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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

“From Beat Generation to Hacker Generation: On/1 The Road: Experimental Road Narratives”

Résumé

Published in 2018, Ross Goodwin’s 1 The Road cannot but escape comparative reading with Kerouac’s iconic Beat Generation road novel, On the Road, first published in 1957. Beyond the paronomastic echo of their title, Kerouac@100 provides a timely context for a parallel reading of these two novels, which, in their own style and with the writing tools of their time, challenge the very notion of writing, offering experimental prototypes of the genre. If Goodwin himself attests that “Kerouac’s drives inspired the NYC-to-NOLA route for [their] journey,” there are indeed more connections at stake than inspirational drives. An examination of the through line from Kerouac’s prototype for the road narrative to Goodwin’s cutting-edge RNNs-LSTMs experimental automation of the American literary road trip shows how these probe for a way to write the American literary road trip as a transformative or consciousness-raising experience through the lenses of time, space and mobility. The triad will provide an entry into this comparative study of Goodwin’s 200,000 words-long scroll text and Kerouac’s 120-foot Original Scroll, as this paper will precisely favor the legendary 1951 scroll draft over the 1957 published version, as well as occasional references to the journals (Jack Kerouac. Windblown World) The paper addresses how, in both novels, time, space and mobility/movement are at the heart of both compositional processes and thematic development. The analysis starts by examining on the one hand how Goodwin’s automotive AI assemblage (a surveillance camera, a GPS, a microphone, a clock) to write with a car might echo or, on the contrary, challenge Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose and “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” And on the other hand, how the input the AI was fed with (i.e., Goodwin’s favorite classics of Anglo-Saxon literature) and which generates the output of 1 The Road partake of the same dynamic and drive as the umpteen textual references to classics literature which constitute Jack Kerouac’s input to his own Great American novel and the different stages of his apprenticeship novel. The paper then considers time and space as central issues and media. If Kerouac’s novel questions the accepted concept of temporality and society’s use of time, and if his characters claim knowledge of time, how is the neural net time-conscious (GPS)? what is it it precisely knows? Similarly, how is it space conscious (Foursquare API)? how each novel deals with the surfacing features of the landscape the car zooms past, and which features are prioritized? How does this substrate inform both the narrative and the politics of space, as either a threat or an exposure of the techno-capitalistic power? Eventually, in Kerouac’s 1949 Journal, Kerouac stated “On the Road is on the road, that is, moving (Windblown World, 255). Although he was referring to the ongoing writing process of the novel, it also stresses its central concern and imperative: movement and mobility. On the Road is indeed primarily concerned with movement, and refuses fixity and stasis. 1 the Road is a car-written narrative; hence movement is the driver and substance of the text, it is what fuels the text. Yet, strangely enough, the reader is often left with the feeling that the text produced/generated is static. But what if statis was the very consequence of the repetitiveness of the generated text as experienced by the reader, and which eventually perhaps more than the medium used gives the novel its experimental turn? The paper will end precisely on this pattern of repetition which, in both texts, is materialized either by the text itself (1 The Road) or by the form of its journey (On the Road).
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Dates et versions

hal-04073407 , version 1 (18-04-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04073407 , version 1

Citer

Peggy Pacini. “From Beat Generation to Hacker Generation: On/1 The Road: Experimental Road Narratives”. Beat Times: Temporalities in Beat Writing. EUROPEAN BEAT STUDIES NETWORK 10th ANNUAL CONFERENCE, EUROPEAN BEAT STUDIES NETWORK, Sep 2022, Murcia, Spain. ⟨hal-04073407⟩
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