Representations of Big Sur in Late Modernist and Early Postmodernist American Writing
Bent Sørensen, Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark
i12bent at hum.aau.dk
Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan all wrote prose about Big Sur, California. This locus haunts these writings in three different ways: To Miller (Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 1957) the potential of Big Sur as a true artists' commune was lost to progress and materialism. He is haunted by the unrealised potential of a Romantic locus amoenus. To Kerouac (Big Sur, 1962) the California coast he had loved to explore with Gary Snyder as his Buddhist mountain goat guru in the 1950s (the subject of Dharma Bums, 1958) was becoming a site of horror and delirium (tremens) by the early 1960s when he revisited Big Sur and Rainbow Canyon in search of peace of mind and inspiration for a 'sea-poem'. He is haunted by the loss of self and connection to a genius loci in the potentially sublime coastal vistas. To Brautigan (A Confederate General from Big Sur, 1964) the locus of Big Sur has already become a fully textualized topos which can only serve as a vehicle for pastiche and postmodern parody of his modernist precursors' anxieties. His text is haunted by intertextual ghosts of Kerouac and Miller's gender and racial values, which are spoofed and sent up by Brautigan's unlikely crew of beatnik womanisers and exploiters of both land and native American (and Confederate!) heritages.
Online Source: http://www.kk.kau.se/eng/conf/space/abstracts/sorensen.html
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