Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader Read online

  Like Hemingway, like Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs aspired to “write his own life and death,” to leave something like a complete record of his experiment on the planet; by his own admission, there is finally only one character in his fiction—himself. In a guarded but uncannily astute review of The Wild Boys (1971), Alfred Kazin analyzed what he took to be the solipsism of Burroughs’ narrative form; Burroughs wanted “to make the fullest possible inventory and rearrangement of all the stuff natural to him . . . to put his own mind on the internal screen that is his idea of a book.” Yet Burroughs was not in any usual sense a confessional or autobiographical writer.

  A leader of postmodern literary fashion in the 1960s, Burroughs early discarded the Western humanistic notions of the self traditionally associated with autobiography. In a 1950 letter, he commented severely on Ginsberg’s recent discovery that he was “just a human like other humans.” “Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.” Burroughs took his starting point to be the place where “the human road ends.” In his fiction, identity is an affair of ventriloquism and property rights—everything is potentially up for reassignment or sale. In a compulsive gambling session described in Naked Lunch, a young man loses his youth to an old one; lawyers sell not their skills, but their luck to the hapless clients they defend. Most things in Burroughsland function as addictive substances, and the “self” can be simply the last drug the person in question has ingested. Or it may be a random object, someone else’s discard, an “article abandoned in a hotel drawer.”

  Yet if postmodernism is, as a number of its critics have said, a disavowal of responsibility, Burroughs was no postmodernist. In his view, the elite’s last shot at virtue lay in taking responsibility for the consequences of its power, and Burroughs for one—and almost the only one in the ranks of recent, major, white male American authors—was willing not only to shoulder responsibility, but to extend it. In Burroughs’ magical universe, if we are everywhere complicit, we are also everywhere active. “Your surroundings are your surroundings,” he wrote in The Soft Machine. “Every object you touch is alive with your life and your will.”

  When Burroughs wrote, in a famous line from Naked Lunch, that he was merely a “recording instrument,” he wasn’t implying, as a number of his critics and fans have thought, that he made no choices, exerted no control over what he wrote, but rather that he wanted to learn how to register not the prepackaged information he was programmed by corporate interests or artistic canons to receive, but what was actually there. In a 1965 interview with The Paris Review, he explained that while the direction of Samuel Beckett, a novelist he admired greatly, was inward, he was intent on going “outward.” For Burroughs, the “control machine” is almost synonymous with the Western psyche. The point, as he saw it, was to get outside it, to beat it at its own game by watching and decoding the extremely partial selections it makes from the outside world and then imposes on us as “reality.”

  Like Marshall McLuhan, himself a fan and brilliant expositor of Burroughs’ work, Burroughs saw that Western man had “externalized himself in the form of gadgets.” The media extend to fabulous lengths man’s nervous system, his powers to record and receive, but without content themselves, cannibalizing the world they purportedly represent and ingesting those to whom they in theory report, like drugs inserted into a bodily system, they eventually replace the organism they feed—a hostile takeover in the style of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Instead of reality, we have the “reality studio”; instead of people, “person-impersonators” and image-junkies looking for a fix, with no aim save not to be shut out of the “reality film.” But Burroughs believed that a counteroffensive might still be possible, that the enemy’s tactics can be pried out of their corporate context and used against him by information bandits like himself. Computers might rule the world, but the brain is the first computer; all the information people have forgotten is stored there. The problem is one of access.

  In the 1960s, as he developed the “cut-up” method of his first trilogy, The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964), Burroughs became fascinated by tape recorders and cameras. A how-to writer for the space age for whom science fiction was a blueprint for action, dedicated to “wising up the marks,” he instructed readers in the art of deprogramming. Walk down the street, any street, recording and photographing what you hear and see. Go home, write down your observations, feelings, associations, and thoughts, then check the results against the evidence supplied by your tapes and photos. You will discover that your mind has registered only a tiny fraction of your experience; what you left unnoticed may be what you most need to find. “Truth may appear only once,” Burroughs wrote in his journal in 1997; “it may not be repeatable.” To walk down the street as most people perform the act is to reject the only free handout life has to offer, to trample on the prince in a rush for the toad, storming the pawnshop to exchange gold for dross. What we call “reality,” according to Burroughs, is just the result of a faulty scanning pattern, a descrambling device run amok. We’re all hard-wired for destruction, in desperate need of rerouting, even mutation.

  How did this happen? How did Western civilization become a conspiracy against its members? In his second trilogy, Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1984), and The Western Lands (1987), which taken as a whole forms his greatest work, Burroughs fantasized the past which produced the present and excavated its aborted alternatives, the last, lost sites of human possibility. The first is the United States that disappeared in his boyhood, the pre- and just post-WWI years when individual identity had not yet been fixed and regulated by passports and income taxes; when there was no CIA or FBI; before bureaucracies and bombs suffocated creative consciousness and superhighways crisscrossed and codified the American landscape—“sometimes paths last longer than roads,” Burroughs wrote in Cities of the Red Night. In the heyday of the gunman, of single combat, and of the fraternal alliances of frontier culture, the promises of the American Revolution were not yet synonymous with exclusionary elite self-interest. Now, however, Burroughs wrote, there are “so many actors and so little action”; little room is left for the independent cooperative social units he favored, for the dreams that he saw as the magical source of renewal for whole peoples as well as individuals.

  Globally, Burroughs located a brief utopian moment a century or two earlier, a time when one’s native “country” had not yet hardened into the “nation-state” and the family did not police its members in the interests of “national security”; before the discovery by Western buccaneers and entrepreneurs of what was later known as the Third World had solidified into colonial and neocolonial empire, effecting a permanent and inequitable redistribution of the world’s wealth; before the industrial revolution had produced an epidemic of overdevelopment and overpopulation and capitalism had become an instrument of global standardization.

  Burroughs had no sympathy for the regimented, Marxist-based Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. He saw the Cold War administrations of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. not as enemies but as peers and rivals vying to see who could reach the goal of total control first. Yet both Burroughs and Karl Marx had an acute understanding of just how revolutionary the impact of plain common sense could be in a world contorted by crime and self-justification, and in a number of areas their interests ran along parallel lines. Unlike Ginsberg or Kerouac, Burroughs unfailingly provides an economic assessment of any culture, real or imaginary, he describes; how people make a (legal or illegal) living is always of interest to him. Like Marx, he was certain that “laissez-faire capitalism” could not be reformed from within: “A problem cannot be solved in terms of itself.” He, too, saw the colonizing impulse that rewrote the world map between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries as a tactic to “keep the underdog under,” an indispensable part of capitalism’s quest for new markets and fresh supplies of labor.

  Burroughs never accepted the geopoli
tics that divided the American continent into separate southern and northern entities. Both were part of the same feeding system, though the South was the trough, the North the hog. Traveling in Colombia in search of the drug yagé in April 1953, Burroughs reported to Ginsberg that he was mistaken for a representative of the Texaco Oil Company and given free lodging and transportation everywhere he went. In fact, as Burroughs knew, Texaco had surveyed the area, discovered no oil, and pulled out several years before. The Colombian rubber and cocoa industries, totally dependent on American investment, were drying up as well. Colombians, however, refused to believe it; they were still expecting the infrastructure of roads, railroads, and airports that U.S. industry could be counted on to build to expedite the development, and removal, of a Third World country’s material wealth. Burroughs had no more sympathy for the losers in the neocolonial con game than he did for any other “mark.” “Like I should think some day soon boys will start climbing in through the transom and tunneling under the door” was his derisive comment on Colombian delusions about U.S. investment.

  The literary critic Tobin Siebers, writing about post-WWII literary culture, has speculated that the postmodern disavowal of agency, almost entirely the work of First World, white, male writers and theorists, is both an expression and an evasion of racial and economic guilt. Looking at the defining phenomena of the twentieth century, its holocausts, genocides, gulags, and unimaginably lethal weapons of destruction, who would want to advertise himself as part of the group that engineered and invented them? Postmodernism allows whites to answer the question “Who’s responsible?” by saying, “It looks like me, but actually there is no real ‘me’”—no one, in postmodernspeak, has a firmly defined or authentic self. In the universe of total, irreversible complicity postmodernism posits, the cause-and-effect sequence of individual action and consequence, motive and deed, is severed. Where Burroughs breaks with the postmodern position is that in his fiction, though everyone is complicit, everyone is also responsible, for everyone is capable of resistance. There are no victims, just accomplices; the mark collaborates with his exploiter in his own demise.

  “We make truth,” Burroughs wrote in his journal shortly before his death on August 2, 1997. “Nobody else makes it. There is no truth we don’t make.” What governments and corporations assert as truth is nothing but “lies”; such bodies are inevitably “self-righteous. They have to be because in human terms they are wrong.” For Burroughs as for the postmodernists, identity was artifice, but for him it was made that way, betrayed that way, and can be remade differently. To deny the latter possibility is the last and worst collusion because it’s the only one that can be avoided. Burroughs’ final trilogy is a complex, funny, impassioned attempt, with one always aware of the death sentence under which it apparently operates, to “punch a hole in the big lie,” to parachute his characters behind the time lines of the enemy and make a different truth.

  As he explained it in Cities of the Red Night, what Burroughs had in mind was a globalization of the Third World guerrilla tactics that defeated the U.S. in Vietnam. He prefaces the novel with an account of an actual historical personage, Captain Mission, a seventeenth-century pirate who founded an all-male, homosexual community on Madagascar, a libertarian society that outlawed slavery, the death penalty, and any interference in the beliefs and practices of its members. Although Captain Mission’s relatively unarmed settlement didn’t survive, Burroughs elaborates what its “New Freedoms” could have meant if it had: fortified positions throughout the Third World to mobilize resistance to “slavery and oppression” everywhere.

  Despite his scorn for those lining up to welcome their destroyers, Burroughs did not traffic with the racialized thinking that—in historical fact—buttressed and excused the empire-building process, the definition of Third World people of color as inherently lazy, dishonest, incorrigibly irrational, and unable to look after their own welfare. The Western virtues of rationality and instrumentalism were largely suspect to Burroughs in any case; he shared the so-called primitive belief in an animistic universe which the skeptical West categorically rejected. In Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs is explicit that whites would be welcome in his utopia only as “workers, settlers, teachers, and technicians”—no more “white-man boss, no Pukka Sahib, no Patrons, no colonists.” As he recounts the history of seven imaginary cities in the Gobi desert thousands of years ago, Burroughs explains that before the destruction of the cities by a meteor (itself a forerunner of late-twentieth-century nuclear weaponry), an explosion which produced the “Red Night” of the title, all the people of the world were black. White and even brown and red-skinned people are “mutations” caused by the meteor, as was the albino woman-warrior whose all-female army conquered one of the original cities, reducing its male inhabitants to “slaves, consorts, and courtiers.”

  Burroughs’ cosmological myth resembles the Black Muslim fable, embraced notably by Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, about the creation of a white race of “devils” by an evil black scientist named Yacub intent on destroying the all-black world that has rejected him. Yet Burroughs never signed up for the fan clubs of the Third World revolutionaries so compelling to young, left-wing Americans in the 1960s; to his mind, heroes like Che Guevara were simply devices for those running the “reality film,” a gambit designed to leave the “shines cooled back . . . in a nineteenth century set.” Burroughs claimed to belong to only one group, the “Shakespeare squadron”; in the historical impasse in which he lived, language was his only weapon.

  Language as he found it, however, was rigged to serve the enemy, an ambush disguised as an oasis—in the West, language had become the “word virus,” the dead heart of the control machine. Burroughs’ avant-garde experiments in montage, the cut-up, and disjunctive narrative were attempts to liberate Western consciousness from its own form of self-expression, from the language that we think we use but which, in truth, uses us. “Writers are very powerful,” Burroughs tells us; they can write, and “unwrite,” the script for the reality film.

  Defending Naked Lunch during the obscenity trial of 1966 as an example of automatic writing, Norman Mailer noted that “one’s best writing seems to bear no relation to what one is thinking about.” Many post-WWII writers showed a quickened interest in the random thought that reroutes or classifies the plan of a novel or essay, but Burroughs came closest to reversing the traditional roles of design and chance. For him, conscious intent was a form of prediction, and prediction is only possible when the status quo has reason to assume it will meet no significant opposition. In his fiction, the continuity girl, the person who keeps the details of one sequence of film consistent with the next, has gone AWOL; there are no shock absorbers. Jump cuts replace narrative transitions; straight chronological, quasi-documentary sequences are spliced with out-of-time-and-space scenes of doom-struck sodomy and drug overdoses. Lush symbolist imagery and hard-boiled, tough-guy slang, the lyric and the obscene, collide and interbreed. Burroughs’ early style was founded on drug lingo and jive talk; he was fascinated by their mutability, their fugitive quality, the result of the pressure their speakers were under to dodge authority and leave no records behind. His later work elaborates and complicates this principle. No one form of language can hold center stage for long. Fast-change artistry is all; sustained domination is impossible.

  The novelist Paul Bowles, a friend of Burroughs’, thought the cut-up method reflected an “unsatisfied desire on the part of the mind to be anonymous,” but it also came out of Burroughs’ need to work undercover, at the intersections where identities and meanings multiply faster than language can calculate or record. The cut-up method was not a refusal of authorship. The writer still selects the passages, whether from his own work, a newspaper, a novel by someone else, or a sign glimpsed out a train window, which he then cuts up and juxtaposes. You always know what you’re doing, according to Burroughs. Everyone sees in the dark; the trick is to maneuver yourself into the position where you can recognize what
you see.

  The first step is to realize that the language, even the voice that you use, are not your own, but alien implants, the result of the most effective kind of colonization, the kind that turns external design into what passes for internal motivation and makes what you are allowed to get feel like what you want. In The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs challenged his readers to try and halt their “subvocal speech,” that committee meeting inside the head that seldom makes sense and never shuts up, the static of the self, the lowest idle of the meaning-fabricating machine. Who are you talking to? Burroughs wants to know. Is it really yourself? Why has Western man “lost the option of silence”? The nonstop monologue running in our heads is proof of possession, and the only way to end it is to cut the association lines by which it lives, the logic by which we believe that “b” follows “a” not because it in fact does, but because we have been aggressively, invasively conditioned to think so. Like the Jehovah who is its front man, Western language has become prerecorded sequence, admitting of no alternatives.

  “In the beginning was the word,” the Bible says, but the only beginning the line really refers to, Burroughs reminds us, is the beginning of the word itself, the recorded word, literacy as the West understands it, a period that makes up only a tiny fraction of human history. Burroughs suggests that people try communicating by pictures, as the Chinese and Mayans did, even by colors and smells; words are “an around-the-world oxcart way of doing things.” English as spoken shuts out the infinite variations in which meaning presents itself; the body thinks too, though the Western mind can only imperfectly translate its language. Burroughs wanted to abolish “either/or” dichotomies from our speech, change every “the” to an “a,” and root out the verb “to be,” which is not, as it claims, a description of existence, but a “categorical imperative of permanent condition,” a way of programming people to disavow change, no matter how imperative.