Charles W Scheel

Verlaine -Metz

in the Making of On the Road and Visions of Cody

This paper was geared originally toward the workshop on Life at work, more specifically concerned with fiction, and could also have fitted in the one on Truth in fiction, since my current rereading of Jack Kerouac's work can focus easily enough on such terms. It is a bit more challenging to integrate the notion of "American documentary culture" in my paper, but I hope I will manage to create a few interesting perspectives, beyond a stretched rhetoric. For although this workshop focuses on the first decades of the 20 th century, the French version of its description in the CFP extended the corpus to post-WW2 works, much to my relief, since I am about to discuss works mainly written in 1951-52. I also need to adapt the two questions asked in this workshop: 1. What defines the authority of documentary with the onset of intermedial practices, combining photography, reportage, case histories and testimony ? And 2: What record may be provided when conventions exercised by documentarists are appropriated by the intellectual, the poet and the novelist ? In the case of Kerouac and the two books I am looking at, we are obviously not dealing with a reporter, documenting some events from outside, but with a poet-novelist reporting about his own experience.

Interestingly enough, both On the Road (OTR) and Visions of Cody (VOC) are books usually classified as novels but the composition of which involved the author's recourse to documents, much more than to what is commonly understood as "the art of fiction." Indeed, to further strengthen my position on this panel, I will claim that much to Kerouac's chagrin -most of his work -starting with OTR and because of OTR -has been received as cultural testimony (of the Beat generation), rather than literature. In other words, Kerouac belongs to those writers who challenged the very notion of literature in modern times -and therefore also shook up the notion of fictional truth.

If today I would like to consider two books by Jack Kerouac, allow me to remind that in his lifetime Kerouac published some twenty volumes: four collections of poems, two essays on Buddhism, and about 15 books that hover between novel, poetry, travel writing, and autobiography. As early as 1955, when he had only published his first book, the novel The Town and the City, he had come up with the overall title for this substantial oeuvre of "The Duluoz Legend" -Duluoz being an Indian, Canuck, name for louse. For those who find this somewhat self-derisive association intriguing, the word Canuck was used in New England to refer to the French Canadians working in the industrial suburbs of Boston and Lowell where Kerouac grew up during the 1920s and 30s (incidentally, the other nickname for them was the even more pejorative "coon-ass"). Kerouac mentioned this title in a letter to his would-be publisher while he was desperately trying to get OTR accepted, and had already seven other manuscripts on his shelves. In a later text, the prefatory note to VOC, he confirms the title "The Duluoz Legend" for his apocrypha and gives an extremely lucid description of them, including this witty, and nonetheless very true, statement: "My work comprises one vast book like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sickbed."

When OTR finally did come out in 1957, it had two, somewhat contradictory effects on Kerouac's life and career. Mainly because of its refreshing content but also because of its scandalous aspects, OTR was such a huge popular success, that Kerouac rapidly became an icon for the "hip, cool and frantic" youth of the time. The media were desperate to interview an author who was quickly reduced to the so-called "father of the Beat Generation," or "the drop-out who started it all" -"it" being the "wild odyssey" of those marginal young people who "made the scene with sex, jazz, and drink" -as it is advertised on the jacket of this pocket edition I had bought in the early seventies and which certainly amazed the student I then was in Strasbourg. Incidentally, there was not a single reference in the paratext of this edition of OTR to the 15 other books that Kerouac had published by then.

With OTR, Kerouac finally made some money from his writing, but he was so shocked by the consequences of sudden fame that he fled out of New York. While reporters and fans wanted only to hear more juicy details and names about the wild, hedonistic lifestyle described in the book, "decent" American citizens were disgusted by such sinful decadence and some even managed to beat the writer up. Whatever Kerouac published later would simply not be taken seriously and this lack of recognition as a writer might indeed have increased his problem with alcoholism that led to an untimely death when he was only 47 years old. What nobody except some close friends -such Beat luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs or John Clellon Holmes -seemed interested in, was the literary achievement that Kerouac was obsessed with, and of which OTR was only one facet.

Thanks to his bestselling fame, Kerouac did get his other works published, but OTR's succès de scandale would prevent serious critics from seeing that Kerouac was not intent on shocking readers with the unusually free lifestyles described, but rather concerned with how to include such experiences in literature. For beyond the existential aspects of the Beat generation to which he was associated, Kerouac was simply obsessed with writing, intent on finding his own voice as an American writer. After all, emulating Thomas Wolf as he had done it in his first novel, had not sufficed to make him noticed, and the way he was perceiving the world and literature was not to be told in the manner of either Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Proust or Celine -to mention only the weightier names among the writers who were crowding his literary pantheon. We know that Kerouac did find his own voice : the tremendous success of OTR was not only due to the exciting adventures told therein, but also to the infectious, exhilarating style of a first-person narrative that, arguably more so than any other book of the 1950s, blew up literary conventions even if critics were not ready to see that for quite a while and preferred to relegate Kerouac's writing to the Beat generation fad. A fad that, as we know, was going to have a major effect on American -and even Western culture -of the second half of the 20 th century. Kerouac's particular writing style is most often referred to as "spontaneous prose" and such a

phrase seems at odds with the notion of "documentary" as a foundation for literature. It also needs to be reconsidered, both in the case of OTR and of VOC, on account of the very different and yet closely intertwined compositions of those two books. In this paper I would like:

1. to look at how The Original Scroll (TOS) of OTR, as a document of literary history, sheds light on how "spontaneous" autobiographical truth had to be edited according to generic conventions and social norms for the publication of OTR; 2. to see how "Kerouac played with Tea, Tapes and Text" to compose the amazing documentary and poetic diptych of VOC; 3. to see how fellow beat-poet Allen Ginsberg evaluated the truth of "The Visions of the Great

Rememberer", and also to look at the notion of "action writing" to characterize Kerouac's work.

I. On the Road and The Original Scroll

The earliest complete manuscript of what became OTR is the legendary Scroll, which was published by Viking in 2007, to celebrate the 50 th anniversary of the novel's appearance on the market in 1957. Howard Cunnell, the editor, was at pains to reproduce over 250 pages, in a legible print rather than in a fac-simile, the text that Kerouac, stimulated by Benzedrine, had typed in less than 3 weeks of April 1951, in a single paragraph on long sheets of paper that, glued together, constituted the 120-foot scroll. It is easy enough to agree with the editor's claim printed on the dust jacket, that TOS "is undoubtedly one of the most significant, celebrated, and provocative documents in contemporary American literary history."

Four learned introductions to this publication furnish a lot of arguments about the relevance of this claim, and I am indebted to them for a lot of insight into the history of the conception and publication of what, most people agree, is the single most influential product of the Beat Generation in American culture, and one of the most striking "novels" of 20 th century American literature. It is precisely the question of the literary status of OTR that I would like to address. TOS does not only confirm what was known through Kerouac's correspondence and journals or other documents of the time, i.e. that most of the events described in OTR were indeed of an autobiographical nature. TOS also shows more clearly what Kerouac's idea of spontaneous prose was all about.

If the Scroll is considered as a literary document today, Kerouac himself did not conceive it as a "documentary endeavor," but as an experimental form of writing in which formulation was the main concern. We know that, for documentation, he had his notes and drafts and travel journals on the table as he typed along, trying to keep the story flowing through his fingers in a trance-like effort. Reading the scroll it becomes obvious that to write so much so fast was only possible precisely because: 1) Kerouac had developed exceptional typing skills (thanks to the time spent as a child in his father's printshop); 2) that he had an incredible memory which earned him the nicknames "Memory Babe" or "The Great Rememberer", and 3) because the author was writing about things he knew very well for having experienced them himself.

He did not have to create characters and to be careful to invent a coherent story around them, as is required by the conventional craft of fiction. Instead, he followed the model of those "wildly exuberant letters that Cassady sent to him in late 1950 and early 1951" -including the fabled -and unfortunately lost-"Joan Anderson letter" -which had convinced him that, for his idea of a novel, he had "to write as it happened." TOS is clearly an autobiographical travel memoir that was turned into a postmodern novel, OTR.

For once the Scroll was written, and even if Kerouac was obviously very happy with the result, he immediately started editing the text : except once, it seems, he did not submit the Scroll to publishers, but manuscripts derived on its basis. And this is how TOS is now a document allowing to see how this spontaneous narrative was packaged for publication. In this sense, Kerouac provides an interesting consideration on our workshop title, "Seeking the truth : American documentary culture" : the Scroll confirms not only that but how the "spontaneous," autobiographical narration of certain raw and wild experiences at the end of the forties had to be packaged as a tamer fiction for publication even years later. Kerouac's urge to write his truth ran into the walls, first of his own moral conscience, but also into the walls of social decency, aesthetic convention, and legal concerns. The so-called King of the Beats and self-confessed Catholic was far less comfortable with sexual transgressions, for instance, than his buddies Cassady, Ginsberg, Burroughs et al.

The publication of the Scroll "as an authentic artifact," half a century after the novel, merely "documents" the cultural "truth" of those times : certain words could not be printed and that all truths could not be told, not only to protect the reputation of real people involved in the story, but to protect American society from the knowledge of whatever naughty things these same people might have experienced -especially around 1957, at the height of McCarthyism.

Besides the changes in character names, the recourse to a more conventional organization in chapters and paragraphs, and some stylistic polishing, the publication of TOS has shown that Kerouac did use stronger vocabulary and mention a few unmentionable acts. More about these aspects can be read in some learned articles with striking titles, such as "'Adventures in Auto-Eroticism': Economies of Travelling Masculinity in Autobiographical Texts by Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady" or "Scandalous for Being Scandalous: 'Monstrous Huge Fuck[s]' and 'Slambanging Big Sodomies' in Jack Kerouac's On the Road" (the latter quoting phrases from the Scroll and describing a sexual performance by Neal, that allegedly made poor Jack sick, as he sat in hiding "on the castrated toilet" of the motel room and watched). From that angle, TOS is indeed an even more interesting document about the sexual mores of the times (and one understands why a Dr. Alfred Kinsey was so keen on interviewing prominent Beats for his famous report).

But it says a lot too about Kerouac's "spontaneous" as opposed to "edited" language. Here is a sample in which Kerouac quotes Ginsberg about Cassady's sex-schedule during a stay in Denver (we must remember that Cassady, although a wild and exuberant character, was also a very methodical man...): "What's the schedule?" I said. There was always a schedule in Neal's life and it was growing more complicated every year. "The schedule is this: I came off work half an hour ago. In that time Neal is screwing Louanne at the hotel and gives me time to change and dress. At one sharp he rushes from Louanne to Carolyn -of course neither one of them knows what is going on -and screws her once [… Louanne is all for the divorce] but she insists on screwing in the interim. She says she loves his big cock -so does Carolyn -so do I." I nodded as I always do… (p. 145)

Here is the corresponding, edited passage in OTR: "What's the schedule?" I said. There was always a schedule in Dean's life. / "The schedule is this: I came off work half an hour ago. In that time Dean is balling Marylou at the hotel and gives me time to change and dress. At one sharp he rushes from Marylou to Camille -of course neither one of them knows what is going on -and bangs her once [… Marylou is all for the divorce] but she insists on banging in the interim. She says she loves him -so does Camille." / Then he told me how Dean had met Camille... (p. 37) As you can tell, while Neal's partners of both sexes focused on a particular part of his anatomy, Dean Moriarty was only the object of "generic love" by Marylou and Camille. Whether version A, with its more precise truth-value, has more literary value than version B with its tamer, more impressionistic expression of passion -well, that is a question that readers must answer, alone, in their hearts and aesthetic consciences.

Incidentally, in the afore-mentioned article on "monstrous" sex in OTR, R.J. Ellis makes the point that other novels about unconventional liberated mores of the late 40s published in the States as early as 1952, contained material as least as scandalous as OTR, without provoking waves nearly as shockingly high (he refers to Chandler Brossard's Who Walks in Darkness, George Mandel's Flee the Angry Strangers and John Clellon Holmes's Go). He claims that by the time OTR finally came out, reviewers were expecting a scandalous novel from Kerouac and stressed that aspect at the detriment of any serious literary consideration.

II. The Tapes in Visions of Cody

The renewed interest with Kerouac's editing strategies of OTR in light of TOS has revealed the parallel work the author was devoting to another manuscript that became Visions of Cody. Hence this section, initially conceived as a full paper entitled "Playing with Tea, Tapes and Text : the Recorded Truth and the Art of Fiction in Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody." For the innocent in this audience, tea here means pot, or grass or marijuana. The "tapes" involved were those recorded by Kerouac himself during his stay with Neal Cassady in Frisco while editing On the Road in 1951-52. There too, Kerouac's endeavor was to reconcile a "spontaneous" experience, as recorded live, with aesthetic concerns. He did it in so radical a fashion, that Visions of Cody was only published posthumously, in 1972.

Perhaps I should add for those who grew up in a digital age, that the possibility -for the general public, to record sounds on magnetic tapes was an amazing new technological breakthrough of the early 1950s, along with the introduction of LP records and the concept of stereo sound, all things that radically changed access to music and documentation : anybody could now record people talking and create personal sound archives. The tapes were reel-to-reel and required a machine that in those days was fairly bulky and heavy. We know that Bryon Gysin introduced William Burroughs to the use of tape recordings with his Poem of poems created in Morroco, and of course it is just as easy to create cut-ups with tapes as it is with paper (Dister,. But in the Morroco of those days, using recorders at all was highly problematic on account of the poor and unreliable power grid, and it seems that Burroughs, with his assertive button-pushing technique, would destroy cheaper Japanese-made plastic recorders withing days. Champion-typist Kerouac probably had no such problems while staying in Neal Cassady's house in San Francisco, shortly after Kerouac's second wife, Joan Anderson, had left him, although pregnant. (This is a strange repeat of the situation described in the OTR incipit : "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up." Which, incidentally, is different from the first sentence of the Scroll : "I first met Neal not long after my father died..." Indeed, Neal had come to NY with his first wife -16-year-old Luanne -late in December 1946 and met Kerouac in early January. Now, five years later, newly separated Jack flees to meet his old buddy Dean, who is living with his second wife and their three babies in Frisco where, beyond doing his share of the baby-boom, he worked for the railroad, just like Kerouac was going to do it too.)

To separate the autobiographical from the fictional in VOC is not any easier than in OTR, but VOC is infinitely more interesting as a literary construct, made of sheer documentary passages on the one hand, and chapters mixing prosaic passages with tremendous flights of poetic prose, on the other. The book's structure is quite unconventional for a text usually labeled a novel. The first two of its 3 parts consist in some 100 pages, divided in loosely connected, chapter-like episodes, telling about memories or fictional visions associated with Cody Pomeray -this is Neal Cassady's new name in this second book dedicated to him.

Although the first two vignettes describe an old diner and the Capricio B-Movie in NY, the formal incipit of the book starts on the second page with a sentence that echoes the one that closed OTR ("I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty."): "In the Autumn of 1951 I began thinking of Cody Pomeray, thinking of Cody Pomeray." This invocation is followed by a series of passages in which the narrator describes his loneliness in several NY places, in often poetic or even lyrical terms.

Part 2 evokes all kinds of places and events leading to the impatiently awaited trip to San Francisco and reminding Jack Duluoz of Cody, his "old buddy on the road." Part 3 is subdivided in 3 sections. The first one entitled "Frisco: The Tape" is a 120-page minute transcript of the recording of five evenings at the Cassady house, mostly dialogues between Cody and Jack (Kerouac in real life, named Duluoz in the book), sometimes including Cody's wife Evelyn (in reality Cassady's wife Carolyn) and a couple of friends who visit for an evening party.

The transcript includes parenthetical remarks about what is going on in the room (what is being smoked or drunk, for instance) even radio broadcasts captured by the microphone.The content of the conversation ranges from the trite and prosaic (like when Cody is changing the diaper of the baby) to anecdotes (mostly by Cody, sometimes very detailed like one about an occasion when Burroughs -named Old Bull-had nearly died of an overdose), emotion-laden declarations, or discussions of books and music. Most of the times the participants seem to ignore or forget the presence of the microphone (none, including the author, probably thought that their words would end up in print). A strong impression of free, informal and spontaneous discourse emerges from this transcript which constitutes a fascinating cultural document about the speech and lifestyle of two major Beat actors at that time and in that place. Its inclusion in a literary work reminds one of a modernist mix à la Dos Passos, with the notable difference that the document in question is not of a social kind, taken from newspapers or pamphlets, but of a personal, autobiographical one.

This transcription section, the longest in the book, pretty much at its center and constituting something like a testimony, is followed by an intriguing and disturbing 25 page section entitled "Imitation of the Tape", subtitled "Composition by Jackie Duluoz. 6-B". The text is a rather wild jumble of bits of stories mostly by a first person narrator often recognizable as Kerouac (allegedly still a pupil in 6 th grade), which could be either the transcription of recorded monologues or conversations with undisclosed partners -or transcriptions of dreams (often drug-induced, according to several indications) -or simply improvisations on the typewriter (one of them is laid out like an article playfully entitled Peyotl is total -Essay on Cody Pomeray). Several pages deal with sport events, baseball players, landscapes devastated by the 1938 hurricane in New England, the narrator's "first visions of the world seen from a college window" in NY, and include many remarks on literature, the use of "running consciousness stream", the ways American men now look at each other in an age of suspicion, etc.

The style of this pages is eclectic, mixing marks of orality and unchecked profanity with critical statements on literary and cultural questions, or with surrealistic descriptions mostly couched in long paragraphs in which dashes replace periods in the typical jazz-like Kerouac prose, full of puns and maintaining slips of the tongue, typos or hesitations in the text. Spontaneity is definitely the key impression.

The last pages evoke in crude terms souvenirs of a "Moldy Marie, an usherette at the Rialto Theater, Lowell, Mass." who used to give blow-jobs all day long -and, lastly, beginning with the question : "You think I was afraid of them there Mawrdegroos in the muckeroo?" a final, amazing Rabelaisian-Rimbaldian rant by a character who could be Cody and evokes in challenging, violently poetic terms, a drunk, abusive father and husband. Several episodes in the book mention encounters with "perverts", "fags" or "dirty old men", and passages of the Tapes illustrate the tension arising between Jack and Cody due to a promiscuity that includes their sharing the favors of several women (among which Cody's wives) and a homo-erotic dimension. But the general erotic content, which is strong if not obsessive, centers on the macho celebration of sexual pursuit, described in transgressive terms : plenty of "hard cocks" "fucking" "juicy cunts" (cf. Ginsberg: "Spurts of Fantasy Prose Love Cunt babbling, adoration of pussy which prevented the book from being published..." in VOC Afterword).

If this "Imitation" section is of an ambiguous enunciation status, the next and last one, entitled "Joan Rawshanks in the Fog," begins with a 15-page critical description of the filming of a night scene by a hysterical Hollywood crew, in a fancy Frisco neighborhood. It involves the star actress of that name repeating several times a very simple scene in which she walks up to an apartment building and opens its door. The absurdity of the gigantic logistic operation for this product of the mainstream entertainment industry, is expressed in the irreverent repetition of the section title, implying that the movie star, shipped in from Hollywood, is indeed utterly lost in the Frisco fog.

The next 100 pages revert to the patterns of the first 2 parts of the book, namely the rambling sequence of visions of Cody (remembered or imagined) described by the narrator in eclectic, often poetic ways, but, equally often, resting on precise memories and recorded dates and places. In the middle of them, seamlessly sewn in, several other tape transcripts of intense Cody-Jack conversations about everything. The last 60 pages of the book constitute a shorter and intense variation on "the matter of OTR," a sort of summary of Cody's and Jack's wild meetings and travels together. The last two pages revert to their staying together in Frisco and to Jack's leaving to return East.

It is interesting that a book based on such a mix of facts and flights of fancy was apprehended recently in a study entitled "Kerouac His Own Historian; VOC and the Politics of Historiography" in which Sten Belleto looks at notions such as genre conventions and self-reflexiveness. Of the latter there is plenty in VOC, but it mostly concerns literary aspects.

For those unfamiliar with VOC, here are a few excerpts of that prose:

"But you can't say that anything really tremendous happened to Cody and me till the summer of 1949 when I went out West to find him. / A night in Denver […] I died in Denver I died. […] Oh the sadness of the lights that night! … the great knife piercing me from the darkness.. the night cloud of my dreams rising, and the general brownness of my salvation which is like the brownness in old barrooms and also on Ninth Avenue in October and when they talk about scatology and in Rembrandt's canvas corner when he draws the mighty and golden aracanions, archways, bulverses and mardigras gargoyles for his surrounding-space to the minute and fragile, lost, world-conscious figures of Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery, as priest stare. In a swash, no, paragraph. / In a swash, no, who says paragraph, who says swash. / In a simple swash of dust clouds things were accomplished and I simply took off for Denver to -that is-for San Francisco, to see Cody..." (294-95; bold char. mine) "I've had several visions of Cody, most of the great ones in the middle of a tea-high and the greatest on jazz tea-high, matched only by the vision I had of him in Mexico in 1948 […] goodly two years after I met him in that naked door. It was as if he was a superhuman spirit walking, or that is racing in flesh sent down to earth to confound me not only in my actions but in my thoughts: wild, wild day I suddenly looked from myself to this strange angel from the other side (this is all like bop...) [..296.] Cody reads Proust slowly and reverently, has been 729 pages along in Vol 1 over the past two years, reading damn near daily, loud, with pride and dignity... […] The one great occasion that I saw him with eyes of fire or on fire and saw everything not only about him but America, all of America, was when in Mexico after having just blasted a great rugged cigar of marijuana in the desert […] he was by far the greatest man I had ever known... the bastard sensed it. Yet he's an angel. I'm his brother, that's all. / But enough of my greatest ennemy -because while I saw him as an angel, a god, etc, I also saw him as a devil, an old witch, even an old bitch from the start … [298].

"But the latest [..] best vision I had of Cody, also on a high, was as he showed me one drowsy afternoon in January, on the sidewalks of workaday San Francisco […] what and how the Three Stooges are like when they go staggering and knocking each other down the street [+ 4 dense pages finishing with three lines of cartoon onomatopoeias, p.300-305]. [Contrary to what T.S. Eliot says of ridiculous images] "There was no images springing up in the brain of Cody Pomeray that were repugnant to him at their outset. They were all beautiful. [..] There was nothing ridiculous; it's just a matter of believing in his own soul; it's just a matter of loving your own life [..] and Cody did, loving the soul of man..." (p.306-7) "Cody is like the brother I lost; he's the brother I had, too, the spittin image of Mike Fortier, Cody is Mike all inverted and twisted and torn, and inhibited, neurotic, restless, too-intelligent, gone, blank, a stud who is down, man, really down. "I have seen the red sun fall on Cody's clothes on the floor of the attic […] his poor clothes piled in the sad attic of Frisco joyous hamburg-sizzling suppertime dusks of summer and manual labor ; good Cody ; but how those clothes lie there, unattended, left and thrown there, still-life geometrical images of Cody's poor attempt to stay alive and strong beneath the skies of catastrophe." (325-26) "But it was only yesterday that Cody said to me and nobody's said such a thing in over a year, 'I love you, man, you've got to dig that; boy, you've got to know.' 'Okay Cody, I said, I heard you, I sure do know now.' [It was the day of judgment, I was coming down the stairs with my tenor horn around my neck, my first day as a tenorman, learning the rudiments of raw wild joy which is American jazz]. I was so intent on music that I didn't remember Cody's saying he loved me, till the, till a day later or so. No Cody is not dead. He is the average man, Cody is the fellow who works for a living and has a wife and kids […] But Cody isn't great because he is average. I have seen the star of an Angel in his eye, the beauty of his brow and eye sidebones ; also I have noted the beauty of his children and his works in the arrangement of their lives. […] Why should he be average? He is as mysterious as frost. […] [I'd be afraid to fight him] He's no struggling babe, he's a raging murderous man. " (p. 330) [story of the disastrous 8th of february 1952 when Jack lures Cody out to celebrate Cody's birthday with some girls, much to wife Evely n's disgust] "Peyotl is legal at this time, high, I'm telling you, high. 'Well, I say to Cody, and so you are Cody Pomeray', I felt like he was a ghost I'd come to see, which is exactly what he was when I left NY to come here. / Now I shall leave Frisco. I am going off to another ghost, to report... I hope it's a girl, not a baby daughter either. (Do I have a baby daugther somewhere? I have not troubled to find out, and bird's on the wing again, (lost)(and am lost)"...( 335) [beautiful portrait of Cody and 'Joanna' in early 1947, the 3-some...] "Whenever, on the East Coast on some warm spring evening, happen to be thinking of the overbulge of the land all the way to California … I see Cody's face occupying the West Coast like a big cloud"...

(342) […]

"A blade of grass waves in the sunny Frisco afternoon, it grows out through the greasy rocks of the railroad track of Cody […] / Yet, and yes, there's Cody Pomeray.... cuttin to work. A new day is dawning in the blue lagoon east over Oakland there... it's Cody going deadheading to Watsonville... I'm a fool... my heart went out to lonely sounds in the misty springtime night of wild sweet America in her powers... I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss -I am made of Cody too... and Cody is blank at last. Tree, tree, in thy bushy stand make me a vow: promise my star of pity still burns for me.... / Goodbye Cody... / Adios, you who watched the sun go down, at the rail, by my side, smiling -/ Adios, King. /// (p.396-398)

III. Ginsberg on "The Visions of the Great Rememberer"

The first edition of VOC in 1972 came with a perceptive 5-page introduction by Allen Ginsberg entitled "The Great Rememberer." Ginsberg, who had shared many of the moments described in the book, and was obviously saddened by the death of Kerouac in 1969, and Cassady's the following year. Some of his comments also address the question of Kerouac's prose and method (with an expert's knowledge of how drugs affect speech and writing), often underlining its extraordinary lyricism and/or prophetic quality : I worship Jack's candid observation of inner consciousness manifested in solitude. […] Jack wrote this book for love not for money. He gave it to the world ... that's what makes VOC a work of primitive genius that grooks next to Douanier Rousseau's visions. […] The book was a dirge for America [VOC was dedicated to "America, whatever that is"], a dirge for the American hope that Jack and his hero Neal carried so valiantly through the land after Whitman -an America of pioneers and generosity. […] Jack's phrasing was archetypal for this moment of consciousness enlarging in wonderment to notice Americanist minute particulars aside from the centers of If such an introduction by Ginsberg constitutes a historical document of literary criticism, it is interesting to note that, in the re-editions of VOC by Viking since 1993, this text has become an afterword entitled "Visions of the Great Rememberer" which, lo and behold, is much longer (30p), and is mostly made of a succession of comments that Ginsberg wrote in the summer of 1972, while reading Kerouac's book for the publisher. If it was not the length of the text provided by Ginsberg, that prompted its being reduced to a much shorter introduction, it might have been Ginsberg's very harsh remarks on America [or his underlying phrases from Kerouac's book such as this : "the word America is the sound of my unhappiness … America is being wanted by the police... and nobody cares... America's a lonely crockashit" (p.90-91), or Ginsberg's sometimes crude comments about his sexual relationship with Cassady (and with Kerouac too, he claims). About the tapes, Ginsberg makes the following remarks:

Of course Neal wasn't entirely romantically frank with Jack [meaning, always calling a spade a spade, especially if the spade involved with Neal's cat was Jack's spade]. […] The halts, switches etc are 'a slice of life' exactly reproduced, teahead life talk which had never been transcribed […]. It's real, It's art because Jack placed the actual teahead-high speech of his model-hero at the center of his book as an actual sample of the Reality he was otherwise Rhapsodizing. […] The art lies in the consciousness of doing the thing, in the sacramentalization of everyday reality […]. Jack's style of transcription of taped conversation is impeccably accurate in syntax pronunciation labeling of voices etc. -A model to study. […] We see the beauty of the tapes that Jack cherished, that they are inclusive samples of complete exchange of information and love thoughts between two men... A lot has been written about the sadness of Kerouac's last years, when he retreated to a mostly embittered life with his mother and his wine bottles, and, 12 years after VOC, he only reluctantly accepted to let Cassady drive him to the NY apartment in which Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters were celebrating their crossing of the continent on the Magic Psychedelic Bus in 1964. But one has to admire Kerouac's fidelity in friendship to the end, as proved by one of his latest interviews (the Berrigan one, of 1967) in which he confirmed his admiration for Neal's genius, claiming that the fabled Joan Anderson letter was "the greatest piece of writing" he had ever seen, that Neal "has written better" than he has, and that he was "the most intelligent man" he'd ever met.

Action Writing

To go a bit further than the notion of 'spontaneous prose' to qualify Kerouac's peculiar work, stimulating and perceptive ideas can be found in a 2006 study entitled "Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form". Author Michael Hrebeniak (H) offers these telling notions because of his conviction that Kerouac's work "embodies the 'progressive gestalt' of the arts produced by the Bohemian communities that spurred the great post WW2 consciousness in America". He believes that Kerouac's merged "fiction-poetry has a revolutionary, countercultural social purpose at the deepest level of form," that "Kerouac's swirling meditation on memory is grounded in his lifeaffirming writing," and "that Kerouac's work is born of a trans-disciplinary poetics." The latter statement comes in the wake of some of Ginsberg's assessments to the same effect. I think Hrebeniak is right, when he claims that one has to "give space to Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollock as well as to Walt Whitman and Carlos Williams," if one aims "to release the radicalism within texts that refuse to yield definitive meanings in traditional literary terms" (p.2); or that "The convergence with jazz in Kerouac's works informs the possibilities of the act of writing itself to enter the present with contemporary techniques of expression."

Other perceptive comments by Hrebeniak concern the "Dionysian insistence on creativity" of Kerouac's writing, the attempt to discover "the sacred, embodied voices of the imagination," in an experience quite reminiscent of Whitman's and with a similar "perpetual conflict with regressive drives for stability."

Conclusion

Since it can be safely claimed that The Original Scroll of On the Road and Visions of Cody constitute the pillars of the whole Duluoz Legend construction, most of the judgments passed onto the Legend are valid for its foundation. Thus when Hrebeniak considers that, "Driven by the ecstatic model of bebop, the Duluoz Legend celebrates the principles of perpetual renewal," we can confirm that both TOS and VOC amply illustrates this statement. Equally valid for our two novels, the claim that "in his search for conviviality, the rhetoric of Kerouac's narratives is vigorously performative : an act of making that abandons patterns of 'recognition'".

We cannot read those books like standard novels, especially VOC, which was much more experimental even than the Scroll, by abandoning the latter's straightforward chronological narrative structure for a complex one based on a gathering of improvisational writing episodes, surrounding and integrating the documentary element of the Tapes. Obviously, the statement that "Kerouac's passages across the land take their place among the mythic geographies of America" applies especially for OTR and VOC. And beyond that geographical dimension, these texts indeed "situate language at an existential point of discovery" because Kerouac "insists on that need to return language to its place in experience." Again, if the published version of OTR did not suffice, TOS and VOC certainly do count among the most striking experiments in that field. If they do, it is because, "Like Pollock's, Kerouac's forms emerge ecstatically" and that for him "Writing becomes the work of unleashing perception" (H. 260).

Although it may be perceived, at first consideration, as contradictory with the above statements on writing in ecstasy, both The Original Scroll that became On the Road and the Tape Transcripts fitted in Visions of Cody are documents that show how Jack Kerouac invented new ways of using language to produce his own poetic truth -in works that have become themselves founding documents of a major cultural shift in America. In total defiance of the kind of "documentary culture" that has made it possible to turn America into what it so often seems to have become : a data-controlled nightmare.

Bibliography

Allamand, Carole. "La Voix du paradis: La Québécitude de Jack Kerouac", in Etudes Françaises, 2004;40 (1): 131-48.

Berrigan, Ted. "The Art of Fiction: Jack Kerouac", pp. 51-81(1967 interview) in Hayes, Kevin J. (ed. and introd.) Conversations with Jack Kerouac. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi;2005.

  […] Cody is the brother I lost -He is the Arbiter of what I Think. (320) "O brother Cody Pomeray of Night! Why do you not speak to me! Who has spawned your Fear in the Foggy Dark?" (321)


In order to insert this paper into a very sketchy literary frame covering about the last one hundred years, I will say that the masks of Mexico apparent in Larry McMurtry's fiction are situated -both historically and narratologically -about halfway between those found in K.A. Porter's short stories and a recent Cormac McCarthy national bestseller.

On the one hand, finely crafted stories of Mexico or Texas in the 1920s with even female Indian characters as heroines -like Maria Conception -and, on the other, a voyeuristic, staccato, script-like text with three white honcho dudes as heroes, surrounded by shadowy and anonymous characters generically labeled "Mexicans" and ever ready to be at the white man's service, as long as the bottom line shows the right amount in dollars, in a place purported to be "No country for old men" today (of course, one has to admit that reality beats fiction by a long shot these days, when it comes to spectacular violence South of the Rio Grande these days).

In t the latter book, the Mexicans are, in the best case, friendly nurses and doctors, but they are more likely to be cynical cabdrivers or hotel receptionists with drastically reduced lifespans, when their part is not limited to creating patterns on walls, as in the following passage occurring in a Texan motel along the Rio Grande : "Chigurh [the psychopathic and nonethess very clever hero] stood listening at the door. Then he punched out the lock cylinder with the airgun and kicked open the door. / A Mexican in a green guayabera had sat up on the bed and was reaching for a small machinegun beside him. Chigurh shot him three times so fast it sounded like one long gunshot and left most of the upper part of him spread across the headboard and the wall behind it." Etc. Goes to show that in certain books it don't pay to sit in a motel room while Mexican... Never mind why not. What matters is who pulls the trigger first, just like in good ole pulp westerns 150 years ago. The closest explanation given for Chigurh's killing-lust is a taste for method and a sensitive ego. One -or THE -beauty of this modern example of the Southern Gothic is its refined ending: the monster is still alive, thus the reader may go on quivering in his bed when the book is read. Now, it might be objected that K.A. Porter's heroine Maria Conception, notwithstanding the ring of such a name, was not exactly your model of true Christianity or of Catholic female morality. After all, as you might rmember, at the tender age of 19 or so, she kills her husband's mistress in cold blood while the latter is still weak from giving birth, snatches up the baby to make up for the loss of her own, and resumes marital life with her favorably impressed husband and with the tacit approval of the village population.

Here was some serious food for thought, couched in beautiful prose, and published in the thirties in a country where mere scarlet letters had left dreadful marks on the fate of women characters, not only in fiction. Of course several of Porter's witty stories involved bohemian anglo characters representative of the so-called lost generation -to which Porter herself belonged -who, as writers, journalists or artists lived on the cheap in Mexico "in order to study the native customs" (p.78). More often than not, they did so from the kind of low perspective one gets while rolling under some bar tables or in brothel beds.

Thus the protagonist of That Tree "had really wanted to be a cheerful bum lying under a tree in a good climate, writing poetry" (p.65), until his first wife, a blond teacher from the Midwest, gave him a good kick and got him off his bum to become a successful journalist.

Such Porter characters are recalled by the ones appearing in Larry McMurtry's novels of the sixties and seventies. But in other respects, McMurtry's protagonists are closer to the ones in McCarthy's books than Porter's, for they are not the cosmopolitan American ex-pats of the 1920s, but simple visitors from the neighboring borderland, Texas. Mexico is not reached by plane or boat, but by a hop over the Rio Grande -usually in a car or a pickup truck.

In The Last Picture Show (hence abridged in LPS, published in 1966 but set in the early fifties), Sonny Crawford and Duane Moore, two high school seniors from the mythical small town of Thalia, Northern Texas, decide to hit Mexico out of sheer boredom and frustration with their amorous and professional prospects. Their mildly epic trip to the border is all the more interesting as it constitutes one of the notable episodes left out of the classic and eponymous movie directed by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971.

Another auto-censored episode in that movie is the less than glorious gang rape of a blind cow by the teenagers of the place -from proud seniors, Duane included, down to sometimes undersized freshmen. One should note that no representatives of ethnic minorities appear among the population of Thalia and that the first mention of non-Caucasians in the novel is made by Jimmy Sue, a female car-hop and occasional whore who has to "peddle herself to make ends meet" but has her pride nonetheless. For, as she puts it, "The only thing I draw the line at, is Mixicans and niggers."

It might realistically be assumed that, except for seasonal jobs as farmhands, no Mexicans actually lived anywhere close to the Court House in a place like Thalia at the time and, therefore, that the young protagonists had no direct social contact with such people. So when Sonny and Duane decide to hit the road to Mexico on impulse, after getting beaten up by some boys from a neighboring town over the matter of Duane's girlfriend, they do so in accordance with a local tradition : everybody, at least once in their youth, has something of an adventurous trip further than Austin or Dallas.

Before the two boys have tanked up their old pickup truck, they are warned of the dangers resulting from drinking buggy water or catching the clap if they get drunk on tequila, by older residents who reminisce nostalgically about their own experiences. After being lent a map, they opt for Matamoros as the goal of their trip because Duane has heard that "it's about the wildest". So that's what they will go for : the reputedly wildest Mexican border town, while their motherly friend Genevieve, the pleasant and sexy café waitress, "wishes she was young again and free and could go rattling off across Texas toward the Rio Grande".

What happens to the protagonists during some 12 hours spent in Matamoros takes about 10 pages in chapter 16 of a novel that counts 26 chapters, and amounts to little more than the experience of one night of total existential confusion followed by a bad hangover and a dreadfully tiring drive back North. Worse, the trip's exciting value gets totally overshadowed by the fact that upon returning to Thalia, Sonny and Duane find out that their friend and mentor, Sam the Lion, owner of the café, of the poolhall and of the picture show, died of a stroke during their short absence, thus creating a void that signifies the brutal end of their boyhood and the necessity to face a number of existential choices on their own. with people even at night; for the staggering sum of 15 $ they were shown an old dirty movie projected on the back of a calendar in someone's dirty room, involving a woman having sex with both a man and a dog. The boys were speechless with shock and held spellbound by the ugliness of the action, but also "immediately felt the trip was worthwhile, if only for gossip value. Nobody in Thalia had ever seen a dog and a lady behaving that way".

They drove on to "Boys' Town" in the outskirts of Matamoros (which must be understood as a place where boys were likely to have fun, and not girls) and discovered a district with some twenty places at streetcorners lit up with neon lights, and dark rows of strange cribs in-between. Having been advised to hit the Cabaret ZeeZee, they found a place with some couples dancing to a jukebox and many American boys -many from Texas A&M -sitting at tables. After having drunk 5 or 6 bottles of his first Mexican beer, Sonny followed a pretty young girl called Maria to a dingy little room closed only by a curtain, was surprised to find out that she was clearly pregnant and fell asleep before concluding the 25 $ act, he had paid for. He woke up in mid-morning alone with the sun in his face since the room had no ceiling or roof, vomited in the street while the whores of Matamoros around him -much more cheerful than they had been in the cabaret at night -were filling their pitchers with water from the water-wagon driven by a friendly old man, who gave Sonny some water to rinse out his mouth.

What Duane experienced is not told, but Sonny found him asleep in the pickup truck, sick and in even worse shape. While driving across the river, Sonny managed to notice that the water of the Rio Grande was green in daylight, but both boys "wondered why in the world they had been so foolish as to come all the way to Mexico. Thalia seemed an impossible distance away." Later during the tedious drive, the boys got anxious over their health and stopped every fifty miles to pee, "just to be sure they could." What McMurtry didn't need to explain then -but what we need to tell our students today, is that, once upon a time, there was the dreadful notion whispered about, that "dirty sex" could cause your thing to fall off… It is only towards evening, with the coolness, that the boys got a second wind and "that the trip ceased to seem like such a fiasco; after all, they had been to Mexico, visited whorehouses, seen dirty movies. In Thalia, it would be regarded as a great adventure."

How great the distance from the land beyond the Rio Grande is, gets reinforced by the narrator toward the end of the chapter : "The country around Thalia had never looked so good to them as it did when they came back into it, at four in the morning. […] All seemed comfortable, familiar, private even, part of theirs and no one else's. After the strangeness of Matamoros the lights of Thalia were especially reassuring." So, if we draw a bottom line under this escapade from the characters' point of view, it is quite clear that, because of their general ignorance of matters Mexican -starting with the language-and the material conditions of a trip that took them only a few miles beyond the border of a country, whose size and wealth they can hardly estimate, Sonny and Duane are likely to propagate the usual American cliches about Mexico : a poor, dirty and chaotic place, where people don't sleep at night, seem to have neither moral principles nor shame and are ready to sell anything for a few dollars.

What Sonny and Duane have accomplished in their own eyes and in the eyes of their buddies in Thalia, is the ritual trip of young, barely educated, male Texans, who have dared cross a border into a cultural wilderness where they spilled a few of their wild oats in brief uncontrolled sexual acts with whores, and saw a few unbelievable, hardcore pornographic pictures on a bad screen.

They have gotten away with that bewildering, if not downright frightening, experience of cultural otherness, and once the fear of having perhaps caught one of those diseases has disappeared, they are likely to feel confirmed not only in their virility (even if the sexual experiences were not very rewarding as such), but mostly in the definite superiority of their own waspish culture, and are thus also likely to reinforce the well-know patterns of racial condescension that are still rampant today. Confirmation of the realism of such prejudices can be found in articles like the one that Ariela J. Gross published in a recent issue of the Law and History Review under the title "Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness."

Having reached such a conclusion, should we burn LPS and remove McMurtry from our reading-lists, on account of insufferable political incorrectness? -Hell, no! The beauty of this novel is that its narrator is much more aware of what's going on than his characters.

While Duane and Sonny's perspectives are naturally limited by their youth and ignorance, the omniscient narrator of this fiction is far from restricting his tale through focalization by the Even if the description of the more than 1,000 km-drive is very brief, the narrator does point out the boys' surprise at the variety of landscapes once they reach the valley (they grew up in immense, dreary, flat North Texas where a mere tree creates relief) and their marveling at the piles of fresh vegetables along the road (incidentally, they never even take the time to eat anything while in Mexico, and only notice the pervading smell of onions in town). What amazes the boys and what the narrator underlines, is a totally different way of life -there is so much going on in the public sphere of the streets -a different social organization and, above all, a much more open and candid approach to sex even as a marketable fact of life.

While the boys are obsessed with getting what is taboo in their home-town, the narrator depicts a society in which showing dirty movies to outsiders can be done in a private bedroom while a woman is working in the kitchen and kids are sleeping on the bed. This casualness is what shocks the Texans most. Thus Sonny is stunned by discovering that his chosen whore is pregnant, and that she has already two children. While he is too drunk to remember his fear of catching "something" and even thinking of a protection, she is the experienced woman who checks his sex for signs of a potential VD.

Altogether, the picture of the Matamoros nightlife given by McMurtry shows that the visiting gringos are mostly ignorant teenagers and students who get milked for their dollars, and are otherwise totally ignored. Although there is an obvious case to be made about the massive corruption of social mores brought into this Mexican border-town by hords of horny dollar-waiving Gringos, especially with regard to the sexual exploitation of women, the scene of the morning-after shows a very interesting humanity that hung-over Sonny can barely register.

While he tries to recover his wits, he is surrounded by women who not only totally ignore him but are described as having cheerful social intercourse which each other while filling their water-pitchers. Without in the least aiming to pretend that these women might lead an ideal life, the lesson that the reader might draw -if less hung-over than the focalizing character, Sonny -is that : a) the lives of the whores is not limited to just whoring; b) other aspects of their lives are more fun than sitting around bars waiting for a customer and then dealing with whatever he wants to do or can do, assuming he has any kind of awareness and/or self-confidence.

Such remarks might sound trite or far-fetched or even politically incorrect, but the chapter of LPS devoted to the whoring excursion in Mexico needs to put in perspective against the general backdrop of life in Thalia, Texas. Where the heck would one find an assembly of cheerful women on any morning of the year in that town? At the Café? At the general store? At school? Is there a single cheerful laughter to be heard anywhere in that town? Or is it sardonic glee at best? For what McMurtry does in LPS, is to consistently expose the cultural poverty, hypocrisy and bigotry informing the average living conditions in a Texan small town in the early fifties -which he knows first-hand, having grown up near Wichita Falls in those times.

Between the new-rich oil-millionaires like Jacy's father and the car-hop at the new drive-in who gets hardly paid for taking their hamburgers, fries and cokes to the customers sitting in their cars, a fairly dysfunctional and very unequal society of mostly dissatisfied and unhappy individuals is described. On top of the harsh climate and economic disparity, it is mostly the effects of puritanism that weigh on people and drag them down. Ignorance, prejudice, fear and hypocrisy create barriers and dramas. Sonny has an affair with a sad woman stuck in a marriage with the football coach who gets the English teacher fired by accusing him of his own homosexual leanings ; a shy classmate bullied by his preacher-father almost gets lynched for having dropped the panties of an unsuspecting five-year old girl. Etc.

Between the glamorous sexiness of Hollywood stars seen at the picture show, and the cool orgies indulged in by the rich kids of the Wichita Country Club on the one hand, and the repressiveness of the churches, the law, and public opinion, on the other, the young are hopelessly confused. Thus the full picture given of the trip to Mexico in LPS takes more depth and shades for the reader, because even the brief excursion beyond the Rio Grande allows him/her to put in perspective whatever conclusions Sonny and Duane might reach from their experience. Behind the inscrutable bland or grinning Mexican faces they met during some 12 hours on the other side, there is plenty more to discover…

The next McMurtry character to give it a shot is young Danny Deck in and All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers. He teaches some Aggies lessons in gallantry in a borderbrothel and has an eccentric old uncle who lives in a crazy camel farm in the desert where he lights a fire every night as a beacon for Zapata. At the end of the novel, Danny tries to drown the manuscript of his second novel in the Rio Grande. Now why the heck would he do that ? Y'all might be told next year…

  the Rio Grande in Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show : What Kind of a Rite of Passage? 1

  1Paper read at the 2008 AFEA Conference on « SUDS/SOUTHS» on a panel entitled »From the South to El Sur / Documented aliens: the Masks of Mexico and Hispanicity in US Literary Imagination » chaired by Yves-Charles GRANDJEAT, Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux 3 and Jacques POTHIER, Université Versailles Saint-Quentin (Congrès de l'Association Française d'Etudes Américaines, 28-31 mai 2008, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier).

  protagonists. (As opposed to what McCormack does in the book mentioned earlier, in which only the sheriff's thoughts are exposed in separate chapters, while most other protagonists are mere killer robots seen thru external focalization by a strangely unenlightened narrator.)


Julie Marsault

Catherine Rudin

Keywords: relative clause, internally headed relative clause, definite article, relativizer

Relative clauses in Omaha-Ponca (Umoⁿhoⁿ) are internally headed. They are identical in form to non-relative clauses except for the presence of a clause-final article which serves to nominalize (or relativize) the clause. The head of the relative clause can have any function and can be any type of nominal (noun, pronominal, or null). The clause-final article also has other functions, so the distinction between relative clauses and other types of clauses or nominal phrases is not always sharp.

Relative clauses in Omaha-Ponca (Umoⁿhoⁿ) * 1. Introduction

Relative clauses (RCs) in Umoⁿhoⁿ are internally headed; that is, the head noun is part of the clause, occupying the same syntactic position it would hold in a "normal", non-relative clause, instead of being a sister to a clause which contains a coreferential gap. Compare the externally headed relative clause in (1) with the internally headed one in (2). The rough tree diagrams below each example correspond to the two types. (Throughout the paper the head noun of each RC is underlined, the associated article is double-underlined, and the verb stem is boldfaced.)

(1) Externally headed relative clause (English) [DP [DP the book] Internally headed relative clauses (IHRCs) are found in most if not all Siouan languages, as documented in a number of works: Lakhota [START_REF] Williamson | An indefiniteness restriction for relative clauses in Lakhota[END_REF][START_REF] Ullrich | Lakota grammar handbook[END_REF][START_REF] Ullrich | Modification, secondary predication and multi-verb constructions in Lakota. Düsseldorf[END_REF], Osage [START_REF] Quintero | Osage grammar[END_REF]), Hoocąk (Helmbrecht in progress), Hidatsa [START_REF] Boyle | The syntax and semantics of internally headed relative clauses in Hidatsa[END_REF] and Crow [START_REF] Graczyk | Incorporation and cliticization in Crow morphosyntax[END_REF]. Not all scholars agree that all RCs in Siouan languages are IHRCs, but IHRCs are certainly the norm for Siouan languages. Umoⁿhoⁿ is thus typical of Siouan languages in having IHRCs. Umoⁿhoⁿ, along with at least some other Dhegiha languages, differs from other branches of Siouan in the specifics of the construction, including especially the fact that there is no dedicated relativizer morpheme in the language: instead RCs are simply nominalized clauses marked (usually) with one of the many definite articles.

In this paper we will first demonstrate, in section 2, that Umoⁿhoⁿ relative clauses are in fact internally headed. This section also covers the characteristic features of IHRCs in this language and crosslinguistically, including the fact that the head is always indefinite: the accompanying article is associated with the entire IHRC, not the head. Section 3 digs deeper into the range of different types of IHRCs in Umoⁿhoⁿ, showing that (1) RC heads can be any nominal function, that is, any type of argument or adjunct; (2) RC heads can also be any nominal form: overt noun, null or pronominal; and (3) the typical relativizing article can be absent. In section 4 we briefly mention some issues for future research.

Characteristics of RCs in Umoⁿhoⁿ

Umoⁿhoⁿ IHRCs have been described by [START_REF] Koontz | Preliminary sketch of the Omaha-Ponca language[END_REF], [START_REF] Rudin | Relative clauses in Omaha-Ponca (Siouan)[END_REF], [START_REF] Rudin | Omaha-Ponca[END_REF], as well as [START_REF] Marsault | Valency-changing operations in Umóⁿhoⁿ: affixation, incorporation, and syntactic constructions[END_REF], which is the source of much of this paper. In the earliest of these, Koontz (1984:171) writes: "the technique for forming relative clauses involves substituting for the head [noun] in the matrix clause the entire modifying clause, with its own version of the head [noun] intact". This corresponds to the definition of internally headed relative clauses that we find in Creissels (2006:244), for example. Later works have all agreed with this basic description. Reduced to its simplest form, an Umoⁿhoⁿ RC is as in (3) -a complete clause, normally followed by one of the group of words usually called articles. The article acts as a nominalizer, turning the CP (complementizer phrase) into a DP. It functions in a similar way to relativizers in other languages. We will sometimes refer to this item as a "relativizer" for convenience.

(

3) [[clause] article ]

The status of the articles, their meaning, usage, and whether in fact they are articles or some other type of particle, is a complex and much-discussed topic in Dhegiha languages. (See for instance Eschenberg 2005.) A discussion of the article system would take us too far afield here. For purposes of this paper just notice in Figure 8 that the articles carry information not only of definiteness, but also animacy, position, obviation, and other features. Looking in more detail at the Umoⁿhoⁿ relative clause given in (2) and repeated in its fullsentence context in (4a), we see that the RC (bracketed) serves as the object of the main verb, thizé 'get'. The head noun, tanúka 'meat' is in the position it would normally occupy if "he promised he would get meat" was an independent clause. The only difference in form from the corresponding independent clause in (4b) is that the noun cannot be followed directly by an article; instead, an article, k h e in this case, marks the end of the clause. The demonstrative phrase thé k h e 'this thing' is an appositive; appositive phrases commonly occur with both IHRCs and other types of nominals in Umoⁿhoⁿ.

(4) a. The clause-initial position of the head might be taken to suggest that it is separate from the clause, i.e. that this is actually an externally-headed RC like the English example in (1). There are two reasons to believe that this is incorrect and that Umoⁿhoⁿ RCs are in fact internally headed. The first of these is that initial position is not absolute. Although the head noun almost always appears at the beginning of the RC, it can be preceded by another element. [START_REF] Rudin | Relative clauses in Omaha-Ponca (Siouan)[END_REF] pro-vides example (5) from elicitation (Rudin et al. 1989-92); both sentences in (5) were provided as a translation of "The boy wants the man who lives here to leave". Clifford Wolfe proposed (5a) first, and then (5b) when asked to repeat. In (5a), the head noun is preceded by the adverbial adjunct théthudi 'here', and we see once again that the RC has the same structure as an independent clause, with considerable word-order freedom.

(5) a. The second argument is that head nouns are never followed by articles, as noted by both [START_REF] Koontz | Preliminary sketch of the Omaha-Ponca language[END_REF] and [START_REF] Rudin | Relative clauses in Omaha-Ponca (Siouan)[END_REF]. It is a well known characteristic of IHRCs across languages that they always have a morphologically indefinite head (see for instance [START_REF] Williamson | An indefiniteness restriction for relative clauses in Lakhota[END_REF][START_REF] Platero | Head position and internally headed relative clauses[END_REF]). This "Indefiniteness Restriction" has been attributed to compositional semantic effects which are beyond the scope of this paper; for our purposes the point is just that a restriction to indefinite heads in Umoⁿhoⁿ RCs is expected if they are IHRCs but would be unexpected for external-headed relatives. Since all articles in Umoⁿhoⁿ are definite, the head of an IHRC cannot be determined by any article. Instead, the RC as a whole is almost always determined by a single article, which functions as a clause nominalizer, marking the clause as a DP. In ( 6), the head noun wa'ú 'woman' has no article, and the whole clause is at the same time both relativized and determined (marked as definite) by the article akʰá. {'The woman who's coming over here} is my grandmother. ' (Rudin et al. 1989-92:Tape 17 / Clifford Wolfe)

In a simple sentence the noun wa'ú would be expected to have the article, as in ( 7), where the DP wa'ú akʰá 'the woman' is the subject of the sentence. Compare (6), where the notation'Ø' indicates that no article is possible in that position.

(7) Wa'ú woman akʰá art.px dúda here a-i come-px 'The woman is coming over here' (constructed example).

The articles used as relativizers mark the role of the RC in the matrix clause, not that of the head noun in the relative clause. For instance, the choice of proximate versus obviative article depends on the function of the RC within the matrix clause, not the function of the head noun within the RC. So,in (8), where the head noun is the subject of the predicate inside the RC, but the RC itself is the object in the matrix clause, the relativizer is an obviative article, generally used for object rather than subject.

Diversity of RCs: range of functions and structures

Relativized arguments and adjuncts

All types of arguments can be relativized in Umoⁿhoⁿ. Example (5) above illustrates the relativization of the subject of an intransitive active verb. (To repeat, the relativized syntactic role is visible within the RC: 'the man lives here'. It must not be mistaken for the syntactic role of the RC in the matrix clause.) Other relativized syntactic roles are exemplified below. In each case, the RC is between brackets, the head noun is single-underlined and the verb stem is boldfaced, as usual. (Note that in (9), théthu 'here' is not a verb stem, but it is used predicatively. It corresponds to an intransitive stative construction.) A1sg.hope 'I hope that, as this letter goes very soon, you will give one and send it to {the writer who is here}. ' (Dorsey 1890:509.2-3 / Dúba-moⁿthiⁿ) Since property words are verbs in this language, any noun modified by a property stative verb is a RC in Umoⁿhoⁿ. This is the analysis followed by Koontz (1984: 175), who illustrates it with (10), another example of relativization of the subject of a stative predicate. 13) shows the relativization of the theme of 'í 'to give x to y'. Example (14) shows the relativization of the recipient of the same verb, but the RC is in apposition to the noun phrase headed by míⁿzhiⁿga 'girl'; note that the appositive phrases, míⁿzhiⁿga thiⁿkʰé 'the girl' and úwi a-'i thiⁿkʰé '(the one) I gave the earrings to, ' have the same final article. The RC here is a headless relative clause; that is, its head is null as indicated by "Ø". go-A1pl-O3pl-caus=pl 'We sent the horses towards the mouth of {the small stream by which we camped}. ' (Dorsey 1890:438.3 / Páthiⁿ-noⁿpázhi) Adjuncts of time and place can also be relativized, as shown in ( 16) and ( 17). ( 16 17) shows a RC corresponding to an adjunct of place. We assume that the RC is headless, and precedes the phrase pamú ámusta 'right above the descent of the hill, ' and that both together form the adjunct. The literal translation would be: "When he goes, where they surrounded the herd, on the hill on top of it, I will lie looking at you. " The RC can be recognized from the article that nominalizes it.

Headless relative clauses

In Umoⁿhoⁿ, numerous RCs lack an overt head noun, as already noted for ( 14) and ( 17). Another example is (18). The absence of a head noun is highlighted by "Ø". This kind of RC is very common in Umoⁿhoⁿ. Note that when the head noun is null, it sometimes implicitly is taken to refer to a specific entity, as in (18), or it can be non-specific, and refer to any entity that would match the description of the RC. In the latter case, the head noun can be expressed by a generic term like iⁿdádoⁿ 'what' in (19), with the same semantic result. These headless RCs, or RCs with generic heads, correspond to free relative clauses in English [START_REF] Rudin | Relative clauses in Omaha-Ponca (Siouan)[END_REF]; see also Creissels 2006:208). want=pl.neg=hab 'They don't want to do {what we teach them}. ' (Rudin et al. 1989-92:Tape 15 / Bertha Wolfe)

The fact that the relativizers and definite determiners are the same set of morphemes (the "articles"), and the head noun is regularly missing, explains why in many contexts nouns are difficult to distinguish from verbs and relative clauses can be confused with simple DPs, especially when the supposedly relativized verb takes the ambiguous prefix wa-(which has both antipassive and nominalizing functions), as in ( 17) and ( 18). The RC wa-móⁿthoⁿ=noⁿ thiⁿkʰe 'the one who steals' could alternatively be analyzed as a noun phrase 'the thief'.

Some RC lack a nominalizing/relativizing article

Umoⁿhoⁿ relative clauses can also lack a relativizer/nominalizer (article), though this occurs infrequently. This is the case in (20) for the relativization of an applicative object (an instrument), and probably in (21) for an object. ( 20 (The end of the sentence is inaudible. The RC seems to be an apposition to shé-ama'these ones' and would be expected to end with the same article. The translation is mine (Marsault). Octa gave a word-for-word translation.)

Example ( 22) shows two relative clauses, the first lacking an article, and the second lacking a head-noun (another good example of the tricky noun-verb distinction). The reason why some RCs lack an article remains to be understood. Non-clausal DPs also lack an article in some cases, for instance when the referent is easily accessible or when it is indefinite or generic (see [START_REF] Gordon | Information-structural variations in Siouan languages[END_REF]Marsault 2021: §8.4). Inasmuch as RCs externally act as DPs, it seems logical that they are subject to the same kind of article deletion. This topic requires further investigation.

At the typological level, [START_REF] Rudin | Relative clauses in Omaha-Ponca (Siouan)[END_REF] notes that internally-headed relative clauses are a feature that often appears cross-linguistically with other types of nominalized clauses (see [START_REF] Culy | The syntax and semantics of internally headed relative clauses[END_REF]. Creissels (2006:246) provides a list of features often found in languages that have IHRCs, among which are the clause-final position of the verb, that the relativizer is typically positioned at the right edge of the clause, and that it is not uncommon to find constructions without any relativizer (which supports our point here).

Conclusion: theoretical issues, open questions

Within Umoⁿhoⁿ, the most interesting issue raised by IHRCs is how they contribute to an understanding of the articles. As mentioned earlier, the Dhegiha article system is unusual in encoding a number of semantic features which are not typical of definite articles across languages, such as position, animacy, and obviation. Furthermore, this group of words has functions other than the typical article function of nominal determiner; all (or nearly all) of the "articles" also function as clause-final markers of some sort too: complementizer, evidential, or various types of auxiliaries [START_REF] Eschenberg | The article system of Umóⁿhoⁿ (Omaha)[END_REF]). In the case of the IHRC, the article seems almost balanced between clausal and nominal functions; it is clause-final, but it also marks the end of a DP and functions as a nominalizing element.

Widening the focus beyond Umoⁿhoⁿ and Siouan, IHRCs are cross-linguistically rare (occurring in less than 3 percent of Dryer's 2013 sample of 824 languages), and although they are found in a number of language families, they are still quite under-studied. In addition to Siouan languages, IHRCs have been described in Quechua [START_REF] Cole | The structure of internally headed relative clauses[END_REF][START_REF] Hastings | The syntax and semantics of relativization and quantification: the case of Quechua[END_REF]), Navajo [START_REF] Basilico | The Navajo relative clause[END_REF][START_REF] Willie | Why there is nothing missing in Navajo relative clauses[END_REF]), Korean [START_REF] Chung | Differences between externally and internally headed relative clause constructions[END_REF], at least one Tai language (Moroney 2017), several African languages [START_REF] Culy | The syntax and semantics of internally headed relative clauses[END_REF], and have been noted to occur in various others.

A number of formal syntactic issues raised by IHRCs remain open. Deeper study of IHRCs in Umoⁿhoⁿ and other Siouan languages could contribute to the general linguistic conversation over these issues. [START_REF] Rudin | Relative clauses in Omaha-Ponca (Siouan)[END_REF] listed several questions, at least two of which remain unanswered: (a) Is there an external (empty) head N or NP (at any level)? (b) Is there movement of the head N or NP or an abstract wh-element to some position such as Spec or Comp? (at LF)? Even asking these questions obviously depends on a particular theoretical framework (and may be of little interest to most Siouanists). We will not go into the arguments here except to note that, while some works (e.g. Moroney 2017) have suggested both answers may be "yes", the issue is far from settled.

Figure

  Figure 8: The article system of Umóⁿhoⁿ

( 8 )

 8 Relative clause as object of matrix clause that, as this letter goes very soon, you will give one and send it to {the writer who is here}. '(Dorsey 1890:509.2-3 / Dúba-moⁿthiⁿ)

  press {these heated irons} repeatedly against the wounds, (...)'(Dorsey 1890:231.19 / Páthiⁿ-noⁿpázhi) Literally: When I press against the wounds those {irons which are heated by fire}, (...).In a transitive clause, either the subject or the object can be relativized, as shown in (11) and (12) respectively: (11) Relativization of the subject of a transitive verb "... " … á-biamá say-report {níashiⁿga {person shínudoⁿ dog thixé pursue ahí arrive akʰá.} art:px} 'said {the men who had pursued the dog and arrived at the Orphan's}. ' (Dorsey 1890:113received {the letter which you sent home}. ' (Dorsey 1890:511.1 / Ishtáthabi) Example (

( 13 )

 13 Relativization of the theme in a ditransitive clause {shóⁿge {horse shéna no.longer oⁿ-thá-'i P1sg-A2-give thoⁿkʰá } art.obv.pl } t'a=í die=pl '{The horses which you gave me} have died. ' (Dorsey 1890:480.2 / Pí-zi-thíⁿge) (14) Relativization of the recipient in a ditransitive clause the girl, {(the one) I gave the earrings to.}' (Rudin et al. 1989-92:Tape 17 / Mary Clay)Example (15) illustrates the relativization of an applicative object indicating a location (inessive locative 'in', introduced by the applicative prefix u-). The applicative verb is utí 'to camp in x'.(15) Relativization of an applicative object thé-oⁿ-woⁿ-tha-í.

'

  When he goes, I will lie looking at you, right above the descent of the hill {where they have surrounded the herd from time to time}. '(Dorsey 1890:45.10 / Nudóⁿ-axa)

  {the one who steals}. '(Rudin et al. 1989-92:Tape 3 / Mary Clay)

  used to take care of {the packhorses} for {those who surrounded the herd}. '(Dorsey 1890:466.2 / Frank La Flesche)

  ) Relativization of an adjunct of time that you shall see it by {the day that I see you}. '(Dorsey 1890:741.7 / Fred Merrick)

	'I think Example (
	ki	{óⁿba	wi-tóⁿbe	tʰe }	étʰoⁿdoⁿ	wa-shtóⁿbe	tatʰé	ebthégoⁿ.
	and	{day	A1sg/P2.see	art.vert}	by.that.time	antip-A2.see	irr	A1sg.think

The question mark in parentheses is in Dorsey's original translation.