Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation movement

¶ … American Jazz in

JACK KEROUAC'S ON THE ROAD

As perhaps the only true American musical artform, jazz was created mainly by African-Americans in the early years of the 20th century through an amalgamation of elements drawn from European-American and tribal African musical forms. As Barry Kernfeld so acutely points out, jazz "has had a profound effect on American culture, not only through its considerable popularity but also through the important role it has played" in shaping the numerous forms of American popular music that developed around it and out of it (580). This role can also be applied to other forms of artistic expression, particularly in the field of American literature in categories like poetry, the short story, and the novel. One pivotal literary work in which the elements of jazz serves as a sort of rhythmic foundation is Jack Kerouac's 1951 opus On The Road, inspired by "the drug-fueled cross-country car rides that Kerouac made with Neal Cassady" and narrated in a "headlong style. . . based on beauty, alcohol, sex, drugs, mysticism" and of course jazz music (Liukkonen, "Jack Kerouac," Internet).

Not surprisingly, Kerouac's life-long penchant for American jazz also shows up in a number of his other works written in the 1950's when Hollywood actor James Dean symbolized the true American "bad boy" and stood as the penultimate American rebel. One of these is Visions of Cody, written between 1951 and 1952, which "Beat poet" Allen Ginsberg, serving as the novel's unofficial editor, "considered as a "holy mess" yet did not change its "rambling style and discontinuous structure" because of its improvisational quality reminiscent of jazz music (Luikkonen, "Jack Kerouac," Internet). As added support, Kerouac as a member of the "Beat

Generation" personally identified with jazz and recognized it as "a fundamental part of the Beat sub-culture" while also viewing jazz musicians as "heroes and sages," figures like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, appreciated by Kerouac as "true American geniuses, heroes and rebels" in protest against traditional white American, middle-class values ("The Influences of the Beat Generation,' Internet).

Certainly, Kerouac's deep understanding and appreciation of American jazz served as his foundation for the syncopation found within the pages of On The Road. In this respect, syncopation in musical terms can be described as "an effect of rhythmic displacement created by articulating weaker beats or metrical positions" (Kernfeld, 1178), but in the case of On The Road, these rhythmic displacements and articulations were accomplished via the use of certain words and phrases, a form of "confessional, jazz-like prose" ("Influences of the Beat Generation,' Internet) which takes the reader on a strange, musical trip, much like listening to a jazz band while under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Thus, Kerouac's approach to utilizing the elements of American jazz inspired him to insert poetical, jazz-like assonance and alliteration into the text in order to give it rhythm and colorization, much like one would find in a composition by Charlie Parker under the cognomen of "Bebob deluxe."

Exactly why Kerouac decided to approach On The Road in such a manner has much to do with his personal sense of lyrical/poetical movement, wherein the words on the printed page exhibit a kind of syncopated rhythm which the reader can easily recognize via sounded musical beats and measures, strong at one point and weak at another, a type of rising and falling as with notes issuing from a saxophone played by Charlie Parker or piano notes so brilliantly executed by Thelonious Monk.

In On The Road, the character of Sal Paradise exclaims to his fellow passenger in the car, Dean Moriarty, while passing through the southern section of Louisiana, "Man, do you imagine what it would be like if we found a jazz joint in these swamps, with great big fellas moanin' guitar blues and drinking snakejuice and makin' signs at us? Yes!" (Kerouac, 131). Obviously, Sal Paradise, much like Kerouac himself, loves American jazz music, especially played on the acoustic guitar by an African-American jazz/blues giant like Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly.

As Mark Richardson sees it, writing in "Peasant Dreams: Reading On The Road," "The strain of the basic primitive," in this case jazz, ". . . is what Sal and Dean listen to in order to hear" what they call "wailing humanity" (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Internet) or, in other words, the vocals of someone like Leadbelly wailing out the blues, another original form of American music with roots sunk deep in the elements of jazz. For Richardson, it seems that Kerouac's application of jazz in the text of On The Road serves not only as a theme but also as the basic framework for the personalities of Sal and Dean, two rebels "on the road" and "on the beat" exploring the endless complexities of the American musical landscape.

This jazz theme in On The Road can also be applied to race and gender, for as Richardson points out, Kerouac utilizes the idea of "whiteness" as contrasted with "blackness," with the first being the so-called WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, a person who usually shuns anything to do with black culture, especially jazz music, and sees jazz musicians as peasants or those who wander from place to place, much like gypsies, without putting down social roots. As to "blackness,' this refers to African-Americans like Leadbelly, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk who stand in stark contrast to "White America" and find pleasure and satisfaction in playing jazz music. For Kerouac and Sal, this "whiteness" is the antithesis of jazz and is symbolized by "a suit of clothes too good to be comfortable" on the body of a jazz-loving, "on the beat" rebel more suited to non-conformity ("Peasant Dreams," Internet).