Do you hear that? The sound of it alone is wonderful, no? What can you give me in English to match that for sheer beauty of resonance?

—Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

Kerouac attempted to resolve the aesthetic problems of Visions of Cody in his next period of writing, from 1953 with the writing of The Subterraneans on through the sixties, as his life and thinking became more religious and philosophical. The culmination of the experiments that comprise Visions of Cody is found in Desolation Angels, [hereafter abbreviated as DA] a novel concerned with the period of legend/life from 1956 to 1957. The novel, first published in 1965, is based on Kerouac's journals written in the year before the appearance of On the Road; these writings were put in novel form after the success of On the Road,¹ and integrate the events of the road with the Zen philosophy he was learning as he developed both as a man and as a writer. The first half of the book was completed in Mexico City in October 1956 and “typed up” in 1957; the second half was not written until 1961, although chronologically it follows immediately after the first.² The novel is thus another take on Kerouac's road adventures: it covers roughly the same aspects of his legend as On the Road and Visions of Cody and is stylistically the logical culmination of them both.

Although the merits of this novel have often been hinted at, some critics, such as Dennis McNally, state flatly that the writing is not nearly Kerouac's best.³ Tytell, on the other hand, lauds the work as “the best existing account of the lives of the Beats” and further claims that its influence upon the nonfiction novel emerges in such books as Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Tytell also groups Desolation Angels with The Dharma Bums in claiming that neither novel represents the essential Kerouac—the ideal of spontaneous composition, the flaunting of conventional novelistic expectations.⁴

Indeed, Desolation Angels has not yet been understood as a stylistically integrated work. If the earlier experimental novel combines adventure with the meditative mode, then the later novel builds upon that combined form by sustaining the structure, techniques, and images beyond the initial experimentalism. If On the Road describes the outward journey and Visions of Cody the inner one, here the techniques of both are joined for a more consistent narrative. Thus, even though several books follow in the chronological sequence of Kerouac's career, Desolation Angels will be shown here to be the stylistic perfection of the techniques of the Duluoz legend, and perhaps its best expression.

The circular narrative structure of Desolation Angels begins and ends with a period of intense confrontation with the self. The terror and beauty of utter solitude on Desolation Peak—sixty-three days of proximity to nature's powers, including lightning storms, huge looming mountains, voids of gorges and canyons, bright sunsets, fog, silence, loneliness—end with Duluoz/Kerouac's finding nothingness at the bottom of “myself abysmal,” after the lustful desire to return to the world.⁵ In the end he finds only “a peaceful sorrow at home is the best I'll ever be able to offer the world, in the end, and so I told my Desolation Angels goodbye. A new life for me” (DA, 366). Ironically, the descent from the heights of the mountain provides for the ascent of the writer's spirit. Opposing images once again define the thematic shape as well as the linguistic component of Kerouac's text. And the return to the self follows from it full circle.

Kerouac's ability to integrate the diverse components of his prose emerges at last in a distinct narrative voice. More highly evolved than the Paradise or Duluoz narrators of the previous books, this Duluoz voice provides a consistent method of discourse for each prose segment. Each division—whether book, part, or section—echoes the circular shape of the whole, with the opposition between the “abysmal self” and the world vast and teeming with “angels” magnified. The Dean/Cody persona is no longer needed as a catalyst for the narrator's philosophical and adventuring self. The Duluoz narrator here is thus more developed, integrated, and self-contained.

As a self-conscious persona, Kerouac's narrator shapes the action of the novel through his perception. Kerouac now achieves greater control of his method in the reflexive connection between the act of living and the act of writing. Most important, Kerouac's command of his spontaneous prose technique has developed through his experience. The disclosures of Desolation Angels are really the revision of initial insights recorded in On the Road and Visions of Cody. This revision is now his methodological control.

The circular shape of his local discourse controls the design of his narrative at large. Thus the overall form is but the largest circle of these interior structures of thought, the prose paragraphs that comprise the whole. The book and part divisions are named and numbered and the sections are numbered; but even though they are therefore sequential and cannot be transposed as was the case in Visions of Cody, the book and part divisions nonetheless follow the familiar romantic circle. “Desolation Angels,” the first book, contains two parts—“Desolation in Solitude” and “Desolation in the World”—indicating the linguistic polarities of Kerouac's thought in this final stage of legend. “Passing Through,” the second book, has four part divisions in which the writer/self defined in the first book becomes a transient being (like the “gruesome grieving ghost” identified in the earlier fiction) who is “Passing Through Mexico,” “Passing Through New York,” “Passing Through Tangiers, France and London,” and “Passing Through America Again.” Structurally and thematically, then, there is a beginning in innocence that must pass through experience. The Higher Innocence that Kerouac characteristically desires can only be accomplished by the return to themes that are American.

It will be worthwhile to see what this writer/self has to say about his enlightenment in order to describe fully the circular journey as well as to see how the creation of the narrator follows the precepts of Kerouac's earlier literary ethic: “And now, after the experience on top of the mountain where I was alone for two months without being questioned or looked at by any single human being I began a complete turnabout in my feelings about life. … I knew now that my life was a search for peace as an artist, but not only as an artist—As a man of contemplations …” (DA, 219). Jack Duluoz sees himself as singular, lonely, and separate. He talks about the circular notion of a “turnabout” following the movement down from the mountain. This movement echoes the shape of the entire work structurally and thematically.

“A man of contemplations” further defines the consistency of mood of Desolation Angels, a contemplative mood which Kerouac only now achieves: “I was searching for a peaceful kind of life dedicated to contemplation and the delicacy of that, for the sake of my art (in my case prose, tales) (narrative rundowns of what I saw and how I saw) but I also searched for this as my way of life, that is, to see the world from the viewpoint of solitude and to meditate upon the world without being imbroglio'd in its actions …” (DA, 220). Here is another circumlocution that develops in more detail his notion of the writer/self. The contemplation initiates a down movement, as if in his thoughts he were still perched above on the mountain. The word “rundown” resonates, as does the manifest integration of life and art in solitude. But most important of all is Kerouac's declaration (through Duluoz) that his life is dedicated to the contemplation of the creation of not only “what I saw” (a minor explanation of his interest in the form of description called sketching), but also “how I saw” (that is, the vehicle of perception in language). The legend reaches its fullness, in other words, as a discovery of language.

The language of the writer/self is made up of rhetorical tropes similar to those we have found in the earlier novels, revealing an integrity of preoccupation as well as a more highly-evolved form. The free prose sections of the Visions of Cody experiment become a harmonious sphere in the novel's three-dimensional atmosphere, as once again a musical analogy provides a solution to structural problems. Duluoz explains his control over the material in the following way: “‘There's a certain amount of control going on [in my writing] like a man telling a story in a bar without interruptions or even one pause’” (DA, 280).

The voice of Desolation Angels is especially appropriate to Kerouac's interior journey as a rhetorical spiral leads him from exuberance to despair. A hymnal, litanous language maintains the musical analogy. Thus Kerouac solves the time/space, linear/nonlinear problems encountered in the earlier novels because chord structures—or, in the linguistic register, “narrative rundowns”—allow him to repeat as well as to progress. The effect is the paradox of circular motion, at times a mandala of themes on a circular plane. The spiral of recurrence and progression provides the familiar circular motion from beat to beatitude: “It's béat, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat” (DA, 123). The juxtaposition of antithetical images in earlier works is now the very subject of Kerouac's prose. Here the matrix of rhetorical tropes is, as I shall show, simultaneously the completion of an entire image in all its possibilities. The beat moves from a staccato rhythm of exuberance in terse phrasing, through the images of “down in the world” and “oldtime lowdown,” to longer, more cumbersome descriptions of mundane labors usually associated with human misery. Thus Kerouac uses the preoccupations and themes of the entire legend with a more masterful command of the material as his mind recollects it in memory.

DESOLATION IN SOLITUDE

A detailed account of the elements of Kerouac's circles will illustrate this solitude in action. Several sections of prose will be analyzed to explain Kerouac's mature methodology. Indeed, the language of Desolation Angels will be shown to be Kerouac's highest expression of “free prose.”

In section 2 of “Desolation in Solitude,” Duluoz explains why he is on Desolation Peak and has to stare at it for over seventy days. Contained within the passage are suggestions of the madness of solitude, especially in the allusions to King Lear on the heath. At times, the language reflects the garbled and mangled musings of a man in painful isolation; his speech in inchoate syllables of suffering reflects his inability to express these feelings coherently. At these times, the sounds themselves control the narrative. In toto, the section reads like a dramatic monologue:

Yes, for I'd thought, in June, hitch hiking up there to the Skagit Valley in northwest Washington for my fire lookout job “When I get to the top of Desolation Peak and everybody leaves on mules and I'm alone I will come face to face with God or Tathagata and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering and going to and fro in vain” but instead I'd come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it but face to face with ole Hateful Duluoz Me and many's the time I thought I die, suspire of boredom, or jump off the mountain, but the days, nay the hours dragged and I had no guts for such a leap, I had to wait and get to see the face of reality—and it finally comes that afternoon of August 8 as I'm pacing in the high alpine yard on the little wellworn path I'd beaten, in dust and rain, on many a night, with my oil lamp banked low inside the cabin with the four-way windows and peaked pagoda roof and lightning rod point, it finally comes to me, after even tears, and gnashing, and the killing of a mouse and attempted murder of another, something I'd never done in my life (killing animals even rodents), it comes in these words: “The void is not disturbed by any kind of ups and downs, my God look at Hozomeen, is he worried or tearful? Does he bend before storms or snarl when the sun shines or sigh in the late day drowse? Does he smile? Was he not born out of madbrained turmoils and upheavals of raining fire and now's Hozomeen and nothing else? Why should I choose to be bitter or sweet, he does neither?—Why cant I be like Hozomeen and O Platitude O hoary old platitude of the bourgeois mind “take life as it comes”—Twas that alcoholic biographer, W. E. Woodward, said, “There's nothing to life but just the living of it”—But O God I'm bored! But is Hozomeen bored? And I'm sick of words and explanations. Is Hozomeen?

Aurora Borealis
                    over Hozomeen—
The void is stiller

—Even Hozomeen'll crack and fall apart, nothing lasts, it is only a faring-in-that-which-everything-is, a passing-through, that's what's going on, why ask questions or tear hair or weep, the burble blear purple Lear on his moor of woes he is only a gnashy old flap with winged whiskers beminded by a fool—to be and not to be, that's what we are—Does the Void take any part in life and death? does it have funerals? or birth cakes? why not I be like the Void, inexhaustibly fertile, beyond serenity, beyond even gladness, just Old Jack (and not even that) and conduct my life from this moment on (though winds blow through my windpipe), this ungraspable image in a crystal ball is not the Void, the Void is the crystal ball itself and all my woes the Lankavatara Scripture hairnet of fools, “Look sirs, a marvelous sad hairnet”—Hold together, Jack, pass through everything, and everything is one dream, one appearance, one flash, one sad eye, one crystal lucid mystery, one word—Hold still, man, regain your love of life and go down from this mountain and simply be—be—be the infinite fertilities of the one mind of infinity, make no comments, complaints, criticisms, appraisals, avowals, sayings, shooting stars of thought, just flow, flow, be you all, be you what it is, it is only what it always is—Hope is a word like a snow-drift—This is the Great Knowing, this is the Awakening, this is the Voidness—So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and dont be sorry—Prunes, prune, eat your prunes—And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void—

I come back into the house a new man.

All I have to do is wait 30 long days to get down from the rock and see sweet life again—knowing it's neither sweet nor bitter but just what it is, and so it is—

So long afternoons I sit in my easy (canvas) chair facing Void Hozomeen, the silence hushes in my little shack, my stove is still, my dishes glitter, my firewood (old sticks that are the form of water and welp, that I light small Indian fires with in my stove, to make quick meals) my firewood lies piled and snaky in the corner, my canned goods wait to be opened, my old cracked shoes weep, my pans lean, my dish rags hang, my various things sit silent around the room, my eyes ache, the wind wallows and belts at the window and upped shutters, the light in late afternoon shades and bluedarks Hozomeen (revealing his streak of middle red) and there's nothing for me to do but wait—and breathe (and breathing is difficult in the thin high air, with West Coast sinus wheezings)—wait, breathe, eat, sleep, cook, wash, pace, watch, never any forest fires—and daydream, “What will I do when I get to Frisco? Why first thing I'll get a room in Chinatown”—but even nearer and sweeter I daydream what I'll do Leaving Day, some hallowed day in early September, “I'll walk down the trail, two hours, meet Phil in the boat, ride to the Ross Float, sleep there a night, chat in the kitchen, start early in the morning on the Diablo Boat, go right from that little pier (say hello to Walt), hitch right to Marblemount, collect my pay, pay my debts, buy a bottle of wine and drink it by the Skagit in the afternoon, and leave next morning for Seattle”—and on, down to Frisco, then L. A., then Nogales, then Guadalajara, then Mexico City—And still the Void is still and'll never move—

But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.

(DA, 4-6)

Like every section, this one is a microcosm of the whole work, a compendium of antithetical imagery, a prose poem complete within itself. Placed at the book's beginning, this passage sets up the idea of the quest in solitude and without movement, reminiscent in its way of the gnomic utterances of the Old English “Seafarer” poem of which Ezra Pound was so fond. Kerouac uses the solitude of the American landscape, so profoundly frightening in its accentuation of his own preoccupations about life, to eclipse his own expression, his own self. The linguistic oppositions that unified earlier novels recur as animation is pared away and he is left alone, all the wandering “to and fro” supplanted by stillness. In the austere clearing that remains, the two principal Kerouacean techniques of vision are particularly evident: the all-inclusiveness of opposing imagery and the generalization from the particular to make a philosophical point.

Duluoz begins with a rhetorical “yes” of affirmation and proceeds to build up to a philosophical dialogue with himself. Words like “up,” “top,” “peak,” are countered by “valley”; he suggests he must go up to stay level. In his first speech to himself, he speaks of lateral movement which balances up and down. He begins the narrative refrain of “face to face,” for example, and balances that with “to and fro” for the creation of the tautologies that are characteristic of this section. The narrative takes a turn with “but,” and between the repetitions of “face to face” he begins a series of negations to counterpoint the “yes” at the start: “no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it. …” The first tautology of “face to face” is “Hateful Duluoz Me,” a self-negating image followed by verbs that suggest his death: “I thought I die, suspire of boredom, or jump off the mountain. …”

After the first break, indicated by dashes, concrete details bring reality home. The word “and” precipitates the all-inclusiveness of oppositions. “Wellworn,” “beaten,” “banked low” contrast with “peaked pagoda roof and lightning rod point.” Extreme actions, even when referring to mice, contrast with a simultaneous stasis: “The void is not disturbed by any kind of ups and downs,” Duluoz muses. He then identifies the Void and the mystery of the experience on Desolation Peak with another mountain vision which he can actually sight from his perch, a vision of Hozomeen, which becomes the object of a set of rhetorical questions from which he generalizes. He questions the oppositions of “bitter or sweet,” for example, and asks why we must choose between them. Then, in further tautologies, he reveals that no choices can be made because every choice already contains its own opposite anyway.

Kerouac's haiku in midsection is typical of Desolation Angels,⁶ and is a compressed form of his philosophizing in general. Here the idea that the endurance of the mountain is second to the endurance of the Void is central to the linguistic collapse of oppositions, to the unified vision of all-inclusiveness. The next segment suggests that even the mountain will crack and fall apart, since “Nothing lasts.” Again, Kerouac suggests a lateral movement of activity which goes along with the extreme stasis, boredom, and stillness of the mountain (“faring-in-that-which-everything-is” and “passing-through”), which is then set in opposition with the desire to “ask,” “tear,” “weep,” echoing Prufrock's dilemma. The next cluster of mere syllables evokes Shakespeare (”burble blear purple Lear on his moor of woes”). Not only does Kerouac's narrator liken himself to Lear, but he generalizes from the comparison to the human condition as a whole—to be a “flap with winged whiskers beminded by a fool.”

Then, evoking Shakespeare once more, he revises a tautology into “to be and not to be,” with special emphasis upon the “and.” Consciously or not, Kerouac strives for a stasis or balance of oppositions, leading to a series of questions about the activity of the Void—“Does the Void take any part in life and death? does it have funerals? or birth cakes?”—which ends in a single question, identifying the narrator in the negative: “Why not I be like the Void, inexhaustibly fertile, beyond serenity, beyond even gladness, just old Jack (and not even that).” The Void is represented in images of passing through: “beyond serenity,” and “beyond gladness.” Even Jack and non-Jack are represented with the same strong metaphor: “winds blow through my windpipe.” Then he negates the Void to affirm himself. The oxymoron “ungraspable image” is used to define the Void and the “crystal ball”; the “hairnet of fools” is that by which he is “beminded” (like Lear above) when he preoccupies himself with his woes. Thus he brings the Lear image full circle. The net contains the hair torn away by man in despair. But it is a reassurance that allows the narrator to transcend the conceits of these tautologies by exhorting himself to have the courage to pass through.

First he tells himself to “hold together … everything,” whether “dream,” “appearance,” “flash,” “eye,” “crystal lucid mystery,” or finally, “word.” He thus exhorts his writer/self to “hold still” and to “go down”—that is, to descend in order to ascend. This action results in “infinite fertilities,” a correspondence with the “inexhaustibly fertile” nature of the Void earlier in the passage. And rather than create thoughts or words that prevent the passing through from taking place, he exhorts himself to “flow.” This exhortation precipitates another set of tautologies as the old ones break down: “It is only what it always is”; “Hope is a word like a snow-drift”; “This is the Great Knowing”; “[T]his is the Awakening”; “This is the Voidness.” Thus Kerouac implements the “flow.” And just as the appearance/reality theme is resolved in the me/not me imagery of Desolation Angels, the antithetical images brought “face to face” bring the picture of the Void full circle with its image of “pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.” This writing, as if in Kerouac's characteristic “semi-trance” has thus built up to a release of expression—to the completion of an all-inclusive image.

There follows a return to Duluoz's physical state, with new understanding. That is, insight follows release: “I come back into the house a new man.” Now an interior landscape is juxtaposed with the exterior landscape of the first movement. But the interior is not the same after the new insight. “Bitter” and “sweet” are not oppositions but are together in “what it is.” Thus the description, though specific in detail, generalizes from the particular to show the interior in a total image, not subject to flux. Lateral movement marks the passivity of the scene: “silence hushes,” “stove is still,” “dishes glitter,” “firewood … lies piled and snaky in the corner.” The stillness evokes the Edenic paradise of prebirth bliss for which Duluoz is nostalgic. Though the objects in this cabin are personified, the verbs indicate passivity: “canned goods wait,” “pans lean,” “dish rags hang,” “things sit silent.”

But there is still movement in this silent scene as the wind “wallows and belts … upped shutters,” a movement indicating ascension after a going down. This movement leads to enlightenment, to images of passing through: “wait,” “breathe,” “eat,” “sleep,” “cook,” “wash,” “pace,” “watch,” “daydream.” Kerouac capitalizes Leaving Day as if it were a day of celebration and exuberance, and in one long breath envisions the future in a kind of apocalypse of mundane images that brings the section full circle with the repetition of Skagit and other geographic detail; the repetition of “then” allows the enumeration to flow. The ultimate paradox of the circular imagery of all-inclusiveness then emerges: “And still the Void is still and'll never move.” The flow which implies movement is so all-inclusive as to take up all space and need not operate in time at all. This is the final enlightenment of the passage. Duluoz ends, however, by identifying himself (“face to face”) with the Void in the bridge: “But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.” True to Kerouac's design, even this bridge that ends the section defies closure as it leads to the next.

DESOLATION IN THE WORLD

The second part of the first book opposes “Desolation in Solitude” with “Desolation in the World.” An examination of a sample section will reveal still another development in Kerouac's expression. For example, Kerouac's “sketch” of Seattle in section 52 bears the refrain of how hard it is to come off the mountain:

Seattles in the fog, burlesque shows, cigars and wines and papers in a room, fogs, ferries, bacon and eggs and toast in the morning—sweet cities below.

Down about where the heavy timber begins, big Ponderosas and russet all-trees, the air hits me nice, green Northwest, blue pine needles, fresh, the boat is cutting a swath in the nearer lake, it's going to beat me, but just keep on swinging, Marcus Magee—You've had falls before and Joyce made a word two lines long to describe it—brabarackotawackomanashtopataratawackomanac!

We'll light three candles to three souls when we get there.

The trail, last halfmile, is worse, than above, the rocks, big, small, twisted ravines for your feet—Now I begin sobbing for myself, cursing of course—“It never ends!” is my big complaint, just like I'd thought in the door, “How can anything ever end? But this is only a Samsara-World-of-Suffering trail, subject to time and space, therefore must end, but my God it will never end!” and I come running and thwapping finally no more—For the first time I fall exhausted without planning.

And the boat is coming right in.

“Cant make it.”

I sit there a long time, moody faced and finished—Wont do it—But the boat gets coming closer, it's like timeclock civilization, gotta get to work on time, like on the railroad, tho you cant make it you'll make it—It was blasted in the forges with iron vulcan might, by Poseidon and his heroes, by Zen Saints with swords of intelligence, by Master French-god—I push myself up and try on—Every step wont do, it wont work, that my thighs hold it up‘s'mystery to me—plah—

Finally I'm loading my steps on ahead of me, like placing topheavy things on a platform with outstretched arms, the kind of strain you cant keep up—other than the bare feet (now battered with torn skin and blisters and blood) I could just plow and push down the hill, like a falling drunk almost falling never quite falling and if so would it hurt as much as my feet?—nu—gotta push and place each up-knee and down with the barbfoot on scissors of Blakean Perfidy with worms and howlings everywhere—dust—I fall on my knees.

Rest that way awhile and go on.

“Eh damn Eh maudit” I'm crying last 100 yards—now the boat's stopped and Fred whistles sharply, no a hoot, an Indian Hooo! which I answer with a whistle, with fingers in mouth—He settles back to read a cowboy book while I finish that trail—Now I dont want him to hear me cry, but he does he must hear my slow sick steps—plawrp, plawrp—timber tinker of pebbles plopping off a rock round precipice, the wild flowers dont interest me no more—

“I cant make it” is my only thought as I keep going, which thought is like phosphorescent negative red glow imprinting the film of my brain “Gotta make it”—

Desolation, Desolation
                    so hard
To come down off of.

(DA, 76-77)

Again the passage is made up of antithetical imagery with an eye toward all-inclusiveness. Again Kerouac's eye focuses on the particular to render the general. Again he has Duluoz speak from above, as if he were a god, as if the identification with the eternity cited in the previous passage were complete. The omission of the apostrophe in “Seattles” (and despite Kerouac's overall irreverence for standard punctuation) is purposeful. It renders the city an emblem of many an American city. Naturally the fog, mentioned twice, indicates the haziness reminiscent of Joan Rawshank's movie set in Visions of Cody. As Kerouac catalogs the things of this world, he chooses seamy details: “burlesque,” “cigars and wines,” mundane images of “ferries,” “bacon and eggs and toast.” Then he sums it all up in the clause after the dash: “sweet cities below.” The eye of the narrative's movement is down, and thus he descends.

The word “Down” in fact begins the following paragraph as Kerouac's eye now descends to the timber line, the specific Ponderosas, and inclusive “all-trees.” The next image is a technicolor “green” and “blue.” His own path is contrasted with the “cutting” boat, which is going to “beat” and “swing.” The juxtaposition of the two movements allows for a tentative release in enlightenment as “candles” correspond with “souls” at the point of reaching a “there” that is the bottom. Once again, he must descend to ascend.

Looking upward, Duluoz compares this portion of the journey by stating that the last half mile is worse. But this journey down the mountain is a metaphor for Kerouac's life as a whole. Just as Duluoz laments “‘It never ends!’” the “But” signals a change in the course of the narrative. The suffering trail as “a Samsara-World-of-Suffering trail, subject to time and space, therefore must end,” but it will “never end.” He resolves to stop the “running” and “thwapping,” lateral movements which obstruct his fall. And so, in letting go, he “falls.”

But again, the contrasting movement of the boat cuts his fall short: “‘Cant make it.’” The boat represents an aspect of civilization that deters man from his descent/ascent. It represents stoppage as the narrator must “sit,” “moody faced” and “finished.” The “But” signals a shift in the narrative, time and civilization drawing near. The all-inclusive image of the railroad is seen in “making it”/“not making it” on time. “It”—both civilization and time—is like a relief sculpture etched into eternity, “blasted” by society's heroes, by “Poseidon,” “Zen Saints,” “Master Frenchgod.” Against this image of stasis, Duluoz pushes “up.” But his effort to engrave himself on this surface “wont work,” and he falls further—“plah.”

The next paragraph is replete with christological images of the “fall.” Duluoz is “loading,” “placing topheavy things,” feeling “strain.” He is raw with “bare feet,” “torn skin,” “blisters,” “blood,” “I fall on my knees.” But after a brief rest, his expression turns toward contemporary civilization, as Fred hoots and whistles to him. In keeping, then, with the antithetical imagery throughout the description, the fall from grace is balanced by the “cowboy book,” “I dont want him to hear me cry,” “timber tinker … plopping,” and “wild flowers”—in short, by the civilization he has just described.

The final bridge of the passage contrasts “I cant make it” with “Gotta make it” and interprets the return to civilization as Duluoz images the descent from the mountain not in Christian terms but in a red neon imprint. The image is reminiscent of the lighting in the Hector's Cafeteria scene of Visions of Cody and is summed up in the haiku at the end with its “hard” mountain echoed by the clumsy line “To come down off of.” And yet, the quotidian images produce the divine as well as the mundane. The movement of the journey down the mountain likens Duluoz not only to a drunk, but also to a man on his knees, seeking repentance. Hence the all-inclusive image of beat/beatitude is complete.

But the pretext of closure in the all-inclusive imagery of beat/beatitude presents a paradox. The haiku at the end suggests that we must repeat in order to progress. Thus a spiral upward is created even as Kerouac preaches a “digging deep,” a down movement in the language itself. The language and structuring of language is indeed well-suited to the function of a novel that mediates, or attempts to mediate, the highly subjective quality of the experiments of Visions of Cody with the need to express something objective to the world. Hence the texture of Kerouac's language explains why his role as writer/self—distanced, itself an object of the novel rather than its subject—is so necessary in this book at this stage of legend. Therefore a preoccupation with expression emerges as a thematic motif in “Desolation in the World,” which becomes the object of the quest that finally gives context to Duluoz's arduous journey.

Thus in section 97 the overt concern is with the problem of expression. The passage is both consistent in movement with previously cited passages and shows the characteristic progression of techniques—from general to particular and all-inclusive imagery—to resolve the paradox of beat/beatitude:

So we go out and get drunk and dig the session in the Cellar where Brue Moore is blowing on tenor saxophone, which he holds mouthpieced in the side of his mouth, his cheek distended in a round ball like Harry James and Dizzy Gillespie, and he plays perfect pretty harmony to any tune they bring up—He pays litte attention to anyone, he drinks his beer, he gets loaded and eye-heavy, but he never misses a beat or a note, because music is his heart, and in music he has found that pure message to give to the world—The only trouble is, they dont understand.

For example: I'm sitting there on the edge of the bandstand right at Brue's feet, facing the bar, but head down to my beer, for modesty of course, yet I see they dont hear it—There are blondes and brunettes with their men and they're making eyes at other men and almost-fights seethe in the atmosphere—Wars'll break out over women's eyes—and the harmony will be missed—Brue is blowing right on them, “Birth of the Blues,” down jazzy, and when his turn comes to enter the tune he comes up with a perfect beautiful new idea that announces the glory of the future world, the piano blongs that with a chord of understanding (blond Bill), the holy drummer with eyes to Heaven is lilting and sending in the angel-rhythms that hold everybody fixed to their work—Of course the bass is thronging to the finger that both throbs to pluck and the other one that slides the strings for the exact harmonic key-sound—Of course the musicians in the place are listening, hordes of colored kids with dark faces shining in the dimness, white eyes round and sincere, holding drinks just to be in there to hear—It augurs something good in men that they'll listen to the truth of harmony—Brue has nevertheless to carry the message along for several chorus-chapters, his ideas get tireder than at first, he does give up at the right time—besides he wants to play a new tune—I do just that, tap him on the shoe-top to acknowledge he's right—In between the sets he sits beside me and Gia and doesnt say much and appears to pretend not to be able to say much—He'll say it on his horn—

But even Heaven's time-worm eats at Brue's vitals, as mine, as yours, it's hard enough to live in a world where you grow old and die, why be dis-harmonious?

(DA, 198-99)

The bridge tells us the all-inclusive imagery here is harmony/disharmony, itself the image of a circle, or wholeness, especially as it pertains to musical form. Throughout the passage, images of harmony are juxtaposed with images of disharmony, up until the final question posed at the passage's end. Yet the passage is also self-reflexive in its generalization of the musician's work to stand as a metaphor for the work of any artist; it is about the ability of art—in Kerouac's particular case, of writing—to render perfection.

Echoing the movement of passages cited earlier, Duluoz will “fall” or descend in order to ascend. He will “dig” in the “Cellar.” Images of harmony follow in the shape of a circle leading to perfection: “mouth” and “round ball” lead to “perfect pretty harmony”—“to any tune they bring up.” He goes down, in other words, to go up. Getting “loaded” and “eye-heavy”—images of plodding like Duluoz's difficult trip down the mountain—are used to describe the travail of the musician in Kerouac's cast of types or generalized personae. The “but” is not a rhetorical contradiction but a synthesis that completes the circle of his attributive perfection—“he never misses a beat,” “music is his heart.” Music is his vehicle of perfection. He has found in music “that pure message to give to the world.” Like Duluoz, he has a message. But, to complete the image, there is inevitably the contrast of trouble, or disharmony, stated in the negative in contrast with the prior affirmative: “they dont understand”; that is, there is no enlightenment.

“For example” is a narrative shift into the scene that follows, creating first a still setting shattered by disharmonious images. Duluoz sits facing the bar (like facing the Void) followed by a “but” that implies the synthesis of all-inclusive imagery that will emerge momentarily (“head down”). “Yet” shows the narrative will take another turn. “I see they dont hear it” shows a complete disharmony of the senses. The eyes of the people are darting about unlike the heavy eyes of those working. Images of disharmony ensue with particular pungency in phrases like “almost-fights seethe in the atmosphere,” “Wars'll break out,” and “harmony will be missed.”

After the dashes, images of harmony show what this audience will miss: “‘the Birth of the Blues’”—reminiscent of Kerouac's prebirth bliss—“down jazzy,” that is, in “Deep Form”⁷ (in its suggestion of “digging deep”). “Turn” underscores the change in narrative course as upward images make Duluoz ascend to an apocalyptic image: “up,” “perfect beautiful new idea that announces the glory of the future world.” This beatific view precipitates the “chord of understanding.” These “up” images of “holy,” “eyes to Heaven,” “lilting and sending in the angel-rhythms” that cause the stillness of passing through hold everybody “fixed.” And “of course” there is “the exact harmonic key-sound,” the highest point. And “of course,” too, the listeners who do hear—other musicians and black children described in antithetical images of “dark,” “shining,” “dimness,” and “round”—are, unlike their down counterparts, capable of perfection themselves. The message provides a quiet apocalyptic view—“It augurs something good in men that they'll listen to the truth of harmony.”

“Nevertheless” indicates another narrative turn, a lateral movement or development of the idea of carrying the message. Duluoz does so in “chorus-chapters” (his kinship and identification with the jazzman is explicit). And, wishing to progress, he continues to carry his message, to play a new tune. The lateral or shifting movement of antitheses is even graphic in “between,” “beside,” and “appears to pretend not to be able to say much—He'll say it on his horn.”

The bridge therefore has resonance as an image of the condition of the man with the truth, with a message to convey, whether by words or music or both. In his characteristic juxtaposition of images, Kerouac creates a vision of a heaven with a landscape of hell. The disharmonious is stated in the negative, which, as we might expect by now, only serves to reinforce the positive, the affirmation of the perfection of harmony. Therefore, as writer/self, Duluoz understands his calling. Like the jazz-man he must proclaim this truth of harmony through his art.

PASSING THROUGH

The second book of Desolation Angels, “Passing Through,” was written much later than the first book and shows Duluoz experiencing the lessons of that prior “desolation.” “Passing through” becomes a metaphor for traveling and, later on, a metaphor for life itself. More to the point of Kerouac's writing, “passing through” becomes a structural metaphor as it leads to the collapse of antithetical imagery in favor of images of stasis. These provide a more secure spiritual context for Kerouac's belief. Section 15 of “Passing Through Mexico” is particularly resonant in echoing the technique:

So, as Lazarus walks thru villages, so God walks thru our lives, and like the workers and the warriors we worry like worrywarts to straighten up the damage as fast as we can, tho the whole thing's hopeless in the end. For God has a bigger foot than Lazarus and all the Texcocos and Texacos and Mañanas of tomorrow. We end up watching a dusk basketball game among Indian boys near the bus stop. We stand under an old tree at the dirtroad crossing, receiving dust as it's blown by the plains wind of the High Plateau of Mexico the likes of which none bleaker maybe than in Wyoming in October, late October …

p.s. The last time I was in Teotihuacan, Hubbard said to me “Wanta see a scorpion, boy?” and lifted up a rock—There sat a female scorpion beside the skeleton of its mate, which it had eaten—Yelling “Yaaaah!” Hubbard lifted a huge rock and smashed it down on the whole scene (and tho I'm not like Hubbard, I had to agree with him that time).

(DA, 244)

First, we find the general in the particular, especially in the anecdote recounted in the postscript. There is also the customary “So” transition. And there is also the characteristic antithetical movement of rhetorical tropes. But more evident here are the images of “passing through.” “Walking thru,” for instance, is contrasted with images of stoppage like the “worker” and “worrywarts” fixing “the damage,” the still-life description of the Indian boys playing, the bus stop, and the activity of standing while the dust is blown by the winds. The hint of closure in the repetition of “end” contrasts with the abrupt cut-off line. Finally, the postscript remembrance is the concrete evidence of the message of “above,” told in up/down opposition as Hubbard lifts the rock (reminiscent of Sisyphus?) and then smashes it down on the whole scene. The image of the female scorpion's murder and cannibalism of her mate is the recognition that “the whole thing's hopeless in the end.” In nature the best and worst of circumstances are alike contained. There is, however, harmony and agreement in the incorporation of despair, because “passing through” is ultimately a metaphor for living life in the acceptance of its totality, bliss and despair together.

When Duluoz passes “through America again,” it is to return to the realization of the perfected image. The circle is now the image of life and death together. Section 84, the last section of the novel, repeats the structural solution of the entire novel, bringing it all full circle:

So I go downtown and get an expensive hotel room to make up for it—But a sinister Marble Hotel it is—Now that Gaines' gone away all Mexico City is a sinister Marble Hive—How we continue in this endless Gloom I'll never know—Love, Suffer, and Work is the motto of my family (Lebris de Keroack) but seems I suffer more than the rest—Old Honeyboy Bill's in Heaven for sure anyway—Only thing now is Where's Jack Going?—Back to Florida or New York?—For further emptiness?—Old Thinker's thought his last thought—I go to bed in my new hotel room and soon fall asleep anyway, what can I do to bring Gaines back to the dubious privilege of living?—He's trying his best to bless me anyway but that night a Buddha's born to Gina Lollobrigida and I hear the room creak, the door on the dresser creaks back and forth slowly, the walls groan, my whole bed weaves like I say “Where am I, at sea?” but I realize I'm not at sea but in Mexico City—Yet the hotel room is rocking like a ship—It's a giant earthquake rocking Mexico—And how was dying, old buddy?—Easy?—I yell to myself “Encore un autre petrain!” (like the sea storm) and jump under the bed to protect myself against falling ceilings if any—Hurracan is whipping up to hit the Louisiana coast—The entire apartment building across the street from the post office on Calle Obregon is falling in killing everybody—Graves leer under Moon pines—It's all over.

Later I'm back in New York sitting around with Irwin and Simon and Raphael and Lazarus, and now we're famous writers more or less, but they wonder why I'm so sunk now, so unexcited as we sit among our published books and poems, tho at least, since I live with Memère in a house of her own miles from the city, it's a peaceful sorrow. A peaceful sorrow at home is the best I'll ever be able to offer the world, in the end, and so I told my Desolation Angels goodbye. A new life for me.

(DA, 365-66)

First, a linguistic analysis reveals the repetition of the all-inclusive imagery, and second, a thematic analysis reveals the relationship of the section to the Duluoz myth. Once again the rhetorical “so” leads into the piece from the previous passage. The movement is down: “downtown” and “sinister” culminate in “endless Gloom”—the concept of gloom, in other words, has no closure. By contrast, the active tropes of “Love, Suffer, and Work” are what Duluoz inherits too: “I suffer more than the rest.” This proclamation leads him to question his direction. The upward “Heaven” contrasts with Florida and New York, which can provide only “emptiness.” The closure of “Old Thinker's thought his last thought” slides into images of the grave. The “bed” and “room” further signify falling—“fall asleep,” “the dubious privilege of living.” The attempt to bless is cut by “but” and an image of rebirth ensues (“Buddha's born”). The two movements of beat/beatitude are, in other words, once again juxtaposed with one another—“creaks back and forth,” “walls groan,” “bed weaves” (Kerouac's version of Whitman's cradle “endlessly rocking”). The “yet” signifies a synthesis with “room is rocking like a ship.”

As this death fantasy makes Duluoz envision his own death, he begins to talk to himself, the images becoming more active than those in life. He yells and jumps and protects himself from “falling ceilings.” Even a hurricane “whips” and “hits.” An entire apartment building falls and kills everybody as a prologue to the final announcement that signifies closure, or the end—“It's all over” the contrast to “passing through.”

“Graves leer under Moon pines” is, however, the most powerful image of the circle of closure/nonclosure. That “graves”—the image of the inanimate final resting place—are personified by “leer” and then juxtaposed with enduring images in nature—“Moon pines”—is a contrast to “It's all over,” which finishes the paragraph. But not surprisingly, it does not finish the book. The final paragraph is fraught with active oppositions: “Later,” “back,” “more or less,” “but,” “sunk,” “unexcited,” “tho,” “I live,” “it's a peaceful sorrow,” “in the end,” “A new life for me.”

Of course the creation of this language extends the Kerouac myth, and this final section of Desolation Angels draws the Duluoz legend to its close in the core group of Kerouac's novels. The characters (the Desolate Angels Bill Gaines, Irwin, Simon, and Lazarus) are identified by stock epithets or leitmotifs. In fact, they are deindividuated as characters in the traditional sense and reinvented as figures of myth. Bill Gaines, for example, is elsewhere called “Old Guru Gaines, in fact the first of many characters I was to know from that innocent time to now” (DA, 223). And “Gaines was the now fairly famous character who stole an expensive overcoat every day of his life for twenty years in New York and pawned it for junk, a great thief” (DA, 225). If the characters of The Town and the City are philosophical archetypes and those in On the Road and Visions of Cody “holy” or spiritual archetypes, here they are “angels” and godmen in fuller service to beatitude. Kerouac's mock-heroic progresses from that in his first novel. Comic types thus proliferate: “Everybody in the world is an angel, Charley Chaplin and I have seen their wings” (DA, 66); W. C. Fields is conjured as a voice in a vignette involving the “Thirties Luncheonette” (DA, 107); and Duluoz waits for his friends in Mexico, sitting on the edge of his rooftop, “looking down on the street for the Four Marx Brothers to come walking down Orizaba” (DA, 231). The four principal characters are thus placed within a larger mythic and relentlessly American context.

But their main function is to put the deeply reflective narrator in relief by contrast to them. Unlike the narrator of the earlier works, this Jack Duluoz is most concerned with a self-conscious appraisal of the writer—that is, himself—as he allows life to pass through him as he passes through it in God's image. Thus the God-reflexive/self-reflexive state becomes an aspect of the development of Kerouac's mind as he advances closer to carrying out his own aesthetic philosophy of simultaneity. Duluoz says, “My life is a vast inconsequential epic with a thousand and a million characters—here they all come, as swiftly as we roll east, as swiftly the earth rolls east” (DA, 12).

The moon becomes the chief icon for the new level of consciousness revealed by this novel. Duluoz repeatedly invokes the moon as if it were a poetic muse: “And that night I see the Moon, Citlapol in Aztec, and even draw a picture of it on the moonlit roof with house paint, blue and white” (DA, 228). Thus the moon is connected integrally with the act of writing: “I remember, that is to say, a spasm takes place in my memory chamber of the brain (O hollow moon!)” (DA, 60). The Moon represents a category of belief in the writer/self: “… and over such a text as the Lankavatara Scripture which says things like … Life is like the reflection of the moon on the water, which one is the true moon? meaning: Is reality the unreal part of unreality? or vice versa, when you open the door does anyone enter or is it you?” (DA, 349). This passage supports the life/death theme at the end (“graves leer under Moon pines”). The moon is a circle on one plane and therefore as a shape echoes the shape of the entire work.

The circle also maintains the musical analogy by containing as well the “big rhythmic loops” that allow Kerouac to incorporate even the images that are most ugly and despairing to him:

Because by far the sweetest gift on earth … leads to children who are torn out of the womb screaming for mercy as tho they were being thrown to the Crocodiles of Life—in the River of Lives—which is what birth is. … [F]or every Clark Gable or Gary Cooper born, with all the so called glory (or Hemingway) that goes with it, comes disease, decay, sorrow, lamentation, old age, death, decomposition—meaning, for every little sweet lump of baby born that women croon over, is one vast rotten meat burning slow worms in graves of this earth.

(DA, 267-68)

The image of rebirth is a circle that is repeated in the final pronouncement “A new life for me.” Clearly the return to prebirth bliss is the goal of Kerouac's ultimate journey and his discontent in the world. He writes, “All I remember is that before I was born there was bliss” (DA, 283). Presumably, the ultimate circle is the return to that bliss, in death. The return to that memory of prebirth bliss is the final expression of the Duluoz legend, the end/not-end. The canonical novels—The Town and the City, On the Road, Visions of Cody and Desolation Angels—represent the fullest expression of the life/legend and the spiritual development that completes the story they tell, even as the story remains without end.

Desolation Angels is a refinement of Kerouac's aesthetic philosophy. The circle analogy and musical metaphor go far to explain the culmination of control achieved in Desolation Angels, still written spontaneously as if in one long breath out of a horn but refined by a sensibility that understands the repetition of chord changes as a perpetual opportunity for refinement and revision. Thus Desolation Angels can be seen as the perfection of Kerouac's nonlinear or free prose. And this structural ideal underscores a thematic perfection he seeks as the object of his mythic quest.

Notes

1. Tytell, Naked Angels, p. 174.

2. Krim, “The Kerouac Legacy,” p. 214.

3. McNally, Desolate Angel, p. 295.

4. Tytell, Naked Angels, pp. 174, 175.

5. Quoted in Tytell, Naked Angels, p. 173.

6. The Columbia University Archives houses numerous manuscript pages of Kerouac's American haikus. These demonstrate his interest in a poetic form that accompanies his interest in Zen philosophy. In Desolation Angels his prose paragraphs often culminate in haiku lines that form a “bridge” to the next section. Kerouac also mentions his interest in haiku in his Paris Review interview, p. 367.

7. Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” p. 73.