“Riverrun”: Jack Kerouac Beating Down the Rivers with James Joyce

This article, after establishing the importance of James Joyce in the early career of Jack Kerouac, explores the influence of Joyce’s water-centric ecopoetic on Kerouac’s own after 1949, the year of his “Rain and Rivers” notebook. It will show through questions of topography and toponymy how Kerouac pushes territorial and linguistic frontiers via the encounters of numerous rivers, bearing many names in different languages, whose accretive accumulation will eventually reach the depths of the “Sea,” the title of the poem at the end of Big Sur, echoing the circular structure of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It will also attempt to show how Kerouac creates his own flood myth, liquifying, after Joyce, the English language through the exploration of epiphanic stream of consciousness writing and complex plurilingual strategies. Excerpts from Kerouac’s exploratory and experimental water writing will be examined through an intertextual reading of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.