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The Long Last Goodbye: Control and Resistance in the Work of William Burroughs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

David Ayers
David Ayers
Affiliation:
Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, England.
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Extract

As a lifelong homosexual and sometime heroin addict born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914, Burroughs' formative experiences led him to focus in his work both on the repressive social control of sexuality, and on the direct metabolic control of the body associated with heroin. Burroughs' work, developing the American Libertarian tradition rather than any form of Anarchism, let alone revolutionary collectivism, maps a quest for physical and spiritual freedom from a range of repressive forces including, finally, death itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , August 1993 , pp. 223 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 References in the text to the works of William Burroughs are as follows: NL = The Naked Lunch (London: Paladin, 1986)Google Scholar; SM = The Soft Machine (London: Paladin, 1986)Google Scholar; TTE = The Ticket That Exploded (London: Paladin, 1987)Google Scholar; Nova Express (London: Panther, Granada Publishing, 1968)Google Scholar; The Job (London: Calder, 1984)Google Scholar; The Third Mind (with Brion Gysin) (London: John Calder, 1979)Google Scholar; The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (London: John Calder, 1985)Google Scholar; The Western Lands (London: Picador, 1988).Google Scholar

2 On this subject see Junky (London: Penguin, 1977)Google Scholar and Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (London: The Bodley Head, 1991), 167–71.Google Scholar

3 The disjointed voices in the centre of this passage attract attention to the extent to which Burroughs will anthropomorphize psychic functions in his fiction and redeploy them within a shifting “B” movie script. The Western Lands employs this procedure with the seven aspects of the Ancient Egyptian soul.

4 Contrast Olson, 's Mayan Letters (1953; London: Jonathan Cape, 1968)Google Scholar or Ginsberg, 's “Siesta at Xbalba” in Collected Poems 1947–1980 (London: Penguin, 1987).Google Scholar

5 This disintegration is one which does not consume the agent, who is always able to escape: when Kim Carsons in The Place of Dead Roads shoots a hole in the reality film which erupts in conflagration, “a Johnson holds up a barbed wire fence for others to slip through” (The Place of Dead Roads [London: Paladin, 1986], 17)Google Scholar – where a Johnson is a person who follows the Mind Your Own Business code of the later Burroughs (see The Place of Dead Roads, 7)Google Scholar, and is “saved” while those who perish are part of the preprogrammed reality film and cannot escape it.

6 Tanner, Tony, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970 (London: Cape, 1971), 15–16.Google Scholar

7 Skerl, Jennie S., William S. Burroughs (Boston: Twayne, 1985). See Chapter 4.Google Scholar

8 I discuss Imagism and Burroughs in “‘It's a sick picture, B.J.’: Imagism Regurgitated,” in Parataxis no. 1 (Spring, 1991).Google Scholar

9 On The Waste Land see Eagleton, Terry, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1978), 148.Google Scholar

10 This is to discount for the purposes of this analysis his accounts of the evolution of the human body out of time into a space-faring vessel – a predominant concern of the later novels, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands.