23
Yet if postmodernism is, as a number of its
critics have said, a disavowal of responsibil-
ity, Burroughs was no postmodernist. In his
view, the elite’s last shot at virtue lay in tak-
ing 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 ex-
tend it. In Burroughs’ magical universe, if we
are everywhere complicit, we are also every-
where 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 “re-
cording 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
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prepackaged information he was pro-
grammed 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 ma-
chine” 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, Bur-
roughs saw that Western man had “external-
ized himself in the form of gadgets.” The me-
dia 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
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23
ingesting those to whom they in theory re-
port, 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 counteroffens-
ive 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
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how-to writer for the space age for whom sci-
ence fiction was a blueprint for action, dedic-
ated 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, feel-
ings, 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 repeat-
able.” 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 Bur-
roughs, is just the result of a faulty scanning
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23
pattern, a descrambling device run amok.
We’re all hard-wired for destruction, in des-
perate 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 abor-
ted 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 pass-
ports and income taxes; when there was no
CIA or FBI; before bureaucracies and bombs
suffocated creative consciousness and super-
highways crisscrossed and codified the
American landscape—“sometimes paths last
longer than roads,” Burroughs wrote in
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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 independ-
ent 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 utopi-
an 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 in-
terests of “national security”; before the dis-
covery by Western buccaneers and entre-
preneurs of what was later known as the
Third World had solidified into colonial and
neocolonial empire, effecting a permanent
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27
and inequitable redistribution of the world’s
wealth; before the industrial revolution had
produced an epidemic of overdevelopment
and overpopulation and capitalism had be-
come
an
instrument
of
global
standardization.
Burroughs had no sympathy for the
regimented, Marxist-based Communist re-
gimes 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 num-
ber of areas their interests ran along parallel
lines. Unlike Ginsberg or Kerouac, Bur-
roughs unfailingly provides an economic as-
sessment of any culture, real or imaginary,
he describes; how people make a (legal or
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23
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 in-
dispensable part of capitalism’s quest for
new markets and fresh supplies of labor.
Burroughs never accepted the geopolitics
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 re-
ported to Ginsberg that he was mistaken for
arepresentative of the Texaco Oil Company
and given free lodging and transportation
everywhere he went. In fact, as Burroughs
knew, Texaco had surveyed the area,
60/1780
Documents you may be interested
Documents you may be interested
