Beating time: Configurations of temporality in Jack Kerouac's On the Road

College Literature, Fall 2001 by Mortenson, Erik R

Yet Mexico is not always configured as death and doom. In an attempt to critique notions of time in the United States, the novel makes numerous references to the less constricting temporal order of Mexico. The capital, Mexico City, is described as a place without physical or temporal end. Sal writes "We wandered in a frenzy and a dream. We ate beautiful steaks for forty-eight cents in strange tiled Mexican cafeterias with generations of marimba musicians standing at one immense marimba.... Nothing stopped; the streets were alive all night. nothing ever ended" (Kerouac 1976, 302). Here temporality is limitless, from "generations" at a single "immense" marimba, to a city where there is activity "all night." It is no accident that On the Road takes a detour from its east-west travelings and eventually heads south. Mexico is repeatedly portrayed in obverse relation to an oppressive America. Things are cheaper, cops are nicer, and time sheds its constraining feel. This point culminates, perhaps, in Dean's gift of his wristwatch for a crystal. Traveling through the mountains, Dean spots some Indian girls selling crystals by the road. Dean then "went fishing around in the battered trunk in the back-the same old tortured American trunk-and pulled out a wristwatch .... Then Dean poked in the little girl's hand for `the sweetest and purest and smallest crystal she has personally picked from the mountain for me"' (Kerouac 1976, 298). The contrasts generated by this passage are endless. The "American trunk" situates the wristwatch, itself laden with images of time, in a distinctly US. context. Its exchange for the native crystal thus signals a swap of constraining, constructed, American temporality for the natural, formless production of the Indian earth itself.5 The presentation of an alternative temporal universe undermines the idea that time constructed in the US. is somehow "natural" and singular.

Though On the Road clearly sees Mexican temporality as preferable to that ofAmerica, the question as to what time itself means in Mexico remains. If US. time is rejected, with what is it being replaced? An answer to this question can be found in Robert Levine's book A Geography of Time. Admittedly written some forty years after On the Road's publication, this work is nevertheless a valuable asset in understanding how time is perceived in Mexico. Levine compared thirty-one countries in terms of three factors, walking speed, work speed, and the accuracy of public clocks, in order to determine where the pace of life was fastest. Mexico ranked last (1997, 136). According to Levine, "Slowness is so ingrained in Mexican culture that people who abide by the clock invite insult" (138). Rather than controlling time with clocks and established schedules, Mexico instead tries to mesh with time.Where the US. has accepted a Lukacsian rationalization of temporality, Mexico opts for organic notions of time. Quoting a psychologist who commutes from Tijuana to San Diego, Levine writes "In Mexico, we are inside the time. We don't control time. We live with the time" (190). Of course Sal had experience with this concept even before his trip to Mexico. In California Sal has an affair with Terry, a Mexican girl who soothes him with "`Manana,' she said. `Everything'll be all right tomorrow... Sure, baby, manana.' It was always manana ... a lovely word and one that probably means heaven" (Kerouac 1976, 94). Interestingly, the English word "tomorrow" is translated as "manana," but the dictionary translates "manana" as both "tomorrow" and "in the near future" (Castillo and Bond 1987, 161). While the English "tomorrow" can refer to an unspecified future, it appears as though the Spanish "manana" contains more temporal ambiguity. Rather than designating a fixed time, the use of the word "manana" allows for open-ended possibility in the future, which is precisely why Sal thinks it "means heaven." Time in Mexico is less rigid and fixed than in America.