The Subterraneans (1958). Detailed description

Grove Press published The Subterraneans in 1958, within months of the publications of both On the Road and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac claims to have completed the novel within “three full moon nights of October,” while under the influence of the amphetamine Benzedrine. Critical opinion on the novel, as with his other works, is polarized: Some claim that The Subterraneans is his finest example of “spontaneous prose,” while others find it disorganized, slangy, and basically in need of the editorial revision seen in the completed versions of On the Road and The Dharma Bums.

While Kerouac intended The Subterraneans to fit into the massive autobiographical work that he called the Duluoz Legend, the novel’s stylistic differences prohibit its full inclusion as part of the saga. It does, however, form an important chronological link, as it documents a period in Kerouac’s life during summer 1953. While the events it parallels took place in New York’s Greenwich Village, The Subterraneans is set in San Francisco; some critics cite this point as a challenge to the supposed believability of Kerouac’s other novels. As in his other works, Kerouac centers the narrative on an autobiographical character, this time named Leo Percepied. The critic Warren French suggests the translation of the name as “Lion with Pierced-Foot,” perhaps to refer to Achilles or Oedipus, though a nod to Kerouac’s character as a perceptive observer, and the use of his father’s first name, are other likely sources as well.

The plot of the novel follows Leo’s two-month relationship with Mardou Fox, a half-black, half-American Indian woman who runs in Percepied’s social circle. The novel itself contains as much rambling rumination as plot, as the narrator acknowledges, stating that it is difficult to compose a narrative when you’re “such an egomaniac all you can do is take off on big paragraphs about minor details about yourself and the big soul details about others go sitting and waiting around” (3-4). Much of the novel documents explicit sexual encounters of Mardou and Leo, as well as Leo’s experiences under the influence of marijuana, or “tea,” as he calls it.

Like Leo, Fox is assigned a symbolic name, perhaps to refer to Kerouac’s animalistic characterization of her throughout the novel. Leo describes Mardou as “snakelike” and consistently refers to her body in dehumanizing, misogynistic ways. His first thought upon seeing her is “By God, I’ve got to get involved with that little woman,” and even by the end of the novel, he still expresses the idea that “the man can make the little woman bend, she was made to bend” (2, 107). As does On the Road, The Subterraneans resists categorization as a bildungsroman (coming- of-age story) because the narrator reaches the end of the novel without growing or changing.

Another constant is the narrator’s emphasis on his racial difference from the “Negro” Mardou. The morning after their first sexual encounter, as he looks over at the sleeping Mardou, he describes her face alternately as looking like an Aztecan mask and having “a boxer nose,” which he describes as “slightly Mongoloid” (18). He expresses concern that Mardou is involved with him only to steal his “white man heart,” calling her “a Negress sneaking in the world sneaking the holy white men for sacrificial rituals later when they’ll be roasted and roiled” (49). Leo’s convictions that Mardou and he exist on fundamentally different planes because of their racial difference, coupled with his chauvinist idea that he can mold her desires to fit his own, eventually lead to their turbulent breakup.

Still, gender and racial difference are not the only sources of prejudice in Leo’s life. The Subterraneans has been critiqued as one of Kerouac’s most homophobic novels as well. Percepied refers pejoratively to “fags” throughout the novel and even recounts an instance when he physically and verbally harassed a “queer” when he was younger. Contrary to these statements, Leo endangers his relationship with Mardou by engaging in ambiguously homoerotic behavior throughout the novel. He abandons her to spend a night with Arial Lavalina (based on Gore Vidal) and seemingly becomes infatuated with a young male member of the subterraneans. Although he does not form any fulfilling relationships with homosexual men, it is safe to assume that homosexual contact played a role in Percepied’s (and, in friends’ accounts, Kerouac’s) life.

But as Ann Charters points out in her biography of Kerouac, “Kerouac’s pride in tossing The Subterraneans off in three nights gave him more lasting satisfaction than anything that happened between him and the girl that summer” (195). Indeed, in this novel readers can most clearly see the detriment to personal relationships that is the result of Kerouac’s insistence on being the constant observer, always removing himself and seeking experience so that he can later document it. Seemingly, the only meaningful relationship he can maintain is with his mother, with whom Kerouac was living at the time The Subterraneans takes place. As his relationship with Mardou falls apart, Leo has a vision of his mother’s saying to him, “Poor Little Leo, poor Little Leo, you suffer, men suffer so, you’re all alone in the world I’ll take care of you, I would very much like to take care of you all your days my angel” (104).

This quote harks back to the common theme in Kerouac’s writings that all life is suffering. From his early Catholic childhood to his Buddhist quest for Enlightenment, Kerouac advances his theory that even in a world of inspiring music, good friends, and a dynamic landscape, the only constant is anguish.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Compare The Subterraneans to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), a novel that Kerouac claimed to have used as a model for his own work.

2. A 1958 Time magazine review of The Subterraneans called the group to which the title refers a band of “‘urban Thoreaus’ in an existential state of passive resistance to society.” Compare the “subterraneans” to Henry Thoreau in Civil Disobedience (1849). Does Kerouac’s characters’ urban status render them utterly different from Thoreau, or are the two comparable?