‘A Sense of Dooming Boom’: Kerouac’s Psychopathic Aesthetics of Speed in Big Sur

This presentation will focus on Kerouac’s radical aesthetics of speed through the character of Cody in his 1960 novel Big Sur. While the narrator Jack Duluoz – Kerouac’s alter ego – falls victim to a sense of apathy that precipitates his self-destruction, the scenes involving Cody bring a neat contrast to the text. His legendary impetuosity, his ebullient and impulsive nature produce a transcending movement that seeks to nullify the pervasive nothingness of the novel.

This movement in the text is expressed through an aesthetic strategy foregrounded in the transience of prosodic forms; it aims to convey the illusion of energy, of spontaneity and of liveliness on the page, one of the trademarks of Kerouac’s œuvre. Such a strategy, as it reverberates Cody’s restlessness in the narrative, generates a momentum in the writing, a flux indexed on the very movements of the writer’s consciousness through which his most intimate and immediate perceptions are arranged intuitively in relation to the conditions of the instant.

Hell-bent on velocity, thrusting his own self forward into the unknown, Cody’s commotion encapsulate a form of ecstatic performativity that echoes Norman Mailer’s notion of the ‘psychopathic’ in his essay ‘The White Negro’ (1957): Cody nourishes a tremendous desire for life whose ultimate apotheosis is self-annihilation. Crucially, I will show that this contradictory movement of creation and destruction is embedded primarily in the writing: as it rushes towards self-destruction, it creates its own vortex within which all syntactical and narrative forms collapse.