Burroughs across Borders

One of William S. Burroughs’s distinctions is to figure among the most controversial of US authors, for both his life and his work, the former often invoked to indict the latter. The publication of Jorge García-Robles’s wonderful little book may go a long way toward smoothing out the controversy, for the very significant reason that it joins current efforts to view the Beat Generation as a transnational phenomenon. A novelist, himself, who is the leading Mexican specialist on the Beat Generation and a translator of Jack Kerouac, García-Robles offers a vivacious narrative that situates Burroughs’s exile years in Mexico, 1949–1952, in the currents of the country’s modernism and social life that ran in the shadow of the formidable political and cultural presence to the north. Illuminating this exile as driven by a fascination, both anthropological and deliberately indulgent, with poverty, abjection, addiction, and corruption, The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico enhances the critical understanding of Burroughs’s writing as a remarkably keen series of commentaries on extended imperial networks.

Readers of Burroughs, of course, know that the time in Mexico, marked by heavy consumption of drugs and alcohol, culminated when an extremely high-risk “William Tell act” came unhinged. Aiming his Star .380 automatic through a chemical haze at the glass on his wife Joan Vollmer Burroughs’s head, the author fired the “stray bullet” that killed her. The sense of the importance of this moment in Burroughs’s path to becoming a writer originates in his own account: in the introduction to his 1985 Queer (a novel he first wrote in Mexico in 1950), for the first time he fully confesses the circumstances of what he had previously designated an accident, stating that “the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have no choice except to write my way out.” García-Robles transfers this much-rehearsed chapter of Burroughs lore from the disembodied, mythical status that repetition accords it to the concreteness of its social and cultural setting, the unruly and intoxicated aspects of Mexico City underground life that the author sought. First published as La bala perdida in 1995 and reissued in a 2007 volume with García-Robles’s companion book on Kerouac in Mexico, El disfraz de la inocencia (also just published by Minnesota in Daniel Schecter’s translation, At the End of the Road), The Stray Bullet provides evidence that placing the transnational dimension of the Beat Generation at the center of critical attention may be a habit in Mexico. However, it remains a novelty in the United States, despite being a sine qua non in accurately assessing these writers’ immense contributions to American literature.

García-Robles opens the book with other familiar Beat tales: the meeting between Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in New York, the now-immortal circle that included Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Hal Chase, Lucien Carr, the ill-fated David Kammerer, Edie Parker (who married Kerouac), and her roommate Joan Vollmer. We read of sex, drugs, violence—Carr’s stabbing of Kammerer, who had stalked him for years, the subject of the recently published early novel by Burroughs and Kerouac, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Tanks (2009), and the 2013 movie directed by John Krokidas, Kill Your Darlings. García-Robles completely saves this section of the book from tedium through his poetic chronicling, at the pace of a tight thriller leading us to Burroughs’s heroin addiction and arrest. Exile in Mexico becomes a necessary consequence: “He had no other choice but to leave the country via the shortest route possible and flee…There was no other way. Fate had called the shots. Mexico it was. Next stop: hell.”

García-Robles depicts the thriving transnational forces that were, among other things, securing Mexico’s status as a Third World country...