This book regards Gerard, Jack Kerouac's older brother, whom he saw as nothing less than a saint--the book is written with all the admiration and awe and love of his childhood under Gerard. The book begins with some anecdotes about the elder brother, sort of to get an idea of him I suppose at times other than his dying days, which makes up the bulk of the book. I should probably mention that Gerard died at age nine (Jack was four at the time). So yeah, lots of hero worship, which is completely understandable, and maybe some indulgence and fantasies on the facts--again, not surprising, and even if there was, would Jack himself even have known? So I guess it can be argued that there's an unreliable narrator thing going on, but even if it is is it really... Does that make sense? Because maybe it's not the truth but it's what Kerouac remembers so for him it's the truth even though in actuality it's not... Yeah...
Well, like I said: hero worship. An early anecdote regards Plourdes, an always-hungry boy from a family too poor to properly feed him. Gerard fed him--Kerouac then claims that on a recent visit back to his hometown (Lowell, MA) he saw Plourdes again, fat and full and healthy--thanks to Gerard? is Kerouac's musing. He then adds "Without Gerard what would have happened to Ti Jean?" (5). (Ti Jean was how he sometimes referred to himself in his books.) And more: "[Gerard's] heart under the little shirt as big as the sacred heart of thorns and blood depicted in all the humble homes of French-Canadian Lowell" (7). I've never really understood the heart of thorns thing (I assume it's more of a Catholic thing) but I assume it's intended to be Jesus's heart--so, there we go, it's clear what Kerouac means to say about Gerard.
Another comparison drawn between Gerard and Jesus: Gerard found a hurt baby mouse and made him a little basket and bed to nurse him back to health. The cat of the Kerouac household found the basket and of course ate it--Gerard and Jack cry over the incident, and Mrs Kerouac attempts to explain that the cat couldn't help it, it was simply its nature, et cetera--even though Gerard (according to Jack) understands all of this, he takes the cat and holds it by the jowls and yells and lectures at her. Kerouac, frightened by this unprecedented outburst, connects the feelings he had witnessing this to what one would have thought when Jesus in the Temple turns over the moneychanger tables in a rage. (The story commonly being called the 'Cleansing of the Temple'; you can look it up.)
Often in the anecdotes and even when the descent to Gerard's death begins, Gerard often laments upon the fact that he is not in heaven, for their he will have birds, people will not harm mice or each other, he will have a wagon pulled by lambs, and so on--it's kind of... chilling, I suppose is the best word, because he does die, he does end up in heaven. His wish was granted. Jack, actually, so excited that his brother will finally receive all of these great things (and will no longer suffer in the mortal coil), runs and dances down the street when his brother dies, shouting such gleefully--because he understands: it's sad his brother has died, of course, but he is receiving his award. Her didn't seem to even be aware that there was any ill meaning attached to it. (Of course, he is only four so he probably wouldn't have really understood the concept of death in regards to a human anyway.)
"We are baptized in water for no unsanitary reason, that is to say, a well-needed bath is implied--Praise a woman's legs, her golden thighs only produce black nights of death, face it--Sin is sin and there's no erasing it--We are spiders. We sting one another. No man exempt from sin any more than he can avoid a trip to the toilet" (31). Regarding the women--a double-meaning possibly, in that sex is supposed to be considered a sin (Right? Someone help me on this one) or at least lust, and that from what is produced from between those thighs--a baby, who continues the chain of suffering and sin in another facet, and so on... I point out his condemnation--it's a little too strong of a word but unfortunately I can't think of a more appropriate one--of women yet again. In... Dharma Bums? Desolation Angels? ...He says the "girls here make shadows taller than the shadow of death" (or essentially that) and tends to generally view women as... well, unnecessary, a cause of unnecessary suffering and such (no surprise, considering his take into Buddha and such), though of course that never really stops him from pursuing them, even when they're clearly mad, like whatserface (Elliot's mother) in Big Sur.
Jack, imagining Gerard's thoughts as he runs through an icy winter rendition of Lowell: "--Not a soul in sight, a few cruds of old snow stuck in the gutters--A fine world for icebergs and stones--A world not made for men--A world, if made for anything, made for something dead to sympathy--Since sympathizing there'll not be in it ever--He runs to warm up--" (42).
At one point Jack remembers a Halloween where his mother dressed him up as "a little Chinaman" (47). I was going to make some joke about HP Lovecraft being freaked out, until I remembered that though he was a New Englander, he lived in Providence, RI. Aww. Then I got weirded out, because it's kind of strange to think they were alive at the same time, you know? Obviously they weren't working at the same time, but still.
Gerard was a sickly child, I guess, and it wasn't unusual for him to get a bad dose of the flu in the winter. So when he got so ill he had to leave school, the nuns kind of knew the drill. Anyway, according to Jack, on the day of his final day of school, he had fallen asleep in class because breathing trouble at night kept him from sleeping well. Sister Marie wakes him up and he tells her dreamed of the Virgin Mary and adds, "'dont be afraid my good sister, we're all in Heaven--but we dont know it!'" (54). A doctrine easily recognized from Kerouac, from his other books. Projected by Kerouac or what actually happened, I don't know. Kerouac says most of his ideas came from Gerard--and I trust this, even if in this case he could be considered an 'unreliable narrator'.
"God made us for His glory, not our own" (59).
Kerouac writes about how even though his brother his sick and dying, he still teases, plays with and loves his brother and how he (Jack) took it all for granted, of course, and was "going to be made to appreciate it, like a Fallen Angel" (67). That is, basically, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone". Or that he had always been made, like from the beginning in his form to appreciate it eventually--not that it would come as though something new. Or it just seems new, even though it was always there, because he was never actually aware of it...
"An old dream too I've had of me glooping, that night in the parlor by Gerard's coffin, I dont see him in the coffin but he's there, his ghost, brown ghost, and I'm grown sick in my papers (my writing papers, my bloody 'literary career' ladies and gentlemen) and the whole reason why I ever wrote at all... [is] because of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero..." (112). So by 1956 he was already getting fed up with it all... Big Sur wouldn't even be due for another five years... (He died in '69, victim of alcoholism and exhaustion and depression all playing off one another.) Might I also add that his little aside in parenthesis sounds like anyone of Stephen King's washed-up author characters' asides.
Like I said earlier, he doesn't quite understand death or why anyone would be upset at it. At Gerard's funeral he can't understand why anyone would cry, but cannot express the reasons why he wouldn't cry, why anyone wouldn't cry, because he is only four--but he's not upset because Gerard has gained his divine gift, "it has come, has always been with us, the formalities of the tomb are ignorant irrelevancies most befittingly gravely conducted by proper qualified doers and actors and Latin singers" (127). And, an odd thought just came into my head... In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, he says time as the aliens see it (Tralfamadorians) is everything happens at the exact same second, even if what is happening is being performed by the same person doing something else... but wouldn't what Kerouac has said properly describe that too? The divine reward is forever because it is eternal life and if everything is happening forever in that one moment... You see? Could it work?
Well, there you have it. I quite enjoyed the book--I'd be surprised if anyone put it down and said they didn't, or at least said that they weren't touched by it. As for recommending--I would--but it would probably mean more to a person who's read some of Kerouac's other works first, and not just his best-known, On the Road.
MLA citation information: Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Gerard. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Kids with Guns by the Gorillaz
This post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Whatever happens to you, whatever happens to me, I hope that I'll fall asleep knowing that you'll always be the story with no ending
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