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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2009

“Spontaneous Bop Prosody: Jack Kerouac’s Verbal Jazz”

Peggy Pacini

Résumé

My presentation explores Kerouac’s belief in the musical quality of literature and develops the basis of his writing method, how jazz, blues and bebop affect the content and form of his prosody, and how orality and music deeply informs his style. According to Kerouac, just as a jazz musician begins a chord or a melody and weaves intricate improvisational works around the ”jewel point,” the writer could start with an image and limitlessly “blow-on-subject seas of thought” freely creating musical sounds from the subject of the image. In fact, Kerouac’s statement in the author note to Mexico City Blues that he wanted “to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday” emphasizes the importance of jazz technique on his style, which develops the technique he had already used in his first book of poems, San Francisco Blues. The presentation starts by pondering on Nancy Grace’s statement that “dipping into and out of jazz and literary production, [Kerouac] wrote with and against these art forms”, and expends on the jazz influence in understanding and reading Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend, his fictional autobiography, as a “blue(s) song,” a endless blues chorus, a stylistic means for him to translate his Franco-American experience – his vision of America through the eye of an American of French Canadian descent. If jazz signalled a change in his literary use of language, allowing him to explore the different aspects of American orality, and provided him with a model for recording the prose rhythms of American life, then it also indirectly presented him with a language form heralding intuitive spoken transmission which could stand as a correlative to his own first language, Joual. Jazz was as spontaneous an oral culture as was his own native language and was a perfect direct means for Kerouac as a writer to translate his own American experience stressing the musicality, the vocal performance of his prose architecture, his “new vision,” his new style for America.

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Littératures
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Dates et versions

hal-03453209 , version 1 (27-11-2021)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03453209 , version 1

Citer

Peggy Pacini. “Spontaneous Bop Prosody: Jack Kerouac’s Verbal Jazz”. AISNA XX Biennal International Conference -- Translating America: Importing, Translating, Misrepresenting, Mythicizing, Communicating America, Associazione Italiana Di Studi Nord-Americani (AISNA), Sep 2009, Torino, Italy. ⟨hal-03453209⟩

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