The performance of violent sexuality as spectacle is a persistent theme running throughout Cities Of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs. It isn’t the only theme, but it is one among many. When you’re being hit in the face with a firehose of surrealistic imagery, some of which is quite disgusting, it’s a good idea to grasp a hold of whatever you can to avoid being completely overwhelmed, subjugated, and absorbed into the wildly colorful filth washing over you.
This novel begins with a chapter about a man in a South American jungle who contracts a virus and has sex with his local guide on the shore of a river. A link between sexuality and viruses is established early on even though these characters never re-emerge in the story afterwards. Next a Chinese military unit enters a mountain village in Tibet where a death-virus is spreading outwards from a temple overlooking it from the peak. Then we are in a hospital where a heroin addicted doctor is called in to manage a giant influx of patients with a virus that causes them to have seizures and orgasms simultaneously. In a board meeting at the hospital, a scientist shares a crackpot theory that a spaceship crashed in the Gobi desert and unleashed a virus that ran rampant in seven lost cities, spreading radiation over them causing the night time sky to turn red. Viruses spread from these cities and these viruses are closely linked with both language and opiate based addictive drugs. This is coherent writing considering it came from the mind of William S. Burroughs.
Then we’ve got the pirates. The young Noah Blake, an expert in building and repairing firearms, gets hired to work on a ship with a bunch of his friends. While sailing to Veracruz, they encounter a pirate ship, led by Captain Strobe, and form an alliance that goes on to Port Roger on the eastern coast of Panama. These lost boys form a utopian society that plots to free Latin America from Spanish colonial rule. Part of their plan is to hook the Spaniards on opiates to weaken them. Another is to have Noah Blake invent superior weaponry; while having sex with another man his ejaculations inspire him to invent cannons and guns with exploding shells. The power of phallo-centric violence is ever-present in this novel and most of Burroughs’ other novels too. His writing really takes on life when the reader is able to make the proper connections between semiotic elements like sex, guns, and magic.
The commune is also a place where gay sex is freely explored among members of all races and ethnic groups. Noah Blake rises to prominence as he lays out a plan for a constitution as law for a free, equitable, and just society based on leftist libertarian principles. These boys eventually launch an attack on Panama City. Some biographers of Burroughs have pointed out that this commune was inspired by the Lost Boys in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
The sex and violence spectacle is present in this commune when a ritual theatrical performance is staged. These gay men are paired up with women, or sometimes groups of women, and they dress up in costumes of their choice representing animals or Pagan gods. Then they have sex for the purpose of procreation while all the others watch. Since these gay men have no interest in women, the act of private lovemaking has to be put on public display as a ritual to ensure that their society is able to reproduce. This is the worst part of the novel. It is hastily written, without much description, and pretentious, kind of like an eccentric camp porno movie filmed in a tiki bar by tacky people with really bad taste. And I don’t mean to suggest that there are any pornographers with good taste either. It’s just that there is bad taste and then there is really bad taste. But a John Waters disciple will be quick to point out that bad taste is entertaining and sometimes even makes a statement.
Otherwise there are the ubiquitous hangings resulting in orgasm. Captain Strobe tells a story about how he got sentenced to hang for some criminal offense. After the noose pulled taught around his neck and he ejaculated, someone climbed onto the gallows and cut him down, helping him to escape before he died. Since Strobe cheated death in this way, he is considered to have magical powers. These hangings happen frequently in most of Burroughs’ writings going all the way back to Naked Lunch. They are always on display to an audience and the man’s pants are always pulled down so they can see the ejaculation. Burroughs fetishizes this image and treats it as through the spectacle of it makes magic possible.
The story line of the 17th century pirates alternates every two chapters with the 20th century story line of Clem Snide. This character reoccurs after having first appeared in The Soft Machine. Clem Snide refers to himself as a “private asshole”; no doubt this is a play on the noir term “private dick” meaning “detective”. And that is what Clem Snide is. He gets hired to track down a missing boy named Jerry Green, a seemingly ordinary kid who disappeared in Greece. Snide indulges in a sex magic ritual with his assistant Jim for guidance in the case. He ends up traveling to Athens and working with a detective named Dmitri who is also an expert on the occult. Sex and witchcraft are also closely linked in Burroughs’ novels. But anyhow, Snide learns that Jerry Green secretly had a gay lover and the two of them had been kidnapped, taken to Mexico City, and involved in the science of transplanting one human head onto the body of another. Experimentation with this technique began in Panama in the 17th century at the time of the pirate escapades written out in the alternate story line of this novel.
The two threads merge when Snide meets the Iguana Twins, a Mexican brother and sister pair, also portrayed in The Burroughs File as a hermaphroditic spirit that changes sex during intercourse, that liaised with Noah Blake in earlier times. Snide goes to Lima in search of a dead body being shipped by sea and some Mayan manuscripts the Iguana Twins want him to locate and buy. Things take a bizarre turn in one of those unpredictable about-faces you find in Burroughs’ later works when something so unexpected happens so that you become completely disoriented and remain that way until you reach the end. Clem Snide gets blackmailed into writing a movie script for a Nazi commune of genetically engineered white boys run by a CIA agent. Here Burroughs exposes the homo-erotic nature of white supremacy. Some of the men on this commune are pirates from the other narrative thread and they appear, disappear, and reappear throughout several chapters near the end of the book.
The narrative then moves erratically and abrasively, skipping from one unrelated scene to another. Some nude men parachute into a desert crater, probably the site of the previously mentioned ancient spaceship crash. The crater figures into the final passages of The Place of Dead Roads and also appeared first in The Soft Machine. In Burroughs’ mythology, the space ship unleashed a virus that infected the throats of primates living in the crater and this caused them to develop language. This viral infection, and how it caused language to develop, is graphically described in The Soft Machine.
These boys wander off into one of the seven cities where the sky turns red at night. They end up in a nightclub where hangings of men are done, complete with ejaculations, for the entertainment of the patrons. In this same city, a riot happens when the lower classes rebel against the controlling authorities. The bar tender recounts the history of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, forcing you to question whether or not the city is an alternative version of New York. Is it the same city in a different time or a different dimension? A parallel universe or a reoccurrence in a different form? A theme of the transmigration of souls runs throughout the entire novel. But the author offers no clear explanations while holding the whole novel together like a lump of gelatin which is why he is a great writer.
Clem Snide shows up in another one of the seven red night cities, one that is divided by a river. On pne side is a casbah inhabited by the lower classes where all manner of vice and illicit activities take place. On the other is the upper class neighborhoods who have declared war on the casbah with the intention of exterminating the lower classes. The casbah dwellers, being those most sympathetic to Burroughs, are described as a bunch of men whose faces bear traces of all ethnic groups and races; the faces’ features begin to alter and swirl, making all the ethnicities blend together to the point where it is impossible to tell them apart. This is the culmination of the 17th century pirates’ vision of utopia which complicates the narrative since the pirates reemerge in the story as members of the white supremacist commune although they do show up to fight in the final war along with Clem Snide on the side of the casbah classes. That war is described like an epic Hollywood movie, overblown as if Cecil B. DeMille had filmed a version of a Hieronymous Bosch painting. Just as importantly, when Clem Snide gets taken to the upper class neighborhood, he finds the evil and controlling Contessa de Gulpa who is running the human head transplant operation that erry Green fell into.
One extraneous passage explains a lot of what might be going on in this book. Burroughs describes a warehouse with theaters, stages, and audiences. Dressing rooms have people changing character by changing costumes. Many of these performances are of sex and the voyeurism of the hanging and orgasm ritual in which souls escaping from bodies can be harnessed and directed for magical purposes. Or else the escaping soul can also be permitted to transmigrate into other bodies. This comparison of souls changing bodies the way actors change costumes to play different roles might be part of what Burroughs is attempting to say about the passage of time and the nature of human existence. It could also be emblematic of a man with an unstable identity, the kind of man who might imagine himself as a secret agent, a magician, a doctor an outlaw, an imaginary animal, or any of the other literary personas created by Burroughs. It could also be emblematic, self-consciously or not, of the writing process as an author is someone who enters the minds of literary personas, seeing the world through their eyes, and doing what they do in the imagination so that they can be written as characters into a story. This is why I say you don’t need to believe any of Burroughs’ far out theories to harmonize with what he has to say. Besides, if you take critique, satire, or symbolism at literal face value then it doesn’t function as critique, satire, or symbolism. Multiple meanings of signs are necessary to make these things work.
Cities Of the Red Night is probably the most linear novel Burroughs has written since Junky. That’s not to say it is linear in a conventional sense in any way. The two threads that course through the first half of the book follow time lines, but they don’t tell a story in the way that traditional story telling is done. Actually the plot lines are weak and even generic. Half way through everything goes haywire and Burroughs hits you with a grenade full of sentences reminiscent of the proto-Surrealist writer Lautreamont. The plot is still there but the wheels have flown off the narrative train and the reader proceeds by attempting, sometimes in vain, to connect all the shards and shrapnel into a picture forming a coherent whole. I think this is too much of a task for most readers, but I also say that Burroughs is like Thomas Pynchon of the field of modern art; you need to commit over a long period of time to get the most out of it. By looking for interconnections and overlapping themes, you will reach a point where some things snap into place and the incomprehensible becomes somewhat comprehensible. But then again, confusion is part of what Burroughs is expressing. Notice the formula of viruses-guns-sex-magic-time. It is like a semiotic chain whose links recombine in varying pairings and orders like DNA to build wordscapes reflecting the inner world of the author’s mind.
So what can be made of the public spectacle of hanging with orgasm in front of an audience? Burroughs draws links early on between guns and ejaculation as well as between magic and ejaculation. He also draws a connection between public hangings and the release of the soul for transmigration and habitation of another body. In all these cases, the idea of a powerful energy being released towards a specific goal is present. In an early chapter, the pirates watch a ritual performance of sex for the purpose of procreation. In later chapters, audiences in town squares, night clubs, films, and other social gatherings watch hangings that end with ejaculation in a ritualized form of death and voyeurism. By linking the actions of sex, death, and transmigration we get a continual cycle of eternal return, hence the references to ancient Egyptian mythology. Since this is the writing of Burroughs, the parts of that eternal cycle are never presented in any specific order. Burroughs might say that time for heroin addicts follows no definite pattern the way it would for everybody else. Junkies live on junk time as he says in Naked Lunch and the sun rises and sets the way a junky gets high and comes down, repeating over and over the same ritual shooting up since he is an addict.
The audience might be there to receive the spiritual energy being released during the death/orgasm ritual of a public hanging. In any case, I recently read something by the anthropologist Ivor Miller who claims that magic only works if it has an audience. He defines “magic” as ceremonial actions that are designed to persuade people to change their behavior in specified ways. In other words, witnessing somebody casting a love spell may influence them to feel love whereas the same ceremony performed in solitude might be nothing more than pissing into the wind. Therefore a hanging without an audience might result in the loss or disappearance of a soul since its magic power is dissipated without being directed towards a specific goal. This goes back to viruses and language since both replicate by moving from host to host. Both survive by circulating throughout communities. Both are discharged from one body to another like semen discharging during an ejaculation or bullets fired from a gun. Without any intended target, semen, bullets, and language serve no function. Burrughs would also say that since a virus resulted in language that makes language a foreign entity in the body. Just like a bullet. Maybe this is nothing but poetry. Maybe not. But at least it’s interesting and gets you thinking hard.
These days, people on the internet have an annoying habit of calling any work of art that is weird or difficult to understand a “fever dream”. Personally I find this term to be so cliché now that I wish people would just stop using it. But then again, a character named Audrey at the end of Cities Of the Red Night wakes up in a hospital bed in Greece. He is probably an altar ego of Clem Snide and, possibly, one persona among many representing the same person throughout the story. The entire narrative was made up of dreams Audrey had while sick in bed with a fever caused by a virus. This book literally is a fever dream. So I have to shut up about that pet peeve for now. Aside from that, this is one of William S. Burroughs’ more accessible books if you are looking for a good start to get into his wilder writings. It is also a rewarding read for veteran Burroughs readers. If you enjoy reading novels that drive you crazy then go for it. You might come out psychologically intact if you are lucky.
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