PARTISAN REVIEW
301
"the unmediated vision," or as "style beyond interpretation." And
Bersani's remarkably interesting book, for all its superficial indebted–
ness to the Paris scene, is profoundly untouched by the sort of meta–
linguistic concerns of critics like Barthes. The distance is visible in the
opening pages of Bersani's book, in the casual but decisive transition
from a discussion of the notion of
sign,
which acknowledges its debt to
Paris, to the category of "experience," which he unhesitatingly assimi–
lates to the firf;t, despite the fact that it allows
him,
for 227 pages,
never again to mention the thinkers who mark his point of departure–
and then, as we have seen, only fleetingly. It is apparent that the roots
of Bersani's book lie in what we have come to realize is the moot fertile
and persistent tendency of New York intellectual life, a tendency to
shape all political, philosophical, and artif;tic problems in terms of a
personal identity crisis.
Richard Klein
REVISIONS OF KEROUAC
VISIONS OF CODY. By Jack Kerouac. Introduction by Allen Ginsberg.
McGrew Hill. $8.95.
Recently, I interviewed Herbert Huneke who knew Bur–
roughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg in the time of their first friendship just
after Wovld War II. Huneke remarked that he never imagined that
Kerouac was a writer then, believing that the ruggedly handsome and
athletic figure was merely part of the scene around Columbia University
in the forties.
If
Huneke, an incarnation of underground hip, didn't
detect the writer's signals from Kerouac, I suppose the general public
can't be blamed for tak,ing him Ie5S than seriously, even after his nine–
teenth book. Of course the fashionable disparagement of Kerouac began
long ago when the media circus, feeding on the apparent marketability
of
On The Road,
created an awful vortex of publicity which somehow
lessened Kerouac's credibility aSf;pokesman for a generation in revolt.
In so many ways there is something essentially American ahout
Kerouac's writing;
his
restless energies could never seI\ltle for a final
form, and each of his novels demonstrates an eager variety in their dif–
ferences from each other, and from conventional expectations of what
the novel should be like. His voice, too, seemed represenrt:ative of an
endemic colloquialism in the American character: to listen to the record-
