Masculinité, immaturité et devenir-enfant dans l’œuvre de Jack Kerouac

Abstract

Considering the accusations of infantilism that were levelled against Jack Kerouac by critics like Paul Goodman or Leslie Fiedler after the publication of On the Road in September 1957, this article sets out to rearticulate the relationship between childhood and masculinity in his narrative works. Far from opposing boyhood and manhood in a binary mode, Kerouac’s child characters seem strangely adult while his adult characters take on the airs of children, thereby enacting an age and gender trouble which also blurs the gaze and the voice of the narrator. Beyond the imitation of the linguistic and cognitive limits of the child or the realist representation of childhood in memorial mode, Kerouac’s writing enters at times what Gilles Deleuze calls a « becoming-child », a mode of subjectivation which exploits the mythopoetic possibilities of childhood and allows him to revitalize novel writing at a time when literature and masculinity seem to undergo a joint decline.