Modern American Fiction Essay

Jack Kerouac Making It New:

The Jazz-Influenced Style of Spontaneous Bop Prosody and its Connection to Modernism

Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, first published in 1957 but written in 1951, is a novel of the Beat Generation, taken place and written when jazz music was reaching its peak in popular culture. Kerouac was clearly an avid listener, as his writing style was influenced and tried to emulate the spontaneity of jazz and, more specifically, bebop. Kerouac’s writing was improvisatory, experimental, and innovative. He named his writing style “spontaneous prose” or “spontaneous bop prosody” and compared it to the production of jazz music. On the Road is a foundational text of the post-modern era, but many key elements of Modernism can be discovered in this novel and related to the composition of a jazz riff. Although Kerouac was writing in a time that comes after the typical ending of the Modernist Era and his influence came from popular jazz riffs, his style of spontaneous bop prosody still finds its roots in Modernism; Kerouac’s innovative style pays homage to the themes of stream-of-consciousness and fragmentation via Sal Paradise’s narration, and he makes his writing style new when compared to the styles of the predecessors of the Modernist movement had established by rejecting these social conventions.

In Chapter 10 of Part 3 of On the Road, Sal attends a jazz show in Chicago, and while there, he gives an internal monologue of the history and important figures in jazz. Kerouac writes, “He [Charlie Parker] raised his horn and blew into it quietly and thoughtfully and elicited birdlike phrases and architectural Miles Davis logics. These were the children of the great bop innovators. […] Here were the children of the American bop night” (241). The musicians that Sal talks about were the individuals of the counter-culture movement who inspired the spontaneous form Kerouac’s of bop prose (Arendt 42). In ‘Jazz America’: Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Douglas Malcolm, the author, extrapolates Sal’s monologue. He writes, “The characteristic which in Kerouac’s mind unites the historic musicians above all is their ‘madness’; the unavoidable implication is that the music they create derives not from rational thought but from visceral spontaneity” (Malcolm 96). The jazz musicians played their instruments with energy and combined multiple elements of style. This scene gives an explanation as to why Kerouac was so attracted to jazz and bebop. He details the passion and energy that the musicians had for making their music, which parallels Kerouac’s own writing endeavors (Kerouac 243). This visceral spontaneity inspired Kerouac’s “intellectual energy,” according to Paul Michael Arendt (4). His energy comes in the form of breaking Modernist traditions and postmodern expectations for literature.

Both the actual text of On the Road and its writing style are reminiscent of the spontaneous and improvisational style of jazz and bop music. Kerouac wrote the entirety of the first draft of this novel in three weeks without stopping to edit it because he vehemently denied revisions (Weinreich 4). This style of writing is similar to jazz in that both are done immediately- with musicians playing their music live and Kerouac typing the words of his mind onto paper- with no room for immediate revisions (Arendt 8). In her essay titled “The Aesthetics of Spontaneity: A Study of the Fiction of Jack Kerouac,” Regina Weinreich writes, “It is essential to see that the structure of the jazz riff can be identified with that of Kerouac's literary structures— to perfect a deliberate style that produces the illusion of spontaneity (12). Similar to a jazz musician composing a bop beat that would be seen as contemporary, Kerouac wrote spontaneously and without limitations of editing, but he did so coherently and with a purpose of a final result in mind. When revisions of structure and content did happen, they were mental and immediate choices on part of the artist, both the jazz musician playing and Kerouac writing, rather than a line that they went back to change after composing the piece (Weinreich). This style and composition allow for certain elements of Modernism to be extrapolated and explored.

The style of Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody has musical influences rather than a basis in a literary model, yet this style has still been largely influential in American literature and has changed the scope of writing styles and processes. Besides the years of publication, the improvisational style helps to clearly delineate Kerouac from Modernist writers. During the Modernist era, stream-of-consciousness was a popular style of writing. Kerouac challenged these conventions in On the Road by writing in a style that resembles stream-of-consciousness but also made this form new by finding influences in the growing counter-culture movement in the late 1940s through 1950s. In a stream-of-consciousness novel, the narrator often jumps around in thoughts and in time. This style does not appear in On the Road as frequently or dramatically as it does in Modernist texts. However, Sal provides a first-person point-of-view in which the train of thought may jump around, but Kerouac utilizes this to give background information or Sal’s thoughts about people and situations. He does go back in time via Sal’s memory but does so only in limited spaces. Rather than write in stream-of-consciousness, Kerouac innovated and utilized the writing form of spontaneous prose. The difference between these two forms can be more thoroughly understood by reading Kerouac’s own explanation of his writing style. In Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, Kerouac writes, “The object is set before the mind […] or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object. […] in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image” (Kerouac 1). Whereas, in a stream-of-consciousness writing, the author does not set a certain image or memory in their mind before writing; rather, he or she sits down and writes what comes to mind, even if it does not follow a given topic. Kerouac’s style takes the Modernist element of stream-of-consciousness and makes a new, contemporary form of writing by applying techniques that jazz musicians were using in their improvisational bop tunes. Jazz musicians and writers both know the rules and traditionally correct ways to compose their pieces, and they utilize this knowledge to go beyond and break these rules to create a work that is more expressive and relevant to their intentions (Malcolm 106). In this sense, the improvisational styles of bop and writing are not simply putting words and notes down with no regard to form, but are deliberate choices and rebellion against the ‘norm.’ In this case, Modernism was the norm and the mainstream culture. Bop music and the Beat Generation writers were part of the counter-culture movement against the norm, or, as the counter-culture referred to it, the squares. And if stream-of-consciousness is the square, then Kerouac went outside of the box with his contemporary bop prosody style.

A key element of bebop is its tendency to be intentionally sporadic but retain familiar riffs that it will go back to over the course of a song. In literature, this style is referred to as fragmentation and is a key stylistic element of Modernist and postmodern literature. Kerouac utilizes fragmentation, which is evidenced by his tendencies to jump scenes and revisit certain characters or settings in the same way that a bop musician will return to familiar jazz riffs during an improvisatory performance (Weinreich 12). In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of On the Road, Ann Charters quotes Malcolm Cowley as having said that the novel swings “back and forth between East Coast and West Coast like a huge pendulum” (Charters xxvi). Throughout this swinging back and forth, Kerouac frequently returns to the familiar characters of Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx, and Old Bull Lee and the cities that he visits multiple times. This emulates the riffs seen in bebop. Weinreich quotes Albert Murray as saying that a jazz riff is a

“brief musical phrase that is repeated, sometimes with very subtle variations. Riffs always seem as spontaneous as if they were improvised […] not only are riffs as much a part of some arrangements as the lead melody, but many consist of nothing more than stock phrases, quotations from some familiar melody” (12).

In this regard, the familiar characters and cities are the riffs of Kerouac’s novel. Fragmentation is tool that Kerouac and bebop musicians use to connect various melodies and stories together when there may be a lack of connection. For example, Sal went to many different places across the United States and in these cities he took part in various activities with a plethora of characters. However, Kerouac linked these adventures together with the major characters of Dean, Carlo, and Bull Lee and with the settings of bars and jazz clubs. These act as stock settings and characters; they are the bebop riffs in literature and effectively made new the Modernist concept of fragmentation.

Kerouac’s novel established for itself a place in literature that had not existed prior to its publication. Kerouac rejected the harsh social conventions that Modernism and its audience expected. Through his emulation of the stylistics of bebop, Kerouac composes a novel that transcends the square of Modernism and makes the form of prose new again. The musical influences of spontaneous bop prosody create a style of fiction in which the mainstream aspects of stream-of-consciousness and fragmentation are at once revisited and rejected. Spontaneous bop prosody reflects these aspects of Modernism but reworks the details to be more improvisational like the bebop jazz music of the counter-culture.

Works Cited

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Spontaneous Prose in “On the Road”, “The Subterraneans”, and “Tristessa”." Order No. 1474805 Villanova University, 2010. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 5 Dec. 2017.

Campbell, James. “Kerouac's Blues.” The Antioch Review, vol. 57, no. 3, 1999, pp. 363–

370. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4613885.

Charters, Ann. Introduction. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, 1957, Penguin, 1991, pp. xxvi.

Kerouac, Jack. "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose." Evergreen Review. 2.5 (1958). Print.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print.

Malcolm, Douglas. “‘Jazz America’: Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac's ‘On

the Road.’” Contemporary Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 1999, pp. 85–110. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1208820.

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