A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as Poet

4. Keroac in Mexico, Mexico in Kerouac

4 Kerouac in Mexico, Mexico in Kerouac [In Mexican history} we are sounding out the last necessities oflife itself. We are learning out ofanother life-course to know ourselves what we arey what we must bey what we shall be. It is the great school ofour future. ~ In the "Passing Through" sections ofDesolation Angels, the _ narrator, Duluoz, discusses the conflict he feels between solitude and "the world's action" and describes the geographical polarities that both symbolize and contain the conflict: "It's only in Mexico, in. the sweetness and innocence, birth and death seem at all worthwhile" (222). Duluoz's recollection of his impression of the city also balances the conflicting elements in a charming equipoise: "Candlelight in a lonely room, and writing about the world" (222). This dualism is typical of Kerouac's attitude toward Mexico, and the image and theme ofMexico run through all of his work, playa major role in Mexico City Blues beyond the title itself, and tie his writing securely to a tradition of European literature that was taken up with great enthusiasm by the Beats. Allen Ginsberg, for instance, anticipating his departure for Mexico City-where he, Gregory Corso, and Peter and Lafcadio Orlovsky p1an11Cd to rendezvous with Jack Kerouac in the fall of 51 A Map ofMexico City Blues 1956-sat down to write a poem. "Ready to Roll" identifies the main attractions oflife south of the border: the immediate adventure of travel, the low cost of living, escape from repressive authority , abundant drugs, easy and uninhibited sex, an interesting ancient culture, and solitude. Mexico City, the seat of both Native American and Spanish cultures, had already become, in Ginsberg's eyes, "a naked hipster labyrinth," exotic and alluring, hospitable to Beat ideals. From the time of William S. Burroughs's escape over the border from New Orleans after a drug bust in late 1949, Mexico had become both a sanctuary and a site of pilgrimage for Beat writers, and it has continued to fulfill these functions for neo-Beat artists as well. For Kerouac the country satisfied all the needs Ginsberg pointed out and more: it served as a vantage point from which he could observe the frantic doings of the civilized world and provided a garret in which Kerouac could write in peace. Using his prodigious synthetic powers, Kerouac fused the varied significance Mexico held for his contemporaries with his own sense of it in Mexico City Blues. In an impressive and durable work ofscholarship called American and British Writen in MexicoJ 1556-1973, Drewey Wayne Gunn has divided the appeal ofMexico for writers through the centuries into five categories: the possibility of making a fresh start in a strange new country; the thrill of danger in a more violent and lawless setting; isolation, both positive and negative ; interest in an unidustrialized culture; and the beauty of Mexican arts (x-xi). In the next-to-Iast chapter, ''The Beat Trail to Mexico," Gunn notes that Beat writers were lured south of the border for all these reasons, but that they are distinguished from other writers because "they formed the only noteworthy group to have worked together in Mexico" (229). Naturally, he places Kerouac squarely within this subcategory of a very special literary tradition . He also believes that the Beats' interest in Mexican primitivism ran deeper, and he observes that many Beat writers went on from Mexico to explore cultures even more remote from America. The way Beat writers combined the practical and metaphoric values of the country and city ofMexico differs from the way members of the Lost Generation combined those same values of 52 Kerouae in Mexico, Mexico in Kerouae the city of Paris. Burroughs, for instance, the first of the Beats to discover the delights of Mexico, developed an early interest in the Mayan codices (ancient mythological annals), an interest he transmitted to Ginsberg, Kerouac, and other members of their circle at Columbia in the mid-1940s. Near the end of the same decade, however, Mexico took on a much more practical importance for Burroughs: he sought refuge there from narcotics charges stemming from his arrest in New Orleans, an episode described in detail in his novel Junky. And in a much later retrospective prologue to the sequel of that novel, titled Queer, which is set almost entirely in Mexico City, Burroughs also gives his version of the attractions of the place: In 1949, it...