In the introduction to the text I was struck by Klein's mention of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums and the Beat's general fascination with Zen Buddhism. In the the introduction Klein locates the Beats within the moment when American cultural producers turned their gaze eastward. However, I think that one can locate The Dharma Bums within the sentimentalism that was so prevalent in middlebrow depictions of Asia.
It seems that one of the charges most frequently leveled against Kerouac is that his work is overly sentimental. The Dharma Bums is no exception to this charge. While discussions of sentimentality generally focus on other aspects of Kerouac's works, it seems that Klein's conception of this middlebrow sentimentality is indeed applicable to Kerouac's depiction of Zen Buddhism and the a Zen way of life. Regardless of Kerouac's status in 2010, as a writer in the late 1950s his novels were middlebrow literature. On the Road was a bestseller and Kerouac would later appear on television programs such as the Steve Allen show. One year later, in 1958, when The Dharma Bums was published, I doubt much had occurred to change Kerouac's status within the middlebrow. In the novel Kerouac romanticizes Zen to the point of almost parody. As such, it serves to demonstrate this notion of sentimentality.
Conversely, I think that Kerouac's fellow Beats Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg approach Zen from a different position. While both poets triumphed the philosophy and way of life neither romanticized it in the way Kerouac did. The argument could be made that Ginsberg's approach was romanticized to a certain degree, yet his interest comes off as more authentic.
The same can be said of Alan Watts' article “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen”. Watts's article is not so much a meditation on zen, but rather an attempt to break up the mythology surrounding it. Watts attempts to disentangle Zen from its association with the Beats. Furthermore, he attempts to point out how America was getting it wrong in attempting to adopt Zen principles. In this respect, Watts was attempting to dismiss the sentimentality that surrounded Zen and it's adoption into American culture.
This got me thinking about authenticity and about how we don't consider Christians in Asia or Africa as somehow "faking it" or romanticizing a belief system.
ReplyDeleteThat led me to think about Gary Snyder's deep ecology which has always been a mishmash of eastern religion and western indigenous "spirituality."
I thought about issues of cultural appropriation and I keep going back and forth asking if any culture is really authentic or belongs to a particular people or geography (since religion spreads through war or through hegemonic cultural institutions backed by the threat of violence) or whether this attitude itself is a peculiar one that does the job of the market for the market: placing every collective expression of meaning up for exchange.
Your description of how the Beats used Zen differently explores some of these nuances!