Our critical understanding of the American development of the international novel is inextricably connected with the normative figure of Henry James, whose social novels and stories about Americans in Europe have set the standard for what we expect from fictional treatments of the international theme. Before him, American writers produced all-too-schematic and reductive representations of Old World cultures and societies; after him, in the rich corpus of American expatriate literature, novelists set aside comparisons of the social dimensions of America and Europe, and preoccupied themselves with man's existential predicament.
In the history of the decline of the subgenre, Jack Kerouac, whom we usually do not associate with the international novel, plays an important role, for his travelogue Satori in Paris,(1966) marks the historical and narratological end of a long tradition. In this short book, a record of his ten-day trip to France in 1965, Kerouac drives the nails into the coffin of international fiction. He casts postmodern man in the role of a tourist, who fails as human being and as artist by unsuccessfully attempting to emulate the romantic traveler and by borrowing his adventures from the inventory of romantic literature. International fiction is dead, Kerouac seems to suggest, because postmodern man can no longer attain the experiential depth which travel once afforded, and because the postmodern writer lacks the (romantic) originality necessary to keep literature alive. He is quintessentially a tourist, roaming about yet never finding for what he is searching.
In Satori in Paris, none of Kerouac's pursuits comes to fruition. His romantic expectations--that he will encounter something extraordinary and significant in foreign lands, that he will have satisfying human relationships--are frustrated. His high hopes as a traveler turn into the plight of the tourist who finds himself lonely and insecure before the foreign environment. Equally unsettling are his experiences as a writer. He cannot communicate with the French in their own language; he is haunted by the ghosts of famous European writers; he is not accepted as an accomplished American author; and his meeting with his kinsman, Ulysse Lebris, reminds him of his meager talent. He feels called upon to catch up on the literary achievements of the Old World, yet he is capable of producing at best a narrative like Satori in Paris, which draws upon some romantic stock in trade.
In Satori in Paris, Kerouac posits the tourist as postmodernism's representative man. His shallow encounters with foreign societies fall short of the romantic traveler's serious engagement with other cultures; his artistic productions are mere copies of romantic techniques and topoi; and his competition with European rivals, the very impulse that brought into being the international novel, appears as a lost cause. The project of international fiction is at its end, for the tourist--as human being and as writer--can only re-visit and re-write.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.