May-June 2019 The last decade or so has seen a Renaissance of Beat Generation scholarship, appropriately taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite persistent caricatures among journalists and professors alike of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and a host of others as scribblers peddling literary stunts to a wide-eyed following, critics have explored the capacious reading and often elaborate techniques that were integral to these writers’ practice. This recent critical focus has illuminated a dimension of beat writing patent to anyone who pays attention to the density of allusion in, say, Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s work: the conception of literature as a transnational and even global phenomenon. Increasingly, scholars recognize the Beat Generation as far more than a midcentury countercultural movement, presenting them as readers of and contributors to literature that extends across national borders. Seen in this light, they become major figures in the global literary currents of the twentieth century. Véronique Lane’s The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation is a welcome addition to this reassessment. Although its title modestly suggests a catalogue of sources, Lane’s book is much more; by examining Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac’s wide-ranging interest in modern French literature, she not only documents its mark on their work but arrives at a perspective on modernist and postmodernist literature that underscores its complicated international itinerary. In her introduction, “Beyond ‘Rimbaud in a Raincoat’” (the quoted phrase is from Kenneth Alsop’s 1960 description of Burroughs), she begins with the fact of these writers’ “intense” Francophilia. Although their early habit of writing to each other using French phrases could be explained away as college pretentiousness bolstered by Kerouac’s bilingual heritage, over the next few pages she details the ways that they self-consciously gravitated toward French literature, philosophy, and cinema as aesthetic and critical sources. From Sartrean existentialism to authors who, more than most, define modern avant-garde and experimental literature — Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean Cocteau, St.John Perse, Guillaume Apollinaire, and many others — Lane considers not just the obsession of the Beat Generation “big three” with such sources but also the social, historical, and cultural reasons for it. Their specific interest in French material, Lane explains, stems from an identification with the outsider status of all the authors on their list. Hence, the three are “worthy successors” to Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, and Henri Michaux, who addressed their work to “misfits,” “illiterates,” “human trash.” This strain of French literature offered Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac a means of articulating their own sense of disaffection. Moreover, it suggested a way out of the constriction of national borders, “an

中文翻译：

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超越贝雷帽的方式

2019 年 5 月至 6 月在过去十年左右的时间里，Beat Generation 奖学金的复兴发生在大西洋两岸。尽管杰克·凯鲁亚克、艾伦·金斯伯格、威廉·巴勒斯、格雷戈里·科索等许多记者和教授一直在讽刺漫画，将文学特技卖给睁大眼睛的追随者的涂鸦者，但评论家们已经探索了广泛的阅读和经常精心制作的技巧。这些作家的实践不可或缺。最近的这一关键焦点已经向任何关注凯鲁亚克和金斯伯格作品中的典故密度的人阐明了节拍写作专利的一个维度：文学作为一种跨国甚至全球现象的概念。越来越多的学者认为，垮掉的一代不仅仅是一场世纪中叶的反文化运动，将他们展示为跨越国界的文学的读者和贡献者。从这个角度来看，他们成为了 20 世纪全球文学潮流的主要人物。Véronique Lane 的 The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation 是这次重新评估的一个受欢迎的补充。尽管它的标题谦虚地暗示了一个来源目录，但莱恩的书远不止这些；通过考察巴勒斯、金斯伯格和凯鲁亚克对现代法国文学的广泛兴趣，她不仅在他们的作品中记录了这一点，而且还得出了对现代主义和后现代主义文学的看法，强调了其复杂的国际旅程。在她的介绍中，“Beyond 'Rimbaud in a Raincoat'”（引用的短语来自 Kenneth Alsop 1960 年对 Burroughs 的描述），她从这些作家“强烈”的亲法开始。尽管他们早期使用法语短语互相写信的习惯可以解释为凯鲁亚克双语遗产支持的大学自命不凡，但在接下来的几页中，她详细介绍了他们自觉地被法国文学、哲学和电影作为美学所吸引的方式和关键来源。从萨特的存在主义到定义现代前卫和实验文学的作家——亚瑟·兰波、马塞尔·普鲁斯特、安德烈·纪德、路易斯-费迪南德·塞琳、让·科克多、圣约翰·珀斯、纪尧姆·阿波利奈尔等——莱恩不仅考虑了垮掉一代“三巨头”对此类资源的痴迷，还考虑了其​​社会、历史和文化原因。他们对法国材料的特殊兴趣，莱恩解释说，这源于对名单上所有作者的局外人身份的认同。因此，这三个人是 Antonin Artaud、Jean Genet 和 Henri Michaux 的“有价值的继任者”，他们将自己的工作描述为“格格不入”、“文盲”、“人类垃圾”。这种法国文学为巴勒斯、金斯伯格和凯鲁亚克提供了一种表达他们自己的不满情绪的方式。此外，它提出了一种摆脱国界限制的方法，“一个