Jazz bodies: In process, on trial and instrumental

Abstract

Summary Fictional narratives commonly stage the ineffability of music while simultaneously constructing located identities and trajectories of meaning in the course of its configuration. This argument concerns a range of these constructions: attempts to configure jazz in discourse through translations across the border between the music and corporeality. The literary embodiment of jazz has historically been embedded in primitivist discourses which reify desire in a racist mode. By applying Kristeva's explication of the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic, the article considers recent examples of jazz literature ‐ most notably Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter (1984) and Geoff Dyer's pastiche text, But Beautiful (1991) ‐ which counter this reductive tendency by constructing the imbrication of desire and codes of expression. These renderings of the emergence of the jazz subject allow for productive ruminations on the relations between the somatic body, the body of the instrument and the body of knowledge out of which individual performances arise. The article concludes with the claim that jazz discourses might well be a site for theorising fluid processes of intersubjective becoming and that these theoretical variations might well have application in a range of other knowledge domains.