Big Sur writing

Since I had the good fortune to pick up a copy of Jack Kerouac's novel of delirium and paranoia, Big Sur, some time in the late 1970s I started pondering what the California coast might really be like. In 1992 I finally had the chance to road trip down Highway 1 from Northern Calif., and to see first hand some of the locations the Beats haunted and were haunted by during their West Coast jaunts. I also started discovering that Big Sur in particular was a well represented locality in late modernist and early postmodernist literature. Henry Miller lived there and wrote about it, and Richard Brautigan zipped by sometime in the early 60s and made fun of Miller...

The year before last I put together a research paper on these 3 writers for a conference in Sweden on place and haunting, and I have just received the proofs to read through for the publication of the book of proceedings...

Here is a teaser:

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan all wrote prose about Big Sur, California. This locus haunts these writings in three different ways: To Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957) the potential of Big Sur as a true artists’ commune was lost to progress and materialism. He is haunted by the unrealized potential of a Romantic locus amoenus. To Kerouac in Big Sur (1962) the California coast he had loved to explore with Gary Snyder as his Buddhist mountain goat guru in the 1950s––the subject of Dharma Bums (1958)––was becoming a site of horror and delirium (tremens) by the early 1960s when he revisited Big Sur and Rainbow Canyon in search of peace of mind and inspiration for a ‘sea-poem.’ He is haunted by the loss of self and connection to a genius loci in the potentially sublime coastal vistas. To Brautigan in A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) the locus of Big Sur has already become a fully textualized topos which can only serve as a vehicle for pastiche and postmodern parody of his modernist precursors’ anxieties. His text is haunted by intertextual ghosts of Kerouac and Miller’s gender and racial values, which are spoofed and sent up by Brautigan’s unlikely crew of beatnik womanizers and exploiters of both land and Native American (and Confederate!) heritages. The Californias represented in these three works thus serve to re-actualize the questions with which Walt Whitman ends his poem, “Facing West from California’s Shores”: “But where is what I started for so long ago?/And why is it yet unfound?”

I look forward to receiving the printed volume from Cambridge Scholars Press later this year...

My continuing fascination with California has resulted in, among other things, a course I ran a few years back, titled Writing California - check out my course page for that...