‘A Commitment to Self-Destruction: The Glamorisation of Death in Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa through the Phenomenon of the Sublime’

This presentation will explore the paradoxical movement of construction and glamorisation of narrative forms, and their subsequent destruction in Kerouac's novella. As I connect the textual strategies of glamorisation to the processes of annihilation that Tristessa features, I will show how the novella exemplifies the phenomenon of the Sublime – as developed specifically by Immanuel Kant – in its contents as well as in its style.
More specifically, this paper will focus on the foundational paradox of the novella, which is expressed aesthetically through the intensification and magnification of the debasement of the heroine by, and for, the autodiegetic narrator. Consequently, Tristessa will be devised as an aesthetic project with a morbid perversion lying at its core; I will show that its momentum is located in the fragile balance between the substantial depiction of the Sublime and the outrageous decomposition that it yelds. It is precisely upon this irreconcilable contention that the novella is based, as it convokes the forces of the Sublime in order to revoke them in the macabre dissolution of beauty of an extraordinary nature.