Boris Vian Ou Le Pianocktail Litteraire

Abstract

The present study aims to prove that the French writer Boris Vian – who was also a gifted trumpet player in a jazz band – built his fiction, and especially his famous novel “L’Ecume des jours” (Froth on the Daydream), using the same principles and techniques that he employed in composing and interpreting his music. Jazz was considered, at the time, experimental music: it was abstract and symbolical; it had a playful side and a great part of sophisticated improvisation. And so is Vian’s writing: it uses the polyphonic composition, the counterpoint technique, the syncope, the artificial and illogical changes of rhythms and themes; just like jazz, this fiction admits everything that goes against the classic system and its rigorous rules. We can assert that, during Modernism, there are no pertinent differences between arts, and they all echo and respond to each other, on the principle of Baudelaire’s “correspondences”.