Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester (review)

In this thorough and engaging study, Ben Giamo succeeds in establishing Jack Kerouac as, above all else, “a ragged priest of the word, a prose artist on a spiritual quest for the ultimate meaning of existence and suffering and the celebration of joy in the meantime.” Using Kerouac’s overlooked first novel The Town and the City as a starting point, Giamo traces a pattern that lasts through Kerouac’s career, particularly the high period beginning with On the Road and ending with The Dharma Bums. He describes Kerouac’s career as a quest, through the development of his prose style, for the elusive “IT,” a condition of transcendence whose definition changes as Kerouac changes. Giamo’s thorough admiration for and knowledge of Kerouac’s life and work is the backbone of the study. He draws liberally and relevantly from Kerouac’s letters as well as his fiction, and his ability to connect Buddhism and Christianity to Kerouac’s life and works is what makes the study particularly worthwhile. Giamo is well versed in the Bible and in Buddhist traditions and texts, and he alludes to them deftly and usefully. At the same time, there is a refreshing subjectivity in Giamo’s study that begins with a dream he had of Kerouac, whom he sometimes calls Jack and sometimes addresses directly as he launches out of his subject of literary inquiry into a critique of contemporary American culture.

Admirably, Giamo tries to remove Kerouac from his status as “King of the Beats” and to consider him as an individual, “one of the most soulful, inventive, idiosyncratic, and misunderstood literary figures in American letters.” The point would have been stronger if he had bucked the trend of reminding the readers who’s who in Kerouac’s fiction, for the biographical connections that are a commonplace of Kerouac criticism contribute greatly to his “King of the Beats” label, and the reader of this study would probably know them already. Although it may be evident to even the casual reader that Kerouac was on a spiritual quest in his writings, no other critic has treated the subject as comprehensively as Giamo does here. Given that fact, Giamo should have engaged more deliberately with the critical tradition surrounding Kerouac in order to place his study more clearly in the line of previous works. While the biography, Kerouac’s letters, and Giamo’s own close readings are of course valid methods of evaluating the career, a deeper nod to the tradition of Kerouac criticism would have been useful. Given the personal nature of Kerouac’s writing, it is natural and appropriate to consider his works through a biographical lens. Yet the most admirable and original aspect of Giamo’s study is his attention to the development of Kerouac’s prose artistry as an offshoot of a Catholic-Buddhist spiritual quest, and the originality of this idea is somewhat obscured by biographical details. Whether or not Giamo wants to call attention to this fact, Kerouac, The Word and the Way is an important contribution to the existing body of Kerouac scholarship.