Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" and the American Walking Tradition

"I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand..."

So Japhy Ryder begins his drunken monologue on the philosophy of the Dharma Bums and his vision of the coming youth revolution. It's a revealing passage, both for its importance to our understanding of the narrative and for the way it so extremely demonstrates the author's style. The Dharma Bums is rendered in what Jack Kerouac called "spontaneous prose," capturing the unedited meanderings of the mind, prioritizing the content of the written word over any grammatical structure. Japhy's monologue, if it'd even be accurate to call it that, comes in the form of a single sentence of over 220 words. It's reminiscent of a prolonged jazz solo, a deliberate improvisation in an otherwise carefully arranged piece. For the purposes of this novel, it also mirrors the mindfulness of Buddhist meditation, of letting your thoughts wander and fragment and coalesce until you get to some deeper truth.

The Dharma Bums, like most of the rest of Kerouac's novels, is a roman à clef. Japhy is actually Gary Snyder, Alvah Goldbrook is Allen Ginsberg, and Ray Smith is, of course, Kerouac himself. In other words, Kerouac's novels, being filled to the brim with writers, are ultimately about writing itself. Whole scenes here are dedicated to these poets talking about other poets or reading poetry: the obvious example is the dramatization of the famous Six Gallery reading, "the night of the birth of the San Francisco Renaissance," where Ginsberg first read "Howl." That being said, if we read this novel with that perspective in mind, it becomes clear how Kerouac and the rest of his friends are consciously situating it within a larger literary tradition.

If Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau represent the 19th-century's vision of walking in America, then Kerouac, Snyder, and Ginsberg represent the 20th-century's. Gone is the concern with crossing the Western wilderness, with expanding the nation's borders into the unknown frontier; we've reached California, and our characters are products of the culture it's created and, in turn, the culture they themselves are creating. Their interest in Eastern religion, their commitment to the "bum" lifestyle and rejection of domesticity, is quintessentially countercultural before the counterculture was en vogue. 

But, wasn't Thoreau, by definition, also countercultural? His embrace of the "wilderness" in lieu of civilization was, really, a radical embrace of freedom, an embrace of Hobbes's proposed "state of nature." Whitman, prophesying the Open Road, envisions a total democracy, replete with all the contradictory notions therein.

More important than these authors' political leanings to The Dharma Bums, though, is their association with transcendentalism, a philosophical and spiritual movement that believed in the core goodness of people and the divine in the mundane. Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and specifically his poem "Song of Myself," is the classic example of the movement's influence on literature. While there isn't a direct connection to Buddhism, nor are the two totally compatible, there's a clear list of similarities between the two systems of thought. In other words, the American walking tradition has long been a spiritual and religious one, and Kerouac's unique only in his championing of the decidedly non-American — though perhaps not totally un-American — dharma.