comparative american studies, Vol. 11 No.

3, September 2013, 290–99

Satori in Paris: Deconstructing the

French Connection or the Legend’s
Satori
Peggy Pacini
University of Cergy Pontoise, France

The deconstruction of Kerouac’s trip to France in search of his family name

and lineage as described in Satori in Paris, published in 1966, is examined,
and consideration is also given to the very process of redefining French con-
nections. The novel — a voyage to the end of the night trying to decipher,
redefine, and blur the French signs that Kerouac had scattered his Duluoz
Legend with — is riddled with many deconstructing elements, which allow
for better insight into both the quest Kerouac had set for himself and the
meaning of French connections throughout the Legend. ‘What’s in a name’
could precisely be the question and possibly the answer. The deconstructing
process initiated in Big Sur is now reaching its ultimate step, jeopardizing
the stability of the creation of Duluoz’s and Kerouac’s legend altogether.

keywords Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris, lineage, etymology, naming, genealogy,

myth, legend

In a letter to Bill Ryan dated 10 January 1943, Kerouac writes that he has always
wanted to write epics and sagas of great beauty and mystic meaning (Charters, 1995:
36). About twenty years later, in the author’s note to Big Sur (Kerouac, 1962) he
would define the framework and guidelines to reading his whole literary project:
My work comprises one vast book like Proust’s except that my remembrances are written
on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed. Because of the objections of my early
publishers I was not allowed to use the same personae names in each work. On the Road,
The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Tristessa, Desola-
tion Angels, Visions of Cody, and the other including this book Big Sur are just chapters
in the whole work which I call The Duluoz Legend. In my old age I intend to collect all
my work and re-insert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books
there, and die happy. The whole thing forms one enormous comedy, seen through the
eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz, the world of raging action
and folly and also of gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye.

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/1477570013Z.00000000047

 SATORI IN PARIS 291

The scope behind the Legend echoed a literary life of wandering towards the point
of origins, which would take the shape of a constant return onto the topology of an
imaginary world that had become legendary. In fact the origin of the legend is rooted
in a journey whereby the return to the origins is the necessary tool to writing and
(de-)constructing the character of this homo franco-americanus Jacky Duluoz.
The Duluoz Legend is a huge project building up from a variety of tales and stories
with numerous storytellers (Uncle Mike, Aunt Louise, Mémère, Jacky), told as anal-
epses, and scattered about the whole project and beyond. The writing of the Legend
is a superimposition of voices and tales all contributing to showing the importance
of descent in the construction process. These voices and tales are going to become the
material for writing the family saga. It is indeed an interweaving of stories aiming at
finding a place in history/History. It is on this overlapping and interweaving of stories
and tales and family legends full of gaps and blanks that Kerouac is going to weave
his own legend and add his own variation and version of the tale.
At the beginning, the author did not have information so we might doubt the
reliability. Kerouac sums this information up in a letter to Fernanda Pivano from the
beginning of 1964 and they would constitute the key dates of this legend:
You should know my ancestry: Lebris de Keroack is the way the name is given in
‘Rivista Araldica’, with a motto, ‘Aimer, Travailler, Souffrir’ and ‘Un clous d’argent’ on
a blue field. ‘Originaire de Quebec’, pioneers of Quebec, and they were from Brittany and
Capt. François Alexandre Lebris de Keroack married an Iroquois squaw in the 1750’s
so that today one of the Four Nations of the Iroquois is named ‘Kirouac’ and another
‘Levesque’ (my mother’s family name). So I’m proud of my ancestors and I will not defile
their graves with denunciations of the very skies they suffered under, in the ‘Nouvelle
Vache’. (Charters, 1999: 378)

The information Kerouac collected is very poor indeed and one understands that he
will have to increase his genealogical knowledge by means of amplification first
before checking the reliability in Satori in Paris. This obsession with searching for his
genealogy lies at the core of his identity search (as a Franco–American Canuck and
as a writer), and implies giving a meaning to the name (Kerouac/Duluoz), finding its
etymology, inscribing it in history and going back in time and space to a time when
legends prevailed.
Published in 1966, Satori in Paris represents one of the final steps of the writing of
the legend. It is the story of Kerouac’s trip to France in search of his family name and
lineage. The novel has lost all the innovative and rhythmic qualities of formers, but
it is fraught with many deconstructing elements that allow a better insight into not
only the quest Kerouac set for himself but also into the meaning of French connec-
tions throughout the Legend. The meaning of the eponymous satori is perhaps a key
to the construction of the myth Kerouac had built throughout the various chapters
of his Legend.
Here, I consider not only the deconstruction of the quest for the French lineage and
name, but also the very process of redefining French connections. ‘What’s in a name’
could precisely be the question one might ask and perhaps the answer one might
offer. The deconstructing process initiated in Big Sur undergoes its ultimate step with
Satori in Paris, jeopardizing the stability of the creation of Duluoz’s and Kerouac’s
292 PEGGY PACINI

legend altogether by giving its most significant meaning to the creation of a legend
the last descendant of which would be Duluoz/Kerouac, Jean Louis Lebris, Prince
of Brittany. Satori in Paris is a voyage to the end of the night where the narrator is
trying to decipher, redefine, and blur the French signs that the author had scattered
his Legend with. Hence, one might ask whether the outcome, or aborted experience,
of this deciphering process is not precisely the satori, and more specifically the
Legend’s satori. First, I try to determine how the narrator conceived of his experience
(as satori or quest) before focusing on what’s in a name and how everything seems
to converges to this primary element to eventually conclude on the creation of
mythologies and legends and how in the end everything seems to be summed up: ‘My
name, My Quest’.

A Satori? A Quest?
The very first chapter of the novel provides the reader with the two guiding lines of
this travelogue, i.e. the satori and the search for the name Lebris de Kerouac: ‘As in
an earlier autobiographical book I’ll use my real name here, full name in this case,
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, because this story is about my search for this name in
France’ (8). We are presented with the outcome of Kerouac’s ten-day trip to Paris and
Brittany for what is later disclosed as his search for his family name, as his ‘quest for
ancestors’ (92). In the opening lines, he asserts having received ‘an illumination of
some kind that seemed to have changed [him] again’ (7). ‘Something did happen’ (7)
he specifies ‘towards what [he] suppose’ll be [his] pattern for another seven years
or more’ (7). The reader is thus drawn to some kind of expectation as to what this
illumination is. Despite the attempt to give it a definition, a ‘satori’, the Japanese term
generates several translations: ‘sudden awakening’, ‘sudden illumination’, ‘kick in the
eye’ (7). In addition, the narrator has difficulties determining it precisely, perhaps as
result of the ‘suddenness’ of the thing. The satori, he says, has been handed to him,
but here again the narrator has difficulties saying to whom or what he should be
grateful. It might have been any person he has met along the way or a fear, a perform-
ance, or anything else. The incapacity to anchor the illumination in time and space
and to give it an origin runs through quite a large portion of the book (chapters 2,
15, 21). By the end of the first paragraph, the reader is left waiting for a satori, the
content of which remains unknown, its cause vague and so infers that the writing of
the book is somehow an attempt to regroup all the ‘confused events’ which have
taken place during these ten days. As Jones (1999) concludes, Satori in Paris revolves
around the paradox that [Kerouac] is unable to identify the moment of his satori
(205).
However, in the following chapter, the narrator ‘confirms’ that there is an explana-
tion to that satori that might in fact be revealed in due time on one condition, if he
tells what happened from the beginning (10). The narrator thus invites readers to wait
until they have read the adventure or tale through and reached the climax and conclu-
sion. He cleverly manipulates his reader by pretending he does not know ‘how [he]
got that satori’ (10). On the other hand, he seems to infer that in order to comply
with the expectation of the novel and fulfil its literary requirements, these elements
will be revealed at the perfect moment in the story, i.e. ‘right at the pivot’ (10). There-
fore, Jones’ statement that Kerouac’s use of the term novel in quotation marks (8)
 SATORI IN PARIS 293

implied that in this final instalment of the Legend, Kerouac had crossed the bound-
ary into fact can be challenged. Moreover, the fact that he would even forgo the
appearance of fictionalization (206) is debatable and forces us, as Grace underlines,
to reconsider the relationship between fact and fiction, veracity and mendacity, auto-
biography and the novel (Grace, 2009: 7). Eventually, halfway through the novel, he
confesses ‘I’m not a Buddhist, but I’m a Catholic revisiting the ancestral land’ (69).
Thus, the use of the very term ‘satori’ needs to be reconsidered as the definition of a
satori provided by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as ‘a sudden enlightenment and
a state of consciousness attained by intuitive illumination representing the spiritual
goal of Zen Buddhism’. The reader is forced to question and reevaluate the nature of
the illumination and especially the signified.
But going back to the second paragraph of chapter 1, one notices how it appar-
ently contrasts with the first paragraph. The narrator gives the reader certain reading
and interpretive clues that might be useful in understanding the eponymous satori.
Although emphasizing the autobiographical nature of the novel, the author insists
that the theme of the book — ‘the story about my search for this name [Lebris de
Kerouac] in France’ (8) — somehow required the use of such a genre. Kerouac’s
obsession with his search for his genealogy in the last years of life is here translated
in his interrogating the family name, a name which needs to be identified, checked
and which must be given a meaning. This pilgrimage to France, the ancestral land,
transforms the search into a quest. Beyond the search itself, as a ‘descendant’ of
‘Princes of Brittany’ (16), it is a chivalrous enterprise involving an adventurous
journey he would like to perform. The noble chivalric dimension is traceable to
the early 1940s when Kerouac signed his letters ‘Jean, BARON DE BRETAGNE’
(Charters, 1995: 7, 45) or ‘Baron Jean-Louis Lebrice de Kerouac, Gentilhomme et
Roue’ (Charters, 1995: 122).
In attempting to write the story behind his name and to make it the very narrative
framework of Satori in Paris, the author explicitly inscribes his genealogical search in
the writing of the Legend. The enigma around his name is thus transposed to fiction.
There is no dividing line between Kerouac and Duluoz — just enigmas and myriad
explanations giving the name its mythical scale. It is thus interesting to look further
into how the novel handles the link between etymology and mythology.

In the beginning was the name

Kerouac’s desire to root his name is already embedded in his author’s note to the
Duluoz Legend at the opening of Big Sur. The Legend is of Proustian or Balzacian
scale and testifies to the writer’s wish to ‘fix it on the sensitized plate of art’ (Nicosia,
1983: 21), and perhaps fix it alongside great European and French writers. But before
he can write his name in history, he has to give it a meaning, prove it exists, even
vicariously.
The uncertain character of his name has been underlined many a time by Kerouac
biographers, and Nicosia dates this enigma back to Kerouac’s given name. Kerouac
was baptized Jean Louis Kirouac. On his birth certificate, his name is listed as Jean-
Louis Lebris de Kerouac, i.e. the name he calls himself in Satori in Paris. From the
start, a mistake has filtered in the patronymic so that the erroneous spelling of the
294 PEGGY PACINI

name proves the lineage problematic, thus inviting the author to fill gaps, correct
misprints and expatiate on this nobiliary particle. There is more to it than just a
search for a name, therein lies the search for the name at the origins, for the name of
the origins. It is not so much a matter of finding one’s ancestors as to give this name
a meaning, to restore the meaning it was denied. It is all the more important if we
relate this issue to Kerouac’s relation to his ethnic origin and to the possibility to
analyse this quest through the prism of a discourse on the origin and of an ethnic
discourse. As Boelhower (1987) recalls in Through a Glass Darkly: ‘According to
ethnic semiotics, in the beginning was the name. In order to discover who he is, in
order to begin, the subject must interrogate the beginning of his name. Ethnic dis-
course is a discourse of foundations’ (81). This statement echoes the problematics
underlying our study of onomastics and its transposition in the Legend. The prob-
lematics of the name and the necessity to build for oneself a genealogy, possibly a
prestigious one, are thus intertwined. The writing of the Legend could eventually be
read as the attempt to elaborate the story behind the name and to find the history of
his origins. Boelhower adds that ‘by discovering the self implicit in the surname, one
produces an ethnic seeing and understands himself as a social, an ethnic, subject’ (81).
If Kerouac’s conscious ethnic gaze and perspective might be argued by some, there is
no denial that by trying to write the history behind the name, the author implicitly
and unconsciously produces an ethnic-oriented approach of the world of his Legend.
Telling about the family story would allow the author to establish links with his
origins and produce ethnic semiosis ‘through a strategic use of memory which is
nothing other than the topological and genealogical interrogation of the originating
culture of his immigrant ancestors’ (Boelhower, 1984: 89). Kerouac’s onomastic quest
does produce ethnic semiosis, but the extent of the process and its failed outcome
precisely constitute the plot of Satori in Paris.
In this novel, as Kerouac stresses in the incipit, he uses his real name and his full
patronymics and not the Duluoz pseudonym to comply with the nature of the quest.
For this search, it appears essential to lift the veil and erase any American transposi-
tion of the name in order to impose that name. The first step to his quest is to check
in the French papers the written proofs that his lineage exists (21), but above all, that
his name exists. The journey is then precisely centred on meaning, which is what the
satori should reveal. Therefore, he embarks on a journey, or rather a tour of Parisian
and Breton libraries. His first visits bring him to the French National Library and the
Mazarine Library ‘to check up on the list of the officers in Montcalm’s Army 1756
Quebec, and also Louis Moréri’s dictionary, and Pêre Anselme etc., all the informa-
tion about the royal house of Brittany’ (Kerouac, 1985: 22). But his search proves
unsuccessful since the ‘Nazis done bombed and burned all their French papers in
1944’ (22). The destruction of the papers constitutes an historical blank denying any
possibility to inscribe the name in history and above all to authenticate it. However,
the narrator needs to find this name in order to be able to follow its geographical
evolution. He absolutely needs, whichever way, to validate his research. The reader
wonders what really motivates the narrator: the object of the search or the search
per se? In fact, this search is an exhaustive and long-term search, which eventually
extends beyond the novel itself.
 SATORI IN PARIS 295

What’s in a name?
The necessity of providing the name meaning to show it exists shows beneath the
surface the whole Legend. Finding its etymology would mean giving it a root, anchor-
ing the narrator’s roots and being part of a genealogy. However, as the reader under-
stands, the etymology of his name is based on hearsay and the meaning Kerouac is
willing to retain is motivated and not at all trivial. One of them, for instance, is Love,
but he gets this meaning from an old hitchhiker he had met in San Francisco and who
told him the name meant ‘Love’ in Russian. As the reader comes to realize, the signi-
fied is as vague as the signifiers. However, such vagueness is useful to the narrator in
his literary project because writing a legend requires prestigious places, men and
dates. Consequently, if one of the signified serves this approach then you just have
to imagine how to link it in the signifying chain. This etymological process leads
Kerouac to decline the various geographical presence of the name: Scotland, Ireland,
Cornwall, Wales, Brittany (Kerouac, 1985: 25). Doing so he imagines possible contact
with native populations and dynasties that only a name is enough to inscribe the tale
in the Legend: ‘then I realized, “of course, outa Mongolia and the Khans, and before
that, Eskimos of Canada and Siberia. All goes back around the world, not to mention
Perish-the-Thought Persia.” (Aryans)’ (25). This catalogue of names only gives the
illusion of the legendary, since in the signifying chain, they invalidate one another, as
the narrator underlines at the beginning of the following chapter (9): ‘the fact of the
matter is, how can you be an Aryan when you’re an Eskimo or a Mongol?’ (27). The
reliability of the link matters much less than its connotation in inscribing the name
in the legend. The Russian etymology is only meaningful when associated with what
lies behind the word Russia, i.e. the literary filiation with Tolstoy (27). At the begin-
ning of chapter 9, facing this etymological incoherence, the narrator does express
reservations on the reliability of the character of Joe Ihnat and subsequently the reli-
ability of his explanations; the character which by the way becomes old Joe Tolstoy.
If the quest for his ancestry is clearly organized around the etymology of the
surname, it implies above all being able to return, thanks to iconographic documents
— such as the history of the royal house of France (32), and of the great officers of
the crown and of the house of the king and of the ancient barons of the kingdom
(32–33), a list of the officers in Montcalm’s Army in 1756 (51), the Rivista Araldica
(101), and so on — to a past left fallow and which he wishes to reshape or reorgan-
ize. What seems important is to validate the coherence of the name and of the
ancestry. And here proof is required. The narrator gleans it everywhere, in his past,
in his imagination, as for instance from one of his childhood teacher, Miss Dineen.
Here again, hearsay prevails: ‘We were told that their folks came from France, and
the name was de Kerouac. I always felt that they had the dignity and refinement of
aristocracy’ (27). And rumour validates facts once again: ‘we were told’. The ‘we’
followed by the passive voice once again challenges the reliability of the information
by shifting it to its so-called reliability through oral transmission. In this quest it
seems that orality prevails over the written since according to the narrator written
evidence is not reliable, they even contradict themselves sometimes: ‘I copied [what
I asked for] from their incorrect and incomplete files, not fully what I showed you
above about Pêre Anselme1 as written in the completely correct files of London, as I
found later where the national records were not destroyed by fire, saw what I asked
296 PEGGY PACINI

for, which did not conform to the actual titles of the old books they had in the back’
(34). The narrator thus prefers the complete and correct records from the British
Library to the incorrect and incomplete catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale,
which do not comply with the titles of the old books they have in their archives. The
narrator is in fact being denied what could have authenticated his search.
At that precise moment in the quest, Kerouac highlights a problem, i.e. the
Americanization of his first name, Jack. A link is therefore immediately established
between the fact that he is refused access to some papers and his name. An incompat-
ibility between what he pretends to be (i.e. of French aristocratic descent) and what
his first name betrays (i.e. the process of Americanization of the name plus the fact
that Jack as a common name does not sound very aristocratic) is outlined. This
inadequacy is also problematic in America as he tells Ulysse Lebris to whom he pays
a visit in Brest. Upon presenting his passport to vouch for his identity, he also has to
justify the fact that his name has been Americanized to ‘John Louis Kerouac’. John
has become a substitute for Jean to prevent genre confusion: ‘You can’t go around
America and join the Merchant Marine and be called ‘Jean’ (95). There is an incom-
patibility between these homographs and homophones. The same signifier can
have two different signified: the genre of the allophone Jean is masculine in French
whereas it is feminine in English. Moreover, the erroneous spelling of the surname,
which should be written, as Kerouac says, ‘Kerouack’ (34) also seems to hamper the
narrator’s quest. In fact, spelling is quite an important issue all through the book as
it affects phonemes and graphemes, thus contributing to graphic changes that come
to affect the inscription of the name in history and to blur the avenues to explore.
However, the narrator cannot understand that there are no traces of such an old
name as this that was never changed (72):
I had come to France and Brittany just to look up this old name of mine which is just
about three thousand years old and was never changed in all that time, as who would
change a name that simply means House (Ker), In the field (Ouac) [. . .] I only wanted to
find out why my family never changed their name and perchance find a tale there, and
trace it back to Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland and maybe Scotland afore that I’m sure,
then down over to the St. Lawrence River city in Canada. (72–73)

Etymologically, as he points out, the existence of the name is guaranteed by the sig-
nifying chain which the prefix ker- generates and of which Kerouac lists the linguistic
variations — ‘I knew that the name of Cornish Celtic Language is Kernuak’ (72) — or
geographic variations (‘Kériaval’, ‘Kermanio’, ‘Kérlescant’, ‘Kerdouadec’, ‘Kéroual’
(72) — standing as symbols of a forgotten past. The link between Brittany’s prehis-
toric structure and the search for the pre-history of the name is hinted at. Despite this
signifying chain, the name Kerouac cannot be found, for several reasons that shall be
later tackled.
Eventually, Kerouac is not only interested in finding his last name ‘Kerouac’, he
also seeks precise etymology of his additive name, Lebris (73). At that point of the
story, the etymological journey proceeds in Brittany where the association of names
and places coincide to inspire the narrator with an ancestral link between the name
and the land of his ancestors: ‘I knew that the original name for Bretons was “Breons”
(i.e., the Breton is Le Breon) and that I had an additive name “Le Bris” and I was in
 SATORI IN PARIS 297

“Brest”’ (73). Everything seems to provide a successful conclusion to the quest but,
as Fournier the owner of the bar in Brest underlines, he is rather in a hurry to leave
the place where he could meet Lebrises of all lifestyles. The choice of the one he goes
on to meet is motivated. The man’s name is Ulysse Lebris and most of his ancestors
were Lebris de Loudéac. His first name and the paronomastic association of the two
surnames (Lebris de Kerouac and Lebris de Loudéac) give the illusion of a partially
successful quest. Nonetheless, the mystery that hangs over the genealogy and the
etymology of the family name is the perfect material for writings myths and legends.

‘My name, my quest’

As the onomastics has turned into a quest and material for fiction, the link between
the etymology and the genealogy of the name and the writing of the Legend becomes
obvious. As Satori in Paris progresses, it appears clearly that the mythology surround-
ing the name is more important that its very etymology, as testified by the numerous
literary references that are scattered throughout the novel. Chateaubriand is men-
tioned several times (17, 42, 66), and references to Céline (66), Voltaire (42, 52),
Balzac (36, 114), Pascal (36), de Montherlant (42, 102), Breton (45), Villon (45), Stend-
hal (59), Victor Hugo (78, 82), Proust (102) are made. Thus forcing readers to ques-
tion themselves as to whether the quest for his literary forebears might not be more
important than the quest for his family ancestors. As Kerouac explains in chapter 14,
the trip was inspired by reading Voltaire, Chateaubriand and de Montherlant the
previous winter in Florida. The shadow of French writers, but also of Irish writers,
hangs over the journey. For instance, the ladder used to pick up the records at the
Bibliothèque Richelieu the narrator asked for evokes to him Finnegan’s fall (33). The
sonority of the name, its connotation, is of a greater interest to him than the name
per se. Finnegan, like its truncated form Finn, is a direct echo to both Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake and Twain’s Huck Finn. The real motive behind the genealogical
and etymological quest is appearing to the surface on the text in the form of inter-
textuality. What is Kerouac actually trying to do? To have his identity recognized, or
his literary work recognized? Alternatively, is there a close link between the two that
would suggest that one depends on the other? If we return to the issue of naming and
etymology in relation to Kerouac’s unifying pseudonym in the Legend, Duluoz, we
notice that it is as much inscribed in the literary mythology as it is in the genealogical
search. In fact, in Satori in Paris Kerouac even tries to anchor this fictional name on
the land of his ancestors, but in vain: ‘I search blindly for that old Breton name
Daoulas, of which “Duluoz” was a variation I invented just for fun in my writerly
youth (to use as my name in my novels)’ (101).
It is in fact a blurring of avenues that Kerouac is presenting us with in the novel.
What seems to matter more is the idea of the quest per se, perhaps even the myth of
the quest, or this impossible odyssey he embarks upon, i.e. the impossible return to
the ancestral land. For instance, Kerouac presents himself as ‘the Little Prince of
Kerouac’ (93). Similarly, all through the novel, he magnifies ordinary common char-
acters he meets into Princes like these ‘Negro Princes from Senegal’ (20) to comply
with the nature of the quest. In much the same way, the recurrent use of the adjective
Breton becomes like a neon sign blinking at the reader and hammering at the genea-
logical and geographic outcome of the quest. Though he attributes the name Ulysses
298 PEGGY PACINI

to the Lebris he meets in Brest, he is the real Ulysses of the novel, and the nature
of his quest and the writing of the novel puzzling. The reader gets the feeling that
Kerouac has to undergo several trials to see his journey through.
Very often in the novel the narrator is misdirected, as in the gendarme episode in
Chapter 10 — the only chapter to have been given a title in the form of an annotation
(‘Strange Chapter’) (29) — where he is unable to read the map or rather to overlap
information and make sense of their coincidence. He goes where he should not go at
the wrong moment (as in the episode at the airport), which always delays the outcome
of the journey. Therefore, the narrator’s ability to read (100–101) or hear right (109)
and interpret signs and direction correctly and incorrectly (29–31) partake in his need
‘to get around’. However, the reader merely gathers that Kerouac simply gets lost,
and probably lost in translation for there is a great emphasis on spelling and pro-
nouncing words correctly (13, 34, 45–46, 67–69, 83) or corrupting them (45). The
narrator proves too blind (101), too hasty or too stubborn to search methodically in
the end.
In the end, Kerouac’s digressions in the novel, his historical and spelling comments,
mislead readers and take them further away from the search, which might have been,
from the start, only a pretext. By the end of chapter 14, not even half way through
his journey, the narrator is already homesick — a proleptic sign, a hint for the read-
er as to how the search will end but also as to how he might botch his plans. Voicing
his homesickness also allows him to indirectly reintroduce the idea of the satori in
relation to the writing of the book: ‘Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you
travel, how “successful” your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and
learn to change your thoughts. As usual I was simply concentrating everything in
one intense but thousanded “Ah-ha!”’ (43). The concluding burst of laughter might
suggest in fact that, after all, this trip and quest might be read as a huge farce, an
enormous comedy as he called the Legend, orchestrated by the author, disarmingly
puzzling the reader in its expectations. No matter the various interpretations that the
narrator provides of his patronymics, they eventually blur more than enlighten his
search. Its many definitions seem to become a repository of signified which Kerouac
manipulates, for, in the end, Kerouac seems to prefer the oral legends surrounding
the name than finding its true written proof.

If the novel is a journey into the narrator’s past and origins, into the very origins of
the myth surrounding not only the patronymics but also the family history, the out-
come of the journey, i.e. the inconclusive return, is more revealing as the true mean-
ing of the journey. As the novel unwinds, the reader realizes how tightly connected
the family and the literary quests are, and eventually understands that one prevails
over the other, the latter. As Kerouac confesses very early in the novel, what he is
looking for in this quest for the name is in fact ‘a tale’ (73). However, as the legend
progresses and the tone and style of his novels grow darker, more pessimistic and
fragmented, the reader might also read the legend as acknowledging a failure: one the
one hand, the impossibility to comply and claim the title of Prince of Brittany; on the
other, the impossibility to complete that legend; and, eventually, the realization that
he is a prisoner of just one noble title: king — ‘King Kerouac’ (108–109, 112).
 SATORI IN PARIS 299

And this is precisely what makes Satori in Paris important. The novel actually
debunks the myth Kerouac has made for himself and his Legend. Besides being drunk
almost the entire journey, the narrator presents himself as a cowardly Breton (77) yet
a crafty worthless Canuck (76), somehow a trickster figure actually, who realizes that
unlike Ulysses, he does not come home any wiser. For the narrator, the so-called
satori is in fact the realization that he can never go home again. The reader learns
that the trip might have just been a pretext to expend the narrator’s Legend and thus
find some place in a story, if not in history, since as Joseph-André Sénécal has shown,
Kerouac’s novels reveal the Franco-American writers’ impossibility to be in history
(Sénécal, 1995: 258).

Note
1
Kerouac here refers to the document he is looking de la maison du roy et des anciens barons du
for: ‘Pêre Anselme de Sainte Marie (né Pierre de royaume, R.P. Anselme, Paris, E. Loyson, 1674,
Guibours), his Histoire de la maison royale de Lm3 397’ (32).
France, des puirs, grands officiers de la couronne et

References
Boelhower, W. [1984] 1987. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford
UP.
Charters, A. 1995. Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1940–1956. New York: Viking.
Charters, A. 1999. Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1957–1969. New York: Viking.
Grace, N. M. 2009. Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jones, J. T. 1999. Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP.
Kerouac, J. 1962. Big Sur. New York: Bantam Book.
Kerouac, J. 1985. Satori in Paris and Pic: Two Novels. New York: Grove Press.
Nicosia, G. [1983] 1986. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. London: Penguin Literary
Biographies.
Sénécal, J.-A. 1995. ‘La littérature et la construction de l’identité nationale: la Franco-Américanie’. Identités et
cultures nationales — L’Amérique en mutation. dir. Simon LANGLOIS. Sainte-Foy, Québec: Presses de
l’Université de Laval, coll. Culture française d’Amérique, 255–260.

Notes on contributor
Peggy Pacini teaches translation at the University of Cergy Pontoise, France. She is
the author of a PhD thesis on ‘Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: A Franco-American
Odyssey’ and several articles on Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation.
Correspondence to: Peggy Pacini. 9 avenue Naast 94340 Joinville-le-Pont, France.
E-mail: peggypacini@free.fr.