, schizoide; il personaggio stesso diventa l’agente e il confine dei due mondi, per dinunciare tramite la propria mancanza di realtà, l’illusione di ogni specie di verità autobiografica.

Infatti i personaggi di Auster come quelli di Pirandello vivono con la coscienza acuta della propria mancanza di realtà, considerandosi spesso fantasme erranti in una vita postuma, e proprio per questo, hanno disperatamente bisogno dello sguardo altrui, sia quest’altro un detective pagato a seguire ogni loro passo, una infirmiera, oppure, al livello metaletterario, il lettore stesso. Alla fine del romanzo Ghost, Black spiega perchè un altro personaggio, Brown si trova sempre a qualche passo vicino a lui: “Because, he needs me, says Black, still looking away. He needs my eye looking at him. He needs me to prove he’s alive[13]”. Nei romanzi più conosciuti dello scrittore americano, The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Moon Palace, The Invention of Solitude, lo scenario si ripete ossessivamente: un evento traumatico iniziale spezza l’ordine realistico del mondo, e la vita tranquilla, borghese, del protagonista subisce una trasformazione totale che equivale o viene paragonata dal narratore con una simbolica cacciata fuori dalla realtà convenzionale. La morte della moglie, un suicidio a cui si assiste per caso, una malattia grave hanno come effetto, la sensazione di essere soppravissuti in un mondo postapocalittico, costituito soltanto da frammenti disparati.. Piano, piano, il sospetto di essere già morto, senza potersi ricordare, comincia ad insinuarsi nella mente di Benjamin Sach (Leviathan), di David Quin (City of Glass), Nick Bowen (Oracle Night), che scappano dallo spazio in cui si volgeva la loro vita di prima, per lasciarsi in balia del caso. “He was alive and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life.[14]” (Leviathan). Un personaggio lascia indietro la sua vita di prima per andare a vagabondare per mesi nel Central Park di New York, un’altro corre all’aeroporto e prende il primo aereo che trova; cosi cominciano le erranze di Paul Auster, che sono, alla fine, ricerche di uno sguardo che possa riproporre, ricreare una nuova identità. Una citazione di Baudelaire ripresa da Peter Stillman in City of Glass, “Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself[15]” sembra definire questo tipo di erranza e che è stata descritta prima da Pirandello in Stefan Giogli, uno e due, dove accade una vera e propria molteplicazione di persone che anticipando Il fu Mattia Pascal provano continuamente a staccarsi dalla loro identità. “Se ognuno di noi – spiega lo scrittore italiano – potesse staccar di se quella metafora di se stesso, che inevitabilmente, dalle nostre finzioni innumerevoli siamo indotti a formarci, si accorgerebbe subito che questo lui è un altro, un altro che non ha nulla o ben poco a vedere con lui. Vogliamo ad ogni costo salvare, tener ritta in piedi quella metafora di noi stessi[16]”. Le due parti che articolano la struttura del romanzo The Invention of Solitude sono costruite proprio sulla transizione da un io narrante, confessivo, alla sua progezione in una terza persona, il cambiamento del registro stilistico della voce narrativa determinando infatti gli ulteriori svolgimenti nella storia.

Benchè il tema dell’illusione, della finzione identitaria in Luigi Pirandello e l’esistenza simulacro ricorrente nella narrativa di Paul Auster possano essere paragonati in uno studio comparatistico più ampio, non esiste nei romanzi dello scrittore americano nessun brano che possa offrire alle esigenze della filologia la prova incontestabile di un legame intertestuale fra i due. Una coincidenza sorprendente, segna, però, il destino di Adriano Meis e di David Zimmer, il protagonista del Libro delle Illusioni (The Book of Illusinons): all’inizio della sua vita a Roma, il Mattia Pascal impersonato ormai nella sua nuova ipostasi s’imbatte per caso, in una delle sue passeggieate romane in un teatrino di marionette. Le marionette recitano una parte che rappresenta “una mise en abime” del racconto e che rispecchiano il caso che domina la nuova vita del Meis. Il burattinaio gli chiede: “Se proprio nel momento culminante si facesse uno strapo nel cielo di carta del teatrino, che avverrebbe?- e la risposta:Ma è facillissimo, signor Meis! Oreste rimarrebbe terribilmente sconcertato da quel buco nel cielo[17]”. Proprio una scena simile è ripresa nel romanzo The Book of Illusions dove David Zimmer, di cui, ad un certo punto, il narratore dice: “much later he would conclude that nothing was real except for chance[18]”, guarda per caso la pellicola di un film muto. Heinrich Mann, il suo doppio simbolico nel romanzo sta recitando nel film la parte di un impiegato che lavora allo scrittoio mentre una parte del soffitto finto crolla, e lui, proprio come la marionetta di Oreste alza lo sguardo verso l’alto. Probabilmente, si tratta di una riscrittura della scena pirandelliana che potrebbe facilitare non soltanto una lettura in chiave pirandelliana di Paul Auster, ma anche una riscoperta di Pirandello alla luce delle ossessioni tematiche contemporanee.

Cristina Felea

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Kerouac and America on the Road to Postmodernism

Abstract: This study introduces Jack Kerouac as an author “who intuited aspects of the postmodern and developed fictional strategies and projects that both express and engage our contemporary moment” (Hunt, xxvi) and anticipated formal, artistic and cultural phenomena that would be theorized later in postmodernist thought. On the Road, his most popular work is presented in its quality of transitional work from The Town and the City, a first published traditional work, to experimental novels such as Visions of Cody.

Keywords: American Literature, Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac: On the Road, Postmodernism.

Because Jack, like me, we speak the unspeakable. And we feel free. We’re Americans, why not? (Gregory Corso, qted. in Watson, 124).

Many commentators, among whom Ronna C. Johnson, argue that the “collapse of distinctions between his media image and fiction produced Kerouac as an “icon” and “cult hero” and left out his dimensions as a creative artist. As a result, “his literary historical significance and artistic achievement remain underestimated” (in Myrsiades, 22). The major cause of this phenomenon, she thinks, is the special quality of his writing whose innovative style, hybrid forms, and composition techniques were ahead of their time. Kerouac’s life and work were both “liminal” and “idiosyncratic” – the former quality accounted for his role as a witness to the neither modernist/ nor postmodernist conditions of a transitional America characterized by major splits in societal and cultural forms whereas the latter points to his original, “invaluable contribution to the definition and clarification of this transitional moment” (Johnson in Myrsiades, 22).

On the Road – a novel deemed characteristically American – illustrates the Beat affinity for the road as a symbol of an attitude toward experience that braves anything as long as movement is encouraged. Even if he has not been considered a great writer, Kerouac is credited with providing the portrait of America for his generation. Despite the passage of time, the book’s audience has grown, and its initial appeal remained.

Depicting an underground culture that departed entirely from the dominant middle-class, On the Road recorded the sense of release and joy experienced by the less privileged. At the time, the book was totally incomprehensible in its general scope and the humanity it described was promptly labeled as psychopaths and neurotics. Similarly to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Kerouac’s book spoke only to the sensibility of those who “felt trapped in the bind of societal or parental expectations, bound by the ethos of personal secrecy and self-constraint that was prevalent” in the era (Tytell 1976, 142).

Kerouac started his exploration of America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His enterprise is rendered unique by his building of a continuous tension between representation and reality (Holton, 38) which accounts for a destabilizing of the myth of America as it was in favor of new frontiers and places. This tension also resulted in the weakening of the myth of the “self” as a firm, safe unit in favor of a multiplicity of assumed identities. Kerouac’s extensive use of the “data-bank” of cultural identities and composition techniques provided by popular culture, among others Hollywood movies, certifies a fictional space new for the 1950s. Finally, the experience of movement and speed relegates traditional temporality to the background in favor of space and causes the apparent dissolution of the issue of representation altogether in favor of the book seen in Deleuzean terms as a machine, as something which does things rather than signifies (6).

The version of On the Road published in 1957 represented the scroll manuscript (written in three-week Benzedrine-induced frenzy) which, through the persistence of Malcolm Cowley, got revised and cut for publication by the prestigious Viking Press. Probably due to these changes, this version is much more structured than the other components of The Duluoz Legend, Kerouac’s autobiographical project in the line of Proust and Galsworthy. With the exception of the final fifth part, the first four parts of the novel are based on Kerouac’s and Beat friend, brother-figure Neal Cassady’s life on the road, having a repetitive narrative pattern: as a consequence of some biographical disillusion, Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s autobiographical projection as the novel’s narrator) sets out in search for “kicks” in the company of and galvanized by manic Dean Moriarty. After a climactic experience, there follows an anti-climax that sends him home.

The two friends participate in an increasingly frenetic travel across the country, the expression of a vast and restless dissatisfaction with their lives and an effort to get free from any socially imposed roles or authority. Referring to Kerouac’s use in the very fiber of his book of earlier American texts (particularly Moby Dick, Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby) one of his later commentators, Tim Hunt, describes the relation between Dean’s formidable energy and hyperactivity and enthusiastic and desperate Sal, in terms of the latter’s exploration of his Americanness, of the conflict between the “East” of everyday life society and the “West” of the visionary society. Finally, the “true ‘West of the “America’ of the imagination transcends and contains the actual society of the ‘East’ ” (44-46).

Tim Hunt claims that the “central dynamic of the novel” is based on the tension between Sal-as-character’s naïve expectations (“Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me” (OTR, 11)) and the narrator’s observations on what experience really offered him (Holton, 7). On the other hand, Robert Holton contends that the novel does not entirely rely on the “traditional linear coherence” such an assumption might imply. Studies and bohemian city life have not prepared young Sal for the actual experience of the road. This is best illustrated in the false start, when his dreams and plans are challenged by the real world. Sal-the-narrator intervenes early in the text with a remark that frames the whole endeavor: “It was my stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great line across America instead of trying various roads and routes” (13).

After Sal sets out, he experiences intensely the joy of finding his imaginary mythic America when he arrives on the banks of the Mississippi, the water road of Huck Finn and the subject of his own “myth of the rainy night” or as else mentioned, “the rainy night of America.”

A similar satisfaction appears in his description of ordinary American life where Sal recovers, one by one, more or less nostalgically, the blue-collar working world reminding him of native Lowell, traces of the “wild selfbelieving” spirit of the past in farmers and cowboys, in marginal figures such as hobo Mississippi Gene and the fellahin colored people, Mexicans, and Native Americans. This way, Kerouac discloses gradually the Beat space and Beat identity with the help of Dean and his friends, “the sordid hipsters of America.”

As Douglas Brinkley remarks, Kerouac was fascinated with “Wild West legends […], football players” and “range-worn cowboys as the paragons of true America;” Kerouac’s journals “teem with references to “folk heroes” and praise for Zane Grey’s honest drifters, Herman Melville’s confidence men, and Babe Ruth’s feats on the diamond and in the barroom.” He concludes that “Kerouac, in fact, brought confidence-man Neal Cassady into the American mythical pantheon […] compelling others to join his roaring drive across Walt Whitman’s patchwork Promised Land” (xvi).

Yet, especially during the first journey, there are episodes that illustrate the clash between what is expected, the represented, and the reality found on the road. For instance, a significant juxtaposition is that of the old America of the frontier spirit and the new America of the suburb as found, for instance, in Council Bluffs: “All winter I’d been reading of the great wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another” (OTR, 18). In spite of Sal’s disappointment at the assumed vanishing of the American frontier spirit, he insists on the figure of the cowboy as preserver of “some older individual integrity,” as Holton notes (1999, 42).

In a subsequent episode, this time occurring in Cheyenne, Sal learns a bitter lesson in what Holton calls “a manifestation of postmodern history” (1995, 272):

“Hell’s bells, it’s Wild West Week,” said Slim. Big crowds of businessmen, fat businessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire, bustled and whoopeed on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne; […] Blank guns went off. The saloons were crowded to the sidewalk. I was amazed, and at the same time I felt ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition.” (OTR, 29)

Sal spends the night drinking in bars but cannot fail to notice among “the fat burpers [who] were getting drunker” a strange apparition, “Indian chiefs wandering around in big headdresses and really solemn among the flushed drunken faces” and then, other “Indians who watched everything with their stony eyes” (30, 31). The juxtaposition of these images creates the sense of a vanishing reality in a world in which the spectacle of the past, its parody, replaces the real and depth is lost in favor of surface. Robert Holton points out the “collapse of history in postmodern parody” from this scene, emphasizing that Kerouac sensed the “finite amount of reality in America” which was “being consumed too rapidly by the culture industry, whose function is to transcribe reality into depthless signifiers, simulacra” (273).

While I agree with his claim that the description suggests both the Indians’ alienation and the superficiality of the fake cowboys, I only partially adhere to his supposition that Kerouac “locates the “real” in the fellahin” because of the latter’s “extra-modern” position, somewhere on the “outside of the degraded culture of modernity” (273). Holton echoes Baudrillard’s and Jameson’s definitions of simulacra and their assumptions that apparently presuppose the existence of a reality. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that the simulacrum is a phenomenon of a different nature, a process that “carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced” (87) [1].

Kerouac’s fellahins,[2] for instance, are described on several occasions and enter various relationships with what Spengler has termed “the beings without depth,” the world’s intellectuals, “waste products” who do not change events or are changed by them, their lives being “planless happening[s] without goal or cadenced march” (qted. in Prothero 1991, 212). In contrast, Kerouac “translates” (in its etymological meaning of transposition, transmutation) Spengler’s concepts in The Decline of the West generates a movement of deterritorialization that destabilizes, one by one, some of the major master narratives present in postwar American culture. While the accusation brought especially from the realm of gender or postcolonial studies may configure a racist and male chauvinistic attitude that legitimated earlier, pre-modern, versions of master narratives,[3] a closer look at Kerouac’s intense spiritual preoccupation yields a different, more accurate picture. The encounters with several “residues” of the “fellah” type are meant neither to posit new “signs” nor to build up an oppositional discourse that would acknowledge the depth model but to open new territories in terms of new forms of expression, a new language, and a new literature that, in their turn, reconfigure the American cultural map.

According to Holton, Kerouac takes over, reverses some of the Spenglerian concepts and reinserts them into the postwar discourse. By doing this, it may be added, he forces Spengler’s pessimistic, apocalyptic vision of history into becoming an obsolete master narrative/ a simulacrum in its own way.

His description, in Part Four of On the Road, of the last journey to Mexico, reminds of the process of simulation as described by Deleuze and Guattari: “Simulation does not replace reality… but rather appropriates reality in the operation of despotic overcoding, it produces reality on the new full body that replaces the earth. It expresses the appropriation and production of the real by a quasi-cause” (210). For Sal and Dean, as for other “old American outlaws who used to skip over the border and go down to old Monterrey,” the “fellah” Mexico represents before crossing the border something like a “Holy Lhasa,” a mythical presence. “We had no idea what Mexico would really be like,” says Sal-the narrator but “everything changed when we crossed the mysterious bridge over the river” (OTR, 224). In many ways, their visit is supposed to be a way out of everything modern America stood for: “Now, Sal,” says Dean, “we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things” and he adds, “’It’s the world,’ […] ‘My God!’ he cried slapping the wheel. ‘It’s the world!… Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damn!” (226).

But this world is no more “real” than the one left behind. Sal’s sense of the Mexicans’ being out of history, an echo of Spengler’s view of “primitive” fellahs, could be the quasi-cause that abstracts from the bodies and things and events mentioned a “transcendental plane of ideal identities” (Massumi) and relocates everything at a different level. The “mysterious bridge” signals the entry into “a new and unknown phase of things,” where, among others, in a drug-induced episode, Sal rejoices in the mere presence of their Mexican friends whose language they do not understand but consider “magnificent:”

For a mad moment I thought Dean was understanding everything [Victor] said by sheer wild insight and sudden revelatory genius inconceivably inspired by his glowing happiness. In that moment, too, he looked so exactly like Franklin Delano Roosevelt – some delusion in my flaming eyes and floating brain – that I drew up in my seat and gasped with amazement. In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God. […] The mere thought of looking out the window at Mexico – which was now something else in my mind – was like recoiling from some gloriously riddled glittering treasure-box that you’re afraid to look at because of your eyes, they bend inward, the riches and the treasures are too much to take all at once… .” (OTR, 233)

The apparently solemn spiritual dimension of the above scene whereby Dean looks “like God” is rendered derisive by the previous reference to Roosevelt and the narrator’s ironic remark. The powerful deterritorializing effect of the drug engenders a zig-zag movement at various speeds, “a whole rhizomatic labor of perception, the moment when desire and perception meld,” as Deleuze and Guattari suggest in A Thousand Plateaus (284). “All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed,” they add, and Sal goes on, “For a long time I lost consciousness in my lower mind of what we were doing,” says the narrator in recall, “and only came around sometime later when I looked up from fire and silence, like waking from sleep to the world, or waking from void to a dream, and they told me we were parked outside Victor’s house […]” (OTR, 234).

Deleuze and Guattari’s have commented on the specific nature of Anglo-American writers’ effort to “break to the wall of the signifier:”

From Hardy to Lawrence, from Melville to Miller, the same cry rings out: Go across, get Out, break through, make a beeline, don’t get stuck on a point. Find the line of separation, follow it or create it, to the point of treachery. That is why their relationship with other civilizations, to the Orient or South America, and also to drugs and voyages in place, is entirely different from that of the French. They know how difficult is to get out of the black hole of subjectivity, of consciousness and memory […] (188)

Restless movement and speed compress time and give space a predominant role in On the Road. “There is simply no connection between men and time,” wrote Kerouac in a 1949 diary entry, “men are only involved in space and place” (Brinkley, 230). In this respect, as many researchers have attested, Kerouac can be said to travel back and forth between what Deleuze and Guattari call the centered system of Western tree and the acentered rhizome system described in A Thousand Plateaus.

Space is central to Deleuze and Guattari. As compared to the centered system of Western tree, the acentered rhizome system is described as being made of plateaus (a term drawn from Gregory Bateson) that are “always in the middle” and of being “composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion” (Deleuze and Guattari, 21). It is also presented as a being a multiple, circular system of “taproots” (5). In spite of its not being “immune from domination by trees or the search for roots” (see, for example, the Americans’ quest for national identity or Kerouac in search for his Breton ancestors), “everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside” (20).

Actually, paraphrasing Massumi’s analysis of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, we could say that if Sal and Dean found out how to undo their “pre-programmed” “death-in-history,” they would also find a way out of the metanarrative of progress and civilization and have a choice to flee to a new vital spatial dimension “to see things no human being ever has or will” (1987).

In spite of the fact that Kerouac is seen by the two French theoreticians as failing “to complete the process” (“The neurotic impasse again closes – the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land – or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol, or worse still, an old fascist dream. […]”), they think that “through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly; […]” (133). Therefore, the key to Kerouac’s success is in their view his spontaneous prose method:

…an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate… that is what style is, or rather the absence of style – asyntactic, a grammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode – desire. For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression (133)

One thing that definitely sets apart On the Road among the books of the decade and contributes decisively to its still fresh appeal is the way it was written and particularly Kerouac’s aesthetics of spontaneity. He discovered the power of the actual and the ordinary, the natural and the commonplace by refusing any ‘literary’ perfection, any craft or revision of the written text. He removed all literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibitions and the arbitrary barriers of conventional punctuation (in the line of Joyce) and used his unusual gift for sound and music to release “the unspeakable visions of the individual”, the music of the body, the pure joy of the ‘undisturbed flow” of the mind, as he calls it. In “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” as well as in the Paris Review interview, he emphasized that his rejection of revision and selectivity helped him communicate “through the sheer ignition of felt energy” (Berrigan, 554).

In terms of aesthetics, Kerouac’s “wild form” was mostly indebted to jazz. He had frequented Harlem music joints since his undergraduate days, and in 1951, they inspired his “bop prosody.” Kerouac’s model was a “tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement’s been made… that’s how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind…” (Berrigan, 555)

Jazz improvisatory method reflected his belief in “moment to moment” truth, and its riffs provided a loose structure for his novel’s dialogue (Watson 139). Indeed, Kerouac is reputed to have exploded many of the remaining boundaries in fiction in his time, following Charlie Parker’s famous opinion that music was the result of the of the artist’s own experience, thought, and wisdom: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art” (Tytell, 144).

The dissolution of the myth of America is supported by Kerouac’s use of writing as experiment conceived as a “process of controlled trial and error.” Marco Abel elaborates on this argument, noting that the accomplishments from Visions of Cody, Tristessa, and the Subterraneans were already visible on the level of expression and content in On the Road. Repetition, for instance, the stop-and-go movements, which he calls “stuttering,” are characteristic for the composition patterns that organize Sal’s and Dean’s travels. Other commentators have called attention to this in various forms: Hunt by referring to the development of Sal-the-character, marked by death and rebirth, Holton by emphasizing the moments of epiphany that are never transformed into revelations, Stephenson by building the pattern of descent and ascent.

In contrast, Marco Abel adopts the Deleuzean concept of refrain (“in impromptu jazz music”) and invests it with a poetic value (“its itinerative force”) that accounts for Kerouac’s aesthetic intent and accomplishment (2004, 17), in other words, it gives consistency to the novel, its characters and the unknown places Kerouac speaks about. Kerouac’s narrator/ character Sal and Dean desire new experiences, set forth, then stop to “figure losses and gains;” similarly, the author of On the Road comes back to the material described and, unsatisfied with the result, writes two other books, Visions of Cody and Doctor Sax, each experimenting strands of On the Road left unexplored.

Sal and Dean repeat their – physical and spiritual – travels in order to comprise as much as possible of America and “the variation of their travels,” states Abel, “affects multiple communities and locations” uniting them in a rhizomatic network that invents a “new America” (20). He also mentions Kerouac’s intense attraction for names and places in On the Road. Indeed, the reading of Kerouac’s journal entries from the late 1940s and early 1950s confirms the writer’s fascination: the section entitled “Rain and Rivers” comprises a vast catalogue of places encountered during his trips, all of them accompanied by minute notes that would later be transformed in pages of On the Road.

Thus, the accusations brought by early critics that the novel and the majority of his books are plotless and that characters are not “rounded” is rendered non-operational by a reading that appeals to “the surface model produced by the force of repetition,” as Abel states (21). Each new movement frees perception of automatism; movement, speed, surfaces, “the American earth in all its extensiveness” (Abel, 21), break down models of “inside” and “outside” and give a sense of flatness to characters and to what Abel, quoting Deleuze, calls the “missing” people. The lack of plot and of “round” characters recalls Ong’s description of oral culture that “has no experience of a lengthy, epic-size or novel-size climactic linear plot.” The novel’s start in media res, its episodic quality, ties Kerouac with epic poetry in this acceptance of the episodic as a “totally natural way of imagining and handling lengthy narrative” (144) and of the presence of the “itinerant hero whose travels serve to string episodes together” (149).

As to the characters, Kerouac’s position is somewhat ambiguous: he would rather go for “flat” types that do not offer surprises because their continuous movement yields them a sort of presentness. Still, Kerouac’s spiritual formation pervades his style and renders his characters memorable. But not for their supposed “depth” or complex psyche. In the Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, Kerouac states that his aim is to free the inner mind and give it verbal shape in the outer world. Kerouac as creator gave the world characters that are not “round” but sites of “positive becoming” (in Deleuzean terms) where “nomad thought” no longer reposes on identity but on difference, not on power but on force, creating an open-ended space (Charters 484-486).

The remainder of the study will discuss briefly how the fragmentation of the subject, the destabilization of the self in favor of a multitude of identities is visible even in a fairly traditional novel such as On the Road. As Frederic Jameson, among others, has claimed, with the repudiation of the depth models of reality and temporal themes replaced by spatial, there also came the dissolution of the old centered self (in Docherty, 72). Sal as narrator/character adopts various identities ranging from the naïve and idealist to prophet and patriarch. His “fluid, shifting self” is the result of the representational clash mentioned earlier in connection with his historical and mythical projections colliding with the “geographical” America he discovers as well as of the “difficulty [he has] separating a real self from his images of selfhood” (Holton 1999, 65). All along the narrative, Sal “tries on” several roles, a quality his author, Kerouac, also possessed to a large extent, as Charters notes in her introduction to the Selected Letters (1940-1956):

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

1. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, Paris, Gallimard, 1991.

2. Julian W Connoly (ed.), Nabokov and his fiction: new perspectives, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

3. Maurice Couturier, Nabokov ou La cruauté du désir: lecture psychanalytique, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2004.

4.  Benedict Giamo, Kerouac, the word and the way: prose artist as spiritual quester, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.

5. Tim Hunt, Kerouac’s crooked road: development of a fiction, Hamden, Conn., Archon books, 1981.

6. Jack Kerouac, On the Road, introduction by Ann Charters, New York, Penguin Books, 1991.

7. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Lolita, edited, with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel Jr, New York, Vintage Books, 1991.

8. Erika Ostrovsky, Céline and his vision, New York, New York University Press; London, University of London Press, 1967.

9. Luce L. Stanford (ed.), Céline and his critics: scandals and paradox, Saratoga, Calif, Anma libri, 1986.

Ştefan Borbély

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Hermann Hesse’s ’Glass Bead Game’

Abstract: Analysing the purely male spiritual enclave depicted in Hermann Hesse’s novel ’The Glass Bead Game’, the author traces the possible origins of this game to Leibniz’s esoteric texts, in which the German philosopher imagined knowledge as the skill of detecting abstract and subtle correspondences between the different sciences and the divine plenitude of the cosmos, based on the art of a generalised calculus, or mathematics, which he called Characteristica Universalis. In Hesse’s independent school system of Castalia, the glass bead game is practised by its participants as a universal science (mathesis universalis) of elaborated European and Oriental cultural symbols and analogies, governed by the pure and abstract equations of mathematics and music. Since Hesse’s Castalia functions as a utopian, exclusively intellectual province, its vulnerability towards the everyday history and politics of the surrounding nations brings it inevitably to the bring of decline and future destruction. Hermann Hesse’s protagonist, the skilled Josef Knecht reaches the highest rank of ’Master of the Game’ (magister ludi), and then quits his office in an attempt to escape from collective mystification and inconsistency.

Keywords: Hermann Hesse, Swiss German literature, literature and decadence, utopia.

The Swiss German novelist Hermann Hesse’s last novel, The Glass Bead Game (1943) is a serene Bildungsroman (novel of formation) conceived in the form of an eutopia (positive, happy utopia) placed in the year 2200, somewhere in the German speaking Europe. The ideal geography of the author envisions a cloistered spiritual province, Castalia, living unharmed and protected from the vicissitudes of everyday history and politics within the borders of a wider state or nation. Its inhabitants form a highly respected male spiritual elite, governed by the strict laws of initiation within willingly obeyed intellectual hierarchies, which reflect the main disciplines of the humanities, although everybody acknowledges the serene organizational superiority of music and mathematics, as they only both combine in a comprehensive celestial harmony.

Each specialized discipline of humanities inside Castalia has as its ruler a master (or a “Magister”), who is elected by the community itself, as a sign of collective respect and as the recognition of a personal spiritual excellence. But apart from the particular disciplines, the very elite of the province gather in the community of the glass bead game players, which needs a special, interdisciplinary initiation. To play the glass bead game supposes the gift of linking apparently unrelated disciplines (like, for instance, medieval music and gardening, or Bach and mathematics) in a higher, sublime spiritual synthesis. The German philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), who beyond his famous Monadology wrote also esoteric texts, imagined knowledge as the skill of detecting abstract and subtle correspondences among the different sciences and the divine plenitude of the cosmos, based on the art of a generalized calculus, or mathematics, which he called Characteristica Universalis. Accordingly, the glass bead game is practiced by its participants as a universal science (mathesis universalis), governed by the pure and abstract equations of mathematics and music. The cast of the glass bead game players form the generally admired extreme spiritual elite of Castalia, who serve also worldly values, as the general plan of the annual festival elaborated by the master of the glass bead game – Magister Ludi – is made public by radio and the press, in order to also implicate players from outside the province, in a feast of ethereal spiritual communion.

Hermann Hesse’s novel presents the career of an outstanding glass bead game player, Josef Knecht (his name means in German “servant”), from his early classes in a grammar school up to the peak of the provincial hierarchy, as Magister Ludi. The novel of formation is paralleled by the description of the fall of a secular cultural system embodied by the spiritual province of Castalia. Meditating upon his condition of cloistered, ethereal intellectual, formed in an enclave willingly ignoring the perils of everyday life struggle and history, Josef Knecht finally decides to quit his appointment and the province itself, in order to become a teacher in a worldly, decadent aristocratic Italian family. Unfit for the outside world, he dies almost immediately, by swimming in an alpine lake. Hesse put much effort in insisting that Knecht’s sudden death, provoked by the rising sun, must be interpreted as a ritual of sacrifice, performed by nature itself against an outstanding member of a community whose spiritual formation has always had as its prerequisite an inorganic and abstract aestheticism. Indeed, the members of Castalia – all men, no women – exclude love, instincts, psychology, sufferance and even death from their cycles of formation. Within the province, nature itself is a cultural object, similar to history, politics, war, diplomatic intrigue, distraction or sport. Accordingly, Castalia is presented by the author as an extremely sophisticated and impeccable artificial society, sustained as a kind financial burden by a state which remains unnamed throughout the text. Josef Knecht’s unexpected demission is determined by the deep understanding that no society or person can live for ever outside history: in a letter addressed to the President of the Order, the quitting Magister Ludi points out that history will necessarily engulf Castalia in an unpredictable future, destroying the very sense of protected permanence and eternity which form the most cherished identity mark of the enclave.

 Two main, intermingled thematic blocks structure the book. The first one relies on Josef Knecht’s intellectual evolution, from his boyhood up to the high ranks of Castalia. The other one consists in the analysis of an enclaved cultural system challenged by a decadent crisis. Both meet in Josef Knecht’s outstanding destiny as a very gifted member of the order of the glass bead game players and in his decision to quit the artificial, cloistered life in order to meet the true rhythms of nature. As such, a main topic of the novel is the relation between eternity and time. Castalia and its members live outside time, as the vicissitudes of the surrounding politics and history come sifted to its inhabitants through the sieve of a pure and crystal-clear inner tradition. To a certain point, Knecht’s career is marked by the same certainty provided by eternity, but several of his personal experiences – like, for instance, his vivid debates about the existence of the order delivered with a visitor of Castalia, the “hospitant” Plinio Designori, or his long visit to a Benedictine monastery, in order to meet an influential Catholic figure, the historian Pater Jakobus – teach him that time cannot be swept apart in the evolution of the humanity, at least for the fact that it contains two basic elements of civilization: decadent erosion and death. Accordingly, the profound plot of the novel is built on the scheme of the archaic sacrificial rituals, by which the ferocious Time devours everything, including Eternity.

Back in the 19^th century, the educational system of Germany was built on a general school hierarchy, accessible to everyone, and on a few elite schools, which could be approached only by strict intellectual selection and invitation. One of them was Pforta, specialized in the humanities, which hosted Hölderlin, Nietzsche and other highly qualified “geniuses”. The rules said that no family was allowed to contact the gymnasium directly, but only after the student has gone through a very tough selection trial. The nomination procedure usually attracted the attention of the whole country, as they were towns (even regions) whose schooling system did not provide, for long and “shameful” years, any suitable candidate for the elite schools. Hermann Hesse described the system in an early, rather bitter novel, Unterm Rad (1906; Engl.: Beneath the Wheel), whose protagonist, the young Hans Giebenrath manages to enter the elite school but fails to meet its inhuman, extremely strict requirements, suffering a nervous breakdown followed by a collapse.

Being a rather gifted schoolboy with no parents, the young Josef Knecht is selected for the elite schooling system of Castalia by the venerable “master of music” (Magister Musicae), who pays a short visit to the student’s small town, in order to verify his outstanding local references. Gently protected by his master, but recommended by his excellent personal qualities and intellect, Knecht goes up in the spiritual hierarchy of the province, being selected for the inner cloister of the glass bead game players, who finally make him their Magister Ludi, following the venerable Thomas von der Trave, whose name is actually an innocent pun, as it secretly refers to Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse’s great friend (Trave is the river which flows through Lübeck, Thomas Mann’s native town in Northern Germany).

Becoming an outstanding glass bead game player, whose intellectual qualities go much beyond his colleagues’ psychological uncertainties, symbolized by Fritz Tegularius, Knecht’s very gifted but unruly friend, the future Magister Ludi is selected by the order as an “ambassador” for two special missions, which lead him up to the highest ranks of the hierarchy. At first he is encouraged to take up a debate with a clever visitor (“hospitant”) of Castalia, the young Plinio Designori, offspring of an old patrician Italian family, who challenges the eternity and artificial rules of the province by contrasting them to the relative and changing dialectics of the outside politics and history. Later on, after leaving Castalia, Designori becomes a highly influential politician and member of the Parliament, still favorable to Castalia even though the financial burden represented by the province proves to be more and more difficult to sustain by the nurturing surrounding political body. Plinio Designori plays a definite role in Knecht’s death too, as the dissident former Magister Ludi becomes the tutor of his unruly son, Tito, who indirectly kills Knecht by beating him in an uneven alpine swimming competition. Before entering the cold lake, Tito Designori performs an orgiastic dance honoring the rising sun; as already mentioned, Knecht dies assisted by the sun, which represents, in Hesse’s symbolical intention, the everlasting ferocious energy of nature.

The second appointment makes Josef Knecht an ambassador to the very powerful Benedictine monastery of  Mariafels, whose abbot Gervasius asked the order of Castalia to send over one of his members to initiate the monks into the mysteries of the glass bead game. Castalia is happy to fulfill the requirement, hoping to get support from the Benedictines within the high ranks of the Catholic Church in the Vatican. Knecht’s manages to complete the hidden task during his prolonged visit, by convincing the famous historian Pater Jakobus to further plead the cause of the province. The intellectual debate between the two gifted men occupy a big part of the narrative episode dedicated to Mariafels, and it has as a result a complete change in Josef Knecht’s intellectual thinking. While getting some valuable information on the glass bead game, Pater Jakobus teaches Knecht historiography and determine him to think the evolution of cultural systems as part of a wider dialectics of time, death and history. Knecht’s personal crisis concerning Castalia has its roots in the protagonist’s debate with the Benedictine monk, who makes him understand that culture is an organic, vivid flow of inspiration, maturity and decadence, deeply rooted in the evolution of society and history. As a consequence, it cannot be contained in a spiritual province of cultivating artificial values, as Castalia does, by privileging the art of endless analyses and combinations of the past despite spontaneity and fresh creation. Such a collective existence – the learned monk suggests – proves to be a glamorous, but already decadent mystification, built on extremely fragile pillars, which will be easily destroyed with every sudden move of history and politics.

The analysis of Castalia as a dying cultural system will obsess Magister Ludi Josef Knecht’s mind while in office, and it will finally determine him to resign in order to try his forces in the outside world, as the tutor of Plinio Designori’s son Tito. In Hesse’s mind, Castalia is a “pedagogical province”, as defined by Goethe in his Wilhelm Meister. On the other hand, it is a post-modern form of purely spiritual collective existence, as Hesse places his order in a period consecutive to our modernism, which is defined in the book as “the Age of the Feuilleton”, that is: the period of a sketchy and hyper-personalized, exacerbated form of culture, entirely dominated by the urge of novelty which does not allow ideas to solidify and structure into eternal and universal strata. Our modernist period – the historians of Castalia used to say – deepened the collective unrest by privileging wars, politics, sport and distraction, apart from the future province which is built on abstract, purely spiritual – that is: universal – humanistic values, concentrated in a superior but necessarily cloistered cultural body. In order to train his members, Castalia has carefully eliminated the organic turbulences living within their souls, like love, family life, psychology or fear, devoting them to a highly sophisticated science of interdisciplinary cultural associations based on numerology and music. No member of Castalia generates fresh creation, as originality is conceived only as the art of detecting magical interrelations between apparently unrelated topics, like European music and Chinese philosophy, or medieval architecture and scholastics.

One must not forget that Hesse published his work in the midst of the violent rage of WWII, presenting Castalian life as a serene spiritual alternative to collective hate, bloodshed and sufferance. But apart from being a mild political manifesto, the novel relies on the German philosopher Oswald Spengler’s famous Decline of the West (Das Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918-1923) in order to define its main categories. In his seminal work Spengler said that the history of antiquity stipulated the existence of two kinds of societies, defined by their representation of time. The so-called “happy”, “eudemonic”, a-historical  societies (like ancient Greece, for instance) understood time as a succession of present moments of energetic plenitude, which actually obliterated the sense of evolution and history. On the contrary, profoundly historical civilizations, like the Egyptians and the Jews, kept strict records of their traditions, developing a sharp sense of caducity or progress. Spengler also demonstrates that the collective sense of time has always been associated to the representation of death. For the Greeks, who mostly incinerated the corpses, the underworld was but a mere counterpart to the existing world, apart from the Egyptians who developed a sober culture of death based on the idea of continuity, or apart from the Jews, who brought into the Mediterranean culture the logic of a future coming of a Messiah, and the image of the apocalypse.

In Spengler’s terms, Castalia is conceived by its author as a a-historical, artificial society, built on the logic of the spiritual “province”. In The Decline of the West, Spengler also stipulated an antithesis between two destinies of culture, defined respectively as the culture of the city and the culture of the province. Both represented in their author’s mind a way of spiritual survival within the organic process of turning the organic “culture” into a hyper-organized “civilization”, which consists the decadent end of each culture. The culture of the city – Spengler asserted – is based on the social logic of the impulsive and faceless mob, which fixes the destiny of cultural evolution by turning it into distraction and intelligence, as contrary to the culture of the province, which keeps tradition alive, preserving its organic vividness through wisdom and originality. Spengler imagined that in a hyper-socialized, incessantly massifying Europe, the spiritual cloistered enclave can be a solution for culture, by the natural tendency of the “cultural province” to produce a highly qualified and dedicated elite. Spengler’s idea has always been very familiar with Hesse, whose other great novels – Demian, Journey to the East, Steppenwolf or Narcissus and Goldmund  – have been built on the logic of the spiritual elite. Hesse also considered that the Oriental way of serene, absolute life can save European culture from disintegration. Josef Knecht is himself attracted by the call of the East, as a chapter of his formation consists in a voluntary obeisance to a Buddhist monk, who lives outside civilization in a tiny oasis of bamboo trees planted by himself. Knecht eventually introduces the Chinese I-Ching book in his spiritual meditation, and proposes it later as the main combinatory topic of a surprisingly original annual glass bead game.

The very meaning of the glass bead games remains a mystery, although there are in the world millions of people who try to solve his logic. Initially the game was played with tokens, but later on the pure spiritual formulas prevailed. The game is an exquisite and almost magical art of combination (ars combinatorial), which was specific to the decadent phase of different cultures, seized by an aesthetic fatigue experienced as a lack of genuine creativity. In order to explain the cultural logic of the combinatory decadence, Hesse used to evoke the antique Alexandria and the fall of the Greek spirituality into magic and mysticism. Another analogy is the dawn of the Renaissance, driven into the flamboyant effervescence of the Baroque or the exquisite skill of inventing magical, unpredictable resemblances between humans, things and symbols, like the manieristic concettos. Many people also say that the functioning principles of the Internet lend to the classical glass bead game imagined by Hesse new and unexpected meanings. Therefore, by simply searching the Web, one can find a lot of sophisticated people who engage in a worldwide community of the glass bead game players. As he died in 1962, Hesse could not think, of course, about postmodernism and the WWW, but his novel still project in the future a fascination considered to be, by many, the serene, purely spiritual solution to our everyday wars, sorrows and disasters.

Corin Braga

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Utopie, récit de voyage et voyage extraordinaire

Abstract: The text explores the relationship between the travel literature (as a non-fiction genre) and the extraordinary voyages (as a fiction genre), on the one hand, and utopian literature, on the other. Using various literary samples and also previous theoretical commentaries on utopianism, it proves that utopias are symbiotically merged with voyage narrative. This cohabitation refers not only to the plot necessity of introducing utopian descriptions through a geographical travel to far away places, but also to the presence of the main character and traveler, who is also a story-teller and a raisonneur of the utopian society.

Keywords: Utopia, travel literature, extraordinary voyages, science-fiction.

L’utopie est un genre transfrontalier agglutiné qui a donné beaucoup du fil à retordre à ses théoriciens. Le nom est arrivé à désigner un hybride sémantique qui chevauche plusieurs domaines et disciplines. L’utopie a été définie par Marina Leslie, reprenant un terme de Rosalie Colie, comme un « generum mixtum », un des genres compréhensifs de la Renaissance caractérisés par l’« inclusionisme »[1]. Dans son texte inaugural, Thomas More avait en effet « inclus » plusieurs topoï littéraires : le voyage imaginaire, le « speculum principis », le « commonwealth » idéal, le dialogue, la satire, l’éloge à rebours, etc. Les successeurs de More n’ont fait que confirmer et exploiter cette ouverture alluvionnaire et cette disponibilité syncrétique de l’utopie.

Jean-Jacques Wunenburger a souligné les difficultés inextricables du théoricien :

« Qu’on ouvre trop le concept d’utopie, et on le dilue dans une activité imaginaire informe, sorte de fourre-tout des possibles rêvés ; qu’on ferme trop le concept, qu’on l’enferme dans une phase politico-littéraire […], et l’on rend incompréhensible la nature des matériaux symboliques qui en composent la texture, et qui en expliquent en même temps les effets de fascination sociale »[2].

Alain Pessin pense même que le problème de la définition pose une difficulté insurmontable ou une impossibilité de principe, à savoir que les listes des œuvres supposées exemplifier le domaine sont si larges, contradictoires et réciproquement exclusives, que finalement le mot utopie « ne possède aucune valeur classificatoire : l’utopie n’existe pas ». C’est pourquoi Alain Pessin soutient qu’à la place de l’utopie, en tant que catégorie abstraite, il est mieux parler des utopies, en tant qu’expériences singulières.

Face à cette nébuleuse qu’est l’utopie, deux attitudes sont possibles : soit d’essayer de tracer l’étendue maximale du territoire recouvert par le terme, d’en circonscrire le contour global ; soit de défaire le complexe, d’isoler ce qu’on pense être son noyau spécifique en écartant les excroissances et les masses alluvionnaires.

Une approche fondée sur une définition extensive est celle de Frank et Fritzie Manuel. Les deux auteurs ont construit leur grand compendium sur l’utopie, Utopian Thought in the Western World, adoptant une conception « libérale et oecuménique », qui les a amené à traiter indistinctement voyages extraordinaires, récits de voyages lunaires, descriptions fantaisistes de mondes perdus restés dans l’état de nature, constitutions optimales, conseils aux princes concernant le meilleur gouvernement, romans sur la vie dans une société utopienne, prophéties millénaristes, plans architecturaux pour une cité idéale, etc.[3] L’Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science fiction de Pierre Versins témoigne d’un dessein totalisant et englobant tout aussi ample[4]. Bien qu’utiles pour donner une idée de l’horizon de réverbération et du plafond atteint par le concept d’utopie, de telles démarches « ouvertes » ont le désavantage de ne pas pouvoir formuler des critères sur l’organisation interne de l’utopie et donc des différences capables de le séparer des concepts apparentés[5].

L’approche contraire réside dans la formulation d’une définition restrictive qui vise la discrimination des genres connexes et l’isolement d’une typologie unique. Cette attitude, adoptée par des théoriciens comme J. C. Davis, Raymond Trousson et Jean-Michel Racault, rappelle les définitions déductives, par des catégories de plus en plus restrictives, de la logique aristotélique-scolastique, mais aussi bien les méthodes de la phénoménologie. Par une telle démarche déductive, il est possible d’isoler successivement l’utopie du « mode utopique », du discours socio-politique, du projet législatif et du modèle des Commonwealth, du mythe et du conte de fées, des thèmes du Paradis terrestre, du Millénium, de l’Age d’Or, des Iles Fortunées, du Pays de Cocagne, de l’Arcadie, etc.

Cependant cette démarche arrive à un point mort au moment où on se propose d’isoler l’utopie du genre du récit de voyage[6]. A la première vue, il s’agirait de deux genres narratifs parfaitement séparables et indépendants, qui pourraient évidemment se combiner et donner naissance à divers hybrides, mais qui pourraient tout aussi bien fonctionner d’une manière autonome. Or une analyse plus poussée de l’utopie démontre que, de fait, elle ne peut exister que dans une osmose plus ou moins placentaire avec le voyage extraordinaire. C’est la symbiose des deux genres que je me propose d’envisager dans ce qui suit.

En ce qui concerne le récit de voyage, Pierre-François Moreau a construit une taxinomie interne du genre. Ainsi, il distribue progressivement, sur une échelle allant de la « réalité » (textuelle évidemment, et non pas ontologique) à l’imaginaire, quatre variétés: le récit de voyage réel, le voyage fictif, le voyage imaginaire et l’utopie. Les deux premières variétés, les récits des voyages réels et fictifs, ont en commun une intention de vraisemblance et de véridicité, qu’elle soit ingénue ou feinte. Les deux types d’auteurs jouent sur la convention de représentation « réaliste » qui donne aux lecteurs la sensation de « vécu ».

En contraste avec les récits de voyages, les voyages imaginaires et l’utopie changent de convention, elles sont construites sur un principe de cohérence interne différent, qui ne suit pas forcement la logique du vraisemblable, mais accepte le fantastique. Cependant, ce fantastique n’est pas le même que celui du mythe ou du conte de fées. Il n’implique pas l’existence d’une surnature et d’êtres divins ou de féerie, bien qu’il peut lui aussi faire appel au merveilleux. Il est fantastique en quelque sorte accidentellement et ne requiert pas une explication transcendante et l’existence d’un monde supérieur.

Avec la disparition du divin et du surnaturel, les voyages extraordinaires utopiques perdent aussi leur sens initiatique et anagogique. Si les quêtes médiévales, dont Pierre-François Moreau évoque le Voyage de Saint Brendan et les descentes aux enfers d’Albéric et de Dante, suivaient un itinéraire symbolique qui menait vers le salut et la transcendance, les voyages imaginaires n’impliquent plus un progrès intérieur, les voyageurs n’en sortent plus transformés ou métamorphosés. Les voyages imaginaires et utopiques sont dépourvus d’un but mystique, ils se déroulent sur le plan du monde terrestre, sans ouverture métaphysique. La séparation du sacré et du profane, puis la clôture progressive de la transcendance, a eu pour résultat la transformation des voyages initiatiques antiques en des quêtes manquées pendant le Moyen Age[7] et en des voyages imaginaires chaotiques à l’Age moderne. On pourrait désigner ce processus comme un passage de l’archétype (et des structures narratives centrées et finies) à l’anarchétype (et aux structures éclatées et hétéroclites)[8].

Enfin, pour clore sa typologie, Pierre-François Moreau doit distinguer aussi entre le voyage imaginaire et l’utopie. La différence est donnée justement par l’utilisation créatrice respectivement de l’imagination et de la raison, étant donné que le voyage fictif est « invention », alors que l’utopie est construite par « déduction ». Si le voyageur imaginaire donne libre cours à sa fantaisie pour inventer une nature étrange et merveilleuse, l’auteur utopique se concentre surtout sur l’échafaudage rationnel d’une société artificielle[9]. C’est ce « souci de présenter un univers ordonné » et rigoureux qui fait s’enliser l’utopie dans ce que Jean-Jacques Wunenburger voit comme une crise de l’imaginaire.

Néanmoins, selon la majorité des théoriciens, l’utopie ne peut pas être défaite de sa liaison placentaire avec le voyage imaginaire. Selon Vita Fortunati, l’utopie est indissociablement plaquée sur le schéma du voyage avec ses multiples composantes (le départ, le naufrage sur une île inconnue, les péripéties, les découvertes, le retour, etc.)[10]. Raymond Trousson estime à son tour que le voyage imaginaire et l’utopie sont unis par la logique interne du récit, toute découverte d’un continent ou d’une île idéale impliquant un trajet et des péripéties de parcours. La différence entre les deux est alors donnée par l’insistance que le récit de voyage met sur le dépaysement, l’exotisme, l’éloignement, le fantastique et le merveilleux, et l’utopie sur la description organisée des structures de l’état proposé modèle[11]. Enfin, on peut même penser, avec Christian Marouby, que les relations entre utopie et récit de voyage sont encore plus troubles, que le désir de l’utopiste de donner crédibilité à sa fiction (sur lequel il nous faudra revenir quand nous parlerons de la critique empirique de l’utopie) le pousse à exproprier les moyens narratifs du récit de voyage et à vouloir l’usurper et s’y substituer[12].

Une approche plus technique du problème de la liaison entre le voyage imaginaire et l’utopie a été produite par Georges Benrekassa dans son étude sur « Le statut du narrateur dans quelques textes dits utopiques », repris dans le volume Le concentrique et l’excentrique. Partant des différences entre les catégories narratives de « personnage », de « figure » (actant) et de « narrateur », Georges Benrekassa trouve que le placage de l’utopie sur le voyage imaginaire institue « une espèce de décalage entre les opérateurs du récit figurés dans le texte et l’idéologie du discours utopique ». Cette distance serait l’expression d’une dénégation (le Verneinung de la psychanalyse) de la part de l’auteur, qui dévoile en cachant (ou cache en dévoilant), c’est-à-dire reconnaît indirectement qu’il est « incapable de tenir directement un discours sur la réalité sociale »[13], ou qu’il ne se propose pas cette fin. En d’autres mots, c’est la double fonction d’actant et de narrateur du protagoniste du récit utopique qui assure le caractère fictionnel de l’utopie et la sépare du simple traité politique ou du projet législatif.

Cette hypothèse est appuyée et confirmée par ce qu’on sait des péripéties de la création du texte fondateur du genre, l’Utopie de Thomas More. La première impulsion de la conception du livre a apparemment été donnée par l’invitation qu’Erasme avait lancée à More d’écrire un Eloge de la sagesse, en réponse à son Eloge de la folie. En tant que tel, cet Eloge de la sagesse aurait dû être un traité philosophique et moral, tout comme l’ouvrage jumeau d’Erasme. En effet, en 1515, Thomas More rend la célèbre visite à son ami Pierre Gilles à Anvers armé de l’esquisse d’un Discours de la Sophia. Cependant, à l’essor de ces discussions avec son ami, More change de stratégie narrative, attribuant le Discours non plus à un narrateur-auteur, mais à un narrateur-personnage, Raphaël Hytlodée. Le fait que, dans le texte final, More attribue à Pierre Gilles l’occasion d’avoir rencontré Raphaël semble une manière fictionnelle de témoigner du rôle joué, dans la réalité, par Pierre Gilles dans la réorganisation de l’ouvrage.

Par cette restructuration, la présentation du « monde sage » passait de la forme de traité, utilisée par Erasme pour exposer le « monde fou », à la forme de dialogue. Bien que la formule dialogique, redevable au modèle platonicien, était plutôt conventionnelle, elle introduisait toutefois un partenaire de conversation, donc un deuxième personnage. Comme le note André Prévost, la Lettre à Pierre Gilles et les premières pages de l’Utopie « indiquent que c’est à Anvers que Hytlodée est entré dans le récit et que, par sa présence, il le transforme. Le Discours de la Sophia, la Sagesse, devenait fiction et prenait une nouvelle dimension »[14].

François Chirpaz, qui souligne à son tour le choix fait par More d’écrire son texte sur le mode de la fiction et non sur celui du traité philosophique et politique, va encore plus loin, se demandant si le personnage de Raphaël n’est pas un double de l’auteur lui permettant d’exprimer la distance qu’il prend face à son texte. « Tout se passe comme si Th. More tenait à maintenir, par la structure même du récit, une distance entre lui et lui-même, ne parvenant pas à unifier son espoir et son souhait » (allusion aux considérations finales de More sur la relation de Raphaël : « Je le souhaite plutôt que je ne l’espère »)[15].

En tout cas, la présence de Raphaël en tant qu’interlocuteur de More et que narrateur du voyage en Utopie implique que la description utopique est dès le début intimement jumelée aux genres du dialogue philosophique et du voyage imaginaire. C’est justement la présence d’un narrateur qui change le « contrat de lecture » et donne au Discours théorique la « distance » qui fait de lui une Utopie fictionnelle[16]. Et si au XVI^e siècle, surtout chez les auteurs italiens d’utopies, c’est la formule dialogique qui a prédominée, à partir du XVII^e siècle, l’utopie a basculé décisivement du côté de la formule narrative. Toutefois, Micheline Hugues prévient, suivant Alexandre Cioranescu, contre le risque d’ignorer le « noyau descriptif » dur et irréductible de l’utopie, et est de l’opinion que le héros utopique véritable, dans le sens romanesque du terme, ne fait son apparition que dans les anti-utopies, où le protagoniste devient une entité autonome (autant sur le plan idéologique que sur celui de l’action) opposée à la société décrite[17].

Le greffage de l’utopie sur le voyage extraordinaire et sur le roman d’aventures a été souligné par plusieurs théoriciens qui ont senti le besoin de qualifier le genre utopique avec des attributs renvoyant à la narrativité. Le premier de la liste, Geoffroy Atkinson a montré que le voyage extraordinaire, en tant que variété du voyage imaginaire, allie deux éléments, le récit réaliste d’un voyage aventureux et la description d’une société utopique éloignée[18]. Pierre-François Moreau parle du « récit utopique », qu’il situe entre le droit naturel et le « roman de l’Etat »[19]. Victor Dupont choisit la formule « roman utopique » pour suggérer que, pour avoir une meilleure prise sur l’imagination, le sujet « didactique » de l’utopie se fait porter par un genre narratif. Empruntant les dispositifs épiques et les charmes de la littérature, « le roman utopique est, à la philosophie et aux sciences sociales, ce que le roman historique est à la science historique »[20]. En d’autres termes, l’utopie peut être comprise comme un traité littérarisé sur l’état. Enfin, Hélène Greven-Borde utilise ensemble les termes de récit, fiction et romanesque utopique[21], alors que Micheline Hugues parle d’utopies romanesques et de romanesque utopique[22].

Pour souligner la dépendance de la description utopique de la narration de voyage et romanesque, Jean-Michel Racault a proposé le syntagme d’« utopie narrative ». L’utopie narrative est « la description détaillé, introduite par un récit ou intégrée à un récit, d’un espace imaginaire clos, géographiquement plausible et soumis aux lois physiques du monde réel, habité par une collectivité individualisée d’êtres raisonnables dont les rapports mutuels comme les relations avec l’univers matériel et spirituel sont régis par une organisation rationnellement justifiée saisie dans son fonctionnement concret »[23]. Comme le travail de Jean-Michel Racault porte surtout sur les utopies de l’Age classique et des Lumières, il est vrai que, beaucoup plus que les utopies de la Renaissance, ces textes sont massivement contaminés par l’esprit des voyages extraordinaires. Mais même faisant abstraction de la prédisposition narrative de l’époque envisagée par le théoricien, il reste que grand nombre d’auteurs, par exemple Cyrano, Foigny, Veiras, Patot, Swift, Prévost, Casanova, Sade, etc., utilisent la narration comme une sorte d’exosquelette leur permettant d’enfiler les organismes de plusieurs cités et pays utopiques ou dystopiques.

On doit reconnaître, avec Krishan Kumar, que « l’utopie a conservé tout au long de son histoire la forme basique d’une narration de voyage » et que sa définition doit nécessairement inclure l’idée d’une « fiction d’un voyage vers un monde nouveau »[24]. Ou, d’une manière plus basale encore, on peut admettre, avec Bronislaw Baczko, que « l’utopie n’est pas seulement imaginée et pensée ; elle se fait intelligible et communicable dans un discours par lequel s’effectue la réunion et l’intégration des idées-images à un langage ». Le discours utopique se serait constitué par l’intégration de deux paradigmes classiques, celui de « l’utopie de voyage imaginaire » et celui de « l’utopie – projet de législation idéale », le premier servant de véhicule et de liant au deuxième[25].

En effet, le syntagme « utopie narrative » évoque en contrepartie le syntagme « utopie descriptive ». La caractérisation d’« utopie descriptive » devrait être appliquée aux utopies dédiées exclusivement à la présentation de cités et de royaumes idéaux, comme celles des anglais More et Bacon et des italiens Patrizzi, Agostini, Zuccolo et Campanella. Néanmoins, les procédés de la description et de la narration ne sauraient délimiter deux espèces distinctes d’utopies. Ils pointent plutôt vers deux pôles du discours utopique, qui peuvent se retrouver dans un équilibre instable ou éclaté, mais ne peuvent pas s’exclure totalement sans détruire l’ensemble. Les utopies descriptives ne peuvent pas se passer d’une minime esquisse d’un cadre épique, même stéréotypé, sans tomber dans une proposition réformiste pure (sur ce bord se trouve l’Oceana de James Harrington), alors que les utopies narratives, sans la description, si sommaire qu’elle soit, d’une communauté meilleure (ou inférieure), retombent tout simplement dans le genre des romans d’aventures (sur cet autre bord se retrouvant par exemple l’Aline et Valcour de Sade). La prépondérance de l’un ou de l’autre des pôles pôles – la description et la narration utopique – peut largement varier quantitativement, mais l’osmose entre l’utopie, en tant que description, et le voyage extraordinaire, en tant que narration, ne peut pas être rompue sans détruire l’organisme symbiotique.

Le voyage extraordinaire, qui doit son nom générique à Geoffroy Atkinson[26], est un type particulier du voyage imaginaire défini par Philip Babcock Gove[27]. En fait, tous les « récits englobants » qui véhiculent les descriptions utopiques sont, selon Gove, des variantes du voyage imaginaire. Par ce trait, l’utopie narrative s’avoisine avec le roman d’aventures et le roman fantastique. Pour une meilleure distinction dans le cadre du genre romanesque, Jean-Michel Racault invoque la distinction anglo-saxonne entre « romance », le « récit non mimétique qui ne suscite pas l’effet de réel et ne requiert de la part de son lecteur aucune espèce de créance », et « novel », le roman réaliste[28]. L’utopie narrative peut être classée, du moins pour son histoire jusqu’au XVIII^e siècle, comme un type de romance, ensemble avec la prose chevaleresque, pastorale, allégorique, religieuse, héroïque et historique, dialoguée, satirique, etc.[29] Ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’elle ne partage pas aussi des traits communs avec le « novel », par exemple avec le roman picaresque et d’aventures, surtout à partir du XVIII^e siècle quand les auteurs d’utopies, pour imposer un nouveau pacte de véracité, commencent à introduire les techniques d’authentification empruntées aux récits de voyage.

Une variété romanesque proche de l’utopie est la robinsonnade[30]. Construit à partir du célèbre personnage de Daniel Defoe, le terme désigne l’entreprise civilisatrice d’un individu échoué sur une île ou un territoire sauvage. La nature y est d’habitude édénique et arcadienne, mais ce qui distingue le Robinson aménageant son île d’Adam en Eden ou du pasteur de l’Age d’Or est sa détermination de faire travailler cette nature, de la transformer en culture. On a considéré Robinson Crusoe comme le représentant de la civilisation bourgeoise en ascension, mais il est tout autant le symbole de l’humanité dans la construction « technologique » de soi. Il est le héros civilisateur de l’Age moderne, position qui implique toutes les caractéristiques de la mentalité humaniste, opposée à celle religieuse, mystique ou magique : humanisme, volontarisme, rationalisme, scientisme, technologisme, etc. Même quand il n’échoue pas accidentellement sur une île déserte mais s’y retire de sa propre volonté, suite à une névrose personnelle, à un traumatisme subi en Europe ou à une misanthropie philosophique, le « Robinson » n’oublie jamais ses dextérités civilisatrices pour transformer la nature sauvage en un microcosme domestique. C’est le cas de Philippe Quarll, « solitaire anglais », protagoniste d’un roman (M. [Edouard] Dorrington, Le solitaire anglais, ou Aventures merveilleuses de Philippe Quarll, 1729) inclus souvent dans la bibliographie de l’utopie, bien qu’il soit une robinsonnade typique.

Tous ces traits, la robinsonnade les partage avec l’utopie, à la différence que Robinson construit un microunivers paradisiaque personnel, alors que l’utopie implique l’effort et la participation de toute une collectivité (quoique, s’il avait une riche descendance, on pourrait bien voir dans Robinson l’ancêtre d’une société utopique insulaire, comme dans les romans de François Lefebvre, Relation du voyage de l’isle d’Eutopie, 1711, et de Guillaume Grivel, L’isle inconnue ou Mémoires du Chevalier des Gastines, 1783-1787). Toutefois la différence entre individualisme et collectivisme suffit, selon David Fausett, pour faire de la robinsonnade et de l’utopie deux genres séparés[31]. On pourrait prolonger cette opposition dans le conflit plus large qui a opposé, d’après William Brandon, les mentalités du Monde Ancien et du Monde Nouveau. « Dominium » et libéralisme, d’un côté, et « communitas » et autoritarisme, de l’autre[32], sont les deux projets divergents que Robinson et Utopus mettent à la base de leurs mondes respectifs, l’un de tendance « capitaliste » et l’autre « communiste ».

Si à l’Age de la raison l’utopie faisait corps commun avec le voyage extraordinaire, à partir du XIX^e siècle, avec l’ascension du positivisme et du scientisme, elle s’est tournée vers une cohabitation avec un autre genre, le roman scientifique et de science-fiction. J. O. Bailey définit la « fiction scientifique » comme le récit d’une invention imaginaire ou d’une découverte dans les sciences de la nature avec toutes les expériences et les aventures qui en découlent. L’idée que l’invention (sous-marin, aéroplane, vaisseau interplanétaire, téléphone, radio, bombe atomique, rayon laser, etc.) devance prophétiquement son époque a fait ressortir la fonction anticipative des utopies (très faible d’ailleurs, à un examen rétrospectif). La confluence entre utopisme et scientisme donne ce que J. O. Bailey nomme la « fiction scientifique-utopique » (scientific-utopian fiction)[33]. Dans ce sens, Raymond Ruyer a mis en relief la tournure utopique de beaucoup des romans « scientifiques » comme ceux de Jules Verne[34].

Caractérisant la science-fiction comme un mode littéraire « distancié », « non-mimétique » ou métaphysique, Darko Suvin la rapproche de l’utopie en tant que genre qui refuse le monde immédiat et lui oppose des mondes « radicalement différents ». Dans la « jungle des genres », l’utopie et la science-fiction apparaissent comme des parents, côtoyés de tous parts par les mêmes voisins : le mythe et le récit mythologique, le conte de fées, le récit fantastique, la pastorale, la picaresque et le voyage d’aventures, la vulgarisation scientifique, etc.[35] Il est vrai que la science-fiction déborde en plusieurs directions et formes l’utopie, à commencer par son imaginaire cosmologique et d’invention technologique, mais, dans l’opinion de Tom Moylan, elle est aussi le genre qui, dans les années 1960, a réussi a ranimer l’utopie du gouffre où l’avaient faire sombrer les dystopies antitotalitaires du XX^e siècle[36].

En changeant le point de repère, on pourrait tout aussi bien regarder les œuvres de science-fiction contemporaines comme appartenant à l’imaginaire utopique, perspective offerte par exemple par le travail de Hélène Greven-Borde sur les Formes du roman utopique en Grande-Bretagne (1918-1970)[37]. En tout cas, l’impulsion utopique ne paraît survivre à l’heure actuelle que précisément dans la pseudomorphose technologique qu’est la science-fiction, bien que sur le plan de l’imaginaire social, les dernières décennies ont nourri le « retour de l’utopie »[38].