“[A]n Exterior Air of Pilgrimage”: The Resilience of Pilgrimage Ecopoetics and Slow Travel from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Susan Signe Morrison

doi:10.3390/h9040117

Abstract

While the Beats can be seen as critical actors in the environmental humanities, their works should be seen over the longue durée. They are not only an origin, but are also recipients, of an environmentally aware tradition. With Geoffrey Chaucer and Jack Kerouac, we see how a contemporary American icon functions as a text parallel to something generally seen as discrete and past, an instance of the modern embracing, interpreting, and appropriating the medieval. I argue that The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer influenced Kerouac’s shaping of On the Road. In the unpublished autograph manuscript travel diary dating from 1948–1949 (On the Road notebook), Kerouac imagines the novel as a quest tale, thinking of pilgrimage during its gestation. Further, Kerouac explicitly cites Chaucer. His novel can be seen not only in the tradition of Chaucer, but can bring out aspects of pilgrimage ecopoetics in general. These connections include structural elements, the spiritual development of the narrator, reliance on vernacular dialect, acute environmental awareness, and slow travel. Chaucer’s influence on Kerouac highlights how certain elements characteristic of pilgrimage literature persist well into the modern period, in a resilience of form, language, and ecological sensibility.

Highlights

While the Beats can be seen as critical actors in the environmental humanities, their works should be seen over the longue durée
A trait of pilgrimage literature even in the Middle Ages, linguistic vigor reflects the forward propulsion of physical pilgrimage and its topopoetics, the language which springs naturally forth to express a specific and ever-evolving landscape and culture
Key to pilgrimage literature extending back into the medieval period is the telling of stories while underway

Summary

The Literary Tradition of Pilgrimage Literature

Pilgrimage as a ritual process expresses the spiritual yearning, interior journey, and physical enactment of the pilgrim actor. This section of the essay explores aspects of Kerouac’s faith as expressed in On the Road, linking that novel to a clear predecessor: Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales Both works, structured around pilgrimage, explore false paths on the spiritual journey. A trait of pilgrimage literature even in the Middle Ages, linguistic vigor reflects the forward propulsion of physical pilgrimage and its topopoetics, the language which springs naturally forth to express a specific and ever-evolving landscape and culture Both Chaucer and Kerouac write using highly-charged, dynamic, and constantly morphing languages. Sal associates specific places and their names with the community they invoke: “And I tried to tell him what North Platte meant to me, buying the whiskey with the boys, and [Remi] slapped me on my back and said I was the funniest man in the world” (64) Kerouac increases this sociality through associating places with literary, filmic, and pop cultural references the reader can connect with. Contingency allows for a measured appreciation of American topography, vernacular accents, and geography

Slow Travel and Environmental Insight

Conclusions