Guillaume Chérel
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uesday night in Venice (where else?) I crossed paths with Guillaume Chérel, who is writing a blog for Le Libération on his own journeys in America exploring Jack Kerouac this summer. That very day he had posted on the episode in On the Road («Sur la Route») in which the narrator picks up Mexican woman on a bus between LA and Bakersfield, the very passage Rodger Jacobs and I were discussing three months ago. g We were on a certain cultural attaché's balcony, near ground zero of Venice (which to my mind is Venice & Pacific), sipping Schramsberg and looking out at the silhouette of Santa Monica Mountains. The attaché's two parakeets kept unusually quiet for sundown; the attaché's guests did not. g Of our conversation, Chérel writes: g Un écrivain ricain de L.A me parle de Kerouac et de Bukowski, puis me sort un truc du genre: «What about Toulouse?» (je ne manie pas bien l’english)… Je me demande comment il sait que j’habite la ville rose, puis il précise: «Delouse !!! »… Deleuze… éh éh… Euh… Rien à battre de Delouze, moi… Ici, les intello-snobs ricains (il ressemble à Régis Debray, l’écrivain de L.A) n’ont que les intello-Français-chiants à la bouche: Delouze, Derrida, Foucauld… Pas BHL, nan… Y’a un truc qui gonfle là-dedans… Et Clément Rosset, par exemple… Y’en a d’autres: j’évoque le terrorisme intellectuel élitiste selon lequel plus c’est compliqué, plus c’est intelligent, subtile. Elitiste. g This is a theme also of the recent book French Theory: "les intello-snobs ricains" fret more about Deleuze, Foucault, et al. than even their French counterparts, and M. Chérel frets about that too. g I remember only bringing up Deleuze to say that both Kerouac and Miller were important to Anti-Oedipus, which seemed to surprise him, but the Deleuze/Toulouse truc du genre was made fairly hilarious by the bubbly. g As it surprises him, now I have to check: in the index of my ancient copy, Kerouac appears twice, on pages 132 and 277, and Miller eight times, often cited to rescue a confusing section. Here's the reference on 132: g Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble to codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. g The second reference: g The case of Jack Kerouac, the artist possessing the soberest of means who took revolutionary "flight," but who later finds himself immersed in dreams of a Great America, and then in search of his Breton ancestors of the superior race. Isn't the destiny of American literature that of crossing limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but also always making these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities? g Of Kerouac's work, M. Cherel admires On the Road, obviously, but does not care much for Big Sur or Dharma Bums. "Big Sur is more belonging to Henri Miller," he says. He is currently working his way through the poems of Mexico City Blues. He likes Visions of Cody quite a bit. g I don't mind resembling Régis Debray...our eyes are similar...although the new left is getting old: Debray is seventeen years my elder...we are in Venice, I need to keep my vanity up...
