William Burroughs

The Boston Phoenix
August 14 - 21, 1997

[William S. Burroughs]

The last Beat

Part 3

by Gary Susman
Burroughs kicked heroin about the time he started mainlining words. He needed to write, as he had once needed drugs, to assuage the pain of living. Writing was a response to the most horrific incident in his life: the accidental shooting death of his wife, Joan, in Mexico City in 1951. During a drunken game of William Tell, Burroughs tried to shoot a glass off the top of Joan's head but aimed too low. Thirty-four years later, he acknowledged, "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death. . . . I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, for Control. So 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 had no choice except to write my way out."
But even writing seemed to Burroughs a form of submission as dangerous as politics, violence, or drugs -- because of the way language enforces its structure upon thought. Modern man is incapable of silence, Burroughs wrote in The Ticket That Exploded: "Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word."
If language was an invading virus, Burroughs inoculated himself by writing. He weakened language's control by stripping it of its power to dictate meaning. In Junky and Queer, he used the street slang of the drug underground, words with fugitive meanings. In Naked Lunch, he threw out plot, narrative continuity, and sentence structure altogether to simulate mental chaos. Finally, in The Soft Machine and the novels that followed, he used actual randomness in his experimental cut-ups and fold-ins -- creating new passages by arbitrarily splicing together phrases from Shakespeare, Eliot, Kafka, Graham Greene, newspapers, pulp detective fiction and sci-fi, and his own earlier works. In this way, Burroughs removed meaning from language and placed it instead in the silences between words and phrases and images. The results, sometimes Dadaesque, were evocative of the very chaos and entropy that he felt characterized American society.

Burroughs saw dim prospects for humanity, which he frequently depicted as a race de-evolving into hideous insect-like creatures, finally honest in their expression of total need. Science and technology simply accelerated the process of dehumanization. The slim hope Burroughs offered lay in isolated acts of sabotage against all systems of control. Burroughs cited his own linguistic anarchy as a blueprint for such acts, and "William Lee," the fictional protagonist of Junky who was initially credited as the pseudonymous author, often showed up in Naked Lunch and the later novels as an agent provocateur. If Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch were presented as Bill Lee's diaries, then later novels such as Nova Express were how-to books.

Many artists followed Agent Lee's instructions. Burroughs's influence extended well beyond his fellow Beats; the systemic paranoia and apocalyptic comedy of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo depend on his example. Cyberpunk fiction that posits anarchist hacking of information systems or the melding of humans and computers into "soft machines" owes a debt to Burroughs. Moreover, his victory in the 1966 Naked Lunch obscenity trial in Boston aided all writers. Never again would a novel be "banned in Boston" -- or anywhere else in the United States -- by the courts.

In the final years, Burroughs's frequent media exposure threatened to make him into a mere signifier of the Beat stance he had once embodied. The nadir was his Nike commercial three years ago, though it's hard to say who got the worse end of the deal -- was it the technophobic author, praising technology and shilling for a company built on Third-World sweatshop labor, or the corporation, hiring a geriatric, openly gay, drug-using, wife-shooting academic to sell athletic shoes? Maybe Burroughs was just proving his own maxim: "To speak is to lie -- to live is to collaborate."

Still, it was hard to begrudge Burroughs some comfort and security in his old age, after a lifetime spent staring down the abyss. Last year, Burroughs said he had finally run out of things to write (though he was working on another book when he died). For another writer, that declaration might have been an admission of defeat, but for Burroughs, it suggested that he'd finally kicked the word habit. Coming from a guru who had never offered transcendence, only relief, the declaration sounded almost heroic.

William Burroughs inspired strong reactions on both sides of the cultural divide. Here's David Bowie, from a statement on August 4:

Burroughs said to me once, "Death comes in all shapes and sizes." In an important way, he will not be missed, as his rechanneling of language and thought so permeates these last years of the 20th century that his essence remains. For writers like myself, he was both a challenge and a path. He helped melt down the divide between our perceptions of reality and dreams. We are all poorer for his passing.

And here's New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, who penned a joint obituary for Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in the Wall Street Journal that began: "It has been a bad year for famous drug-abusing literary charlatans."

Burroughs is often praised for his "humor." But as far as I can tell, there is only one genuinely funny sentence in Naked Lunch, and its humor is inadvertent. "Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic," Burroughs wrote in a preface, "were written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift's `Modest Proposal.' "

. . . Unlike Swift, [Burroughs] had no ideal to oppose to the degradation his books depicted. On the contrary, he was a cynical opportunist who realized that calling his work "satire" could help exempt it from legal action. An obituary in the Village Voice described Burroughs as "utterly paranoid and utterly moral." That is exactly half right.