Syncretic Visions of the Buddha: Melding and Convergence in the Work of Kerouac and Ginsberg

Abstract

Grace, Nancy M. 2007. Jack Kerouac and Literary Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $74.95 he. ix + 261 pp.Trigilio, Tony. 2007. Allen Ginsberg's Poetics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. $45.00 he. xx + 256 pp.The field of Beat studies has at times struggled for academic legitimacy. In preface to The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, Kostas Myrsiades notes the academy's hostility towards (2002, ix), while in her introduction to Reconstructing Beats, Jennie Skerl observes that [a]lthough influential in many artistic circles and bohemian enclaves and celebrated in burgeoning youth culture, these writers and many other less famous Beats were condemned and ridiculed by mass media journalists, thenreigning public intellectuals, and by academic critics. As a result, very little serious criticism appeared in 1960s and 70s, and Beats were largely excluded from academic discourse (Skerl 2004, 1). William Lawlor echoes both Myrsiades and Skerl:That Beats should be a subject of study in established halls of learning is a peculiar, multi-faceted irony. The Beats scorned stuffy academics, insisting that establishment was boring. Various scholars and professors, distrustful of young, outspoken nonconformists, belittled Beats. Neither group envisioned Beat Generation as part of curriculum in schools and universities. (Lawlor 2000, 232).Clearly, Beats have not been most popular denizens of ivory tower - although as Lawlor indicates, not that they would have wanted to be.Having said that, Beat studies experienced a revival during and after commemoration of twenty-fifth anniversary of publication of Jack Kerouac's On Road, and as Skerl notes, field has been further establishing its academic credibility ever since (2004, 1). Recent trends in Beat studies include a broad impulse to expand canon of Beat literature; a feminization of Beat culture through inclusion of women and by documenting ancillary but integral roles that women played in Beat culture; and a theoretical reconstructfion] and reinterpretation of Beats through a process of re-historicizing, recovering, and re-visioning (2004).Two recent works continue this move toward rethinking Beat culture and Beat literature, Nancy M. Grace's Jack Kerouac and Literary Imagination (2007) and Peter Trigilio's Allen Ginsberg's Poetics (2007). Each takes a different approach, but taken together both studies examine how personal struggles with religion and sexuality led respective authors on quests for meaning and truth, quests that led them eventually toward Buddhism as a philosophy for their own lives, and by extension their works. Each book considers how its subject used teachings of Buddhism in their own way in an attempt to reconcile and resolve competing ideologies that were at heart of their own inner struggles. By melding (Trigifio 2007, 20, 192; Grace 2007, 14) competing ideologies and seeking their convergence (Trigifio 2007, 4), Kerouac and Ginsberg engaged in a conscious syncretism of opposing forces. Using this syncretism as a focal point and theoretical filter, both studies argue that influences present in works of Kerouac and Ginsberg respectively were not simply an easy Easternness (33), in which teachings and themes are adopted whenever it was convenient, but instead were result of a serious and disciplined applications of teachings in an effort to find meaning and spirituality in their own lives. The careful application of those teachings in their writing resulted in a form of carefully constructed wisdom literature in case of Kerouac (Grace 2007, 22), and a Buddhist poetics for Ginsberg (Trigilio 2007, ix).Grace's study reaches beyond a focus on Buddhism - or BuddhistCatholic tension - in Kerouac's life, and also attempts to detail Kerouac's overall literary imagination, and his efforts at negotiating and incorporating an American master narrative (12), figure of American folk hero (13), American romance (14), and mindset of an unstated but present American gnosticism (17) that ran contrary to Buddhism's emphasis on a wider consciousness. …