Englishes Today
I
December 2016
I
Volume II, Issue IV
ISSN : 2395 4809
ENGLISHES TODAY
I
December 2016
I
Vol. II, Issue IV
I
ISSN : 2395 4809
“The Music of the Spheres”:
Jazz and the Spontaneous Prose of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road’
Sujoy Chakravarthi
M.A. English
The English and Foreign Languages University
Hyderabad, INDIA.
Abstract
The Beat Generation was a product of America in the 1950s, emerging as a reaction to the strict conformism
of that time. They were not occupied with a post-war loss of faith but rather with the need of it. They sought
meaning and a new philosophy of life by drawing on a multitude of spiritual, philosophical and aesthetic
sources. A driving force behind this movement was Jack Kerouac, whose goal was to transcribe the natural,
effervescent speech of his Beat comrades into an organic prosody of untrammelled flow in his ‘Spontaneous
Prose’.
Amongst the influences of Rimbaud, recreational drugs and stream of consciousness, the Beat Generation
drew their most intrinsic inspiration from Jazz music, particularly the Bebop style which focused on
virtuosity and improvisational prowess. The spontaneity and sustained energy of live, free-flowing jazz was
the direct motivation for Kerouac’s 'On the Road', which is consistently regarded as the seminal work of Beat
literature.
This paper seeks to analyze the narrative style and use of language of 'On the Road' and shed light on how
the motif of jazz persists through almost every line of the novel. It is not only an exploration of the rhapsodic
descriptions of live music also an attempt to establish how jazz influenced the structure and the very manner
in which the work was composed.
For this study, a number of works have been referenced including essays by Kerouac on the art of his
writing, the works of other prominent Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and John Clellon Holmes and a
range of essays on the influences and the literature of the Beat Generation, with the objective of analyzing a
style of writing where music and literature almost become entwined to create a vibrant form of literature with
a pulse.
Keywords : Beat Generation, Jazz, Literature and Music, Narrative Style
Englishes Today
I
December 2016
I
Volume II, Issue IV
ISSN : 2395 4809
What is the Beat Generation?
“The origins of the word "beat" are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to
most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been
used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of
soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it
means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat
whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single
number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.”‘This is the Beat Generation’ - John Clellon Holmes
The Beat Generation was a literary movement that originated in the early 1950’s. Often wrongly
portrayed as born out of post-war disillusionment, the Beat Generation emerged more as a reaction
to the strict conformism of America at that time. The term ‘Beat Generation’ originates from a
conversation between Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes, in which the former remarked: “So I
guess you might say we’re a beat generation.” This generation was not occupied with the loss of
faith – like the Lost Generation – but rather “with the need of it. What seemed to start as a small
group of anti-intellectualists quickly became an anti-establishmentarian movement. They felt
alienated and sought a form of community, a new philosophy or moral idea. Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac and William Burroughs illustrate the typical non-conformism that marked their generation.
Already in the 1940’s, they started travelling across the United States and experimenting with
drugs, bisexuality and the nightlife of jazz.
Kerouac is regarded as probably the main driving force behind this literary movement. His writing
style was inspired by the letters of Neal Cassady, who would later become the hero of his novel ‘On
the Road’. In these letters Kerouac discovered a writing style corresponding to every-day speech.
His goal was to transform this style into literature. Under the influence of natural speech, an interest
in experimental jazz and the organic prosody of William Carlos Williams, he would come to define
this style as ‘Spontaneous Prose’.
Influence of Jazz
Allen Ginsberg frequently emphasized the connection between poetry and music. “Who denies the
music of the spheres denies poetry, denies man, and spits on Blake, Shelley, Christ and Buddha,”
(‘Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl’ (1959)). Consequently music, particularly Jazz,
played a central part in Beat literature and certainly in the development of their style. The Beat
authors borrowed many terms from the jazz/hipster slang of the '40s, peppering their works with
words such as "square," "cats," "nowhere," and "dig." But jazz meant much more than just a
vocabulary to the Beat writers. To them, jazz was a way of life, a completely different way to
approach the creative process. In his book 'Venice West', John Arthur Maynard writes:
“Jazz served as the ultimate point of reference ... From it they adopted the mythos
of the brooding, tortured, solitary artist, performing with others but always alone.
They talked the talk of jazz, built communal rites around using the jazzman's
drugs, and worshipped the dead jazz musicians most fervently. The musician
whose music was fatal represented pure spontaneity.”
Jack Kerouac denoted the significance of Jazz, and particularly experimental bebop in his
‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’ (1957) and ‘Belief & Technique for Modern Prose’ (1958).
Englishes Today
I
December 2016
I
Volume II, Issue IV
ISSN : 2395 4809
The word 'beat' was primarily in use after World War II by jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang
term meaning down and out, or poor and exhausted. Kerouac went on to twist the meaning of the
term "beat" to serve his own purposes, explaining that it meant "beatitude, not beat up. You feel
this. You feel it in a beat, in jazz real cool jazz". Jazz deeply influenced his literature; Kerouac’s
spontaneous prose regularly replicated the typical structure of jazz and bebop improvisations. It
became not only a source of inspiration for him but the very building blocks of the literary
monument he was creating.
‘On the Road’
Jack Kerouac described the process of writing as: “… sketching language is undisturbed flow
from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image”
. He was deeply influenced by the jazz music of the age, revelling in the spontaneity of the short,
sharp shocks of musical phrases and the sustained energy of live, free-flowing and constantly
evolving jazz. Outside of his works, Kerouac often organised regular poetry readings set to jazz
accompaniment, and on certain occasions would dispense of the poetry and take to scat singingvocal improvisation with nonsense syllables instead of lyrics; his repertoire included “a faithful
rendering of a Miles Davis solo that ...was entirely accurate and something more than a simple
imitation”. He was not simply an avid jazz enthusiast - he sought meaning and artistic inspiration
from his passion for music.
His seminal work ‘On The Road’ (1957), regarded as the definitive prose work of Beat Literature,
is testament to his absorption of the principles of the music he was so devoted towards and his
application of the same in his attempt to create a new kind of literature. He sought to blur the lines
between thought and written word - “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition”.
Kerouac hit upon the idea of non-stop typing to generate the ‘kickwriting’ momentum. He used 12foot sheets of drawing paper taped together which he trimmed and fed into his typewriter. Within
three weeks, he had completed the first manuscript for the book as a roll of paper typed as a singlespaced paragraph 120 feet long. Writing ‘On the Road’, Kerouac had finally found his voice and
his subject – the story of the search for his own identity and place as an outsider in America. And in
the “great amorous soul” of Dean Moriarty, the fictional portrait of Neal Cassady, Kerouac created
a character who would set alight the consciousness and imagination of generations to come; the
epitome of “Beat”, the “HOLY GOOF... the root, the soul of Beatific”.
Amidst the detailed description of the travails of the narrator and the people whom he journeys with
or meets on the way and the evocative language used to describe the sights and sensations of the
road, some of Kerouac’s most effervescent writing deals with his time spent in listening to music in
the jazz bars and pubs of America. It is in these descriptions of the vibrant sound of improvised
Bebop jazz and the hysteria it invoked in the entranced audience gathered to hear, and watch, the
performances that the synthesis of Kerouac’s principles for prose writing and his own deep fervour
for Jazz takes place:
“Out we jumped in the warm, mad night, hearing a wild tenorman bawling horn
across the way, going ‘EE-YAH! EE-YAH! EE-YAH!’ and hands clapping to the
beat and folks yelling ‘Go, go, go!’... Boom, kick, that drummer kicking his drums
down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattletyboom! A big fat man was jumping on the platform making it sag and creek. ‘Yoo!’
The pianist was only pounding the keys with spreadeagled fingers, chords, at
Englishes Today
I
December 2016
I
Volume II, Issue IV
ISSN : 2395 4809
intervals when the great tenorman was drawing breath for another blast-Chinese
chords, shuddering the piano in every timber, chink and wire, boing! The
tenorman jumped down the platform... He just hauled back and stamped his foot
and blew down a hoarse, baughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn
and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air.”
This rather lengthy extract is included here as a representative sample for Kerouac’s writing. It
features the use of unconventional syntax, completely breaking away from traditional sentence
composition, the use of onomatopoeic words to convey the sense of sounds as they happened to the
narrator and the attention to minute detail to a fastidious degree. Above all there is pervading sense
of a rolling, evolving body of language which develops into a complete sensory experience. The
energy contained here is palpable – it flows with the same intensity and gradually gathering
momentum of a Bebop improvisation in crescendo towards a shattering climax.
Kerouac stated that Spontaneous Prose can be composed when the writer has achieved a state of
mind akin to “...seas of thought, swimming in sea of English...” .It is this fluid style of writing
where the author seems not only to write as he is thinking but often seems to be putting down the
sentences where thoughts and the written word seem to overlap that we can see put to use in his
most celebrated text. While the prose attempts to convey the soundtrack of the rhapsodic scenes of
jazz clubs and its effect on listeners, the novel itself takes the form of a jazz melody; Kerouac
attempts to transcribe in words what the composer would put down in musical notation. His
dynamism and musicality of language is not restricted to those sparkling narrations of live jazz
alone, but is inherent in passages describing real life as well:
“At dusk we were humming into the streets of New Orleans. ‘Oh, smell the
people!’ yelled Dean with his face out of the window, sniffing. ‘Ah! God! Life!’ He
swung around a trolley. ‘Yes!’ He darted the car and looked in every direction for
girls. ‘Look at her!’... ‘Oh I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful!
I love women!’ He spat out the window; he groaned; he clutched his head. Great
beads of sweat fell from his face from pure excitement and exhaustion.”
The above passage contains all the electric phrases which jump out at the reader like the rasping
bursts of a trumpet. Dean Moriarty, in his wonderful energy and determination to drink in
everything he sees and feels around him, twists and turns, dodges and weaves, even pirouettes at
times to catch the moment, the feeling encapsulated in the elusive search for ‘It’, the indefinable
quantity which every writer or figure from the Beat Generation sought to capture: a ‘je ne sais quoi’
which Kerouac described as “bright Mind Essence” . Dean, the living embodiment of Beat, is
given to equal parts madness and brilliance. He is as unpredictable as the rambling, evolving motif
for a jazz tune where the theme is often lost in the impulsive melody lines and shifting timesignatures. It is astonishing to realise that a character with the dynamism and volatility of a weather
vane caught in a hurricane prompted by a near insane longing to never be static and a pure lust for
Life could actually find its inspiration, and in fact be almost completely true-to-life in depiction, to
a real person: Neal Cassady. Cassady was muse to Allen Ginsberg as well as a great influence on
Kerouac, who was so impressed by the idiosyncratic eloquence of Cassady’s letters that he
“thought it ranked among the best things ever written in America...” Kerouac included most of
Cassady’s utterances verbatim for the character of Dean Moriarty, indicative of how highly he
regarded his eccentric companion’s unique way of speaking; its music and the way he made the
language dance with the same energetic vibe that captured his spirit:
Englishes Today
I
December 2016
I
Volume II, Issue IV
ISSN : 2395 4809
“What’s your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy
road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?”
Kerouac was both a jazz aficionado who used the principles of it to great effect in his prose writings
and also a student of its history. In an ambitious paragraph, he attempts to take on the role of jazz
historian, whilst also paying homage to the ‘Secret Heroes’ to whom he and his entire clique of
esoteric jazz worshippers owed a great deal of their aesthetic inspiration:
“Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New
Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and
broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy
Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of
power and subtlety...Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother's
woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing
on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band
that had Hot Lips Page and the rest - Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to
Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonious Monk and madder Gillespie - Charlie
Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in a circle while
playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly
goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and
horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest ... Here were the children of the
American bop night.”
To understand the effect of what Jazz and music had on Kerouac and the other beat writers, one
needs look no further than their writings. Yet to truly appreciate it, the surface of ambiguous,
incoherent prose needs to be pierced through to reveal the music of the language. It is in the rhythm
of the words strung together, often snowballing into vast paragraphs which capture sights, sounds,
smells and other sensations. It lies in the composition of phrases that seem to echo the break-neck
tempos and the thrill of improvisations leading to newer landscapes to explore, newer
consciousnesses to be gained. The modern jazz was something that spoke for them: “...their lives
knew a gospel for the first time. It was more than a music; it became an attitude toward life, a
way of walking, a language and a costume; and these introverted kids... now felt somewhere at
last”. Jack Kerouac, as high priest for the prose of the Beat Generation, wrote in the language which
he felt gave the closest impression of the pulsating sensations and emotions (the “telepathic
shock”) he felt about the Life he knew. He wrote in his own language of ‘Spontaneous Prose’; he
wrote in the language of Jazz.
References
Primary text
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. USA: Viking Press, Inc, 1957. 39th ed. London: Penguin Group, 2000.
Works Cited
Secondary Sources
Chambers, Jack. Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Print.
Charters, Ann. Introduction. ‘On the Road’. 39th ed. London: Penguin Group, 2000.
Englishes Today
I
December 2016
I
Volume II, Issue IV
ISSN : 2395 4809
Holmes, John Clellon. “This is the Beat Generation”. The New York Times Magazine. November 16,
1952.pdf file. <http://faculty.mansfield.edu/julrich/holmes.htm>
--- Go. USA: Scribner's,1952.
Janssen, Mike. Jazz and the Beat Generation. Web. <http://www.litkicks.com/Topics/Jazz.html>
Kerouac, Jack. Essentials of Spontaneous Prose. ‘Black Mountain Review’. 1957.pdf file.
http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/kerouac-spontaneous.html
--- Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. 1958. pdf file. http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/kerouactechnique.html
Maynard, Arthur. Venice West. USA: Rutgers University Press,1993. Jazz and the Beat Generation. Mike
Janssen. Web. <http://www.litkicks.com/Topics/Jazz.html>
Silberman, Steve. How Beat Happened. 1995. Web. http://ezone.org/ez/e2/articles/digaman.html
Englishes Today
I
December 2016
I
Volume II, Issue IV
ISSN : 2395 4809