Book Review & Literary Analysis: The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs

The Place of Dead Roads

by William S. Burroughs

      The later works of William S. Burroughs have attracted less attention than his earlier writings. By the 1980s, Burroughs was living off his reputation more than his art. He was living in an abandoned YMCA in Manhattan, hanging out in his orgone accumulator and talking to ghosts. He was also hanging out in CBGB’s with Patti Smith who claimed she admired him so much because he was so difficult to get into bed. Well y’know Patti, a gay junky pushing 70 probably isn’t the best horse to bet on, even if you are a woman with hairy armpits (see the cover of her Easter LP).But he hadn’t been forgotten. Musicians in the punk and first wave industrial music scenes had taken interest in him and his earlier works remained perennial classics in the underground art and literary scenes. He was in desperate need of money so he decided to revive his career. The Nova Convention brought him back into the public eye and he even did an introduction for the opening of a Saturday Night Live episode. Along with this he published a trilogy of novels that were not entirely palatable to most readers of the time. But Burroughs being Burroughs has never been specific to one particular time or place. It may be time for a novel like The Place of Dead Roads to be reconsidered, especially considering our current political climate.

William S. Burroughs always defied categories. Whether he could be classified as a Beat Generation or a science-fiction author can be infinitely debatable. Burroughs would have advised you to not waste time on such distinctions since categories are arbitrary by nature. But you can’t deny that, up to a certain point, this novel is a western. But, just as much, it is a science-fiction novel although nobody else has ever written science-fiction the way Burroughs did. In fact no one else every wrote a western the way he did either. But neither of these categories hold since it could just as well be a work of surrealism, romanticism, pulp crime, gay fictions, utopianism, dystopianism, postmodernism, or anything else you could possibly think of. Burroughs is just a category unto himself.

But true to his own style, his 1980s novels defy his own niche that he created in the earlier years of his writing. Most of his earlier works had no plot or character development. They were mostly series of dream sequences and vignettes with characters that extended no further than what they did in each scene. On the other hand, in The Place of Dead Roads there is both plot and character development. This is definitely new territory for this most unconventional of all unconventional authors.

Kim Carsons is a young man who inherits a plot of rural land after his parents die. When arriving in the nearest town, he buys an arsenal of guns which get excessively described in pornographic detail. The eroticism of guns is firmly established early in the story. Kim brings another boy to his rustic cabin and the two look over his guns before having sex. Soon after, Kim goes out to the woods, sets up targets, and begins shooting. While doing so, a faun appears and then they have sex. But the sex is a kind of foreplay for gun shooting which they do in between bouts of intercourse.

Kim begins to attract a group of followers, all male and gay. They indulge freely in carnal pleasures and have gun fights with those who don’t respect them, primarily homophobic bullies and Christians who won’t leave them alone. They also practice sex magic rituals in which ejaculations function like guns, shooting psychically charged deadly venom at their visualized enemies, killing them from a distance without leaving a trace of evidence. The boys quickly gain a reputation for being outlaws and expert shootists who should never be messed with. They dub themselves the Johnson Gang and live by an ethos of everyone minding their own business. This means they demand the freedom to live close to nature, far from the modern world of technology, where they can indulge in sex and drugs. Anybody who intrudes on them has basically signed their own death certificate. The descriptions are explicit and brutal; Burroughs writes about violence with as much passion as he writes about guns and sex. To the chagrin of most feminists, this novel is a celebration of phallo-centrism to an extreme and the vision is one of a masculine society free from the presence of women. Burroughs doesn’t express any animosity towards women. It’s just that they barely exist in the world he writes about.

One interesting passage near the beginning, when Burroughs describes Kim’s childhood and relationship with his artist father, involves the boy writing a science-fiction story and submitting it to Boy’s Life magazine for publication. The story is about some half-human/half-giant insect creatures on a search and destroy mission in a jungle river gorge on Venus. (This passage seems to parallel a chapter in Cities Of the Red Night where the pirates invade Panama City) This bizarre story is so far from anything that would ever be published in the vanilla teenage magazine that it serves to illustrate how distant Kim feels from boring, mainstream America at the onset of his adolescence. Incidentally, Kim travels to Venus in some later chapters of this novel.

Later on, Kim leaves his rural property and travels around America, sometimes with the Johnson Gang and sometimes without them. He liaises with various members of an underground network of gay criminals. Sometimes he is involved with hit jobs on the Mafia. The already thin plot begins to wear even thinner. But then we hear from a visitor from outer space whose space ship crash landed in the desert and released a virus into the world. This takes on significance later.

Meanwhile, Kim travels to Europe and begins working as a secret agent, taking on different identities as he goes along. If you think you can read any Burroughs novel without getting thoroughly confused at some point, you are wrong. It becomes hard to tell when Kim is Kim acting under an assumed identity and when a character isn’t Kim at all. Watching him change personas is like watching a blackjack dealer shuffle a deck of cards; you can briefly see what each card is but they go by so fast they all blur together. Even more disorienting is the way Kim can be at a dinner party with spies in France one minutes, then he opens a door and comes out as someone different in Morocco. Any sense of linearity or stability of character disappears. We get led around the world to Burroughs’ favorite haunts like Ecuador, Colombia, London, Paris, and Tangier. Kim shoots up heroin and methadone, visits exotic weapons dealers in North African bazaars, receives coded messages from secret agents in Gibraltar, and goes to a high level drug dealer’s party and gets seduced by a woman who changes sexes. All the while he’s probably some kind of secret agent being contacted by entities in outer space. Who knows what it all amounts to, but the hallucinatory nature of it all makes you question if Burroughs is expressing the feeling of shifting in and out of altered states of consciousness while using drugs.

The most baffling passage is when Kim is living on Venus with his boyfriend. The two live together in a cabin that is described as being similar to the cabin he inhabits in Missouri at the beginning of the novel. This kind of overlapping is a key feature in many of Burroughs’ writings. He leaves to walk around a tourist resort which he at first says is in Egypt, but as he goes away, unauthorized, from the designated resort, he wanders into a nightmarish world where he finds houses full of dwarfs. Centipedes are emerging from the dwarfs’ heads and shedding them as if the little men are cocoons for the monster insects. Kim can do nothing but shoot them and burn the place down. It’s hard to interpret this, but centipedes show up throughout most of Burroughs’ writings as symbols of fear and anxiety. The dwarfs, being small men of slight stature, give birth to this symbol of fear possible meaning that it is the people of lesser value who unleash the most evil into the world.

By destroying these monstrous creatures, Kim is eliminating something that makes his world terrible. Furthermore, the incomprehensibility of the scenario illustrates what it feels like to live in a world where you can’t connect with others, and in fact wouldn’t want to, and feel nothing but alienation, disconnection, and confusion. It is a hostile and incomprehensible place. You can see why a gay heroin addict, and one who had difficulty even relating to other gay men, would feel a desire to destroy everything that creates the psychological oppression of dread, This is a sadistic, ultraviolent fantasy of a man who wants to live someplace where he can be left alone in peace. The extreme violence of Burroughs’ writing is like an artillery shield that protects a vulnerable man from everything that seeks to destroy him. If you read Burroughs carefully, he does express ideas of what it would be like to live in a peaceful and beautiful world. It is a world without persecution and one where everybody minds their own business.

Another baffling passage comes near the end when Kim, in the guise of a secret agent, gets assigned to visit the desert crater where the aforementioned space ship landed. It is secretly guarded by the American military because the last surviving ancestors of the missing link live there. They are the vectors that came between earlier primates and the human species, the vectors that contracted the virus that mutated into human language. Burroughs always had a thing for viruses and his hypothesis that viruses are used by entities from outer space to control humans is lifted directly from Scientology. Actually, if you think about it, language does bear a superficial similarity to a virus in that it survives and replicates by moving from host to host. It is through language that bad ideas spread throughout society, sometimes in the form of memes as Richard Dawkins defines them. A junky high on heroin can lie for days in bed without thinking a single thought. In the absence of language, they would be impermeable to any ideas bad or good. It would be like a womb of silence without any intrusions from words, similar to the way that the Johnson Gang lives on their private plot of land without any intrusions from the outside. This would be an appealing state to be in when confronted by a hostile and alien world that seeks to destroy you for no other purpose than that is what the world does. Life is a killer. Rub out the word. In any case, the primates in the crater let out a virus that spreads to the nearby military base and presumably beyond. How Burroughs got us from a farm in Missouri populated exclusively by gay outlaws to a crater in the desert populated by the missing link is far from clear. But that’s just the way William S. Burroughs rolls.

These are the easiest themes to digest in this novel. There are so many others that it would be impossible to interpret all of it. You don’t have to pursue every element that enters into the story though; in a Joycean sense, you can only grasp on to whatever you can and let everything else flow by especially when everything else is as appealing as vomit and raw sewage. In fact, the worst part of this book is that it is so jam packed (fudge packed?) with information that you might feel exhausted before getting to the end. But what a wild ride it is.

Burroughs’ final novels deserve some reconsideration. If the lack of traditional literary formulas frustrated you when reading his earlier works, The Place of Dead Roads might be a good place to pick up Burroughs again. It is more structured and fine tuned without losing any of the transgressive qualities that made his writing so notorious to begin with. Maybe readers in the 1980s weren’t ready for this kind of book. Maybe they still aren’t. Maybe someday the human race will catch up to this genius writer. Maybe by then everybody will have learned to mind their own business. We aren’t there yet.

 

Book Review: The Burroughs File by William S. Burroughs

The Burroughs File

by William S. Burroughs

            If you’re interested in the works of William S. Burroughs, The Burroughs File is definitely the wrong place to start. This anthology is a collection of writings that previously appeared in scattered publications and some other scraps that were taken from the old Beat Generation author’s private notebooks. If you haven’t already taken a deep dive into his fiction, philosophy on life, and biography, this one probably won’t make much sense. But then again, it’s William Burroughs so a lot of it won’t make sense anyways. That’s the point.

One way to approach Burroughs is to think of his literature as a radio receiver. You tune into his writing the way a radio tunes into a transmitter broadcasting signals via radio waves from stations in varied locations. Reading from beginning to end is like turning the dial, moving from one channel to the next. In between stations, you will mostly hear noise while the stations will deliver clarity. Sometimes there will be interference. When you are too far away from a transmitter, the signals weaken and the static noise overrides and sometimes completely obliterates the signals being broadcast. Most people find the signals being broadcast to be more interesting than the noise, but sometimes you need to pass through the noise or alter the dial to get a clear signal. Or if you’ve used hallucinogenic drugs, you might find patterns in the noise. Reading Burroughs is the literary equivalent of tuning into the radio in this way. Many thanks to Robert Anton Wilson for this insight.

So what is Burroughs trying to communicate? According to one passage in this book, he puts you in the place of an intergalactic secret agent caught in the trap of humanity, trying to receive communications from the Nova Police. They are the ones trying to save the world from self destruction. Their adversaries are the Nova Mob, a gang of space alien vampires who jam and interfere with the instructional signals being sent by the Nova Police. The Nova Mob’s job is to maximize conflict and chaos on this planet to push it towards the Nova, a state where conflicts become so unmanageable that the entire planet explodes. “Get back...back before the whole fucking shithouse explodes,” the Nova Police tell agent K9 when all hell breaks loose and Dr. Benway is summoned to command control over the masses of humanity who aren’t intelligent enough to maintain order on their own. If this sounds familiar to Burroughs’ readers, that’s because it’s been explained in other places. The passage in The Burroughs File is just spelled out a little more clearly.

Other scraps of information we get in this book is that viruses came from outer space for the sake of controlling humans. Language is a mutation brought by the Nova Mob to sow confusion on Planet Earth. Time moves in a linear directions because we exist in a movie prerecorded on a reel of film stock. Therefore time can be manipulated just like film, rewound, sped up, slowed down, chopped up and randomly spliced back together so that the future inserts itself into the present, something that only those trained with psychic perceptions are able to see. The repeating image of a tear in the sky and someone pulling the tear open to start an apocalypse reinforces this idea that we exist on a reel of film.

One memorable passage involves a radio interview with a man named Mr. D. He claims that he acts amorally and takes on whatever form he needs in order to do his work. A careful reading would have you conclude that Mr. D is Death himself. Other recurring characters are Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin who are actually one person, and old junky named the Saint who poses as a Salvation Army Santa Claus at Christmas time to earn money to buy dope, and a hermaphrodite that changes sexes while copulating with a man it picked up at a party hosted by a drug dealer in Mexico. Some of these passages have appeared or been reworked for other novels written by Burroughs. And of course there is the usual mentions of guns, Scientology, witchcraft, ejaculations, hangings, sleazy cops, heartless businessmen, and cut ups you find in every Burroughs book.

There are plenty of passages here showcasing the experimental cut up technique invented by Brion Gysin. Some of them are inserted directly into narrative passages, derailing the narratives and confusing the reader, while others are printed as stand alone projects. Cut ups work best as literature when you are familiar with the texts being spliced together. It can be like watching two films being superimposed over one another so that images at random points collide making unintended meanings. Burroughs insists these lexical coincidences convey information from the future by disrupting the linear time sequences of the texts. He would have you believe these are messages being transmitted by the Nova Police and only those in the know can understand them. To everyone else they look like nonsense. You don’t buy that? Tough shit. Burroughs is a writer of fiction. It doesn’t have to be objectively true. The cut ups in this anthology are some of the least interesting ones Burroughs has produced which is probably why they were never used in any of his major works.

Moving from chapter to chapter, this book is a sequence of dream-like situations, hallucinations, inside jokes, metatextual explanations, nonsense, and characters that repeatedly float in and out of the text like ghosts. In short, even though this is a collection of odds and ends, it reads just like one of his novels which are usually not driven by plot or character development. What you get out of this will largely depend on how familiar you are with the author’s work and how much of it you can comprehend. What is good about this book is that, at its most lucid moments, it explains some of the more difficult points to grasp in Burrough’s other writings.

The Burroughs File is an acquired taste. Those who aren’t in on the William S. Burroughs mind fuck and head trip won’t get much out of it. For those who are, it is a good supplement to whatever else has already been read.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology by William S. Burroughs

Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology

by William S. Burroughs

      A lot of William S. Burroughs’ readers don’t realize how much Scientology influenced his writings, especially the science-fiction novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In those years, Burroughs was introduced to Scientology by Brion Gysin and the two of them unofficially practiced those techniques outside the cult. This actually is not as bizarre as you might think at first since a lot of science-fiction authors of the 1950s were heavily influenced by Scientology as well. This is largely because the cult’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, started out as a science-fiction writer and moved in the circles of those other authors. But none of those writers took their interest to such an extreme as William S. Burroughs did. In the 1970s he was still convinced of the veracity of Scientology so he decided to join the organization and receive the official teachings and methods. According to biographers, he specifically thought they could cure him of his homosexuality and his heroin addiction. Of course, he continued being a gay junky until he died so that doesn’t reflect well on the efficacy of Scientology. While being a member of the cult, Burroughs wrote three magazine articles and some brief columns about being a member. Along with a Scientology-themed short story, two of these articles were published as Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology.

The first articles included in this slim volume originally appeared in the L.A. Free Press and the East Village Other, two underground newspapers spawned by the hippie counter-cultural generation. Burroughs here wrote polemically against the Church of Scientology because of their rightward leaning political values. He accuses them of being an authoritarian organization that is racist and politically aligned with the values of the John Birch Society. He laments this because he thinks that Scientology has a lot to offer the psychonauts of the LSD generation with their taste for drugs, occultism, meditation, yoga, and altered states of consciousness in general. He argues that Scientology would be better off aligning with the Esalen Institute rather than the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican party. Burroughs’ writings on this subject are more interesting than convincing, though he is right about the disturbing nature of the Church’s quasi-fascist political leanings.

The other article of most interest in this collection appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. Previous to its initial publication, Burroughs had written an in depth article about life in the Church of Scientology for the British porn magazine Mayfair. The cult sued the publishers for defamation and all remaining copies of that issue were ordered destroyed. Under British law, that article, unfortunately, could not be included in this book. But anyhow, a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology wrote a response to it which is published here. In response, Burroughs dissects the Scientology representative’s critique line by line and point by point in the article for Rolling Stone. The first thing to notice about the Church’s representative is that he has poor spelling and grammatical skills; his reading comprehension skills are almost as bad. Burroughs doesn’t comment on this, but it fits in with other things he has said in other places about the shabbiness of the whole Scientology operation. Burroughs does respond in an overly polite manner by pointing out the representative’s misinterpretations of the Mayfair article, along with criticisms that he stands by. He even points out some places where he said he felt some degree of satisfaction with the results of Scientology auditing and e-meter techniques. This article is brief, simple, and doesn’t qualify as something you would read if you wanted any real information on Scientology.

The standout piece in this book is the short story “Ali’s Smile” which previously appeared in Burroughs’ novel Exterminator. It involves a British colonial linguist, stationed in Malaysia, who takes a local boy home, presumably for sexual purposes although that isn’t clearly stated. The linguist inherits a kris from the boy whose name is Ali. A “kris” is a tribal and ceremonial dagger carried by males in some Islamic cultures. Meanwhile back in an unnamed village, which is probably in England, an aristocrat hires a private espionage agent to infiltrate the Church of Scientology and return to administer the techniques to the aristocrat who doesn’t want to join the cult. Meanwhile, a riot starts in the village center. A gang of hippies begin fighting with locals and an army of uniformed Scientologists show up to fight too. The previously mentioned linguist attacks the rioters with Ali’s kris and they all end up dead. My knowledge of Scientology is limited, but I do know that they believe negative thoughts and behaviors are caused by spirit invaders from outer space. Burroughs appears to be saying that such a spirit is possessed in the kris and it causes those who bear the kris to become violent. But this is a William S. Burroughs story so he also appears to be saying that such a spirit can be useful when used against your enemies. Making sense of this story requires some thinking outside the box. In fact, you may have to destroy the box altogether. But it’s a story that is both acerbic and horrifying for those who care to grapple with its obscure meaning.

While “Ali’s Smile” is a good story if you are a devoted Burroughs reader, the articles in “Naked Scientology” don’t add up to much. It would have been more compelling if the notorious Mayfair article had been included. I wish Burroughs had written an essay where he goes more in depth into his involvement with the Church of Scientology since it had such a big influence over his writings and most readers would concede that he had a unique mind and a wild imagination. As it stands, this book is probably best for archivists and collectors, not so much for general readers.

I remember the first time I became aware of the Church of Scientology. While walking down Yonge Street in Toronto, I passed by their building. Men wearing suits were standing in front handing out pamphlets to passersby, most of which threw them on the ground creating a giant pile of litter. The front of the building had large plate glass windows so you could see into the reading room. A bunch of men were sitting inside smoking cigarettes. This was back in the day when smoking was common and done freely in public. It looked about as inviting as a bus terminal in a Midwestern city struggling with its economy. I thought it was a trashy looking place. William Burroughs was a man of some intelligence and it seems surprising that he would get so caught up in such a scam of an organization. But he always did have a fascination for pseudoscience and pop occultism like the fake shamanism of Carlos Castaneda. But I’ll forgive him that considering he wrote some of the most imaginative and provocative books in the history of American literature. John Coltrane, one of the greatest jazz musicians ever, was was deeply inspired by junk mysticism like Theosophy. Arthur Conan Doyle was a true believer in Spiritualism. If this kind of stuff serves as inspiration for great art then I’m willing to set my convictions aside for a short time and tolerate a con game or two. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Exterminator! by William S. Burroughs

Exterminator!

by William S. Burroughs

      William S. Burroughs once famously said that, “the novel is just as outdated a literary form as the sonnet.” That goes a long way in explaining what you’re in for when you pick up one of his books. Exterminator Is one work that challenges our ideas about what literary fiction should be.

One issue a reader might encounter is the impossibility of situating this book in any formal literary category or style. You can’t say it’s a book of short stories because the chapters aren’t really stories. They are more like vignettes or situations. Even quaint terms like “snapshots” or “slices of life” don’t adequately address what is going on since since most often there is no narrative arc. The signals in the prose are often overridden by noise from randomly inserted cut-ups or interference from nonsensical sentences that appear without warning and completely derail any train of thought you might have latched on to. You can never tell where you will end up once a scenario has begun. When you do find some traces of a story line, they sometimes, but not always, have conflicts that never get resolves or even explained. Looking at it from another angle, you can’t really say this is a novel either since there is no plot and no character development. The characters are largely defined by what they do or say in the brief moments they appear. But there are definite patterns in the recurring themes, most of which involves drug use, gay sex, and the eternal conflict between chaos and control. But I’m sure Burroughs would say you’re wasting your time by trying to fit his writing into a category. An unspoken theme in his writing is the navigation, expression, exploration, and manipulation of fluid boundaries.

The book opens with the narrator working as an exterminator. He is more preoccupied with portraying the customers and the people he works with than the vermin he is assigned to kill. You might be temped to read some kind of deeper meaning into this introduction although there probably isn’t anything there. In one sentence though he does compare cockroaches to drug addicts. If there is one theme that crops up throughout the whole book it is that the authorities in America, be they police, military officials, or politicians, think of their country as being populated by human undesirables who deserve to be wiped out.

In another story, a vigilante gang of such undesirables, made up of a gay man, a Mexican, an African American, a drug addict, and a radical anarchist conspire to blow up a military truck shipping a deadly virus across the continent. Notice t4hat the most sympathetic people in Burroughs’ writing tend to be members of minority and marginalized populations. In another story, the military authorities, as propagators of biological warfare, unleash a respiratory disease on the country after accidentally being exposed to it in an office on a military base. Also note the symbolic link Burroughs creates between military officials and viruses. What could he be saying about the military industrial complex and the American impulse towards authoritarian control?

The most memorable passage involves Burroughs in the crowd of activists in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 when the police stormtroopers began rioting, beating the peace activists with billy clubs, and spraying them with teargas. A colonial style boat is set up in the park where a radical political party announces they are running a baboon for president of the United States. (Did Burroughs lift this idea from the Yippies who ran a pig named Pigasus for president?) The baboon gives a speech, but as Burroughs explains it, he has had computer chips implanted in his brain so that his speech and activities are controlled by a technician stationed at a control panel. Of course, as the police enter the scene and start beating people, it turns into a riot that gets blamed on the demonstrators. By bringing a 15^th century colonialist ship into the scene, Burroughs plays with both symbolism and his characteristic manipulation of linear time to make a statement about the invasive founding of America and its relation to present day political attitudes of domination. The baboon as presidential candidate is also an obvious parody of who our presidents really are and how they are not the ones in control.

One of the weakest chapters is about an author, presumably Burroughs himself, who writes a story about a man who goes to a publisher’s office. While in the waiting room he reads an article in a magazine about a man who enters another time and place. It ends with a self-congratulatory note about how he was able to shift his character through multiple times and places within one sentence. If you’ve read The Arabian Nights or The Saragossa Manuscript you’ll know there isn’t anything especially novel about this narrative shuffling. Yet Burroughs beams with pride like a sixth grader who has just been told by his teacher that he wrote the most imaginative story in the class.

These are some of the easier parts to describe. The whole chaotic mess of a narrative is framed by a vignette at the beginning that gets reprised at the end, acting as literary parentheses to contain the book’s contents which seem to ne bursting out in all directions at once. The story is about two red haired men that have sex on a stage in a theater with an audience watching them. While having sex they turn into red haired wolves. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean, but Burroughs sure did have a fondness for guys with red hair as can be seen in his other writings. Does it matter if it means anything? With William Burroughs, it is often the atmosphere that matters most and, quite often, that atmosphere is not one that is comforting.

While the content of Exterminator is continuously exciting, the actual writing isn’t. By comparison, the prose in Naked Lunch is written with carefree, wild abandon as if Burroughs is more concerned with just getting everything he has to say out in the open. The writing in Exterminator is more controlled and deliberate as if Burroughs became too self-conscious of the language he was using. Its restraint makes it lack the vitality and energy of his previous nooks.

While Exterminator is one of William S. Burroughs’ minor works, it does have enough to offer to make it worth reading. This is actually my second time through it and I got a lot more out of it with this re-read. If you feel like an outsider in American society and are also disgusted with the authoritarian and hypcritical nature of the power structure, you will probably find something to relate to as the narrative shifts between comprehensibility and incomprehensibility. In both form and content it explodes the traditional styles of literature and does so without mercy. All the while, it’s a full-throttled assault on the establishment. If you’re clean cut and have no tolerance for disorder, violence, absurdity, filth, and horrifically bad odors, you might as well avoid Burroughs at all costs. You might as well avoid me too because I’ll probably think you’re a bore. 

 

Book Review: Dead Fingers Talk by William S. Burroughs

Dead Fingers Talk

by William S. Burroughs

      Where do you start when talking about William S. Burroughs? Is there a good entry point? Is there an effective method for interpreting his writing? The first time I read Naked Lunch and Junky was forty years ago. I’ve been reading him ever since. The answer to the first question is: just dive into his books and read; don’t worry about whether it makes any sense or not. The answers to the latter two questions are: no and no, but I will say the more you read him the more you get out of the experience. Pieces of one book will explain pieces of another. If you’ve got a mind for pattern recognition, a good memory, a long attention span, a knack for decoding hidden messages, and a high tolerance for noise, a lot of it will make sense in the long run. If you prefer authors who spoon feeds you information and explain everything they think you need to know, stick to your Stephen King and Harry Potter novels. Dead Fingers Talk meets all the criteria of a typical Burroughs novel. Since it is a mash-up of three other novels, any Burroughs fan can be forgiven for skipping over it.

When William Burroughs got to the mid-1960s, he was suffering from writer’s block. With a contract obligation to fulfill for his British publishers and no ideas for a new novel, he spliced together passages from three other books, Naked Lunch and the first and third books from The Nova Trilogy, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. With a lot of fat trimming, rearrangement of sequences, and a partially conscious folding in of vignettes excerpted from the three respectful novels, he created something somewhat new, but not really.

Most of these passages come from Naked Lunch. It’s got the descriptions of the slimy, scummy, dirty life suffered by heroin addicts, the insects, the hallucinations, the gay sex, and the amoral medical professionals. One of the better passages from The Soft Machine is folded in near the beginning. The space alien vampires called the Nova Mob are trying, and probably succeeding, towards driving the planet towards Nova, a state where conflict reaches its maximum height causing an atomic explosion that destroys the whole world. Sowing conflict, chaos and disorder is the Nova Mob’s method. Meanwhile the Nova Police are trying to prevent the Nova from happening by sending coded messages to K9, an agent on Earth, but there is interference on their channels and the messages might not be getting through. When things heat up enough, Dr. Benway is called in to take control of the situation.

Here we get a smooth transition into the Dr. Benway sequence from Naked Lunch where the old doctor shows a younger man around the hospital, explaining his mind control experiments and surgical procedures that are done for no particular purpose at all other than for Dr. Benway’s amusement. Then the doctor loses control, the lunatics escape from his asylum, and take to the streets where they go apeshit attacking and terrorizing anyone they can find. It’s hard to tell if the two Dr. Benways are the same man, but the transition from one novel’s passage to the next makes for an interesting contrast. From Dr. Benway, we get the most direct and easy to understand idea in all of Burroughs’ writing: control is just as addicting as heroin and, like heroin, authoritarianism serves no definite purpose other than to sustain the addiction.

In a couple choice passages from The Ticket That Exploded, laboratory doctors breed creatures, half boy and half fish, in the back room of a pharmacy because the males and females of the human race agreed to separate, making sexual reproduction obsolete. The fish-boys have gills and swim in dirty canals and sewers because they have no place else to go, especially when their lives are in danger. It’s an interesting take on reverse evolution from a notoriously misogynistic gay author.

Otherwise there’s lots of filth, disgusting imagery, and a few passages constructed with the cut-up technique in which two texts are cut in half and spliced together for the sake of making random and experimental prose rather than prose with deliberate intention and outcome in mind. At best, the cut-ups read like French Symbolist poetry in which the writers tried to use imagery to convey emotions that were too abstract to be put into words. But Burroughs isn’t concerned with emotion; his program is to reveal hidden meanings and patterns in random noise. But most of the time this doesn’t happen and the cut-ups are usually nonsense. My tolerance for reading them varies widely depending on what kind of mood I’m in.

Overall, this thrown together novel is best for Burroughs connoisseurs and completists, especially those who have already read the books that these materials are drawn from. But in the end, it just feels like a bit of a con and a half-assed one at that, a quick and easy way to make some money so the author could keep his notorious heroin addiction going. Old Bull Lee might even take that criticism as a complement. 

 

Book Review: Skulls To the Living, Bread To the Dead by Stanley Brandes

Skulls To the Living, Bread To the Dead:

The Day Of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond

by Stanley Brandes

      In the 1990s while living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I went to a Day Of the Dead celebration. On the day after Halloween, a crowd gathered in the neighborhood of Barelas. Many wore skull masks or homemade calavera costumes. Some just wore ordinary street clothes. Some solo musicians strummed guitars while others beat on congas. There were kids and adults, people of all ages, ethnicities, and economic classes. Political activists and artists showed up and camera crews from the local TV stations were there to make 30 second clips to be shown at the end of the 6:00 news. The crowd formed into a procession and circulated through the main streets of Barelas. It was fun and inclusive. Nobody was turned away or told to leave. Occasional cars would pass by, the drivers honking their horns to arouse cheers from the procession, but there were very few people standing on the roadsides watching, something unusual for a parade. But the emphasis was on participation more than observation. After winding through the neighborhoods a few times, the sun began to set and the procession found its way to the Mexican-American community center where information booths were set up and vendors sold sugar skulls, tamales, and hot chocolate.

This way of celebrating the Day Of the Dead is controversial to some. Purists might think it is an inauthentic reinterpretation of a holiday that doesn’t respect Mexican traditions. Less conservative people might say it is an educational opportunity that raises awareness of the Chicano community in America and brings people of other backgrounds into friendly contact. The anthropologist Stanley Brandes, in his study of the Day Of the Dead Skulls To the Living Bread To the Dead, explores the way this most famous of Mexican holidays has changed in practice and meaning over time.

While doing fieldwork in the town of Tzintzuntzan, set in the Mexican state of Michoacan, Brandes began seeing changes to the way the Day Of the Dead, which should properly be called the Days Of the Dead because it is celebrated on November 2 and 3 on All Souls Day and All Saints Day, was celebrated. More people from outside the town were coming in for celebrations and a commercialized aspect was being introduced. This was in the 1960s. To his surprise, the local people welcomed these changes. So he set off to explore the origins of the holiday, how it changed over time, and what it has become today.

Brandes starts off with the common belief that the Days Of the Dead originated with the pre-Conquest indigenous people under the Aztec empire. After checking all the written records in the documented history, he did find evidence that those people had festivals commemorating death, but he did not find any direct connection to the Days Of the Dead. In fact, in most of its aspects, including sweet foods, altars, and the symbol of the skull, it appears to have been imported to Mexico by the Catholic church. In its most traditional form, people built altars in their houses, cleaned ancestral graves, gave sugar skulls to children as gifts, and attended an overnight mass in the cemetery. It was a small affair that mostly involved the family and not much else.

During the Mexican Revolution, the artist Jose Guadalupe Posada used iconography from the Days Of the Dead to make scathing commentaries on the politicians of his day. This brought the holiday into greater prominence both nationally and internationally. By the 1970s, the Mexican government realized how the Days Of the Dead could be used to promote a stronger cultural identity for Mexicans and attract tourists for the commercial benefit of the country at both local and national levels. As Halloween became more popular in Mexico and elements of the two celebrations merged, some Mexican intellectuals started questioning the meaning of the Days Of the Dead and how it related to Mexican national identity.

The controversies get more heated as Brandes’ studies take him north of the border into the United States where he examines the use of the Days Of the Dead as an educational tool. A whole passage is dedicated to how the holiday is presented in public schools, children’s books, and displays in libraries and community centers. He goes a little too in depth here for my tastes. He examines some of the Latino community’s reactions including controversies about what is presented and how. From my own point of view, which has nothing in common with anything the author says, these types of educational programs either overly-glorify aspects of cultural diversity or underwhelm the observer with watered down versions of cultural differences. From my own American perspective, educational programs teaching people about a holiday like Thanksgiving can be misleading. Books and displays make it look more festive than it really is and present history as if it is an important part of every American’s life. The truth is, most Americans can’t explain what Thanksgiving is supposed to be about let alone how it originated. Most people see it as a time to eat like pigs and care little about its intended meaning. Thanksgiving dinners with my family tend to be less than exciting and often not much different from other dinners we have together with the exception of what we eat. Likewise Mardi Gras, as celebrated in New Orleans, is a huge party where lots of people get blind drunk, but very few of them have any idea of what the celebration is actually about. But a survey of children’s literature on these holidays would give an entirely different picture. Community educational displays are also often weak and shallow without providing much in the way of experience or insight; they often come across as little more than scraps of information in a society already super-saturated in information and advertising. My whole point here is that attempts at teaching cultural and national traditions should be looked at with a critical eye since the people producing them mostly fail to give an accurate picture, usually little more than a small taste, of what they present. This applies to the educational representations of the Days Of the Dead just as much as to Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras.

There is little wonder that Chicano community leaders and their supporters raise questions about the authenticity of how the Days Of the Dead are promoted and celebrated in the United States. Brandes examines the whole spectrum from an activist group, at one extreme, that tries to create a Days Of the Dead celebration that is entirely composed of pre-colonial indigenous cultural motifs and from there to a working class neighborhood fiesta with music, dancers, theatrical performers, and vendors that seeks to build bridges between communities while fostering a positive image of Chicanos to those of other ethnicities. Beyond that is a Days Of the Dead art fair in the Mission District of San Francisco that is organized by a Korean woman and has displays that only marginally touch on the themes of the holiday. This is further complicated by the fact that the Mission District used to be a Mexican and Central American enclave that has since been gentrified and now is a predominantly Korean and Asian neighborhood. Brandes analyzes how each festival along this entire range generates its own controversies and disputes about representation and the Mexican-American identity in the USA. This is important as the Chicano community is growing and they need to establish some sense of identity in a sometimes hostile cultural environment where your average citizen knows nothing about Mexican culture aside from tacos, undocumented immigrants, and drug cartels along with whatever caricatures and cliches are found in popular culture.

Brandes finishes the book with a discussion on how the Days Of the Dead prove that Mexicans have a uniquely jocular attitude towards death. He contrasts Mexicans with other Western nationalities who he claims are more serious and less accepting of death. I have to say I disagree with him strongly on this. While I’m not qualified to speak on behalf of Mexican people, I can say that Americans are not any less casual about imagery representing skulls, grim reapers, ghosts, or other things we consider to be macabre. Horror movies are wildly popular as are haunted houses that are staples of carnivals and amusement parks, not to mention the ones that crop up at Halloween time. Jack o’lanters are ubiquitous in the Fall. Skulls are common on t-shirts, album covers, and tattoos. People tell jokes about death and it is a common subject for songs especially in the punk, goth, and metal genres. There was a musical trend in the 1950s called “death rock” in which teenage crooners sang about losing lovers in car wrecks. Death and murder as plot devices are ever-present in movies and TV shows. True crime is a popular genre in literature. And doesn’t he even know about the Grateful Dead? That cult band has done more to spread Days Of the Dead imagery around El Norteno since the 1960s than anybody else with their t-shirts and album covers. The list can go on forever. We see so many skulls and crossbones in America that it hardly even registers with us. Nobody is sad, disgusted, offended, or disturbed when somebody wears a Misfits t-shirt in public. We have a casual attitude towards death too; it just manifests in a different cultural style. Brandes isn’t the only anthropologist I know of who has made this erroneous claim about Mexico either. Leave it to the academics to be completely unaware of their own culture, the one they live in. I guess fish don’t comprehend the water they swim until they reach dry land.

While the conclusions aren’t infallible, Skulls To the Living Bread To the Dead provides a useful history and cultural analysis of Mexico’s most famous holiday. It forces us to question what cultural authenticity really is and also draws attention to socio-political issues embedded in representations of traditional practices. Stanley Brandes doesn’t come to any strong conclusions, but he thoroughly provides enough information to give the reader direction in how to think about Mexico and the Days Of the Dead.