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.
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