The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Some of the Dharma by Jack KerouacTim Hunt
Jack Kerouac. Some of the Dharma. Viking, 1997. 420 pp. $32.95.
Some of the Dharma will not replace On the Road or Dharma Bums as car-side reading. It lacks the rush of events that have now led yet another generation to discover Kerouac (even while his literary reputation remains stuck in the ditch of critical neglect waiting for the tow truck of academe). Still, the publication of these mid-1950s meditations (on Buddhism, consciousness, and writing), sketches, brief poems, and occasional drawings is significant in several ways. It suggests that there is a growing readership for Kerouac’s more experimental work, which in time may encourage the recognition that the core of his achievement is Visions of Cody and his other experiments with voice and form. It also helps define the nature of Kerouac’s experiment. In Some of the Dharma the defining stylistic element is the typewriter—the way it can space letters, symbols, and words as visual designs and also the way it can deploy text and space to convey cadences and inflections and to create various juxtapositions and simultaneities. Fortunately, Viking has preserved Kerouac’s typewriting. This underscores his determination to find ways to evoke the immediacy of the spoken voice (and create an illusion of participating in it), yet also his commitment to construct literary objects for contemplation and appreciation. The typewriterly experiments of Some of the Dharma thus point to the dialectic of Kerouac’s experiment: the desire for a style that would simultaneously have (actually be) the performative immediacy of talk, yet also have the stability and distance of the printed page. So yes, Some of the Dharma offers us Kerouac’s attempt to save himself through Buddhism. It is also (read on its own terms) a sometimes stunning, often interesting, occasionally silly experimental tour de force that asks us to rethink Capote’s dismissive sneer of “That’s typewriting.” [Tim Hunt]