Revolutionary
writing: Programmatic Fiction of William S. Burroughs
Jukka Ylisuvanto
Candidates Thesis
Dec 16th 2010
English Philology
University of Oulu
Table
of contents
Introduction
3
1.
Totality Express 7
2.
Revolutionary Writing 13
3.
Brothers in Arms 18
4.
Pathology of a Definitive Tragedy 24
5.
Fiction as a Mode of Knowing 29
Reference
Sources 33
Appendix 36
Introduction
William S.
Burroughs (1914–1997) was an American writer of enormous notoriety
and controversy, a writer whose biography is as much the focus of
literary scholars as his actual textual output and not just because
of the autobiographical elements in his writing, but because of his
actions, some which defy all possible acceptability. Shamelessly open
as a homosexual and a self-confessed addict of opiates, not to
mention empirical experimentation with countless other psychoactive
substances, Burroughs was there with the first, a pioneer, but with a
pathos almost equivalent to an antithesis of the original and
mythified American pioneer spirit that arrived with the Mayflower. He
also shot his wife Joan Vollmer-Burroughs, which apparently cannot be
unmentioned when analyzing Burroughs’s output, but to which there
are no disclosing accounts, none that I have found at least. There is
an attempt made by J.W. Grauerholz (Grauerholz, 2003), but his agenda
appears too apologetic because of Grauerholz’s personal interests
as the holder of Burroughs’s estate to lever Burroughs permanently
into the canon western literature (Laughead, 2007). To this I try to
provide an account, in section titled Pathology
of a Definitive Tragedy,
which is of course based on second hand material and as such falls
just short of imaginative and in fact, I choose to imagine the event
as a parallel scene to Burroughs’s fiction, one that remains
unwritten but one that exists on the margins of Burroughs works or
better yet, in the interzone
between fact and fiction.
Burroughs is
a name with many epithets, to mention a few: on the back cover of the
1993 Flamingo Modern Classics edition of Burroughs’s breakthrough
and probably still most famous work Naked
Lunch (first
published
in
1959) J. G. Ballard calls him the “first mythographer of the
mid-twentieth century”; or as Will Self deems him on the cover of
the 1998 Penguin edition of Junky
(first published in 1953) “a legend in his own lifetime”. A
mythographer, who was a legend, a myth himself, and due to the lack
of cohesion, narrative or plot eminent in most of his works, not to
even mention the profusely obliterated syntax of the cut-ups and
other experimental modes of writing, all add up to what makes a
chaotically obscure textual mass that evades definitive cartography.
Kathryn Hume
states in her essay titled William
S. Burroughs’s Phantasmic Geography (Hume,
1999) that “Burroughs’s fictions abrade humanist sensibilities
and frustrate the impulse to seek meaning.” Perhaps so, but she dug
into the subject matter even if it did “undermine[s] mental
comfort”, as she puts it. If we now suppose that Kathryn Hume was
not on a strictly mercenary project, we may assume that despite her
remarks, her pursuit affirms that there is meaning there to be
discovered, embedded in the at times nauseating, discomforting, even
nightmarish and wildly controversial body of Burroughs’s work.
As
a writer Burroughs was determined or rather driven — as to why see
section Pathology
of a Definitive Trauma
— and this shows not just as an, at times, feverishly hectic output
that leaps from a scene and routine to the next sometimes
mid-sentence but as a solid attempt to break through the post-modern
impasse that deprives art forms, such as literature, of their value
and applicability as commentaries of the human condition and, as an
instrument of consumerism, continually tries to reduce them to either
misinformed propaganda or mere entertainment as products to be sold
and wringed for profit, since modes like aesthetic appreciation are
not productive in a strictly materialistic sense.
This
breakthrough, according to Timothy S. Murphy’s Wising
up the Marks
(1997), cannot be done by master-narratives calling for that single
and unifying value judgment otherwise known as the truth or by
seducing the reader with “abstract mediation or signs” (Murphy,
1997 p.17-18). This project is as such a challenge to scientific
exactitude and in Burroughs’s case far more poignant than what, for
example, Carlos Castaneda does with his supposed science because of
Burroughs’s systematic dispensation of the scientific and narrative
methods.
Burroughs
is an artist, but a programmatic one, and this is the focus of this
thesis. From this perspective, and to argue the perspective, I try to
re-reveal what Burroughs has already unearthed; the mechanisms of
control and conformity embedded in language and mythology; how the
human train is fortified and how the rails have been laid, how human
history, is according to Burroughs, “pre-recorded” since the
discovery of language: “In the beginning was the word and the word
was bullshit” (Burroughs, 1987:146). Furthermore and more
importantly, I try to show that the medium of fiction can, in a
programmatic sense, re-program the reality through its participants,
the readers or, if we take Burroughs’s magical function of writing
literally,
directly.
For the
purposes of applicability of Burroughs’s work as a serious social
commentary I have compared his ideas to those of Albert Camus, whose
theory of rebellion and vision of the history of western
civilization, as outlined in The
Rebel (L'Homme
révolté first
published in 1951, in English in 1954), rely on a similar
understanding of the human condition and on the same necessity to
rebel as with Burroughs, though their methods were distinctively
different, since where Burroughs uses controversy, Camus prefers
subversion. For Burroughs the head-on collision with society’s
norms was perhaps due to his almost total alienation from the values
and ways of life he was born in to, and this is why I felt that, in
order to support Burroughs’s observations, I needed a voice that
gathers its momentum from the very foundations of the establishments
of social order and their legitimacy.
And perhaps I am able to show similarities between these two writers
that applied together provide prolific insights to reflexive
postmodernism and beyond.
This thesis
is structured so that first I try to provide a rough summary idea of
Burroughs’s narrative strain in terms of the reader in section
titled Totality
Express.
After this, in section titled Revolutionary
Writing,
I focus on what I found to be the most commonly shared elements in
Camus’s and Burroughs’s work; their opposition to totalitarian
authorities and nihilism. What I feel to be my main addition to the
existing study of both Burroughs’s and Camus’s work is hopefully
revealed in section titled Fiction
as a Mode of Knowing,
in which, if nothing else, I interpret, from the point of view of
fiction writing as an instrument to re-invent reality, Burroughs’s
final finished work Ghost
of Chance,
which was omitted by other scholars who had studied Burroughs and to
whom I have referred to in context of this essay. Thus, because
others have not focused on Ghost
of Chance,
I have the opportunity to say something freshly squeezed.
The primary
materials for this thesis are of course William S. Burroughs’s
works. From Albert Camus my primary focus is on The
Rebel,
which is an ambitious study of human history as seen from the
perspective of rebellion. These two writers share an unrelenting
rebel drive which unites them despite their apparent differences in
methods, style and personal interests. In this thesis the agendas of
these writers are understood to align in many of the key issues they
address. This is of course a matter of interpretation but I
personally found that, as works of art with a purpose, both their
works benefit from each other, and as they both were artists who saw
their causes to be more relevant than their personal fortunes, we can
lay aside the discrepancies and antipathies that may have risen
between them had they been made acquainted in this way when they were
alive.
Due
to the plethora of material available from Burroughs I have also
turned to critical sources such as Timothy S. Murphy, Edward Halsey
Foster and others whose works have made my study easier. Murphy’s
Wising
Up the Marks: the Amodern William S. Burroughs
(1997) in particular was a study that influenced my work and helped
me to evaluate the ideas that prevail in Burroughs’s work and how
they are handled in different periods of his career.
Furthermore,
Murphy’s term amodern,
with which he pursues visibility, as opposed to Gilles Deleuze’s
relative invisibility due to the “critical language” with which
he “evades the endless squabbling over terminology that marks most
discussions of (post)modernism” (Murphy, 1997 p.2), was
particularly useful for the purposes of this thesis.
1.
Totality Express
All nations sold
out by liars and cowards. Liars who want time for future negatives to
develop stall you with more lying offers while hot crab people mass
war to extermination with the film in Rome. These reports reek of
nova, sold out job, shit birth and death. Your planet has been
invaded. You are dogs on all tape. The entire planet is being
developed into terminal identity and complete surrender. (Burroughs,
1992: 13)
In an essay
Women:
a Biological Mistake? Burroughs
states that “the Human organism is in a state of neoteny”
but this neoteny is not just a stasis wherein human beings do not
fulfil their evolutionary potential, like the salamander Burroughs
uses as an example in the essay:
Ordinarily a
salamander starts its life cycle in the water with gills; later the
gills atrophy, and the animal develops lungs. However, certain
salamanders never lose their gills or leave the water. They are in a
state of neoteny. The Xolotl salamander found in Mexico is an
example. Scientists, moved by the plight of this beautiful creature,
gave him an injection of hormones, whereupon he shed his gills and
left the water after ages of neoteny. (Burroughs, 1985: 125)
Burroughs’s
visions of the future involve apocalyptic scenarios, which he fears —
or perhaps hopes, see sections Brothers
in arms
and
Fiction as a Mode of Knowing
— will fulfil themselves if this evolutionary stalemate is not
surpassed. To Burroughs the present state of affairs, the human
condition, and not just human but the global condition, or should it
rather be the condition of the biosphere, of which the human is a
part of, presents itself as, to make it short by a metaphor derived
from Burroughs’s novel title Nova
Express (first
published 1964), like a heavily fortified train on a rigidly laid
one-way rail heading for a catastrophic dead-end. If we assume that
this train is, at least partly driven by human species, then the
inability of this species to alter its ways of life is catastrophic.
Camus refers
to some obscure writers who draw upon themselves interpreters rather
than readers as if readers were of less value in a note collected
with some of his essays and magazine articles (Camus, 1971: 241).
This is a note that underlines the basic discrepancy between the
methods of Burroughs and Camus of whom Camus is the subversive one,
who insists on closed form and perfected stylization (Camus, 1969:
224-236) and to whom rebellion in the medium of art is a matter of
style. Burroughs’s fragmented output and scattered clues as to what
he is saying require detective work on the part of the reader, but
this is of course due to the fact that he is indeed wising
up the marks,
like Murphy suggests as the overall argument of his study (Murphy:
1997), with blunt instruments like controversy and antagonism,
freeing and de-conditioning the reader and the reader’s
expectations of what existence is about. From this perspective
Burroughs’ works are not as much in need of scholarly explanations
as they are of readers.
For
Burroughs fiction writing was a revolutionary act. Even with Junky
(first published 1953) he was already breaking ground for modes of
being that were not acceptable or even tolerable within the cultural
and social milieu he had been born into. Being a drug addict was as
alienating as being gay, if not more (Foster 1991: 152) and
Burroughs, with his writing, chose to give both these scenes a medium
wherein these modes of being would be seen as Burroughs saw them from
within the scenes in question. Thus he was indeed breaking ground and
providing a narrative for alienated groups that were demonized
outside the range of social sympathies.
Yet
Burroughs was not satisfied in just providing a documentary like the
realist or naturalist strains of literature had done by using fiction
like an enclosed terrarium in which the characters were like test
mice subjected to conditions the reactions to which would then be in
plain view for the readers. His terrarium would become a training
facility within which the de-conditioned subjects would not just be
the characters of his fiction, but this training and de-conditioning
would be projected toward the readers. From Naked
Lunch
onward his narration would not be just a scenic elevator within the
comfort of which the readers could make their observations regarding
the different layers of the social structure as with for example
Honore de Balzac, whom here represents an example of the kind of
fiction that tries to provide master narratives that cut through the
entire social stratification thus providing an accurate depiction of
conditions and their effects on the subject characters.
Burroughs’s
narration sucks the reader in like a vortex that in Naked
Lunch
starts to whirl with increasing speed. The reader is not provided
with disclosing accounts of the lives of characters that draw
attention and affection to their fates but sent to spin among all the
atrocities the narration has picked up. The fractured images with no
apparent explanations follow each other creating a montage that is as
preparatory as it is pungent.
The methods
of control and conformity embedded in western cultural and social
structures, from language to binary gender roles; from the family
unit to mass scale thought control, provide the subject matter that
is dismantled upon recognition like syntax, which, treated with the
innovations of the cut-up, fold-in and drop-in methods —these were
given a major role for the first time in Soft
Machine
(first published in 1961) — is attacked with a programmatic fury
that renders composition secondary to spontaneous organization by
infiltration of random factors.
After this,
the narrative vortex gains such momentum that the reader has to
struggle even to catch a glimpse of what is presented in the textual
mosaic. All the atrocities and erotic elements are repeated, incanted
and cut-up to the point when they lose their ability to shock and
even arouse. A sample of the exorcism of atrocities out of shock
value is present already in the stream of consciousness escapade
titled Word,
later
collected under the title Interzone
and published in 1989, which precedes the textual mass of Naked
Lunch.
The same is done to erotic imagery in Soft
machine,
this time using the scramble and splice techniques mentioned earlier.
So, the reader is left with words that start to lose their meaning.
Or like Foster says it: “The erotic nature of the original material
is suggested even in the cut-up, but its emotional power is
dissolved, and the reader is confronted with the fact that it is only
style and words he or she is dealing with.” (Foster, 1992: 170)
To sum up
what others, like Murphy and Foster, have already accounted for:
Burroughs describes the existing fabric of human totality as an
artificial structure devised to maintain its repetitive course and
enforce homogeny within its ranks. And while describing this he
reveals gaps, like silence in stead of internal monologue — note
that Burroughs thought of language as both a system that
predetermines lines of thought and reproduces itself through
replication like a virus
— as presented for example in the two latter publications of the
Nova trilogy (Burroughs, 1987 and 1992), through which the reader can
escape the control beam of the “boards”.
If we think
of this chronological and physical structure as a three dimensional
point in time that is defined by its past, a point, which in turn
defines its future course in helpless fatalism having surrendered
under the weight of unmanageable causality that derives from the
inability of first, the individual to govern its own various internal
impulses and secondly, the masses to gain control over their own
course, we have roughly pinned-down the post-modern impasse, at least
for the context of this thesis.
What
Burroughs reveals is indeed artificiality, but the structure is, by
nature, also an attempt to navigate in the ensuing chaos that
surrounds the established physical world, in the form of the unknown,
like the unformed and un-rationalized that surrounds the world of
ideas. This process of rationalization with which we manage the chaos
of totality is one of the basic functions we process constantly
without giving much thought to it, but to the study of which there is
an entire branch of science called Sociology.
If we think
of the structure as the rational or rationalized, then we may call
the chaos the irrational and the formed the rational or we may use
terms Burroughs borrows from Carlos Castaneda and explains in a text
collected in the Burroughs
File:
The
tonal
is the sum of any individual’s perceptions and knowledge,
everything he can talk about and explain, including his own physical
being. The nagual
is everything outside the tonal:
the inexplicable, unpredictable, the unknown. […] While the tonal,
the totality of conscious existence, shapes the individual being, the
tonal
is in turn shaped by the nagual,
which surrounds it like a mold. (Burroughs 1984: 190–191)
So,
the `nagual´ may be loosely defined as the sum total of all that is
untamed by reason, another reality, or rather the parent reality of
which the rationalized reality and chronologic time continuum is just
an offshoot of. Castaneda is a pioneer in describing unordinary
reality,
but unlike Castaneda, an anthropologist himself, Burroughs presented
his findings as fiction.
To this point Foster points out that
All
of Burroughs’s major fiction is hallucinatory — which is not to
say that it is false but that it involves a surrealistic
intensification of the ordinary world. He remained one of Korzybski’s
disciples [],
but the reality described in his fiction beginning with Naked
Lunch
does not derive from what in The
Yage Letters
he calle “Normal Consciousness”. (Foster 1992: 157)
Whatever we
want to call this chaotic parent reality, to Burroughs’s
de-conditioned reader it may have become manageable in other terms
than those dictated by prevailing authorities, and this is the core
of his revolution, and also the reason why it may be called
revolution, because, for the new subjects Burroughs was and is trying
to create, there cannot be an end to rebellion until all oppressive
authorities are abolished.
—There is no
true or real “reality” —“Reality” is simply a more or less
constant scanning pattern—The scanning pattern we accept as
“reality” has been imposed by the controlling power on this
planet, a power primarily oriented towards control— (Burroughs,
1992: 53)
Camus
arrived at this conjuncture through a process of rationalization in
course of which he also happened to explain the style of a writer as
the writers check on reality (Camus, 1969: 233-236). Irrational,
according to Camus, provides moderation to the rational and teaches
us that all human knowledge derives from approximation. To Camus
there are no absolutes; no absolute negation, no absolute affirmation
or truth but this lack of absolutes also renders us all inexorably
equal for if we were to negate someone-else’s equality and right to
exist, we would also negate ourselves (Camus, 1969: 258-265). This
conjuncture starts from the affirmation of basic human rights, which
Burroughs joins in early on as quoted by Alan Ansen in an essay
collected to introduce Burroughs
File:
“No-one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying-pan owns
death.” (Burroughs, 1984: 19)
Revolutionary
Writing
Tuesday August 27:
The Yippies are stealing the show.
I’ve had enough
of the convention farce without humor barbed wire and cops a lot of
nothing.
Jean
Genet says: “It is time for writers to support the rebellion of
youth not only with their works but with their presence as well.”
(Burroughs, 1993: 95)
Writing is
an act of communication. A writer communicates via words, a painter
through pictures; a musician’s language is music. Is art something
other than communication? If we suppose that we communicate through
images and association conveyed by our languages; words that convey
the images, signs that refer to the signified, we have to accept that
as we communicate we are proposing our conclusions, experiences,
insights and opinions to the audience as identifiable and somewhat
universal scenarios and are thus trying to achieve an agreement with
the audience and perhaps also influence their future behaviour.
Burroughs
quotes Wittgenstein in The
Ticket that Exploded (first
published in 1962): “No proposition can contain itself as an
argument.” To Burroughs this is analogous to: “The only thing not
prerecorded in a prerecorded universe is the prerecording itself,
which is to say any
recording
that contains a random factor.” (Burroughs, 1985:124) So, is
Burroughs trying to say that all communication/art is propaganda
unless it has a random factor? That only the random factor
establishes, or should we say masks, propaganda as art? In the
introduction to
Naked Lunch Burroughs
quotes more Wittgenstein: “If a proposition is NOT NECESSARY it is
MEANINGLESS and approaching MEANING ZERO.” (Burroughs, 1993: 13)
If we
understand the postmodern paradigm as an impasse due to the inability
of commentaries or criticisms to effectively challenge the hegemony
of the capitalist system, which through postmodernism assumes a
position beyond criticism, beyond politics, we arrive at what
Wittgenstein proposes above. Thus art, as a proposition, has in the
postmodern era become unnecessary and thus meaningless because of its
futility or, should we say, inability. This, if we boldly digress for
a moment, could account for the predicament of art in general; art
has had to be commercialized in order to sustain its production,
which has caused a radical decline of critical content, and as
capitalist institutions refuse to revive its enemy through the
increase of grants, art has fallen into a rut.
For art to
maintain its purposefulness beyond abstract aesthetics and
entertainment it has to maintain a critical drive. Reading Burroughs
this is obvious: There is a message, simply because, for him there
has to be. Burroughs has an agenda. Even in his most obscure works a
commentary or a suggestion is suspect to be hidden just under the
surface, on a subliminal level. Burroughs was, as an artist, a man
driven by a goal. “Deadly purpose” he calls it in Western
Lands (Burroughs,
1988: 29), this if we may assume like for example Grauerholtz does
(Burroughs, 2000: introduction) that Joe
the Dead
is another of Burroughs’s alter egos.
In Murphy’s
study it becomes clear from the first pages of the introduction on
that Burroughs’s writing constantly addresses the literary canon
thus taking on the failures of modern, postmodern and contemporary
literature. What Murphy introduces us with is his concept of amodern
literature, which as a theory he defines a “reflexive, formalist
strain of postmodernism” (Murphy, 1997 p.3) and critics of this
strain, like Murphy himself, find in Burroughs what they are trying
to define:
“Amodern
literature, if we accept for the moment the bald assertion that it
exists, develops from Ellison’s promise to emerge from the liminal
space of literature with a “plan of living” rather than an
endlessly deferred “participation in language games” or an empty
“love for the world through language” á la John Barth.”
(Murphy, 1997 p. 3)
This “plan
of living” Murphy refers to could easily be seen as the primary
agenda in Burroughs’s writings, or the message we were getting at
earlier, one that Burroughs progressively pursues throughout his
works and develops into an unambiguously utopian quest to find an
imperative, a way out, a detour that takes the “human mold”
beyond the impending doom that Burroughs wrote of as a concrete and
very real threat just around the corner, a threat that is not like
the fantastic horror element we are used to reading about in, for
example, the works of Stephen King
but a reflection of real threats. From the premonition described in
Junky
as to the shortcomings of the capitalist system to sustain and
maintain the “American Dream” of freedom and prosperity through
which the dream of freedom turns into a dream of control (Burroughs,
1998: 105-106), this threat is present in many forms but with many
possible conclusions like the Cold War Nova
that concludes global scale binary antagonism with an array of
mushroom clouds described for example in The
Ticket That Exploded
(Burroughs, 1987: 47) or the ecocatastrophe caused by a species, the
human species namely, that multiplies on the expense of others beyond
all reasonability as described in Ghost
of Chance (Burroughs,
1995: 18-19), though the catastrophe in Ghost
of Chance eventually
turns upside down as it is the human species that ends up on the
verge of extinction. This turn exemplifies a drive distinctly
burroughsian for its motives and to which we will return in the
section titled Fiction
as mode of knowing.
In the
Rebel Camus
attempted to explain the predicament of humanity by cutting through
the recorded history of rebellion while trying to shed light on the
excesses of this rebellion that had ravaged first the individual and
eventually entire humanity on a global scale until the point the book
was written. Camus wrote encircled by the clashes of the realization
of Cold War that in Burroughs’ work manifested most poignantly as
the continuous threat of the aforementioned Nova.
Burroughs and Camus were both aware of the, should we say,
probability of an apocalyptic disaster as a result of a global
ecocatastrophe. One of these possible threats is, of course as the
word `Nova´ would suggest, nuclear holocaust, recission of which is
why Camus may be considered outdated.
In the context of this set of
expectations, the occupation of both Camus and Burroughs is that of
professional rebellion, a rebellion through art or plain activism,
but rebellion that is all the more justifiable as it gains in
potency.
A rebellion
needs an enemy, which to Camus is represented by suffering and
oppression (Camus, 1969: 266–170). In Burroughs’s case it is
not that simple. The burroughsian insistence on obscurity, getting
off the point,
is itself a mode of rebellion; a rebellion against rationality. As to
the motives of rebelling against rationality we can look at, for
example, this section in Murphy’s Wising
Up the Marks:
Reason,
which formerly claimed to pass judgment on means from the point of
view of ends, prostitutes itself by giving up, not some illusory
autonomy it never really possessed, but rather its multiplicity of
other mediations in order to focus on exploitation and profit.
Instrumental rationality is the philosophy of the assembly line,
“mass” consciousness in the sense of identical mass production,
rather than mass consciousness of the self-emancipating proletariat à
la Georg Lukács. (Murphy, 1997: 81)
Rationality
is, in this perspective, which is of course political, a virtue of
materialist society, thus we should not be surprised if Burroughs
wanted to “steep himself in vice” (Burroughs, 1984: 18) and get
off the point; for him such manoeuvres are modes of opposition.
The malice
of materialist rationality, or irrationality, is further amplified by
the fact that the emancipatory qualities of consumer economy, or
whatever cult
of production,
have to be in effect eradicated. This because, if consumption is the
“medicine” or “drug of choice” production based economies
offer to their subordinates as a reward for their efforts, the right
to be administered this alleviation will have to be denied from the
most of humanity, since the right to consume will have to be
restricted and monopolized in order to prevent the rapid destruction
of our habitat and the depletion of resources. From western
perspective this would mean settling for less instead of setting up
standards for consumerism.
Technology
is hardly the solution to this problem, since it faces the same
problems as art; its production is slave to the demand of the market,
which sustains its production, and the market, from this perspective,
is driven by the ever increasing need to produce more surplus value
with which it fuels itself. This surplus value equals to the power,
and if this power was solely derived from technology, and not of
capitalism or any other façade, then, as Camus notes “the machine
finally conjures up the machine” (Camus, 1969: 186) and the
revolution would turn to a revolution of the machine until it stands
alone. This would, according to Camus mean that the oppressed of the
earth would have to remain oppressed until the day when the machine
faces no more competition (Camus, 1969: 156–192). In terms of free
market economy, this cannot happen, unless the whole of the global
market where monopolized by one company. Production will have to
increase for profits to increase. Furthermore, as Camus writes:
“Every form of collectivity, fighting for survival, is forced to
accumulate instead of distributing revenues. It accumulates in order
to increase and by doing so increases its power.” (Camus, 1969:
186)
Camus calls
the elite appointed to carry out the above mentioned restrictions and
monopolization machine
tamers
in accordance to the fact that for him the materialist abundance is
produced by the industry of machines. Burroughs has a slightly
different take, since for him the elite are a small group of people
ultimately: “elevated to positions of absolute power by random
pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave
little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces
who have reached power through surrender of self.” And these
“controllers” are controlled by their need to control (Burroughs,
1990: lyrics from the album Dead
City Radio).
Burroughs’s view on power is harsh and as such probably best summed
up by how he concludes the text from which the above quotation is an
excerpt of: “The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are
rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a
vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them
which buttons to push.” Alas, according to Burroughs, the
controllers have not even tamed the machine.
These are
matters that range beyond the scope of this thesis, which deals more
exclusively with fiction than politics Per Se, although and as we
have seen, Murphy also draws attention to this political aspect of
Burroughs’s writing and if we are to accept that we are dealing
with revolutionary writing, we cannot omit it. Furthermore, when
reading Burroughs, the line between reality and fiction is no where
to be seen and what we see is rather a continual twilight zone where
the borderlines of, no only fact and fiction, but also the human and
the machine, the human and animal, the individual and the mass
organism until what we are ultimately dealing with are the internal
policies of a living organism.
4.
Brothers in arms
So come out of
those ugly molds and remember good is better than evil because it’s
nicer to have around you. It’s just as simple as that. And if
anyone thinks different just assign that cocktail lounge fly boy to
frontline duty so he can register just how unpleasant evil is to have
around you cut off light-years behind enemy lines. (Burroughs 1987:
The Ticket that Exploded)
Both Camus
and Burroughs share a rebellious drive that challenges prevailing
social structures. They are both dissenters in the sense that they do
not accept their powerlessness before the asymmetry that drains the
masses from even the possibility of uniting and thus forming as a
subject with the capability to alter its own course. This goal in
mind both Camus and Burroughs were well engaged in creating
alternative modes of social awareness that would effectively
challenge the conservative and, as according to Burroughs’s
frequent theme of a pre-recorded future,
predetermining structures within society.
To Camus the
call for unifying principles is essential to the rebellion he
promotes and tries to propagate and even amalgamate into a tangible
and functional set of principals. In The
Rebel
Camus shows in detail how rebellion has historically failed to stay
true to its constituting ideals and turned into self-maintaining and
reproducing formation, like soviet communism; how rebellion loses its
emancipatory objective as it turns to demand conformity in order to
justify its false course (Camus 1969: 156-211). Burroughs’s
critique of the capitalist system is at times completely analogous to
Camus’s commentary, since Burroughs criticizes with unrelenting
fervour the same conformist drive that he sees reproducing itself on
the expense of freedom, and even existence when he demonstrates the
mass-extinctions caused by the spreading of human species, like in
for example Madagascar as described in Ghost
of Chance
(Burroughs, 1991). Needless to say that Burroughs valued animals just
as much or even more than he did humans; he gave animals the status
of people (Burroughs, 1991).
Furthermore,
Camus was, as we have earlier discussed, as critical toward
capitalism as he was toward the totalitarian forms of communism. We
could even argue that both Camus and Burroughs shared similar
political inclinations, although they both were critical beyond
compatibility towards dogmatized ideologies. Whether we were talking
in terms of syndicalist unionism,
as with Camus(Camus, 1969: 261–261), or the spontaneously
arising forms of cohesion that mark Burroughs’s works (Murphy,
1997: 222–224), we can agree that they both were drawing attention
to both the emblematic symbols of oppression and the basic facts or
laws that have indisputably unifying qualities.
These basic
laws or commonly shared features here are, of course, the inbuilt
requirements we, as a living organism, share, like the need for
sustenance and sleep that have to be met in order to maintain even
the anal
level functions. Kathryn Hume’s appreciation of Wayne Pound’s
argument she paraphrases in her essay is on point: “…Burroughs
replaces eyes, genitals and mouth with the anus, and this
restructuring of the body destroys patriarchal social structures
based on male and female, active and passive, higher and lower
functions.” (Hume, 1999: 128)
This
“analization” is one of Burroughs’s agendas, one that should
make it obvious that Burroughs was not a misogynist; he comments on
gender issues, more precisely, gender roles and as both Foster and
Murphy have noted (Foster 1993: 23-24; Murphy 1997:14-15, 147), this
is something that should be “equally important to feminists”
(Foster 1993: 24). After all, anal is common to both sexes.
The
emblematic symbols of oppression refer to the amodern
imperative for the creation of socially active group formations with
their mystified emblematic qualities. This mystification is a part of
both maintaining and disputing social power structures as in both
whatever is achieved depends on activity, on activating the subjects
here instrumental, as also presented by Murphy. Murphy uses Gilles
Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of the subject-group,
which is a revised version of Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of a fused
group.
According to Murphy the subject-group
is
a part of “the schizophrenic model of totalization” through which
subjugated individuals would be freed from their stereotype-roleplay
that subjugates them by breaking seemingly stable binary models like
the male and female pair by diffusing the opposing roles into
“thousand tiny sexes”, as the Deleuze and Guattari model
according to Murphy proposes (Murphy, 1997: 38-40) and thus
overflowing “the control machine”, to borrow Burroughs’s term.
This, of course, means that symbolic structures of social tissue are
stripped of their mystified aura and re-dressed into garments more
suitable for the purposes of writers like the two in question.
The problem
is that this model is
acceptable
only as a peripheral movement “incapable of instituting a permanent
and restrictive Law” as summed by Murphy (Murphy, 1997: 38-40) and
thus the model’s instability becomes an inbuilt weakness. And as
Murphy’s “amodernism” is an attempt to “describe Burroughs
contested relationship to the literary canon while acknowledging the
writers explicit desire to escape from the post-modern impasse”
(Murphy 1997: back cover), his “amodernism” could be understood
as a specified form of opposition, as an antithetic imperative for
post-modernism. Thus we also have to acknowledge that the post-modern
impasse it opposes is only a theoretic framework for the as of yet
unaltered course taken by western civilizations and a theory validity
of which affirms the insistence of the de-politicization of the
presently prevailing power structures; if this impasse is beyond
politics, it is not due to political or economic systems but
“natural” development.
Thus the
“amodern” itself in direct opposition and a form of dialectics
which, as above proposed, starts from the assumption that no
justifiable unity is possible within its ranks. This, of course,
within the confounds of the model means that there cannot be more
potent opposition than that of the renegade bands, as described by
Burroughs in Wild
Boys (1983
first published in 1971) and Port
of Saints (1980
first published in 1973),
united
by a common but ephemeral desire that may or may not be in
contradiction with the Status Quo. This sense of weakness and failure
that, after the failure of the student riots of the late sixties in
Europe and the USA to amalgamate into a force capable of instituting
major chances (Murphy, 1997: 146), is, as also noted by Murphy
(Murphy, 1997: 169), already present in the later works Burroughs
middle period such as the Port
of Saints.
Camus refers
to the Bastillé, an apparent symbol of oppression from the point of
view of the subject
group and
the fused
group,
in Rebel
first in connection with Marquis de Sade, to whom such fortresses are
also “strongholds of debauchery” (Camus 1969: 38), and later on
in connection with similar symbolic impetus as with the subject
and fused
groups
when he starts to prepare us for what such spontaneous formations
have to beware of in order to remain true to their rebel origins
(Camus 1969: 87). In retrospect of the 1789 French revolution, which
to him represents the beginning of the era of deified humanity, Camus
states that:
Scaffolds
seemed to be the very altars of religion and injustice. The new faith
could not tolerate them. But a moment comes when faith, if it becomes
dogmatic, erects its own altars and demands unconditional adoration.
Then scaffolds reappear and despite the altars, the oaths, the
feasts, and the freedom of reason, the masses of the new faith must
now be celebrated with blood. (Camus, 1969: 87)
In
this vein Burroughs corrects his fantasies of such groups with a
peculiar sense of humour:
Kim stands
resplendent in his Shit Slaughter uniform with a cobra S.S. on each
lapel, they glow in the dark. Johnsons to the sky, all in S.S.
uniform. They roar out the Johnson marching song. (Burroughs, 1983:
34)
The
Shits in question are like the “Bible Belts, barbarians from Planet
Earth” equivalents of whom are “bigoted ignorant basically
frightened middle class” and as such but “dupes and lackeys for
the very rich and politicians” serving as “convenient guard dogs
to protect the status”. This according to a “Shit Slaughter”
squad trainer in Burroughs’s Place
of Dead Roads (first
published in 1983) who continues that this kind of people are
“vectors, carriers of the virus” and are to be dealt with like
you would “control the fever” that is to say by “killing the
mosquitoes first” (Burroughs, 1983: 30–34).
The Place
of Dead Roads,
is a novel, which according to its title is not, as you might be at
first hand compelled to think, about roads no longer in use but roads
that are dead because they are heartless.
Thus titled the novel could be interpreted to play out a fantasy
while suggesting through its title that this is something ultimately
undesirable; the road of shooting the way to freedom by imposing
redemption at the point of a gun and thus turning the former
oppressor into the oppressed is heartless.
And such roads, as is alluded to in the above excerpt, have been
trodden well enough that we may agree with Camus’s above words of
warning.
Still
Burroughs’s sympathies were on the side of his heroes and he did
not write about something if he did not wish to see it happen or
could not bear it happen. In fact the magical possibility of “writing
things into reality” is one of the key ideas in understanding
Burroughs’s motives. He explains the idea in one of his essays in
The
Adding Machine collection:
First of all, I
recognized writing as a magical operation, and since such operations
are designed to produce specific results, this leads to us to an
inquiry as to the purposes of writing. Remember that the written word
is an image; that the first writing was pictorial, and so painting
and writing were at one time a single operation. Historically, they
do not separate until we have highly stylized pictorial writing, as
in Egyptian, which of course developed much later. The original
invention from which writing developed was quite simply to create on
cave wall images and scenes: hunting, and often so-called
pornographic drawings. The purpose was originally ceremonial or
magical, and when the work is separated from its magical function, it
loses vitality. (Burroughs, 1985: s.49)
He also
stated in his posthumously published Last
Words
that there were “So many stories I don't want ever to write. They
might come true!” (Burroughs, 2000: 59). To Burroughs there were
something infinitely tempting in the idea of all male gangs that
march the streets self-assuredly and he was most definitely on the
side of the artist. In fact, in Western
Lands
the “Shits-Squad” has transformed into another SS, the
“Shakespeare-Squadron” (Burroughs 1988: 203). In this perspective
he sees communism as a lost chance much like Camus did; as one form
of historical rebellions that turned against itself. To these points
a further excerpt from Last
Words:
We're all dying
breeds, way I see it. World is going down into a very nasty police
state. But the top people is caught in a bind they have to [have] the
criminals, vicious gangs, drug lords, drug war. A degree of chaos to
justify an all-out war on dissent.
Before Communism
died, that would have been the way for artists and intellectuals. Way
closed. They subside into nothing. Don't need no street fighters. No
brown shirts.
You want to
destroy a species? Destroy its habitat, where it lives and breathes.
What's left for the artist is a pile of "snirt." Identical
houses to the sky.”(Burroughs, Last Words p.80)
This
quotation is quite explicit in terms of his sympathies, which are at
this point well developed but at the same time he has grown weary
enough to give in. The exclamation “Let me off” echoes throughout
the entire Last
Words journal
hand in hand with his ebbing energies.
4.
Pathology of a definitive tragedy
“You cunts
constitute a disposal problem in the worst form there is and raise
the nastiest whine ever heard anywhere: `Do you love me? Do you love
me? Do you love me???´ Why don’t you go back to Venus and
fertilize a forest?”
“And
as for you White Man Boss, you dead prop in Martin’s stale movie,
you terminal time junky, haul your heavy metal ass back to Uranus.
Last shot at the door. You need one for the road.” (Burroughs,
1992: 11)
To answer
why Burroughs was, as a writer, as driven as he was, we can only
guess but there are certain aspects in Burroughs’s commitment to
being as fixed to his “deadly purpose” as he was that may provide
some enlightenment. At the point of writing Western
Lands
Burroughs was getting old and thoughts of death seem to have become
more and more preoccupying. Here is Burroughs comparing death to
spiritual bankruptcy (from Western
Lands):
The old novelists
like Scott were always writing their way out of debt . . . laudable
... a valuable attribute for a writer is tenacity. So William Seward
Hall sets out to write his way out of death. Death, he reflects, is
equivalent to a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy. One must be
careful to avoid the crime of concealing assets ... a precise
inventory will often show that the assets are considerable and that
bankruptcy is not justified.
A writer must be
very punctilious and scrupulous about his debts. (Burroughs, 1987: 3)
Burroughs
does not narrate the shooting of Joan Vollmer-Burroughs directly but
if Murphy deems this below excerpt from Naked
Lunch
as
“the
closest Burroughs comes to narrating Joan’s death” (Murphy, 1997:
13):
I take three
drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up
screaming “I got the fear!” and ran out of the house. Drank a
beer in a little restaurant—mosaic bar and soccer scores and
bullfight posters—and waited for the bus to town.
A
year later in Tangier I heard she was dead. (Burroughs, 1993: 30),
we can
certainly find a more “direct” narration of Joan’s death in
Western
Lands:
Murphy might well be thinking in terms of chronology; the shooting
occurred between the events described in the first two sentences and
the excerpt itself starts from Joan being alive and ends up with
traumatized Burroughs coming to terms with her being dead. However,
for our purposes Burroughs’s own side-track meditation from Western
Lands,
with which he could well be balancing
his accounts with the reaper,
appears to be more on point:
“Something
jogged my arm, Mother.”
“No-one is
blaming you, dear. Mrs Randolph called to say she knew it was an
accident and she knew you loved Greg. I told her you were under
sedation.”
“Good,
but it was as if, just as I pulled the trigger, making absolutely
sure the pellets wouldn’t hit Greg… Something
moved my arm…”
“Of course,
darling. We are all controlled by the powers. Not one, but many, and
often in conflict. It is a part of some Power Plan.” (Burroughs,
1993: 188)
The scene in its entirety
depicts a suburban upper-class family entertaining guests in their
rose garden who are interrupted by a lion thrown by a tornado, which
is part of the, should we say, master narrative to which this scene
is a sudden and whimsical side-track. The lion attacks the people and
as the son of the host starts to shoot the lion, now attacking his
lover, he ends up shooting his lover instead. Burroughs shot Joan to
death trying to hit a champagne class she was balancing on her head
(Tytell, 1976: 45).
Burroughs
had, since the introduction he wrote to Queer
in
1985,
talked
in terms of demonic possession in relation to the shooting but as he
was
getting
older he was no longer satisfied with the explanation. Still, the
incident was definitive in terms of his life after it. This we may
also collect from the conversation following the above excerpt; first
the son rambles on in a hysteric fit about all the things concerning
the incident and during this monologue he refers to Greg — the
lover now deceased — running “in a stupid panic”, after which
the narration turns to portray the son as being insubstantial of
presence, “too perfect to carnate” (Burroughs, 1987: 189).
The “stupid
panic” is as an observation negative enough that it could hint
toward possible hidden antipathies the son/Burroughs might have
harboured toward his lover/wife. In this vein we may imagine that
perhaps Joan had started to represent something that had started to
accumulate antipathies in Burroughs, something that perhaps reminded
him of what he was not. Bearing in mind that Burroughs was
predominantly a homosexual and, for him Joan, whom according to
Grauerholtz was at the point in a deteriorated physical and mental
state,
might well have been a constant reminder of his failure or guilt of
having married her in the first place. Furthermore, Joan had clung to
Burroughs, even though he had turned her down in many ways, but
whether it was her effeminate claim of love she made over Burroughs
or Burroughs’s failure to be what was expected of him by his family
or the conventional social context at the time, we can only guess
what may have been the motivations — subliminal or conscious —
which, according to Grauerholtz (Grauerholtz, 2002: 4–28),
there were plenty of.
The portrait
of the son in the following narration could very well refer to the
idea of the individual as a complete entity, completeness of which is
impossibility in itself because of different often contrasting
entities with which the individual is riddled,
and as “he seems always on the point of dissolving into a portrait”
(Burroughs, 1987: 189), we may discern that the expectations the
family, and other parties with interests, harboured were in conflict
with the characters ability to fulfil them and the controversy was
enough for the person himself become unreal.
So, as Burroughs merges the sidetrack scene in with a more constant
narrative strain in the novel, and the son presents to his mother Kim
Neferti Carsons — one of Burroughs alias heroes, one that unites
the dandy pistolero Kim Carsons from Place
of Dead Roads and
the Egyptian scribe’s apprentice Neferti from Western
Lands into
a conglomerate identity — Burroughs is actually portraying his own
refusal to bear the social pressures projected upon him. In effect,
the figure of the writer merges into his fiction through which the
writer contests reality.
From
the perspective of rebellion and Burroughs’s commitment to his
writing as an act of rebellion, Burroughs’s standpoint appears
reminiscent of the revolutionary as displayed by Sergey Nechayev in
his Revolutionary
Catechism (Nechayev,
1869). The nechayevian rebel is “a doomed man” with no personal
interest, a man whose only bonds to social order are antithetic.
Burroughs did not die in prison, but like Nechayev,
he used the false
as
in fictitious as a weapon and held his stand to the end. Here it
would be easy to argue that Burroughs could not have been anymore
committed than the average “street junkie” with an inclination
toward boys, but in Burroughs’s case even addiction can be a mode
of rebellion (Murphy, 1997: 67–102). As Alan Ansen said in his
essay on Burroughs: “He is an indispensable indication that it is
possible to be vicious without being slack.” (Burroughs, 1984: 19)
And to this his writing attests.
From this rebellious
perspective his self-sacrifice, if we may so call it, is analogous to
what Camus writes about rebellion and murder:
From the moment
that he strikes, the rebel cuts the world in two. He rebelled in the
name of the identity of man with man and he sacrifices this identity
by concecrating the difference in blood. […] The rebel has only on
way of reconciling himself with his act of murder if he allows
himself to be led into performing it: to accept his own death and
sacrifice. (Camus, 1969: 245–246)
And
although Joan’s death may not have constituted for a murder,
Burroughs finally took full blame of her death. In his Last
Words
he wrote:
''Therein
the patient must minister unto himself."
What a portrait of
National Weakness is the whole concept of psychoanalysis. Again the
shifting of responsibility. Introduced by Madison Ave, the movie as
entertainment. Words, academics, writers-in fact, the whole
sophisticated, informed liberal establishment. "No, I didn't do
it – [it] was my neurotic done it." Don Clericurzio
says:
"Everyone is
responsible for everything they do."
Hear! hear!
Drunk or sober,
mad or sane. I enunciate the Doctrine of total responsibility, drunk
or sober, psychotic, possessed by the Devil, under any coercion.
(Burroughs, 2000: 127)
There
is also an eyewitness account on how Burroughs reacted to this
revelation that clearly discloses his own guilt, possessed
by the devil or not,
he is left with what he did even if it was just a reckless accident,
and given that he never dropped the subject he was not satisfied it
was. Laughead quotes Burroughs saying: “Shoot the bitch and write a
book! That’s what I did!” which Grauerholtz then, according to
Laughead, deemed “So out of character” (Laughead, 2007).
Apparently Laughead, Graueroltz and a student named Dan Diaz were
there to hear Burroughs read out loud from Mario Puzo’s The
Last Don
and give his insights into what it meant to him. The Don Clericurzio
in the above excerpt is a character in Puzo’s novel (Laughead,
2007).
Furthermore
the above excerpt illuminates Burroughs’s severity toward himself
and if we were to go deeper into the lion scene from Western
Lands,
we may come to terms, as he did, with what had ultimately happened
between Burroughs and Joan Vollmer. If we think of the tornado —
the green of which the shot lover is related to have admired — as a
wheel of fortune of a kind due to its whimsical nature and interpret
the lion in nietzschean terms: “it wants to capture freedom and be
lord in its own desert” (Nietzsche, 1961: 54–56) we have a
portrait wherein a monumental whim of nature that had once allured
its victims turns to throw a roaring symbol of freedom to re-set the
scene. Burroughs himself, as far as he embodied the Beat-movement in
his own person as a wildly whimsical thrill seeker, may also be
identified with the tornado since like the Romantics, the Beat
writers were riding the waves of their nature often recklessly, as
the death of Joan clearly indicates. At this point it is no wonder
that Burroughs was so preoccupied with victims, victimization and
dependency in works like Naked
Lunch
and Soft
Machine.
To sum up the relationship and marriage of two very distinct
characters we can look at how Burroughs in his Last
Words
remembers Joan through what his mother had said: “She was just like
a tigress.” And Burroughs so loved his cats (Burroughs, 2000:
250–252).
7. Fiction as a Mode of
Knowing
Captain Mission
did not fear Panic, the sudden intolerable knowing that everything is
alive. He was himself an emissary of Panic, of the knowledge that man
fears above all else: the truth of his origin. It's so close. Just
wipe away the words and look. (Burroughs, 1995: 3)
Ghost of
Chance,
first published in 1991, is a logical conclusion to Burroughs’s
career as a writer, though strangely omitted from supposedly
comprehensive studies like that of Murphy’s or even Edward Halsey
Foster’s Understanding
the Beats,
since it sums up several ideas Burroughs had developed and shows us
his finalized sense of style that, to me, epitomizes his
understanding of what literature should be if taken seriously, that
is to say a mode of knowing. To this conclusion I will also conclude
this thesis, since fiction writing as a medium for the creation of
truths resonates perfectly with the concept of programmatic fiction;
fiction can be designed to convey the very experiences that define
our reality and through it our concerns regarding the reality of the
future.
In Ghost
of Chance
Burroughs does not forfeit “at end of words, what can be done with
words” as he does in Western
Lands (Burroughs,
1987: 258) and does not take his leave at a “powerful admission of
failure as Kerouac’s Big
Sur”
like Foster chooses to interpret both Big
Sur
and Western
Lands
(Foster, 1992: 186). Although, in Burroughs’s last complete novel
his hero is indeed in a situation where defeat is imminent:
This grief can
kill, but Captain Mission is a soldier. He will not surrender to the
enemy. With an agonizing wrench his grief forms an imprecation.
He transmutes his
grief into an incandescent blaze of hate and calls down a curse on
the Boards and Martins of the earth, on all the servants, dupes and
followers:
`I will loose on
them the Blood of Christ!´ (Burroughs, 1995: 22)
And
as we discussed earlier, Burroughs was openly hostile towards
religious fundamentalism and the light in which he portrays Christ in
Ghost
of Chance
aligns Christ with the enemies of life on earth. Christ in Ghost
of Chance
is a cheap trickster who favours mass conformity instead of
individual ways of life and whose blood is caustic ichor (Burroughs,
1995: 22–28), so whatever the “Blood of Christ” mentioned above
means, it is not pleasant. And as to mass conformity, to Burroughs
“the odds” only diminish when standing in line with the masses;
“Watch what everyone else is doing and don’t do it! (— General
Orders of Emergency Conditions—)” (Burroughs, 1992: 94).
The call for
unity that is according to Camus as integral to the act of rebellion
as dissent (Camus, 1969: 203), must take in to consideration the
individual, otherwise, as like Camus wrote: “if one single human
being is missing in the world of the fraternity then the world is
immediately depopulated” (Camus, 1969: 249) and it is sauve
qui peut
and every
man for himself once
again. And all the more so since, as like for Burroughs, the terms of
survival are analogous to the nihilism of Nechayev’s revolutionary:
THE STREETS OF
Lost Chance. Man knows he has one chance in a million to make the
connection that will animate the creature he carries in his body. If
he doesn’t make it, the little creature will die inside him. The
pressure makes him utterly ruthless. Anything to protect the child.
He can lie, pretend, kill, without second’s qualm. For he is the
bearer, the guardian of the one child in a million. (Burroughs, 1995:
48)
Furthermore,
Burroughs criticizes the immutability of “the human mold”
throughout his works and suggests alterations by talking of genetic
design and other hands-on possibilities (Burroughs, 1987:
29–34),
and in line with how Murphy understands the amodern
purpose of writing, that is to come up with a plan of living other
than those dictated by prevailing structures, we can safely say that
Burroughs was not just commenting, he was suggesting solutions. Of
course his suggestions are often humorous, improvised and closer to
slop-stick routines than actually literal but, if we accept that he
was making a point, at least some of his scenes, whether they are
satirical accounts, parodies or horrifically nauseating visions of
sex and sadism co-mingled, serve the purposefulness of his
commentary.
Camus summed
up human thought as approximation and to him there where no
absolutes. Burroughs revised the Nietzschean satire of “biologic
courts” (Murphy, 1997: 110), which is based on the idea that there
is ultimately “nothing `wrong´ about any given life form since
“wrong” only has reference to conflicts with other life forms”
(Burroughs, 1992: 53), and proposed as a solution further evolution
out of the dead-ends of absolute need. The “biologic” counsellors
in Burroughs’s court “must be writers that is only writers can
qualify since the function of a counsellor is to create
facts that will tend to open biologic potentials for his client”
(Burroughs, 1992: 137).
The
dialectic method is based on dialogue between opposing polarities
where the opposing parties are often on irreconcilable terms. These
parties could also be understood in Burroughs’s terms as identity
groups that he compares with life forms in conflict because of their
“incompatible conditions” or basic needs and if they cannot
evolve out of these conflicts the life forms or identities are seen
as terminal (Burroughs, 1992: 53). In the case of the irreversible
Nova
Express
train, we are talking about “Nova” as in the end of the world.
The creation
of facts does not seem very empirical but is not the state of knowing
but a feeling? Is it not the feeling of conviction you derive from
exhaustive research when you’ve managed to convince yourself that
what is in front of you finally makes sense? Camus’s approximation
has to be based on statistics by the very definition of the word. If
Camus would have enjoyed evoking controversy like Burroughs and
stated that he was in fact creating facts, he would have certainly
undermined his own work; After all, he was striving for universal
truth based on his approximation. Camus was indeed subversive enough
to mask himself as one of the legislators thus talking part in the
dialogue of nations but he was a rebel all the same. And the true
revolution, a revolution also in the astrophysical sense of the word,
would be the abolition of the absolute need of oppression. At this
point we can conclude that for both of these writers the imaginary
experience was just as valid as the empirically produced conviction
as the basis of “truth”.
References
Bauman,
Zygmunt & May, Tim. 2001: Thinking
Sociologically.
Padstow, Cornwall: Wiley-Blackwell
Burroughs,
William S. 1990: Interzone.
London: Penguin Books
Burroughs,
William S. 1998: Junky.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books
Burroughs,
William S. 1986:
Queer. London:
Pan Books
Burroughs,
William S. 1993: Naked
Lunch. London
: Harper Collins
Burroughs,
William S. 1986: The
Soft Machine.
London: Paladin Books
Burroughs,
William S. 1987: The
Ticket That Exploded. London:
Paladin Books
Burroughs,
William S. 1990: Dead
City Radio.
United Kingdom: Island Records
Burroughs,
William S. 1992: Nova
Express.
New York: Grove Press
Burroughs,
William S. 1983: Hurjat
Pojat: Kuolleiden Kirja; suom. Kari Lempinen. Helsinki:
Odessa
Burroughs,
William S. 1993: exterminator!.
London: Penguin Books
Burroughs,
William S. 1980:
Port of Saints.
London: John Calder
Burroughs,
William S. 1984: Burroughs
File.
San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Burroughs,
William S. 1985: The
Adding Machine: Collected essays.
London: Calder
Burroughs,
William S. 1982: Cities
of Red Night.
London: Picador/Pan Books
Burroughs,
William S. 1984: Place
of Dead Roads.
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston
Burroughs,
William S. 1988: The Western lands. New York: Penguin Books
Burroughs,
William S. 2005: Kissa
Sisälläni; suom. Elina Koskelin.
Turku: Sammakko
Burroughs,
William S. 1995: Ghost
of Chance.
London: Serpent’s Tail; High Risk Books
Burroughs,
William S. 2000: Last
words: the final journals of William Burroughs.
London: Flamingo
Burroughs,
William S. & Daniel Odier 1989:
The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs. 1969.
New York, Penguin Books
Castaneda,
Carlos. 1970: The
teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui way of knowledge.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Camus,
Albert 1969: The
Rebel (L’Homme révolté).
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Camus,
Albert 1971: Kapinoiva
ihminen: esseitä ja katkelmia:
Helsinki: Otava.
Foster,
Edward Halsey 1992: Understanding
the Beats. Columbia,
South Carolina: South Carolina University Press
Murphy,
Timothy S. 1997: Wising
Up the Marks: the Amodern William S. Burroughs.
Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press
Nietzsche,
Friedrich William 1961: Thus
spoke Zarathustra: a book for everyone and no one.
London: Penguin Books.
Todd,
Olivier 2000: Albert
Camus — a Life.
New York: Carroll & Graf publishers Inc.
Hume,
Kathryn 1999:William
S. Burroughs’s Phantasmic Geography, Contemporary
Literature
Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 111-135: University of Wisconsin
Press: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208821
Laughead,
George 2007: Beats
In Kansas: Shooting Joan Burroughs.
Hosted at WWW-virtual Library:
http://www.vlib.us/beats/shootingjoan.html
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James W. 2002: The
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What
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http://old.lawrence.com/burroughs/deathofjoan-full.pdf
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Sergey, 1869: The
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http://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htm
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Eric 1990: Speech
and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality or Pectorality?
Speculum
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(http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Albert_Camus).
All
internet sources accessed between October 2010 and December 9th
2010
Appendix
1.
Neoteny
– noun Biology .
1.
Also called paedogenesis.
the production of offspring by an organism in its larval or juvenile
form; the elimination of the adult phase of the life cycle.
2.
a slowing of the rate of development with the consequent retention in
adulthood of a feature or features that appeared in an earlier phase
in the life cycle of ancestral individuals: Neoteny in the ostrich
has resulted in adult birds sporting the down feathers of nestlings.”
[neoteny. Dictionary.com
Unabridged.
Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/neoteny
(accessed: October 21, 2010).]
2.
anal
–adjective
1. of, pertaining
to, involving, or near the anus.
2. Psychoanalysis.
a. of or
pertaining to the second stage of psychosexual development, during
which gratification is derived from the retention or expulsion of
feces.
b. of or
pertaining to an anal character.
c. of or
pertaining to gratification derived from stimulation of the anus.”
[anal.
Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com
Unabridged.
Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/anal
(accessed: October 23, 2010).]
3. Junk, as
explained by Burroughs: “When I say addict I mean addict to junk
(generic term for opium and/or derivatives including all synthetics
from demerol to Palfium). I have used junk in many forms: morphine,
heroin, dilaudid, eukodal, pantopon, diocodid, diosane, opium,
demerol, dolophine, palfium. (...) Whether you sniff it, eat it, or
shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.”
(Burroughs, 1993: 7)
