Productions scientifiques

Visions of Cody (written in late 1950 - early 1951, yet published in its entirety in 1972) stands apart from Jack Kerouac’s other novels, if only because of its experimental form. The book’s generic indeterminacy, the fragmented nature of the narrative, and the author’s “free prose” are analyzed here as symptomatic of the gender anxiety and agency panic that shaped Cold War poetics. More specifically, Visions of Cody reads as a love letter to the narrator’s male muse, a letter whose homoeroticism is barely contained at times. Yet, when homosexuality surfaces in Gothic-like passages, through the “keyhole” of the narrator’s eye, it appears to threaten his identity as well as that of his hero – “the archetypal man in America.” Hence, pornography comes to provide a homosocial space where the two protagonists can safely avoid each other’s gaze, bond together, and share voyeuristic fantasies designed to confirm their sense of self as men.

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