William S. Burroughs once famously said that, “the novel is just as outdated a literary form as the sonnet.”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 15th 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.
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