Annotated Reading: Jack Kerouac

Kerouac, Jack. “Part III, Chapters 4 and 10.” On the Road. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.

While the entirety of Kerouac’s 1957 novel has been described as being written with the spontaneity and spirit of jazz musicians, those who don’t have the time or interest in (re)reading the whole work, may be served by focusing on just these two chapters, both of which focus narrowly on jazz performance and feature some of Kerouac’s most stylized prose. As a general introduction, the story, written in long stream-of consciousness passages, is the fictionalized account of Kerouac’s travel adventures as he and partner in mischief Neal Cassady crisscross the country looking for kicks. Transformed into the characters of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, Kerouac and Cassady, seeking the elusive IT, embody the restlessness and rebelliousness of a generation of youth that would come to be known as the Beats. As the young men continually reject contemporary American culture as vacuous and stifling, they find pleasure and freedom and energy in the music of black bop musicians. While Kerouac’s description of the players is filled with awe and reverence, the whole picture may be more complex as it once again raises questions about the relationship between black artists and white audiences.

Chapter Four of Book Three is set in a saw-dust saloon in San Francisco where Dean, Sal, and a group of women watch a small combo on stage giving an uproarious, wild, frenetic performance. The audience, rocking and standing on chairs, is ushered into a kind of ecstatic trance and Kerouac’s prose races along: “Boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattlety-boom!...everything came out of the horn, no more phrases, just cries, cries, ‘Baugh’ and down to ‘Beep!’ and up to ‘EEEEE!’ and down to clinkers and over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds”(187). In passages like this, readers might be able to see how Kerouac adjusts his writing to mimic the sounds he hears at the club. Kerouac continues descriptions like this and even offers and abbreviated history of jazz in Chapter Ten of Book Three, when Sal and Dean are in Chicago. Obvious questions arise, particularly about what Kerouac and his compatriots find so appealing about jazz music and the musicians in the first place. What attitudes do bebop jazz artists espouse? Why might white Beat poets find inspiriting in black jazz music?

Another interesting point to address is how the Beats treat the jazz musicians themselves. Bebop historian and University of Virginia professor Scott DeVeaux, author of The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, has claimed that the Beats, and Kerouac in particular, have a distorted and perhaps even racist view of jazz musicians. In claiming that the musicians “blow” by instinct rather than play by intellect, Kerouac is perpetuating the myth of primitivism and reinforcing stereotypes about black musicality. In Chicago, listening to an alto sax solo, Sal says, “[I]t came from angelical smiling lips upon the mouthpiece and it was a soft, sweet, fairy-tale solo on alto. Lonely as America, a throat-pierced sound in the night” (228). Is this depiction laudatory or is there an undercurrent of prejudice? Is Kerouac unconsciously reflecting the values of his era even as he tries to run away from them? Questions about jazz and race, music and social rebellion, the relationship between artist and audience can all be illuminated through a close reading and a careful discussion.