William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs' death has been on my mind. Long before I was a Marxist, I was a youthful member of the beat generation. In 1960 I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road and a year or so later I read Burroughs' Naked Lunch. These two works deepened my outsider identity. It was the 1960s radicalization that transformed my outsider status into one of revolutionary as I became conscious of the social and economic forces that were arrayed against me and the working class.

On the Road and Naked Lunch are two dialectically opposed works that add up to a penetrating critique of the Eisenhower era. On the Road emphasized the sunny, Whitmanesque, positive aspect of America where the open road, truck-stops, jazz clubs and automats serve as proof of the wonders of this country as long as you look in the right places. After reading On the Road I dedicated myself to a search for these right places.

Naked Lunch offered a completely different view of the world. It was a cold-turkey nightmare of urban decay, sexual perdition and self-loathing. When I read Naked Lunch I was attuned to the essential clarity of Burroughs' vision. Yes, this was America. From that moment on, I was always sensitive to the Kerouac-esque and Burroughs-esque dual nature of American society. What America certainly was not was the television lies based on "Leave it to Beaver" or "Life With Father."

Burroughs' literary landscape was inhabited by grotesque mechanical objects that took on a terrifying life of their own. Surgical instruments, suppositories, diesel engines, radios, etc. were transformed into ghoulish objects capable of torture and death. They grew arms and legs and stalked about the miserable apartments that the characters--such as they were--of Naked Lunch inhabited.

Oddly enough, there is a certain affinity between Naked Lunch and the gothic novels of Stephen King. King's novels central device is to take inanimate objects and invest them with ghastly qualities, such as the homicidal car Christine. Certainly one can imagine the influence of Burroughs on King. As a English major at the University of Maine, he was taught by instructors who consciously identified with the beat movement. Occasionally you will see epigraphs to the chapters of his novels that are drawn from this outsider literature.

Burroughs' relationship to the left was non-existent. As the ultimate misanthrope, it is difficult to imagine speaking from the platform of a peace rally like Allen Ginsburg. It is also impossible to imagine him as a reactionary like Kerouac in his dying, alcoholic latter years.

What Burroughs did articulate was a savage hatred for the destruction industrial society wrought on the United States. There is a powerful video that I saw once that simply consists of William S. Burroughs sitting on a chair ruminating on Thanksgiving. It is a jeremiad against the murder of the Indians, buffaloes and forests in the name of Progress. The New York Times obituary concludes in this vein:

"To the end of his life, Mr. Burroughs remained pessimistic about the future for mankind. In 'Ghost of a Chance,' he lamented the destruction of rain forests and creatures and wrote: 'All going, to make way for more and more devalued human stock, with less and less of the wild spark, the priceless ingredient--energy into matter. A vast mudslide of soulless sludge.'"