Jean-Christophe Cloutier Gets Talky About Kerouac's Creative Written French

You're welcome to download the PDF of issue 3.32 of The Capilano Review in order to read along with us on this one (also available in print): Poet and translator Ted Byrne interviews Jean-Christophe Cloutier, editor of Jack Kerouac’s La vie est d’hommage, a collection of Kerouac's French-language writings published last year by Montreal's Les éditions du Boréal. (Kerouac spoke French fluently up to age six, and his mother was born in Quebec.)

Cloutier discusses the writer's coincident shame and pride in his origins, as expressed in his novel Visions of Gerard, in which "we can detect both an effusive pride, love, and nostalgia for French-Canadian culture and manners of being, yet simultaneously a disgust, a shame, a desperation to get away from the hermetic snare of it." More on Kerouac's translations:

[Jean-Christophe:] ...And say what you will, Kerouac’s oeuvre continents, it continents from coast to coast, and up and down. As I mention in the book, Kerouac even ends up using words that are part Haitian Creole—like “chwal” for “cheval” (horse), which is also where we get “joual” up in Québec. For me, therein lies an important part of the tremendous value of his French experiments; capturing orality on paper suddenly makes visible commonalities between a “continenting” array of peoples and diasporas. Kerouac was aware of this, and in some ways what is often read as overly romanticized and naïve affiliations between his characters and the “fellaheen” or peoples of color can be grounded in this continenting and oral unity. The bit about “sound-spelling” comes from his “Author’s Note” to Memory Babe, an unfinished text—a marvelous, warm, lively text—that has now finally been made available in The Unknown Kerouac. There, he’s trying to explain the peculiarity behind his oft-singular spellings of French in his works. This is the presence of French we already knew from reading Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, etc.—the recorded moments of dialogue or stream of consciousness where French erupts onto the pages of his published works. “Sound-spelling” becomes a way for Kerouac to give scriptural form to his French, which only exists in speech—it is a living language, but it needs a new kind of spelling to faithfully reflect its phenomenological reality. Kerouac is interested in capturing a living record; he wants to preserve the unique flavor of his culture. To do so, he needs to use, and thus create, this new written French. In relation to the question of whether or not we can truly say that he is writing “by ear,” I think the Joyce link is instructive. When we think about Finnegans Wake, we can see that its language is polyphonic, that it is a blend of multiple European languages, and yet it retains the structural logic of English as its primary vector. I believe something similar is taking place in Kerouac’s French writings, only with French as primary vector.

Ted: Just a couple of further points on language. You quote Kerouac as saying, “la langue canadienne-française est la plus puissante au monde…c’est une des langues les plus ‘langagées’ du monde….” What do you think he means by ‘langagées’?

Jean-Christophe: What you cite is actually my translation of Kerouac’s description of the French-Canadian language from a short piece called “The Father of My Father.” It’s a great little piece that was included in Atop an Underwood. The original English goes: “it is one of the most languagey languages in the world.” It’s an interesting question, what does he mean exactly 16 The Capilano Review by that phrase? I think part of the key to what he means comes in the next line: “It is unwritten; it is the language of the tongue and not of the pen.” It has to do with the tongue—la langue, in French, which also means language, as in “la langue maternelle”—it’s a language that has thrived and expanded itself to fill the “new” American continent, like a swelling tongue—“terrific and huge” he says—full of big loud words—“words of power” as Kerouac says later in this same passage. A language made for talking, for yakking, for velocity—it’s a quick, thick language, toothsome yet meant to roll off the tongue…and you know Kerouac rolled his ‘r’s when speaking French. When I was transcribing the French manuscripts, I would often, in the evening, listen to the bits of French interviews Kerouac gave. In order to properly decipher some of the phrases, I needed to really hear its languageyness. 

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