Omar Swartz

 

Exploring the Beat Attitude: Kerouac's Cultural Rhetoric

Prefatory Comment

This paper was written at the request of the organizers of the 6th Annual Beat Attitudes Conference at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. The paper was delivered as the main lecture to the conference on October 5, 2001.

I am an unlikely speaker for this event. I am much younger than most of those who have addressed this conference in the past, many of whom were contemporaries of Kerouac or long established English scholars. I was born in 1967, two years before Kerouac's death, and many decades removed from the 1940s and 1950s which provided the historical context for much of Kerouac's writing. In chronological terms, the Beat Generation was the generation of my parents. My mother, for instance, was seventeen when On the Road (1957) was published.

My formative college years occurred during the mid- to late-1980s--a period of time in which the counter-culture, in most all of its forms, had retreated from college campuses (for what remains, see Epstein, 1993, and Frank, 1998). Once, Timothy Leary and Wavy Gravy spoke on my campus, but they were afterthoughts and anachronisms, as were the occasional classes offered on the 1960s or on the literature of the Beat Generation. My generation came of age when the rest of the nation, giddy with the patriotism and militarism of Ronald Reagan, was busy silencing that part of themselves that questioned, searched, and resisted in the not-so-distant past.

To put this in perspective, I was a sophomore in college when George Will (1988) published his vicious attack on Kerouac and on the people of Lowell, Massachusetts, for daring to commemorate Kerouac with a park. It is not enough for many in our society to curtail and to roll back the political and social gains made by Kerouac, the Beats, and the counter-culture. There has been, and continues to be, an attack on their memory, an effort to discredit them as an idea. In short, a concerted effort has been made to make the very thought of social, cultural, and political change unthinkable (Chomsky, 1989).

My generation has largely bought into this reactionary cultural rhetoric. We have become pacified, and, because of it, we are much poorer as a civilization. The United States is a civilization, even an empire, one with influence and affect all over the globe (Parenti, 1995). Thus, as we grow culturally and spiritually rigid, the rest of the world experiences less room for diversity and for political and economic equity. Whether we call this rigidity "globalization," "McDonaldization" (Ritzer, 1993), or the "Americanization" of the world, the effect is the same--privatization, pauperization, and the institutilization of a stultifying homogeneity grounded in the religion of consumption.

Will had to attack Kerouac, just as we choose to celebrate Kerouac at conferences and festivals such as this, because Kerouac stands for something that is central to understanding the United States as a world power. The Beats understood well enough that power without spirit is dangerous. As Kerouac wrote in The Dharma Bums, "I wished the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's feed money to blow their heads off anyway" (217). So the Beats, along with many others in our history (people such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Emma Goldman, and Eugene Debs) tried to construct a spirit and to forge a sense of decency and respect for life and humanity, helping temper the expansive, violent, and often corrupting influence of U.S. power.

Will, a leading conservative intellectual, knows how powerful this spirit can be, and how this spirit can interfere with established wealth and privilege, how it has done so in the past. Will understands that the 1960s constituted a "crisis of democracy" (Sklar, 1980) in which people began to take back the streets, to re-learn their lives, and to express themselves in ways that contrasted with, and denied, normative American ideology. So Will had to kick Kerouac's bones (yet again) as if the dust were enough to make all the hope in our hearts turn to stone.

In spite of the limitations of my generation, I feel at home among the participants of this conference. We are here to honor a person, a group of people, and a way of life that is important to who we are as individuals. While there is a wider, global dimension to our work, we experience our lived inspiration as thinkers, artists, and scholars, and that is what matters most to our lives. Inspiration is the source of our creativity and the animator of our spirits. We are here today because we are inspired by Kerouac and by the "Beat Attitude." This is our common ground. Through my identification with Beat culture, no matter my age, I have lived close to the Beat Attitude that we are here to discuss.

In what follows, I define how I see Kerouac as a cultural rhetorician, reviewing and extending some of the claims and positions I developed in my book-length study of On The Road (Swartz, 1999). Kerouac's vision in On The Road involved a radical critique of traditional authority and dominant cultural practices in the United States. After discussing this critique and its implications for cultural work today, I will compare Kerouac's earlier vision with his critique as found in The Dharma Bums.

Kerouac as Cultural Rhetorician

When my book on Kerouac was published, I took great satisfaction in having given something back to the group of people who, collectively, helped make me who I am. The book was about the Beat "attitude" and where, in part, it came from and how to understand its significance today. Scholarship should not be about the past; rather, it is about forging tools from the past to manage the problems of the present (Swartz, 1997). Everything I wrote about Kerouac was my attempt to make sense of our world. It so happens that the two worlds--the world in which Kerouac lived and the world in which we live--share much in common, which makes Kerouac important to us today in ways in which other writers are not (Nicosia, 1994, 1-4).

I wrote about the Beat Attitude because I share it, having lived it vicariously in the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others. But I also understand this attitude because of my experience living in this society. Art and life are symbiotic. Beat literature caused me to experience the world in a certain way and my experience of the world helped me to understand the experience of Beat literature. As a result of this process, my life is different than it would have been had people like Kerouac never wrote. Many others feel similarly. Douglas (2000), for example, sums up her relationship with Kerouac with these words: "I, for one, seem to know Kerouac better, he's dearer to me, than all but a few people in my actual life, and the extended confession he called his 'true-story novels' tells me that I am somehow just as important to him" (8). Kerouac has this sort of power over people. This sort of intimacy we feel with him makes his writings, his ideas, his visions, particularly appealing.

Like Kerouac's writing, my book was spiritually (at least) autobiographical: writing about Kerouac was my way of trying to understand myself and the wider counter-culture to which I have always looked toward with respect and admiration. Because this counter-culture (broadly defined) has been subject to so much attack and ridicule, and because its political power and influence has fallen sharply over the years, I felt an intense desire to publicize this respect and admiration and to give voice to the millions of people around the country and the globe who have struggled to make our lives more humane and beautiful.

The strength of my book lies in its passion and in its clearly stated purpose--by using Kerouac's vision as an example I wanted to help construct alternative ways of "knowing" and "being." Specifically, I wanted to thrust myself into America's culture wars and to help turn the tide away from the crass and selfish conservatism that marks much of our current cultural identity as a nation.

In so doing, I ran (and continue to run) the risk of turning myself into a polemicist and of turning Kerouac into something that he was not. This is a danger that many who write on Kerouac skirt. Thus, I open my book with a quote from Albert Camus (1991), which, while not about Kerouac, speaks well of Kerouac's qualities. Camus wrote, "It is good that from time to time we know doubt, for it provides us with the seriousness we need. We despise judges who never doubt and heroes who have never trembled" (69). In other words, I realize fully that Kerouac was a man with many faults, that there are dimensions of his personality which conflict with my progressive reading of him. In spite of these faults, which we all have to degrees, Kerouac remains endearing to us. Kerouac was the most human of writers. By sharing with us the intimate details of his life, he was honest in a way that few others have ever been, and this makes him susceptible to manipulation.

Perhaps there is something polemical about my work, and perhaps I manipulated Kerouac in my insistence of using him as a weapon against cultural and political conservatives. Such scholarly "transgressions" are inevitable. Furthermore, they are desirable. As Lentricchia (1985) explains, "all literary power is social power" (18). For those of us with little wealth, or normative political influence, literature (or rhetoric more generally) is an important avenue for expressing oneself politically--it is a way of becoming more fully alive and human (Wander, 1983). Criticism, literary or rhetorical, as such, is an immensely democratic, community-enriching, and inspiring activity. It is a political power that is not dependent upon the favors of others, as is traditional politics, and thus the critic is pure where the politician is constrained by the long line of backscratchers, by the lobbyists, and by the realities of having to finance multi-million campaigns.

In other, larger ways, my championing of Kerouac cannot fail to be a political act. The politics, the manipulations, the stakes, all these things are larger than myself, Kerouac, or the Beat "attitude." Given the environment in which Kerouac is, perhaps unwillingly, a symbol of so much more than what he was, it is not wrong, as a citizen-scholar, to take a stand with regard to the great issues of the day, and, in Lentricchia's words, to "come down on the side of those who believe that our society is mainly unreasonable and [who believe] that education should be one of the places where we can get involved in the process of transforming [society]" (2).

All of us here either teach literature or learn from literature, and thus the didactic character of literature does not escape us. Whether we are Lentricchia, Kerouac, or myself, we write because we believe that, in the process of engaging with the world, we have the potential to change the world. As ambitious as that may seem, that is what makes the writer such a compelling human being. Every once in a while, one of us succeeds in changing the world. "History," as Camus (1991) notes, "is nothing but the desperate efforts of men [and women] to give truth to their most clairvoyant dreams" (133). That is what makes writers like Kerouac so inspiring. We study Kerouac because we grow excited about our own potential to do great things with our lives through our writing or through our personal expressions of life-poetry.

Judged by reviews, my book was well received among a range of different groups. Social movement theorists (Goldzwig, 2000), Kerouac scholars (Reeves, 2000), and college students (Speaker, 2001) all noted that I had something new and refreshing to say about Kerouac and the cultural movements that grew out of his writing. Predictably, however, other people took offence with my project. For instance, Begal (2000) claims that my study was little more than "an all-encompassing polemic directed against shadowy right-wing entities like the FBI, CIA, Wall Street, imperialists, racists, sexists, industrialists, and the Reagan presidency" (1105).

What I actually wrote was this: Many people read On The Road and were transformed. This transformation involved rhetorical processes as Kerouac, through the articulation of three visions, what I identified as the Vision of Social Deviance, the Vision of Sexuality, and Dean as Vision, attempted to "persuade" Americans to think differently about their lives. Kerouac's point was that culturally, socially, and politically, our country is underachieving, that it is up to the artists, poets, and other visionaries to help make America live up to its potential.

Kerouac made his point clearly because he wrote about things that were actually happening around him, in his small community of friends. In so doing, he was able to capture a part of life that is intuitively authentic, but which escapes most of us due to our culturally-closed minds, to the communist hysteria of the day, and to dazzling new technological gadchits, such as television, with its ensuing amusement culture (Postman, 1985). Kerouac, in short, could see things the rest of us could not, and he used rhetoric to amplify and make persuasive his insight.

The study of the relationship between a writer such as Kerouac and an audience has been central in rhetorical theory since classical times. For instance, Aristotle (1991) is concerned with the issue of ethos. Ethos is the perceived character of the writer as revealed to an audience through a text and through the life of the author. It is the credibility that is negotiated with an audience. Simply, we gain power over people through who we are. As Camus (1991) noted, "Politics is no longer dissociated from individuals. It is addressed directly by man to other men [sic]. It is a way of speaking" (48).

Kerouac and Ginsberg, for example, are two people whose messages lay in part in who they were. Both constituted an "enactment" of their writing. It is nearly impossible to separate what they wrote from the lives they lived. Others, such as Neal Cassady, were "pure enactment"--Cassady was the living force of a new consciousness, and, as such, he did not need to write anything. Cassady simply was. In the authenticity of his life, Cassady inspired others--most notably Kerouac (1957, 1972), Kesey (1962/1999, 1986), Ginsberg (1984), and Wolfe (1968) to write about him.

According to Campbell and Jamieson (1977), speakers can aid in the acceptance of their messages if they can "incarnate" their argument and embody "the proof of what is said" (9). Such speakers live out their arguments with their lives. As such, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady did not merely preach the virtues of an alternative lifestyle; rather, they exemplified it and actualized the sacrifice such a lifestyle entailed in 1950s America. Along with Burroughs, these men paid heavy prices by not conforming and by choosing to challenge the rest of us to lead richer, more authentic lives. In so doing, they inspired such action in others. Some, like Jim Morrison, were to abuse this liberty and to waste their lives, but many others saw in these people a source of spiritual liberation.

In other words, we are the message. We are what we speak and write. Further, we are what we listen to and read. Thus, literature (broadly defined) is more than mere entertainment. Rather, as Burke (1973) suggests, literature is "equipment for living" (304). Books such as On The Road or Howl (1956), involve, in Burke's words, "the strategic naming of a situation" (300):

Literature singles out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutatis, for people to "need a word for it" and to adopt an attitude towards it. Each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary ... . (300)

As Burke further explains:

[We should consider works of art] as strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implication commands or instructions of one sort or another. [Novels] size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes. (304)

Thus, literature is inherently rhetorical and rhetoric is about passion. It is about the way the world is and the way it ought to be. It is about envisioning change and it is a method for that change (Poulakos, 1984). Rhetoric is both a catalyst for change and a reason for changing. Rhetoric, above all, reminds us that we live in a radically contingent universe. Instead of fearing this contingency, as do some people, those who adopt a rhetorical perspective find in this contingency the strength of our humanity (Rorty, 1989). Or, as Kerouac puts it, "Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?" (1958/1986, 199)

As the last sentence illustrates, Kerouac, and the Beats, were aware of the radical human contingency that marks our lives and defines our humanity, and they used it for their cultural ends. A passage from Nicosia (1994) illustrates:

What impressed [Kerouac] most about Gary [Snyder], perhaps, was Gary's understanding that the creation of art is a political act. According to Snyder: "Anybody who really captures the essential thusness of a time and place has changed things. To revoke a reality, and to make a [new] reality, is to make something political happen--because what do people act in terms of except what they take to be real?" That was the same insight Jack and [John Clellon] Holmes had shared in 1948, when they predicted that through their writing America would begin "picking up, changing, becoming sweeter, no more wars, sweet presidents." (496)

An important political aim of the Beat movement was to change this country spiritually and culturally, and Kerouac's writing helped to name our discontent. This naming of discontent was an important early step in the formulation of popular response. Kerouac is not the first writer to exemplify the fact that literary expression is often an important precursor to fundamental political change. Charles Dickens, Lu Xun, Marilyn French, and scores of unnamed pamphleteers are all examples of the power of literature to help formulate popular strategic responses to pervasive cultural malaise. Before we can act, our undifferentiated dissatisfactions must first be focused and directed so people can organize for collective action and come to see their own private suffering as part of a larger group experience (Stewart, Smith, and Denton, 1994). Only then can people transcend the dramas of their lives, escape from the self-indulgence of their own private pity, and forge political weapons for large scale challenges to the culture that is perceived as being the root of their problems. Although contrary to the liberal paradigm, wide-spread social problems such as poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, mental disease, pollution, crime, and prostitution are cultural and systemic, not individualistic and idiosyncratic. Good literature, as good social theory, helps us to view such problems in their proper system-wide perspective, which encourages system-wide and sweeping (often revolutionary) change.

For example, to feel unsatisfied is one experience. Such dissatisfaction may make us gloomy, or cast an existential shadow over our lives. To understand that discomfort as being "Beat" is another experience. That helps us to see how other people may, in fact, be experiencing a similar uneasiness with their lives. It helps us to talk with one another, to help each other with their struggles. To take pride in one's Beat identity is an even further important transformation. With this stage, we can start to feel as if we have control over the elements of our lives which causes us to feel uncomfortable. We start to write poetry, either on paper or with our lives, in which we learn how to transform the gring and waste of our lives into something beautiful and self-affirming. Finally, to be part of a "Beat Generation" is yet another and higher stage we can reach in our development as social beings. Here, we see ourselves as a vast social movement with a political voice and a vision of wide-spread social redescription.

In sum, while a "Beat" attitude may mean different things to different people, it became, after Kerouac and others, fundamentally a consciousness that allows for a degree of coordination and cooperation in artistic, social, and political work. By the 1960s, we began to see the fruition of this consciousness in its political, social, and ecological expressions. Kerouac, of course, by then had gotten "off the bus," but others such as Cassady, Ginsberg, and Ken Kesey kept on driving (Perry, Schwartz, and Ortenberg, 1997). Kerouac, after all, had pointed the way.

Thus, a Beat Attitude involves a transcendence that helps us to know the world and to be and to act in a certain way. It involves the internalization of a set of narratives by which we can know both our place in the world as well as the necessity for struggle to help preserve the world that we envision. A Beat Attitude, in other words, is a way for us to organize ourselves into a community of like-minded people to engage in the democratic work of co-constructing our lives and our nation.

All of us understand that the 1950s were a period of widespread cultural stasis and neurosis (Oakley, 1986). The era was marked by the rise of corporate, plastic, and destructive norms. People were atomized, segregated, and hierarchically situated. Corporate truth became the standard of all truth, and corporations cast the "shadow," in Dewey's terms, in which American politics became situated. Our vary humanity was drawn into sharp suspicion. Rodriguez (2001) explains this suspicion:

Our deep distrust of our humanity is reinforced constantly by religion, philosophy, society, family, and the academy. It is difficult for most of us to fathom nonhierarchical human relations. For without hierarchy, religion threatens us with damnation, government threatens us with anarchy, society threatens us with lawlessness, capital threatens us with underdevelopment, and education threatens us with regression to animality. (17)

With the Beats we learned that we are free, creative, and hopeful beings by our nature. Left to our own devises, we lean toward mutual aid and cooperation: we make choices based upon communal goals (as in Kroptkin, 1989). These natural and healthy human tendencies are a "problem" for our society, and one function of our corporate culture and propaganda is to control our thinking so as to make our urge for a fair life less threatening to the status quo (Carey, 1995). Thus, our bent toward freedom, creativity, and hope are systemically stifled by bureaucracy and hierarchy. Such systems of control have been created out of a deep suspicion that corporatism has of our humanity. Instinctively, corporate apologists recognize that we have within us the impetus of liberation. In other words, our ability to spontaneously create and to celebrate life, sex, art, and nature is a potentially disruptive threat that must be stifled in the interest of "order."

Because of its deep distrust of human beings, the corporate mentality justifies hierarchy to control our libertarian impulses. Hierarchy is thus made to appear natural, inevitable, and necessary. In practical terms, coercion becomes the norm and is the basis of the social order. Through force and fear, the institutions that Rodriguez identified above strip human beings of complexity and diversity. The result is a homogenized conformity and a predicable sameness upon which "law and order" can be situated (see Swartz, 1996). This leads to a "heavy" world, a world that exists not by poetry and laughter, but by the bulk of its inertia.

While mediated somewhat by the Beats and the subsequent successful challenges of the 1960s in terms of human rights, civil rights, critique of imperialism, gender equality, and a rising intolerance for homophobia, many of the worst taints of our paradigmatic 1950s culture have become heightened since the end of the Cold War and the worldwide collapse of alternative political and social challenges. In many essential ways, the moral and political challenges of the Soviet Union forced us to become better as a society (see, for example, Dudziak, 1988). Now that these challenges are gone, it is not clear what will encourage us to find the will to create truly healthy communities and to provide for economic justice.

While Kerouac and the Beats do not provide solutions for these problems (Birkerts, 1989), they help us to understand that issues such as these have systemic roots which can be understood experientially. In this way, people like Kerouac help to give us a politics of experience wherein one's life itself becomes political. By understanding our placement in the societal hierarchy, by inspecting the social pressures that keep us compliant, we come to understand the workings of the entire system. We feel its weight, and we see how the system crushes others. From this we gain a wisdom and a desire for change. As Rorty (1999) notes, "[S]ocial justice in America has owned much more to civil disobedience than to the use of the ballot" (257).

While not a conventional political activist, Kerouac wanted no part of the systemic violence of the hierarchy, and his writing is always informed by an innate sense of pacifism and tolerance ("[h]andcuffs will get soft and billy clubs will topple over" (1958/1986, 97)). He could feel, in ways that many of us cannot, how society dulls our inherent sense of compassion and thus keeps the hierarchy in place. Thus, one major theme in Kerouac's work is his desire to walk away from, and to turn his back upon, those things that cause us to hurt each other. For example, we see in The Dharma Bums Kerouac's express desire to leave the hierarchy altogether:

I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. Intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call "do-nothing." (106)

Of course, the above is not a practical solution as almost none of us can do what Kerouac describes, and neither could Kerouac, as we learn later in Desolation Angels (1965), in which we see a different view of Kerouac's naturalistic Buddhism and its inability to sustain him. But that was just one side of Kerouac, and we all know that Kerouac was a complex and confusing man. He was at once Buddhist and Catholic, Gay and Straight, Radical and Conservative, a Friend and a Betrayer, a Celebrator of Difference and a man insensitive at times to Otherness.

Best known for his "road books," Kerouac was also a writer of "love stories," (Grace, 2000), a poet (Jones, 1992; Enrich, 1994), a "spiritual quester," (Giamo, 2000), a "spiritual protester" (Prothero, 1991), a "pre-postmodernist" (Johnson, 2000), and a "prophet" (Challis, 1984). Kerouac was all these things, and more (See Jones, 1999).

Regardless of what he was, Kerouac clearly inspired, through his life and his work, new ways of thinking and new ways of being for millions of people in the United States. In a classic early statement, Charters (1973) notes:

In the intensity of the vision he had of his confused life he caught the dreams of a generation: the feeling that at some point something had been together, that there was a special vision that all shared, a romantic ideal that called on the road just head. To this generation Jack Kerouac become a romantic hero, an archetypal rebel, [and] the symbol of their own romantic legend. (22)

Charter's observation brings us squarely back to rhetoric. Such "generations," as noticed by Charters, are not time bound; rather, they are rhetorical constructs, identifications that people make with symbols. Thus, I can be a member of the "Beat Generation," even though I came of age in the mid-1980s and lived in an environment that was antithetical to Beat ideology. That didn't matter. I knew who I was, and I learned about myself from reading Kerouac and Ginsberg. My two high school friends and I fantasized of starting a literary revolution, and the Beats were our model. We studied Buddhism, Taoism, poetry, and held great Beat conventions in our minds as we sat in darkened rooms with candles and incense.

To name a generation, as Kerouac did, involves localizing reality and limiting its experience to a particular politics for a particular group of people. In other words, people join generations, they are not born into them, and these affiliations are based partly upon experience but mostly on the internalization of a collection of symbols, fantasies, biases, and ideologies (Bales, 1970; Bormann, 1972; McGee, 1975). Within any single generation, there has to be some unifying theme.

With the Beat Generation, that theme involved a world wariness, a sense that some great and wonderful life-force was being drained from us by a society intoxicated and out of control with commercialism. Thus, in a famous passage from The Dharma Bums, Japhy foresees the great "rucksack" revolution--i.e. the emergent hippie culture and the flowering of Beat ideals:

[The] whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanders, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyways, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures ... . (98)

Because "generations" are ideologically constructed, we can speak of generation "gaps" or of people belonging to generations to which their age does not chronically correspond. Generations are thematic and have a resonant voice or vision that unifies the people who claim membership. Such "naming" is an example of rhetorical action. Thus, Kerouac was a "rhetorician," an artist who, by virtue of symbols, was able to create a surrounding reality and ground that reality in large scores of people with lasting effect beyond the initial contact with the vision.

In the above I discussed, in broad terms, Kerouac's role as a cultural rhetorician, highlighting his radical critique of traditional authority and dominant social practices in the United States. In order to ground my observations more firmly in Kerouac's writing, I will now compare On The Road and The Dharma Bums. Specifically, I will explore how Kerouac's social deviance is manifested in the themes of Buddhism, analysis of television, "crap," and "supervision," and in Kerouac's attitudes toward sex.

Comparison of On The Road and The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums is a different type of novel than On the Road. Although a "complement" to the more famous novel (Giamo, 2000), The Dharma Bums is slower, less visionary, more contemplative and less experiential a novel. It is more measured and calculated--more self consciously written (Hull, 1977). It almost seems contrived or forced at times, as if Kerouac were writing (even if "spontaneously") under the pressure of a publishing industry which expected artistic compromise.

In short, the characters of Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder (Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder) are less complex and compelling than are Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady), and are often little more than mouth-pieces for Kerouac to discuss the apparent mastery of his philosophy. While the novel clearly opens new vistas, particularly in terms of its popularization of Buddhism for an American audience and in its anticipation of the so-called "rucksack revolution," it does not push us or society to the edge as did On The Road. In short, there is an intensity missing in this book. Even Kerouac was aware of this, as he explained to editor Malcolm Cowley, "I've done a creditable job delineating this great new personality [Snyder] in our literature, not a sensational job ... like Dean Moriarty" (quoted in Giamo, 2000, 132).

Clearly missing in The Dharma Bums, from the point of view of an audience that had just read and had been captivated by On The Road in the previous year, was the raw transformative energy of Neal Cassady, which Kerouac so brilliantly captured, amplified, and focused. This factor, coupled with the newness of a Buddhist vocabulary and mysticism, accounts for why The Dharma Bums was disappointing for some.

Recall that On The Road dramatized Kerouac's search "for authenticity in a mid-century America bent on conformity and convenience" (Wilson, 1999, 304). This search lead to a distinctly American transcendence, a redescription and an extension of distinctly American sensibilities. This can be contrasted with The Dharma Bums, where Kerouac gives us an Asian transcendence. While tempered by Kerouac's Catholicism, the Asian flavor of such transcendence was threatening at the time Kerouac wrote. While such multi-cultural perspectives are normal and advantageous in our current more pluralistic society, the American audience that received Kerouac's novel in the late 1950s lived in a fundamentally different world (Norfleet, 2001). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Asia was the most fearful place in the world for many Americans, and was seen as much more of a threat than the Soviet Union which, after all, was racially similar to the United States.

Anti-Asian sentiment was the most discernable prejudice embodied in the U.S. immigration code (Gyory, 1998). For many decades, continuing through the 1950s, Chinese were outright excluded from this country, as were other Asians (who were all perceived to be "Chinese"). The only exception was Japan, so there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans in this country by the start of World War II, and these had been interned, en masse, during the war (Wartime Relocation Commission, 1997). World War II was itself only a few years in the past, and it had fueled the flames of a racial hatred toward what many Americans considered to be the "indiscernible" Asian. The successful Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 further evoked images of Asian "hordes" and the prospect of a Third World War (Wainstock, 1999).

The actual Korean War during the 1950s, and the political stalemate that resulted in an increased Chinese diplomatic strength, further underscored the "threat" from the East (Armstrong, 1977). If this were not enough, the French war in Vietnam was just starting to intensify, and the seeds were being laid for the U.S. war against the Communist North (Karnow,1991). Given this context, the following paragraph from The Dharma Bums is provocative:

East'll meet West ... Think what a great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally, and it'll be guys like us that can start the thing. Think of millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country and hitchhiking and bringing the word down to everybody (203).

Because of above mentioned structural differences between On The Road and The Dharma Bums, and notwithstanding Kerouac's pro-Asian romaniticization in the later novel, The Dharma Bums offers less of a radical critique of society than Kerouac's sustained redescriptions of the United States in On The Road. Outside of the promulgation of Buddhism, Kerouac's call for social deviance, while still noticeable, is less pronounced. For example, Kerouac's world, unlike mainstream America, does not center around money. As Japhy remarks to Smith, "You and I ain't out to bust anybody's skull, or cut someone's throat in an economic way, we've dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings (211). More poignantly, from atop a mountain in California, Kerouac muses:

[W]hat does [Japhy] care if he hasn't got any money: he doesn't need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this. And what gouty millionaire could get up this rock anyhow? (77)

Such sentiments were remarkable in the mid- to late-1950s, when, as Harris (2000b) notes, the fight against communism required loyalty to a "massively expanding consumer culture," in which "the love of full iceboxes" was an expression of loyalty and an articulated commitment to "economic nationalism" (173; see also Ewan, 1977).

Kerouac's Buddhist Persona

Buddhism (or what can be understood as a "mystic naturalism") is clearly the central narrative defining Smith's persona, setting the tone of the novel. Japhy's own understanding of Buddhism largely exists for contrast, a foil against the backdrop of Smith's own perspectives, which Kerouac proudly presents to us. This Buddhism, and its relationship to Kerouac's writing, has been well discussed in Hart (1973), Blackburn (1977), Miles (1982), Leed (1984), Ellwood (1987), Kayorie (1994), Tonkinson (1995), Wilson (1999), and, most recently, in Phillips (2001). Yet, as Miller (1999) notes, "there is no agreement among the critics regarding the depth or even the authenticity of Kerouac's Buddhism" (43). In short, "Kerouac the Buddhist is still an enigma to most of the world" (Albright, 1986, 45).

Many authorities are dismissive or contemptuous of Kerouac's Buddhism, or of "Beat Spirituality." According to Prothero (1991), "Historians of American religion who have explored beat spirituality have tended to focus almost exclusively on the beats' engagement with Zen and then to dismiss that engagement as haphazard" (207). Even among Kerouac's supporters, authoritative statements exist which question Kerouac's Buddhist identification. For example, Charters (1973) maintains that Kerouac's Buddhism was merely a "discovery of different religious images for his fundamentally constant religious feelings" (190) which were essentially Catholic. Philip Whalen, Kerouac's friend and fellow Beat writer, questions if Kerouac "ever really understood Buddhism" (cited in Jackson, 1988, 60).

Other scholars, such as Miller (1999), strike more of a middle ground, noting that Kerouac's persona in The Dharma Bums "did not see any conflict between Christianity and Buddhism" (44). Prothero (1991) actively promotes study of what he calls Kerouac's "religious eclecticism" (216).

Regardless of the authenticity of Kerouac's Buddhism, the fact remains that he became an important interpreter of the Asian Buddhist tradition, making it accessible for many Americans (Jackson, 1988, 60). As Kayorie (1994) notes, Kerouac's version of Buddhism has become, through Kerouac's work, "so basic to the counter-culture that [it] no longer seem[s] counter-cultural at all, but familiar and as American as apple pie" (20). In contrast to the "Square Zen" of Alan Watts (1959)--an important source of "correct" Buddhism"--the popular culture took Jack's book [The Dharma Bums] to its heart and it remains there still" (20). In our "postmodern" world (Lyotard, 1984), a world suspicious of essentialized truths--such as the existence of an "authentic" Buddhism--we have to recognize that there is nothing problematic in Kerouac's appropriation and popularization of an important Eastern religion, even if what comes to us through this medium is an Americanized and romanticized version of Eastern spirituality. Thus, instead of passing judgment on Kerouac's Buddhism per se--what it was, what it was not--I assume Kerouac's Buddhism as given (i.e., that it was culturally influential and that it is an essential part of his critical consciousness).

The Dharma Bums (1958/1986) begins with Smith declaring himself a "perfect Dharma Bum" and a "religious wanderer" (5). Notice the change in Kerouac's persona from Sal. In On The Road, Sal announces his death and rebirth in the first lines of the novel and squarely grounds his entire narrative in Dean, who carries the book on his groin (Swartz, 1999, 61). At the end of On The Road, it is Dean who is tired and in rags, not Sal. Sal has the time and energy, in the final paragraph of the novel, to sit on the broken down peer in New Jersey and to contemplate the poetry of what had transpired in the novel (1957, 310).

In The Dharma Bums, on the other hand, we find that the focal point of action lies with Smith, whose series of non-actions becomes the "action" of the novel. Thus, a repeated theme is Smith's apparent "laziness." While Japhy experiences his Buddhism through activity (which, unlike Cassady, includes productive labor as well as outdoor activities such as hiking), Smith prefers to sit and to meditate with dogs ("St. Raymond of the Dogs is who I was" (145)) and insects: at one point Smith reports proudly that "I even got down on my knees and talked to the ants" (180).

The entire middle portion of the novel is comprised of Smith, at home in North Carolina, sitting in the woods for a year meditating (Albright, 1986). Japhy frequently criticizes Smith for this detachment, which he sees as unnecessarily anti-social, and for his drinking: "How do you expect to become a good bhikku or even a Bodhisattva Mahasattva always getting drunk like that?" (190). One day, when Japhy barges into the shack where he and Smith are staying, he demands, "Why do you sit around all day?" (180). Smith responds lamely, "I am the Buddha known as the Quitter." (180)

Japhy repeatedly tries to help Smith to "mature" as a Buddhist thinker and as an adult, but Smith, who learns the technique of mountaineering and wilderness survival from Japhy, is not transformed by Japhy. As Prothero (1991, 218) notes, Smith and Japhy disagree about religion throughout the novel. Thus, while Japhy is ostensibly the main character in the book, "the number one Dharma Bum of them all" (9), he too, like the sex which Smith can do without (see below), is ultimately dispensable. At the end of the novel Japhy goes off to Japan and we find Smith just about the same as when we first met him--happily living a liminal existence, practicing his mind-Buddhism at the expense of the world, and committed, with growing intensity, to his alcohol. While the novel ends joyfully, with Kerouac giving his shack a good bye "Blah" and a grin before coming down the mountain (244), we know better. According to Blackburn (1977):

Kerouac seems to have had so few happy moments that one wishes the tale could end here [with The Dharma Bums], with this vision of the wanderer, wise and at peace, returning home to the world that hurt him so often. But the tale continues in Desolation Angels, a novel which follows The Dharma Bums chronologically ... While the earlier novel is optimistic, Angels is shot through with melancholy, with despair, and with exhaustion. (18)

No matter the positive gloss Kerouac puts on his novel, Smith, not Japhy, is the liminal character, the one through whose suffering the rest of us gain some new perspective. Throughout the novel and beyond, Japhy remains a scholar, whose Buddhism involves being as present in the world as possible ("my Buddhism is activity" (1958/1986, 175)), and who intends, and in fact does, settle down for a time to a traditional monk's existence in Japan. Further, as Gary Snyder, "Japhy" will live a full and future life as an active and Pulitzer Prize winning poet (Snyder, 1974) and Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Gary Snyder, in the end, does not experience the fate that Smith imagines for Japhy:

I clearly saw a crowded dirty smoky Chinese market with beggars and vendors and pack horses and mud and smoke pots and piles of rubbish and vegetables for sale in dirty clay pans on the ground and suddenly from the mountains a ragged hobo, a little seamed brown and unimaginable Chinese hobo, had come down and was just standing at the end of the market, surveying it with an expressionless humor. He was short, wiry, his face leathered hard and dark red by the sun of the desert and the mountains; his clothes were nothing but gathered rags ... . I had seen guys like that only seldom ... beggars who probably live in caves. But this one was a Chinese twice-as-poor, twice-as-tough and infinitely mysterious tramp and it was Japhy for sure. Maybe he'll leave that monastery and just disappear and we'll never see him again, and he'll be the Han Shan ghost of the Orient mountains and even the Chinese'll be afraid of him he'll be so raggedy and beat. (208)

In this passage, Kerouac seems to be describing his own romantic vision of himself, or of the hobo he frequently idealized (Feied, 2001), more so than that of Snyder, the man. In the end it was Snyder--not Kerouac or Cassady--who was able to live with himself in this world and to create poetic/political literature well into an advanced age (Snyder, 2000).

Further, we should note that Kerouac's friendship with Gary Snyder, the prototype for Japhy Ryder, was, however important to Kerouac, relatively brief. After Japhy leaves for Japan at the end of the novel, neither Smith, nor Kerouac in real life, ever saw him again. In contrast, Kerouac and Cassady had a lasting relationship, which included a wide latitude of intimacies--although Kerouac's guilt in hurting Cassady with the notoriety of On The Road, Kerouac's self destructive drinking, Cassady's increased irresponsible behavior after being released from prison, Cassady's later identification with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and Cassady's heavy use of psychedelics, increasingly alienated the two "brothers" (Plummer, 1994).

It is significant that while Cassady was always aware of Kerouac's admiration of him, and probably manipulated Kerouac because of it (see Kerouac, 1957, 7), Snyder never, as the events of the book were unfolding, had any "inkling that Jack saw him as a hero" (Nicosia, 1994, 496). In other words, Kerouac had an identification with Cassady that dwarfed whatever bond existed between Kerouac and Snyder. In On The Road, Sal took great pains to lose himself in Cassady's ethos, no matter how difficult such effort was to sustain. With Cassady, Kerouac could not express himself subjectively, as Cassady was too domineering, too much a subject of Kerouac's interest for Kerouac to get out from behind Cassady's shadow. Next to Cassady's overbearing presence, Kerouac had no self. Cassady's intensity demanded too much. In The Dharma Bums, on the other hand, Smith makes a continuous effort to not be so close to Japhy, to keep his subjectivity distinct from that of Japhy.

As Smith is different than Japhy, his Buddhism is also different. Smith rejects formal lectures and formal study, which Japhy, as a student of Chinese language at UC Berkeley, embraces. Smith's Buddhism, consequently, is idiosyncratic, choosing his own way by mixing various strands of Buddhism, Catholicism, and the philosophical individualism of Henry David Thoreau.

Whether Smith is hopping freights or returning from two months alone on a mountain as he does at the novel's end, he is essentially the same person--an "old-time bhikku" (or wandering monk) who transverses the "immense triangular arc of New York to Mexico City to San Francisco" (5). Ironically, with Snyder and Buddhism, Kerouac created space for himself to assert his individualism, his own mind in a way that was precluded when the subject of his writing was Cassady.

Television, "Crap," and "Supervision"

With his Buddhist persona, Smith rejoices "in the freedom of relative possessionlessness, and the related freedom of being [an] outsider ... without station or responsibility in the world." (Ellwood, 1987, 155). Utilizing such liminality, Smith declares himself "a future hero in Paradise" (5). But what kind of hero is Smith and what kind of paradise does he envision? More importantly, what kind of world is Smith rejecting and why does he reject it?

The short answer is that Smith is a Buddhist hero. The world he is rejecting is the world of samsara, or illusion. This is the same world, although in a different cultural context, that that the youthful Brahmin rejects in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha (1982). In rejecting illusions, Kerouac forcefully rejects the corporate consciousness that is the root of many cultural illusions (and alienation) in our society. We see this rejection of corporate consciousness most clearly in, among other areas, Kerouac's critique of "television." As we'll see, Kerouac worries that we have been desensitized by television and other "dumb white machinery in the kitchen" (102) against the part of us that is human and joyful--that is, animal, pure, free, and unsupervised.

Throughout the novel, Kerouac makes frequent references to the deleterious effects of television on people's ability to live authentic lives. Television, as we see, is the antithesis of the Dharma (the Truth or the Way). As Ellwood (1987) notes, Kerouac accuses "the average samsaric person of just wanting everything he's [sic] told to want by the high priests of consumerism, while he sits watching the same TV pablum and thinking the same thoughts as everyone else" (154). Or, as Giamo (2000) explains, "TV is the insidious extension of consumer capitalism into the living room and bedroom" (139).

The first example of Kerouac's critique of our television culture occurs early in The Dharma Bums when Smith and Japhy are walking through the U.C. Berkeley campus. Kerouac, while contrasting the "manliness" of Snyder with the neutered students he sees, criticizes college life for its sterility, its forced categories, its abstractions that have little to do with real experience. For Kerouac, the college experience is little more than the drabness of middle-class life personified in the crew cuts and preppy clothes of the students. As he explains:

[C]ollege being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origins of the faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. (39)

Notable in this passage is Kerouac emphasis on "sameness," the result of television, which is contrasted with the spontaneity and animality of Japhy (he "prowls" in the "wilderness" and pursues "dark mysteries"). This animality, our primordial health as found in Buddhist mysticism, is caged by the walls of the living room and by the projections of illusion that radiate from the television screen. This sense of animality caged or denied is something Kerouac often describes with different language strategies.

For example, our denial of some essential human part of ourselves can also be seen in the above passage with the descriptor "crap" (as in "crapulous"). "Crap," descriptions of the anus, and fixation with excretionary functions are frequent tropes in Kerouac's lexicon (and, indeed, in much of Beat literature, particularly in the work of Ginsberg). According to Sterritt (1998), "Kerouac draws on the oral, anal, and genital levels of activity not merely to offer a string of suggestive metaphors, but to invoke verbal creation as an act of physical exchange and interpenetration with the world outside the self" (88). This orality is exemplified by the following typical passage where Kerouac describes a lackadaisical afternoon party:

[W]e picked mussels right off the washed rock of the sea and smoked them in a big woodfire covered with seaweed. We had wine and bread and cheese and Psyche spent the whole day lying on her stomach in her jeans and sweater, saying nothing. But once she looked up with her little blue eyes and said, "How oral you are, Smith, you're always eating and drinking." (1958/1986, 181)

The flip-side of such consumption is excretion, and Kerouac notes how easy it is to consume, and to blind ourselves to the implications of such consumption. So, with the "crap" trope, in particular, Kerouac focuses upon the symbolism of our denial of our nature. Crap is something natural, human, an essential part of life and ourselves. Yet we find it dirty, embarrassing, and deny it like the ancient Pharos, who, being allegedly divine, did not defecate as a matter of State ideology, but who could be seen taking frequent swims in the Nile (obstentially to exercise, but really to hide their excretions). Likewise, we deny and hide that essential part of ourselves in an attempt to escape our animality or to escape responsibility for our actions.

Kerouac guesses our game, sees the denial of our animality as part of our larger social suppression of spontaneity, sex, and freedom, and as an extension of material quests to surround ourselves with comfort. In this way, Kerouac strives to break down our pretensions; he reminds us of how human we are, in fact. Many of us, he notes with sublime derision, are "eager young men in business suits going to work in insurance offices hoping to be big Harry Trumans some day" (1958, 131). What fine and upstanding folks these people are. Yet, as Kerouac reminds us:

All these people ... they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it's all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes that their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wannta eat in the bathroom. (39)

In this passage we are confronted with an important nexus between "crap" and "supervision." To the extent that we must defecate, we have to process it, manage it as we manage the rest of our lives, sanitize it. Similar to our sex drive, or our compulsion for healthy communities, we have within ourselves a nature that does not fit with the packaged suburban life of middle-class America. "Supervision," therefore, is essential--even self-supervision--for otherwise we may allow our "dark sides" to creep forward, as it threatened to do during the early Cold War period. If that were to happen, then we would risk unleashing a real "rucksack" revolution, a greening of the world and a renaissance in our thinking of the place of self in society. Such "revolt" is unthinkable in our managed, profit-driven society. For example, later in the novel Smith is told that he cannot sleep outdoors because it is "against the law." Sulking, Smith observes: "The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted ... would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be 'supervised.'" (120)

In the "madhouse," all aspects of our life are controlled. We see nothing but the bars, the white walls, the gowns and pale flesh of the other inmates, the sterility, the enforced sameness, the insistent blinking of the fluorescent lights, its insect humming, the sedations of television and medication, and, above all else, the management (or mismanagement) of our emotions and life-tendencies (as dramatically highlighted by Kesey (1962/1999)). Such institutions are as much about the "supervision" of excretion as are our sewers. In short, we manage our excretion the same way we "mange" ourselves. Each of us has our own "place," and the organic wholeness of human life and its interconnectedness with others is lost.

In the next reference, Kerouac provides an extended passage that details his dissatisfaction with the mindlessness and mental castration of the world created by television:

But there was a wisdom in it all [meaning his "Zen lunacy"], as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. (104)

Kerouac's world is the authentic world, where people do not need automobiles to get around, where people think different and original thoughts, and where the iridescent, luminous, eerie and ghoulish glow of the television is replaced by crisp moonlight and the intoxications of the mountain air that Kerouac describes in his novel. Kerouac, in short, wants to remind "people digesting dinners at home that all [is] not as well as they [think]" (188).

Yet Kerouac is empathetic and understanding of the delusional multitudes and their self-imposed ignorance, which is the ignorance of our culture: "People have good hearts whether or not they live like Dharma Bums. Compassion is the heart of Buddhism" (132), he muses. More specifically, Kerouac notes that the people watching television, "the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of that Eye" (104).

In at least two sense such people are pacified. First, they are literally suckled by the electronic breast. Second, they are pacified in Orwell's (1995) sense--they have been rendered politically impotent and militarily subdued, if not psychologically castrated. Kerouac then contrasts these sedated, "supervised," and peaceful television viewers with an image of Japhy, who, in his freedom, was not hurting anyone either (104): "I see him in future years stalking along with full rucksack, in suburban streets, passing the blue television windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the Master Switch" (104).

The final reference to television occurs when Kerouac is camping in a thicket outside of Eugene, Oregon, on his way up to Washington to be a fire look out. He lay in his sleeping bag across the road from "cute suburban cottages that couldn't see me and wouldn't see me because they were all looking at television ... ." (219). Here, Kerouac illustrates how television bestows a singlelarity of sight, a focused vision which, as a paradigm, understands only that which it can accentuate or collapse literarily into a box. Some things, however, are outside the range of the camera, do not fit into the box, or are off the radar screen and are thus unperceivable. As such they become invisible, especially within the authenticity of their presence. For a world nurtured on illusion, the presence of Truth is easily overlooked--is this not a foundational assumption in Buddhism?

In short, the more real Kerouac becomes, the more anomalous he is, and the more society has to ignore him, or at least marginalize him, so that his shadowy figure, one lurking in the darkness outside our homes bright with the glare of television, does not, in time, suggest to us the possibility of our turning off the television. If we were to do that, we might find that his "darkness" is actually a sky filled with stars and a future filled with bright, progressive, and hopeful possibilities.

Sex in The Dharma Bums

The final theme for comparison between On The Road and The Dharma Bums is Kerouac's treatment of sex. Sex is featured prominently in both novels, and much negative criticism of Kerouac involved his promotion and glorification of a sexual morality that clashed in fundamental ways with the dominant U.S. culture of the 1950s. In mid-century America, much human sexuality was considered a form of social deviance, since sexual activity falling outside of traditional bounds is a potential threat to many cultural institutions (D'Emilio and Freedman, 1997).

The two books, however, are qualitatively different in their treatment of sex. Sex, once so "holy" and "great," so radically unsettling in On The Road, is far less important in The Dharma Bums. Although sex in The Dharma Bums is more graphic in many ways than the descriptions of it in On The Road, it is far less important a concept than in the earlier novel. Rather than being an important generative force in the development of a new consciousness, sex is at best reduced to an off-hand type of lived meditation for Japhy and Smith. At worst, sex is a distraction, a temptation to be avoided. In neither case is sex a consumption or a compulsion, as it was for Dean. Nor is sex transcendent, as it was for Sal, who used women of color as a way for him to overcome his "dreariness" as a "'white man' disillusioned" (1957, 148).

Unlike On The Road, The Subterraneans (1958), and Tristessa (1960), no women of color appear in The Dharma Bums for Kerouac to consume (see Grace, 2000). Appearing are only forgettable white women, who have less of a presence than they had in On The Road where, regardless of their ethnicity, women served as a trigger for Dean's transformative libido. As such, sex underscored much of the action and drama of the novel, as when Dean impressed both Sal and Carlo (the Ginsberg character) by having repeated sex with two different women on the same day, spending his time rushing back and forth between the two of them who were in separate apartments, with breaks in between for "mad talks" with the two men. (1957, 37). Sex is also a reason why Dean travels back and forth across the country, at times having wives and families on both coasts.

Because Kerouac's Buddhism overshadows the text, the frequent sex that occurs in the novel makes little sense. It is neither emotional nor transformative. Its largely an afterthought to the poetry and appreciation of the Dharma; sex is not itself the impetus of contemplation and experience as it was for an earlier Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise. In fact, Smith largely (but not completely) succeeds in ignoring sex. When first invited to join in an orgy, he declares, "Pretty girls make graves" (29).

For the most part, Smith sits through frequent drunken naked revelries with eyes shut. As he explains, "I was really sincerely keeping lust out of my mind by main force and gritting of my teeth. And the best was to keep my eyes closed" (178). One woman, insulted by Smith's dismissal of her sexual energy, snottily asks, "What's he always sitting with his eyes closed for?" (187). In short, sex has little role to play in this book other than to advertise a certain "hipness" that would come to characterize much counter-cultural sexual abuse. Many women were raped in the name of the "free love" that Kerouac illustrates nearly a decade before the often celebrated (and misrepresented) "Summer of Love" (1967).

Unlike On The Road, several out-right orgies are portrayed in The Dharma Bums, and Smith, shocked at first by what he sees, grudgingly participates in the first of these. The recipient of everyone's attention is a girl named Princess, who "was sex mad and man mad, so there wasn't much of a problem in persuading her to play yabyum" (28), the unlikely Buddhist sex ritual that "spiritualizes" and "justifies" the orgy. According to Smith, Princess "laughed and almost cried with delight everybody everywhere working on her" (30), and concludes, "she was actually glad to do all this" (30). Princess is so enthusiastic, in fact, Smith later has to warn her, "Now don't go wild and get into orgies with fifteen guys on a mountaintop" (95).

At first Smith is morally unsure of his actions, but he soon realizes that Princess "wanted to be a big Buddhist like Japhy and being a girl the only way she could express it was this way, which had its traditional roots in the yabyum ceremony of Tibetan Buddhism, so everything was fine" (31). It is not clear why women Buddhists must be condemned to yabyum as the only expression of their spirituality. Nor is it clear that yabyum is an important Buddhist ritual, as it goes against much of what we take to be routine Buddhist practices (Chodron, 2001). Nevertheless, Princess appears enamored with the idea and no one in the novel appears critical of the sexual practices.

After the novel's first orgy, Alvah Goldbrook (the character modeled after Allen Ginsberg)--who "was immensely pleased" (31) with the group sex and its planned weekly occurrences--criticizes Smith for his "poor" attitude and lack of commitment to sexual festivities:

"Your Buddhism has made you mean ... and makes you even afraid to take you clothes off for a simple healthy orgy."

"Well, I did finally, didn't I?"

"But you were coming on so hincty about." (34)

This passage--so unthinkable in On The Road, where the characters representing Ginsberg, Cassady, and Kerouac enthustically share so many women, including Cassady's wives, prostitutes, and, in real life, each other sexually--becomes exemplary of the shift in Kerouac's emphasis. Without the persona of Dean Moriarty to propel the book as it propelled On The Road, Kerouac must turn to some other driving force with the power to fuel his vision of transcendence and of alternative lifestyle. In The Dharma Bums, that force is Buddhism. Where before, an important goal for Sal was to have "girls" (1957, 11) now women are seen as something to avoid through discipline.

Prior to the above orgy scene, Smith was celibate for one year as a practicing Buddhist, and he mostly remains celibate for the remainder of the novel (with a possible exception with Princess at page 95), although he tried, toward the end of the novel, to bed a girl, but was prevented at the last moment by a gang of drunken men who burst into his room: they "were like angels coming in to drive away the devil woman" (187). As evident from this line, such manifestations of lust were, for Kerouac, considered to be moments of weakness, caused by the ruckus of the city and the madness of the hipsters (even Japhy at times becomes caught up in the excesses instigated by the crowds of partygoers that surround him). Kerouac makes clear that, in his world, only the anti-flesh ascetics of Buddhism has the power to match the generative force of Cassady's libido and soul intensity. So in a sense we experience a flip-flop in priorities--in On The Road, sex was the priority, while in The Dharma Bums, the life of silent contemplation becomes Smith's normative order.

Conclusion

Similar to On The Road, The Dharma Bums is inspiring for the agency it suggests for our lives and for the newness and rethinking of ourselves it enables us to experience. Both offer alternative ways in which individuals can live, grow, and interact with society. Specifically, in The Dharma Bums, we find a continuation of the social deviance that Kerouac articulates in his earlier, more powerful novel. In part, this social deviance can be understood as Kerouac's rejection of the TV mind, his promotion of the "rucksack revolution," and his endorsement of the politics of experience.

Kerouac's work, however, was not just about society and ways to change it. It was also about the man himself. Thus, in The Dharma Bums, unlike a great deal of his subsequent writings, we are privy to a view of Kerouac in which he is more or less at peace with himself. This point is of particular importance as we gather in his home town to honor him. Aside from everything else in the novel, many of us are personally pleased with the small glimpses Kerouac's contentment, which, as we know, will soon dissipate.

Much of Kerouac's appeal lies here, in our contemplation of his successes and failures. In ways that are similar to Kerouac, most of us, over our long years of study and work, have had our liminal moments, small nirvanas shot through with happiness. As Kerouac did, we have struggled to immortalize such experiences with poetry, articles, or scholarly books. But how often have we awoke in the morning, after rich existential highs, to find our sense of achievement gone? Do not years go by before we can experience such heights once again?

Because Kerouac was so honest with us as he went through these experiences, we do not feel as if we are alone. We realize that we share something essential with him and with each other. For those of us who identify with Kerouac, we have in our cultural DNA a little of him. That is why he is so familiar and endearing, and that is why this place, Lowell, Massachusetts, is, in part, our home.

Works Cited
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