Word: kerouac
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...DHARMA BUMS (244 pp.)-Jack Kerouac-Viking...
Jack (On the Road) Kerouac might have called his latest novel On the Trail, or How the Campfire Boys Discovered Buddhism. The book is less frantic than On the Road, less sexy than The Subterraneans, but it reconfirms Kerouac's literary role as a kind of Tom Thumb Wolfe in hip clothing. Like other Kerouac novels, the book has the sound of jazzed-up autobiography, and the most fictional thing about it may well be the brand of Buddhism (ostensibly Zen) that the beat hero and his pals preach and practice...
...Lunacy orgies." Rucksack Revolution. This may explain why Ray drags his sneakered feet a bit when the boys finally start climbing the Matterhorn in the Sierra Nevada. This climb, which occupies about a fourth of The Dharma Bums, is a writer's set piece, a hymn to nature. Kerouac's poetic imagery of towering snowscapes, frosty-breathed dawns, star-drugged nights suggests that the great American romance is still the Great Outdoors. At trip's end Japhy prepares to leave for a Japanese Buddhist monastery, while Ray is possessed by a Whitmanesque vision of "a great rucksack...
This vision helps to illustrate Author Kerouac's unhappy faculty for confusing freedom with irresponsibility, for abusing the Zen Buddhist idea of the inseparability of good and evil by using it as an excuse for self-indulgence. Kerouac's protest against the urban work life (which he once called "the midtown sillies world") and the suburban home life of the U.S. middle class ("all that dumb white machinery in the kitchen") is trenchant but scarce!" new. And Kerouac's cult of "spontaneous writing" makes his pages at least as sloppy as they are sprightly...
...tell you about Harold, the red-eyed bowtied young man mentioned earlier. Harold was tossed out of Adams House two weeks before Summer School. He is writing his thesis on Jack Kerouac. He wanders down Massachusetts Avenue in the infant hours with that burdened shuffle of troubled genius. He is typical of the night-crawlers, repressed, rebellious, and vaguely disturbed...