American life in the 1950s era was famously marked by conservative discourses of consumerism, consensus, conformity, and cold war. Less frequently noted is the fact that these ideologies were challenged by a variety of interrogative, hostile, or downright negational counterparts-or "contravisions," to borrow a term from Stan Brakhage, perhaps the most radical avant-garde filmmaker to emerge during the period ( 143). Such oppositional currents ranged from the socially skeptical writings of Paul Goodman and David Riesman to far-reaching artistic explorations like those of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk in music, Jackson Pollock and the New York School in painting, Judith Malina and Julian Beck in theater, and Kenneth Anger and Gregory J. Markopoulos in film, among others in sundry fields.

Central to this activity was the literature of the Beat Generation. Allen Ginsberg's jazzlike poetry, William S. Burroughs's cut-up texts, and Jack Kerouac's outpourings of spontaneous prose were at once expressions of assertively "individualistic" personalities, explorations of fecund yet officially disregarded aesthetic possibilities, and deliberately chosen sociolinguistic responses to the homogenized tone of "authoritative" literature sanctioned by the academy and/or the bestseller list.

To be sure, the Beats were not organized guerrillas recruiting partisans for group assaults on square ideology. Their rebellion took place on the dispersed terrain of scattered individual consciousness, not so much confronting the centers of organized power as ignoring or evading them. Yet this insurrection was no less carefully conceived or passionately pursued for being carried out through a combination of personal adventurism, aesthetic experimentalism, and intellectual eccentricity. It chipped away at dehumanizing norms by interrogating, demystifying, and ridiculing them, anchoring its own key values in the very oddness and unconventionality that rendered the Beats suspect in the eyes of the American mainstream.

Focusing specifically on works by Kerouac (1922-69), in many ways the group's most complex and representative member, this essay will use Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnivalism to explore the Beat critique of postwar society, emphasizing such key Beat strategies as ambivalent rhetorical tropes and transgressive grotesque-body imagery. Within this context, I will then argue that Kerouac's jazzlike riffs on such seemingly whimsical subjects as a movie actress's photo, an old folk song, and the Hollywood slapstick fantasy exemplified by the Three Stooges share revealing characteristics with the similarly radical assault on 20th-century sociocultural norms launched earlier by Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the French cultural theorist who called for a "theater of cruelty" that would represent the modern human condition with unprecedented fullness and ferocity. My goal in juxtaposing these figures is to trace an underrecognized thread of socially subversive expression woven through the dense fabric of Western culture in what many think of as the monologized and homogenized years after World War II.

Kerouac thought of his work as "spontaneous bop prosody;' and used his writing to rediscover in words, memories, and ideas an array of hidden or overlooked contextual meanings buried in the layers of his own consciousness and in the cultural forces surrounding him. This is especially clear in such early works as Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three ( 1959) and Visions of Cody (written in the early 1950s but not published until 1972, illustrating the uneasy relationship between Kerouac's unconventional style and the book business). Two of Kerouac's most complex achievements, these novels are characterized by an allusiveness, polysemia, and slippage of conventional rationality that exemplify the opposition of Beat writing to the unity and authority of most mainstream expression in the 1950s period. Viewing them from a Bakhtinian perspective, one can describe them as being rooted in the carnivalesque tradition that has mounted a centuries-long challenge to social hierarchy, constructing visions of "life drawn out of its usual rut" and of "`life turned inside out,' `the reverse side of the world' (`monde a l'envers')" (Problems 122-26).

Carnival, as Bakhtin noted, has special importance in times of strong normative pressure. Pointing to the medieval period as such an era, Bakhtin notes that a typical person of that time lived two parallel lives. One was the "official" life, "subjugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence, and piety." Opposed to this was the life of carnival and the public square, "free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred...familiar contact with everyone and everything" (Problems 129-30).

Bakhtin's analysis may be applied mutatis mutandum to the period after World War II, when American culture attempted to nourish only the first of these two "lives," supporting this effort with claims of political and social-scientific rationality while discouraging tendencies toward pararational or "free and unrestricted" existence. Dominant discourses did not eradicate the carnivalistic sensibility, of course, but they did manage to divide the two kinds of "lives" among two highly asymmetrical groups. Proper middle-class citizens lived out something like the "official" life of the medieval subject-trudging through a round of socially sanctified activities, filling strictly designated niches in home and workplace, undergoing the terrors of cold-war paranoia while internalizing the dogmas of a culture obsessed with normality and averageness. It was left for the Beats and other self-styled rebels to live-or try to live-a more carnivalesque existence. One of their strategies was to nurture what Bakhtin calls the "image of the contradictory, perpetually becoming and unfinished being" within individual consciousness (Rabelais 118). Doctor Sax and Visions of Cody provide strong evidence of how much the young Kerouac belongs in this tradition-how free of restriction, how charged with laughing ambivalence, how blasphemous and profane, how fruitfully familiar and radically vulgar he wanted his daily life, and the daily lives of everyone with whom he came into contact, to be.

To make this argument, of course, is not to posit rigid or impermeable distinctions between a straitjacketed bourgeoisie, on one hand, and an anything-- goes bohemia, on the other, glaring at each other across some unbreachable boundary running from the reverentially hushed churches of the former to the wild-and-woolly coffeehouses of the latter. Respectable citizens of the Eisenhower age seized numerous opportunities for carnivalesque laughter and glancing contact with the subversive and profane. Looking just at commercially marketed culture, examples of this phenomenon range from Frank Tashlin's ribald movies (e.g., Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) and Ernie Kovacs's surreal TV shows (e.g., the Brechtian blackout jokes in his weekly network series) to the drug-related inflections of Jack Gelber's plays (e.g., The Connection) and the burgeoning bebop scene. Conversely, many a Beat rebel experienced moments of uncertainty, submissiveness, dogmatism, and even out-and-out traditionalism. Tracing the term "Beat" to the joys of "beatitude," Kerouac himself scorned sensationalistic phrases like "Beat mutiny" and "Beat insurrection," which were repeated ad nauseam in media accounts. "Being a Catholic," he told conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr. in a 1968 appearance on Buckley's television program Firing Line, "I believe in order, tenderness, and piety." In sum, while middle-class conformity and Beat contentiousness reflected radically different perspectives on the human condition, they were less sharply divided than ideologues on either side were eager to acknowledge.

Kerouac's ability to scamper nimbly along this cultural continuum, embracing insights that less flexible minds would call contradictory, is echoed by what Regina Weinreich calls an "oscillating linguistic design" in his most important novels (120). This design asserts itself in rhetorical tensions such as dream/reality, comedy/tragedy, racing up/down, raging action/gentle sweetness, and, more sweepingly, Lost Bliss/Bliss Achieved, a tension that arches through entire novels and groups of novels (122). Kerouac's predilection for mutually contesting tropes plunges his work into the "ambivalence" that Bakhtin finds at the heart of carnivalism. Such ambivalence is related to parody and also to practices of literary doubling; this is especially so when doubling goes beyond the neat binarism of opposed essences and expresses the boisterous multiplicity of dialogic dissemination, bringing together such polar distinctions as those described by Bakhtin as "birth and death (the image of pregnant death)" and "blessing and curse (benedictory carnival curses which call simultaneously for death and rebirth)." Highly characteristic of carnival thinking, Bakhtin notes, are "paired images, chosen for their contrast (high/low, fat/thin, etc.) or for their similarity (doubles/twins)" (Problems 126).

Kerouac's work is filled with doubles, in both its rhetorical oscillations and its narrative moments. Most immediately, one thinks of the many masks and disguises he wears as the thinly veiled protagonist of his various autobiographical novels. One also thinks of the resonant word and image conjunctions that he uses to carnivalize "proper" novelistic discourse. One may say of his creative linkages what Bakhtin said of comparable inventions in Francois Rabelais's prose: that they aim "at destroying the established hierarchy of values, at bringing down the high and raising up the low, at destroying every nook and cranny of the habitual picture of the world" ("Forms" 177).

Kerouac frequently accomplishes his carnivalization through an emphasis on physicality that has (at least by 1950s standards) a decidedly Rabelaisan ring. Like his 16th-century predecessor as described by Bakhtin, he often seeks an expansively comic tonality that "not only destroys traditional connections and abolishes idealized strata [but] also brings out the crude, unmediated connections between things that people otherwise wish to keep separate, in pharisaical error." By doing this he wishes, again like the Rabelais that Bakhtin describes, "to uncover a new meaning, a new place for human corporeality in the real spatial-temporal world," thus allowing the world itself to enter "a contact with human beings that is no longer symbolic but material" (Rabelais 170).

Kerouac's materialization is itself a deeply ambivalent enterprise, however, since yet another pairing in his life and work-an affinity with both Christian and Buddhist philosophy-leads him to complex religious inclinations that oscillate among affirmations of the flesh, of the spirit, and of flesh and spirit as commingled in the Roman Catholic theology (with its doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation) that always played a part in his thinking. In his writing and in his life, he never lost an ultimately mystical fascination with what John Tytell describes as "the bared power of the actual and the ordinary, the natural and the commonplace-like the road that became his primal metaphor" (141).

The actual and the ordinary often mean the bodily for Kerouac, who peppered his 1958 article on "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" with a noteworthy number of somatic references. In punctuation, he likens the "vigorous space dash" to "jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases"; in composition, he recommends not "pause to think of proper word" but rather "the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained"; in rhythm, he recommends working "excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typing-- cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich's 'beclouding of consciousness: Come from within, out-to relaxed and said" (57-58).

Kerouac draws on the oral, anal, and genital levels of activity not merely to offer a string of suggestive metaphors, but to invoke verbal creation as an act of physical exchange and interpenetration with the world outside the self. In this way he aligns himself with the carnivalesque tradition of discourse about the "grotesque body" and the "material bodily lower stratum," which Bakhtin studied and celebrated in Rabelais and His World. The grotesque image is, for Bakhtin, that which "reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming" (24). His favored example is a group of figurines (in the Kerch terracotta collection) representing senile, pregnant, laughing hags who embody "a pregnant death, a death that gives birth" (25). The grotesque body "is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits"; its imagery emphasizes "those parts of the body that are open to the outside world," most notably "the apertures or the convexities, or...various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose" (26).

Kerouac would surely have approved this enumeration. Mouths, genitals, and breasts recur with generous regularity in his prose adventures, as do other body parts. It is not mere coincidence, for example, that the Hollywood figure with whom he most repeatedly conflates his father's image is W. C. Fields, known throughout his film career for the proud potbelly and glowing nose that accompanied his drawling, insinuating voice. Kerouac was also familiar with intimations of life, pregnancy, and death as aspects of a single grotesque (and sometimes terrifying) cycle-as is clear from his description of the Hindu goddess Kali in his important 1968 novel Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46:

Mother Kali of ancient India and its wisdom aeons with all her arms bejeweled, legs and belly too, gyrating insanely to eat back thru the only part of her that's not jeweled, her yoni, or yin, everything she's given birth to. Ha ha ha ha she's laughing as she dances on the dead she gave birth to. Mother Nature giving you birth and eating you back. (273)

Kerouac generally leans toward orality as the privileged site of interaction between self and world. He refers often to food, eating, and drinking, as well as talking, conversing, and singing; at times, as in the highly carnivalesque Doctor Sax, orality and anality are implicitly linked. Genitality enters his work through (among other things) frequent references to the promiscuous sexual relations that were a hectic part of his life as a young adult; there is also a good deal of childhood sexuality in Doctor Sax, which has youthful experiences with masturbation and homosexuality among its many concerns. Its oral/anal interests are even stronger. In this novel-a free-associative, often phantasmatic romance based on a calamitous flood and other incidents from Kerouac's early years in the Massachusetts industrial town where he grew up-there are a variety of grotesque (and often media-inspired) characterizations: the title character, based partly on Fields and partly on "The Shadow" of radio and magazine fame, prized by Kerouac for his orally extravagant "Mwee hee hee ha ha" laugh; Wizard Faustus, a "Master of Earthly Evil" with a "moveable jaw-bird beak" and front teeth that are "missing" (50) yet paradoxically in need of cleaning by the Wizard's own "sensual tongue" (51); and Count Condu, who is a vampire and therefore belongs to the most orally insatiable (and insatiably oral) category of horror-movie monsters. Food also plays a strong part in the book, as does the color brown. This trajectory begins to gather momentum in an early passage where the narrator, young Jackie Duluoz, remembers what he calls his Great Bathrobe Vision, which came to him while

sitting in my mother's arms in a brown aura of gloom sent up by her bathrobe-it has cords hanging, like the cords in movies, bellrope for Catherine Empress, but brown, hanging around the bathrobe belt-the bathrobe of the family, I saw it for 15 or 20 years-that people were sick in...the brown of the color of life, the color of the brain, the gray brown brain, and the first color I noticed after the rainy grays of my first views of the world in the spectrum from the crib so dumb....I am the pudding, winter is the gray mist. A shudder of joy ran through me-when I read of Proust's teacup-all those saucers in a crumb-all of History by thumb-all of a city in a tasty crumb got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove. It's exactly like cold milk on hot bread pudding, the meeting of hot and cold is a hollow hole between memories of childhood. ( 18-19)

Here mother and child form an interconnected union of contradictions and complements (old/young, female/male, outside/inside, etc.) that is not closed and completed, but intertwines within itself as well as interconnecting with the world of things, of people, of movies. Its associations in the protagonist's mind with early-childhood brownness-of life/organicism, brains/thought, food/nourishment-anticipate later immersions in the brownesses of death, decay, and rebirth. A high point of the novel comes when Doctor Sax counsels Jackie not to fear dying because "all and every moment is yearning to stay grown to you even as the pee-rade passes it-you'll take up your place in the hierarchal racks of vegetabalized heaven with a garland of carrots in your hair...in your death you'll know the death part of your life. And re-gain all that green, and browns" (204).

Oblivion and fecundity mingle with carnivalesque flamboyance in such passages. Although Kerouac's investment in the physical often serves a symbolic function, it always maintains an emphatically concrete quality rooted in his own sense of bodily reality. He shares with Bakhtin a hearty respect for the lower body, and a conviction that-as Bakhtin puts it, paraphrasing Rabelais's priestess of the Holy Bottle-the "riches hidden in this underground...are superior to all that is in heaven, on the surface of the earth, or in the seas and rivers. True wealth and abundance are not on the highest or medium level [of the metaphorical body] but only in the lower stratum" (368-69), whence the head of intellect is at its farthest remove, and excretion and copulation reign supreme.

Kerouac's affinity with the dialogically grotesque, carnivalistic, and material erupts more robustly still in Visions of Cody, again narrated by Duluoz, now old enough to be called Jack rather than Jackie. This novel is a structurally intricate account of the freewheeling life, picaresque adventures, and passionate human relationships of Beat Generation ego ideal Neal Cassady, as seen through the eyes and filtered through the sensibility of Kerouac, his closely attached friend and admirer. The tone of the narrative is established with a boldly cinematic description (mimicking a lengthy tracking shot) of Hector's Cafeteria in New York, featuring a rich cascade of food-related imagery, and strongly evoking the carnival tradition of feasts, banquets, and cornucopia, here found in the commodified form given to it by modern consumer society.

As the novel proceeds, even passing references may find biology, mythology, scatology, and theology jangling against one another-as when Duluoz riffs out an acknowledgment that "all my life I've dreamed on breasts (and of course thighs, but now we're talking of breasts, hold your Venus, we're talking about Mars, and your water, we're talking about milk)-the dirty magazines of boyhood become the religious publications of manhood.... The reference here is to a photograph described as "a pix of Ruth Maytime (the famous Hollywood actress)," with which Jack Duluoz becomes infatuated precisely because it is a simulacrum, and therefore a suitable site for the projection of fantasies and lusts generated by his own corporeality. "I can hardly think or control myself--I even know this [gazing at the photo] is infinitely more delicious than touching Ruth's breast itself (though I'd do anything for the chance)," he declares (76). Later he adds that the photo's lack of color further enhances its sexual "reality" since he "was brought up in the balconies of B-- movie theaters" (77).

The filmic allusions in such passages as this and the Great Bathrobe Vision of Doctor Sax-with its evocation of Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress, conjured up by the sash of a mother's cloak-are deliberate and revealing, pointing to movies as an ideal (and idealized) site for grotesque-body imagery. This reflects Kerouac's commitment to the conversion of thought (i.e., writerly imagination) into the physicality of prose modeled less upon traditional literary conceits than upon musical, painterly, and cinematic precedents. The bodily image in cinema has rich potential for grotesquerie, since it lacks such read-world properties as solidity, three-dimensionality, and perceptibility by tactile and olfactory means. Kerouac recognizes this with particular acuteness in Visions of Cody when he describes the spectacle of Joan Crawford performing an on-location movie scene (which he inadvertently encountered in San Francisco one evening) and spins from it the simulacrum-- upon-simulacrum of his "Joan Rawshanks in the Fog" improvisation, wherein he blows manic riffs that echo and parody cinematic procedure.

It is also in Visions of Cody that one finds what is possibly the most explosive combination of cinematic and grotesque-body aesthetics in all of Kerouac's work: his masterful aria on the Three Stooges, whose surreal antics become all the more phantasmatic when-in a clever extension of the appearance/reality ambivalence found in the passage on the Ruth Maytime photo-he considers the comedy trio not as illusory shadows on a screen, but as corporeal beings in the realm of the actual.

"Supposing the Three Stooges were real?" he asks with disarming directness. Then he envisions them springing to life at Cody's side, and almost instantly his prose takes on the crude, exhilarating physicality of their crude, exhilarating identities:

Moe the leader, mopish, mowbry, mope-mouthed, mealy, mad, hanking, making the others quake; whacking Curly on the iron pate, backhanding Larry (who wonders); picking up a sledgehammer, honk, and ramming it down nozzle first on the flatpan of Curly's skull, boing, and all big dumb convict Curly does is muckle and yukkle and squeal, pressing his lips, shaking his old butt like jelly, knotting his Jello fists, eyeing Moe, who looks back and at him with that lowered and surly "Well what are you gonna do about it?" under thunderstorm eyebrows like the eyebrows of Beethoven(304)

As in the Three Stooges' own work-and work by some other film artists, such as the surrealist Luis Binuel and the body-intensive Jerry Lewis-outrageous escalation is one of Kerouac's basic strategies here: "it gets worse and worse, it started on an innocent thumbing, which led to backhand, then the pastries, then the nose yanks, blap, bloop, going, going, gong..." (304). The setting also undergoes expressive changes, from "the street right there in front of the Station" to "a sticky dream set in syrup universe" and then "an underground hell of their own invention." Yet the reality of these Stooges is insisted upon:

like Cody and me [they] were going to work, only they forget about that, and tragically mistaken and interallied, begin pasting and cuffing each other at the employment office desk as clerks stare; supposing in real gray day and not the gray day of movies and all those afternoons we spent looking at them...you saw them coming down Seventh Street looking for jobs-as ushers, insurance salesmen....

And finally, looking at the notion of Stooge-Reality from yet another perspective, Kerouac acknowledges them as performers but takes this actuality as an ironic counterpoint to their on-screen personae:

they are photographed in Hollywood by serious crews...until...they've been at it for so many years in a thousand climactic efforts superclimbing and worked out every refinement of bopping one another so much that now, in the end, if it isn't already over, in the baroque period of the Three Stooges they are finally bopping mechanically and sometimes so hard it's impossible to bear (wince), but by now they've learned not only how to master the style of the blows but the symbol and acceptance of them also, as though inured in their souls and of course long ago in their bodies(305)

From these spectacles of Stoogeish grotesquerie, Cody derives a deep and comforting insight, realizing that "all the goofs he felt in him were justified in the outside world and he had nothing to reproach himself for, bonk, boing, crash, skittely boom, pow, slam, bang, boom, wham, blam, crack, frap, kerplunk, clatter, clap, blap, fap, slapmap, splat, crunch, crowsh, bong, splat, splat, BONG!" Cody's consolation is not a result of mere amusement at the Stooges' antics, or of mere diversion from the cares and conflicts that torment him. It derives rather from the Stooges' embodiment and exemplification-for Cody and for Kerouac himself-of two of the most potent transcendental possibilities to be found in Kerouac's universe.

One of these potentials is the ability of art to summon and sustain the most profound passions with which the human spirit is capable of communing; the Stooges do not simply caper and cavort, but in the untrammeled madness of their improvisations they provide "scenes for wild vibrating hysterias as great as the hysterias of hipsters at Jazz at the Philharmonics." The other is the ability of the (finite) human spirit to penetrate the realm of the (divine) transhuman spirit through the most appalling throes of materiality. "Larry, goofhaired, mopple-lipped, lisped, muxed and completely flunk-trips over a pail of whitewash and falls face first on a seven-inch nail that remains imbedded in his eyebone," Duluoz reports with matter-of-fact respect for this extreme instance of earthly suffering. And then, astonishingly, he continues: the eyebone's connected to the shadowbone, shadowbone's connected to the luck bone, luck bone's connected to the, foul bone, foul bone's connected to the, high bone, high bone's connected to the, air bone, air bone's connected to the, sky bone, sky bone's connected to the, angel bone, angel bone's connected to the, God bone, God bone's connected to the bone bone(304)

As wildly carnivalesque figures whose relationship to "real" character types is tenuous at best, and whose "real" existence for Kerouac transpired wholly on movie screens-he saw Joan Crawford behind the scenes, but never this crazy trio-the Three Stooges are perfect grotesqueries, capable of executing any irrationality, surviving any torment, sustaining any transfiguration that may come their way. Kerouac's trajectory for Larry's ultimate adventure begins with a Rabelaisian linkage of incongruities-eye to bone, bone to shadow-- and then proceeds to an inversion of the conventionally proper (foul connects to high) and a transcendence of the materially possible (bone connects to God). Most audacious in this itemization of Larry's spiritual anatomy is its circularity, foreshadowing the cyclical configuration of Kerouac's novelistic oeuvre while culminating its own escalating ethereality (air-to-sky-to-angel=to-God) with a return to earthly, obdurate bone. The latter figure is doubly affirmed (bone bone ) in its ineluctable corporeality, yet wholly transformed by its contextualization in a catalog of sublimely grotesque body parts.

Observing that the sound of one's own voice is heard largely through bone conduction, media theorist Douglas Kahn notes that the phonographically reproduced voice "returns to its parent through air conduction, that is, without the bones. The phonographed selfsame voice is deboned." Kahn concludes that such deboning constitutes "a machine-critique of Western metaphysics" since it "uproots an experiential centerpiece for sustaining notions of the presence of the voice-hearing oneself speak-and moves the selfsame voice from its sacrosanct location into the contaminating realms of writing, society, and afterlife" (93-94).

This point about phonography cannot be transferred directly to discourse about cinema, as Kahn recognizes (93, 103), because visual reflections (in mirrors, etc.) have always been comparatively accessible and familiar (sonic echoes are a weak competitor for them) and because the anatomical apparatus for vision is configured quite differently from that employed in hearing oneself speak. It remains true, however, that Kerouac's unremitting fascination with precisely the realms of writing, society, and afterlife led him to divine-- on the "real" movie screens of B-movie theaters, and on the phantasmatic "movie screens" of his own propulsively visual imagination-a sublimated Stooge whose haplessly punctured eyebone opens on a vision that simultaneously accepts and transcends the human condition in all its ambiguous ecriture, carnivalistic sociality, and yearning for redemption in a beyond at which even the inspired irrationality of a Stooge and Kerouac combined can only dimly hint.

Points of intersection among hysteria, corporeality, and phonography were familiar terrain for Antonin Artaud, who was famously prone to glossolalia, a nonreferential speech form-often associated with the mentally ill, the spiritually possessed, and the very young-that transforms language into a string of impenetrable signifiers, repudiating all meaning and valorizing the unadulterated voice. An instance is found in a 1945 letter he wrote to Henri Parisot, an editor and friend of the Surrealist group, from the asylum at Rodez where Artaud was confined for many years: "ortura ortura konara/kokona kokona koma/kurbura kurbura kurbura/kurbata kurbata keyna/pesti anti pestantum putara/pest anti pestantum putra" (Selected Writings 451). Kerouac was also fascinated with vocal sound (and its graphological transcription) as a material substance stripped of conventional signification. Examples appear at the end of his novel Big Sur in the appended poem "Sea," which takes its inspiration from noises of the ocean, as in this excerpt:

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

Like these syllables, the catalogs of onomatopoetic Stooge-abuse in Visions of Cody have the musicated ring of Artaud's raving glossolalia. Of particular note is the frequency of /kl sounds in nonsemic utterances by Artaud and Kerouac alike. Looking at Artaud's late work through Roland Barthes's idea of the "grain of the voice" and Artaud's own fascination with conflating the mouth and the anus, Allen S. Weiss calls attention to Artaud's ingenuity in forging a linkage between these anatomical parts by deploying glottal sounds as a "symbolic-and physiognomic-reflection of defecation," since closure of the glottis in speech constitutes a material echo of sphincter activity in anal functioning (288-89).

Kerouac's evocation of dematerialized/rematerialized bones also carries the reader into an Artaudian domain, recalling the French author's ruminations on the convulsively reconfigured body in such a work as his 1947 radio play, To Have Done With the Judgment of God:

In order to exist you need only let yourself go until you are,

but in order to live

you must be somebody,

in order to be somebody,

you must have a BONE,

not be afraid of showing the

bone,

and of losing the meat on the way. (316)

The nonplace that Artaud mentally inhabited in his later mad years appeared to him as the realm of Bardo, a liminal territory identified by ancient Tibetan theology as the home of the soul during the forty-nine days between bodily death and rebirth. Artaud describes Bardo in "Insanity and Black Magic," the final text in his 1947 book Artaud le Momo-the latter word means simpleton or fool-as "the pang of death into which the self falls with a splash" (Selected Writings 530). For his electroshocked psyche, this represents a natural destination for the "body without organs" that he prescribes as a corrective for humanity's ills in the valedictory portion of To Have Done With the Judgment of God:

Man is sick because he is badly

constructed.

We must decide to strip him in order to

scratch

out this animalcule which makes him itch

to death,

god,

and with god

his organs.

For tie me down if you want to,

but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

When you have given him a body without

organs,

then you will have delivered him from

all his automatisms

and restored him to his

true liberty.

Then you will teach him to dance inside

out

as in the delirium of our accordion

dance halls

and that inside,out will be his true:

side out. (328-29)

Artaud associated this deconstructed corps a l'envers with the invisible spaces of the radiophonic airwaves. Yet the paramorphic freedom and grandiose grotesquerie of the body without organs might also be situated in the hyperrealist realm of cinematic simulacra. In an essay entitled "The Premature Old Age of the Cinema," the skeptical Artaud asserted that in film he found only a limited "poetry of contingency, the poetry of what might be" (Selected Writings 314). Still, he experimented with film during his artistic career, and he perceived its capacity for deorganicizing the stuff of life when he observed in his essay "On The Seashell and the Clergyman," about a film made by Germaine Dulac from a screenplay he had written, that it "exalts matter and reveals it to us in its profound spirituality" while constructing a "pure play of appearances" and a "so to speak transubstantiation of elements" (Selected Writings 151-52). He adds that a cinema "studded with dreams" and "the physical sensation of pure life" finds its ultimate expression in "the most excessive form of humor. A certain excitement of objects, forms, and expressions can only be translated into the convulsions and surprises of a reality that seems to destroy itself with an irony in which you can hear a scream from the extremities of the mind" (Selected Writings 152).

Despite his conclusion in the "Cinema" essay that film "remains a fragmentary and...stratified and frozen...conquest of reality" (Selected Writings 314), and despite his eventual abandonment of even radio as an expressive medium, Artaud appears to have suspected that from the radiating surfaces of film might conceivably spring the supremely superficial body of which he dreamed. In the formulation of audiophonist Gregory Whitehead, this would be a body rolling on some stunning ground"-like Captain Ahab, whose "whole beaten brain seems as beheaded"-and quoting Artaud le Momo's late chant:

The

world,

but it's no longer me.

And what do you care,

says Bardo,

it's me. (261)

The existential limbo between me and not-me, and the performative limbo between not-me and not-not-me (Schechner 111-13), are territories of liminality that the Beat writers found haunted with dark beauties and daunting possibilities. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari recognize this when they list Kerouac and Ginsberg among Anglo-American authors who "know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs" yet simultaneously "never cease failing" to complete a transgressive project dogged by the demons of its age. "Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles," these philosophers conclude, lamenting the closures of "neurotic impasse...exotic territorialities...or worse still, an old fascist dream" (132-33).

Kerouac's longing for order, tenderness, and piety bears out his centrality to an American literature whose destiny is, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, "crossing limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but also always making these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities" (277-78). To acknowledge Kerouac's turbulent "oscillations of the unconscious," however, is not to slight the ecstatic revolutionism that erupted from the best, most paradoxical intuitions of his Bardo-- bound spirit. Artaud reached that sublimely metaphysicized realm before him, and-grotesquely and incredibly-so did the Three Stooges, at least the way Kerouac tells it. Jackie Duluoz was perceptive when he called the Proustian meeting of hot and cold a hollow hole between memories of childhood; but it takes the older, wiser Jack Duluoz to decode those differentials of molecular motion into dialogic poles of existence and oblivion, potentiality and void, life in death and death in life; and to apprise cold-war America of the liberating news that History's carnivalesque contravisions may travel a nail-poked route to revelation through organless film-bodies like Larry the Stooge.*