William S. Burroughs’ Cities Of the Red Night trilogy was his most thematic literary project. The first novel in the series used pirates as a central theme while the second, The Place of Dead Roads, drew on cowboys, outlaws, and the Western genre. Both books portrayed the world as a rotten and unjust place. The protagonists set out to establish utopia as a solution to the problems of human existence. They also allude to the need for humans to eventually escape from planet Earth since the whole place is doomed to self-destruction. Since humans aren’t physically or psychologically evolved for life in space, and possibly never will be, the only means of escape from the rottenness of humanity is in death. But for Burroughs, who actually had a strong desire to live, the afterlife stands as the only option available. That is where The Western Lands begins. Only this time, the theme isn’t pirates or outlaws; it is Egyptian mythology.
The novel begins with the self-referential William Lee Hart, a solitary writer living in a boxcar converted into a home on the bank of a river. This should tell you immediately that the whole book is autobiographical in the way that only William S. Burroughs can be autobiographical. I actually would argue that all his novels are autobiographical, but that is a matter for another essay.
The concepts of ancient Egyptian religions are introduced in the beginning too. According to The Book Of the Dead via Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, every living body has seven souls that perform various functions to whoever they inhabit. One is the director or managers of the other souls, one is a body double, another is a shadow self that hinders what the other souls are trying to accomplish. These souls are separate beings that don’t always work together for a common purpose and in fact, sometimes they are at war with one another.
The discerning reader can recognize that the seven souls are represented by different characters in this novel although Burroughs doesn’t make it clear which characters match with which souls. True to the nature of his writing, the links are slippery, ephemeral, and difficult to grasp and hold on to. It doesn’t matter so much though because the characters in his novels are rarely developed beyond what they do upon their initial appearance in the narratives. They tend to be more like spirits or elements, floating through the world in a haze of hallucinations which says a lot about how Burroughs experienced the world. But what the seven souls and their representation all come down to is the relationship between the author and his literary personas. The people written into the prose are all personifications or projections of different sides of the author. Jack Kerouac wrote about the different sides of his personality through the brothers in The Town and the City, Ken Kesey wrote about two sides of his personality with the two brothers in Sometimes a Great Notion, and Dostoyesky examined three sides of his psyche through the three main characters in The Brothers Karamazov. Here Burroughs is driving the point home that authors, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, mostly only write about themselves.
This novel also begins with some references back to early works of this author. The passage where arguments break out in a film engineering studio refers back to the subversievely chaotic attempt at broadcasting the American national anthem fron a television studio in Naked Lunch. The gun fight that opens and closes The Place of Dead Roads is rewritten here too. From there, the book goes on to examine themes previously introduced and repeated throughout the entire catalog of Burroughs’ writings. A rebel secret agent establishes an espionage agency that acts independently of any nation. Their purpose is to sow chaos throughout the world with riots, bombings, and assassinations. An escaped Nazi officer runs black market operations, surviving by impersonating Arabs, Jews, and Mexicans. Exotic weaponry is described excessively in a way that could possibly be considered pornographic in its details. Also there are drugs, sex, inhuman creatures produced asexually, sewers, violence, men who ejaculate while being hung, hideous centipedes, and everything else you would associate with Burroughs by the end of his career.
One memorable passage involves a team of seven men tangentially related to the medical and veterinarian professions even though none of them are actually doctors. But they all have skills that could be useful for a medical experiment. One of them is an expert in building ships in bottles. They are given the task of disassembling wild animals, rearranging the parts, and then randomly putting them together with the intention of creating new forms of nature. This is a kind of self-satire in which Burroughs repurposes his cut up method of writing by applying it to the unfortunate creatures in the laboratory. This is emblematic of the author’s whole purpose: to take the mind into inconceivable territories, dismantling reality, and recreating it in new ways that would never be possible with with conscious intent.
Another memorable passage involves patients in a hospital burn ward who start a riot because the uncaring doctors refuse to give them painkillers as part of their treatments. This could be representative of Burroughs’ experience of morphine or heroin withdrawal in a society in which those drugs are illegal and sometimes unobtainable when the pain of withdrawal is at its most intense.
Yet another passage keys you in to Burroughs’ way of thinking by writing about a literary critic as practicing black magic with the intent to kill the author. The critic posts reviews of books without reading them, but then a mysterious dog shows up and follows him around. Soon after, he is dead. The same dog appears for a spy and a member of high society. The dog is revealed to be a spirit from ancient Egyptian mythology who arrives to lead an individual to the doorway of death. The critic reveals a way of approaching Burroughs’ work by showing how he is both a literary critic and a black magician at the same time. It’s like seeing one man though two different angles so that the angles interact and cut into each other, covering and revealing parts of the man while making it possible to see the whole figure for what he is. It’s like the paintings of Cezanne with his experiments in shifting visual planes and angles.
Then there is the Egyptian mythology itself. Some passages are scenes of a pharaoh’s life and his interaction with Egyptian priests. Wars between Pagans and monotheists break out because for the Pagans, life after death is a privilege that has to be earned whereas for the monotheistic religions that later turned into Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, any person, no matter how insignificant, is capable of attaining life in Heaven just as long as they have faith in God. These monotheistic religions are portrayed as a ruse to make human society more conformist and easier to manage by the priests and kings whose ultimate goal is the enslavement of the whole human race. But the Pagan priests enslaved their societies too, just in different ways. Burroughs doesn’t appear to take any definite stance on which version of the afterlife is best although he does express more contempt for the monotheistic religions. His comments on Islam are quite harsh.
Then there are the mummies. Burroughs explains how the process of eviscerating, wrapping, and pickling dead bodies is a method of making batteries. Yes, batteries. The soul that survives in the afterlife needs a life force to sustain itself. Previous to death, that life source is the living body. Therefore the body is mummified to remain a supplier of life force to the soul the way a rechargeable battery keeps a light bulb shining. But since the mummified body is dead it needs to draw life force from someplace else and that source is the souls of the living. Therefore mummies are a type of vampire that drains life out of the living. If you ever want to read an anti-mummy rant, look no further. No one ever argued that Burroughs isn’t unique. After thinking through this, you might consider it to be another commentary on drug addiction. A junky under the influence of opiates is little more than a breathing mummy. A junky in withdrawal is like a person having the life force sucked out of them. The addiction is like a spirit that survives by sucking all the life out of the junky.
At some point, the narrative moves on from ancient Egypt to modern Cairo and then off to the city of Waghda. Readers of the previous two books in the trilogy will recognize Waghda as the last city out of seven you must pass through before embarking on a journey to the Western Lands, the land of the dead, the land of the afterlife, so called in Egyptian mythology because the sun sets in the West. Waghda is located near the crater where an alien spaceship once crashed, unleashing the virus that infected the larynxes of primates and evolved to become human language. The crater is now inhabited by a tribe of people who can’t escape and are close to starvation but sustain themselves by keeping their souls alive by smoking an herb and playing music. Mixed up in all this is a long explication of the science of virology that reads like a university professor’s lecture. It examines the links and similarities between viruses and humans. This is typical of Burroughs. He starts with a new train of thought and it ends in some place you never could have predicted.
Waghda is a city inhabited by a large population of lower class people who indulge in all manners of vice, especially those involving sex and drugs. A small population of upper class puritans lives there and hopes to one day exterminate all the lower class people who they regard as vermin. Yet again, this is another place with exotic weapons and people with magic powers. One man uses magic to find a guide to take him to the edge of the Western Lands. But somewhere in Waghda there are imprisoned animals and when a lion escapes it gets out to the edge of the city where it sneaks up behind a man. The man’s friend tries to shoot the lion but shoots his friend instead. Then he goes home and cries to his mother because he feels so guilty. It’s hard not to see a parallel between this passage and Burroughs’ shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer. It’s like the author is taking one last literary opportunity to express the misery he felt after killing his wife while trying to diminish the responsibility he had in the accident. Meanwhile, as the aforementioned individual is leaving the outskirts of Waghda, he contemplates how the world is a violent, dangerous place where somebody or something is always trying to kill you.
The narrative circles back to William Lee Hart in his boxcar home, writing and poring over books with pictures of wild animals. He identifies with and admires the most unusual looking animals in the book, a definite statement on how alien Burroughs felt as a member of the human race. As an old man, he begins to detach from the previous parts of his life, letting go of memories of the dream machine and pretending to be an intergalactic secret agent as if they are nothing more than scraps of ideas he no longer needs. Death is a process of leaving behind former aspects of himself. The tone is one of resignation and finding peace with himself in solitude, away from the human rabble, writing articles he expects no one will ever read and not caring. Then a mysterious cat appears and then disappears. Hart vanishes when he tries to find the missing cat. The implication is that the cat is a spirit who has come to lead him to the threshold of death.
So what The Western Lands presents us with is an elderly author looking back on his life and commenting on his literary works. It’s an exercise in meta-narrative and self-reflection/explication that is easier to see by readers familiar with his work and life, but not necessarily easy to interpret. An interpretation might be more mundane than you would think considering how opaque a lot of Burroughs’ writing is. Simply put, he sees human society as a shithole and the older he gets, the less he wants to engage with it. But he takes great delight in creating his own world, one in which linear time and causality are irrelevant and anything, including magic, is possible. To be trite about it, literature and art are the ultimate means of liberation from the world and there isn’t any alternative. “All is permitted, anything is possible,” are the words he puts in the mouth of Hassan I Sabbah, the Old Man Of the Mountains and leader of the Ismailite sect known as the Assassins or the Hashishim as they are sometimes called. Burroughs explicitly says in this novel that he is an incarnation of Hassan I Sabbah and he controls the characters in his writing the way the Old Man Of the Mountain controlled his followers. He is the Guiding Soul overseeing the other six literary souls, the personas created by the author. As for the immortality of the author in the Western Lands or the afterlife, isn’t this just another way of saying that the author’s soul lives on after their death through the books they write? Life in the Western Lands is a privilege to be gained after a lifetime of preparation in a human body. The Book Of the Dead was written to prepare the seeker for the journey to the afterlife and The Western Lands is a document that shows how the author did what he could to earn the privilege of dwelling there.
The novel’s biggest shortcoming is the way Burroughs introduces the concept of the seven souls, starts to make it clear that different characters represent different souls, and then dissolves the theme into the chaos that happens throughout the rest of the book. Either the theme just gets dropped altogether, or I just didn’t work hard enough to draw connections between the souls and the characters. In any case, that is a difficult task considering that so much of this book is like being blasted in the face with a firehose of vomit, diarrhea, animal guts, sewage, toxic sludge, and anal mucous. And William Burroughs is the only author I know of to date who has dedicated any serious literary space to the subject of anal mucous, though I do think J.G. Ballard briefly mentions the subject in The Atrocity Exhibition. Then again, Burroughs constantly expressed contempt for linearity in narratives so this problem of narrative dilution may be an intentional writing technique.
William S. Burroughs died ten years after The Western Lands was published. It not only closes out the themes introduced in the Cities Of the Red Night trilogy, but it also acts as a final statement about the man’s life and works. It’s his last major effort to explain what all of it was about, but Burroughs being Burroughs, the explanation may be just as confusing as what he wants to explain. Like his other books, all the disturbing ideas and imagery are undercut by a mind that sees beauty in nature, creativity, the unfamiliar, and the incomprehensible, a beauty that can only be achieved through art and its interaction with the real world. There is always a sad optimism in his writing that tells us a better world is possible if only we listen to right people, find the right formula, and mind our own goddamn business. But we do none of that and so condemn ourselves to the scumpits of human society instead. The tone at the end of this book is one of clinical detachment and resignation with a bit of magic thrown in. One thing is certain: there’s never been an author like William S. Burroughs and there never will be again. If he was successful at anything it was in creating new visions of the world and its possibilities that you will never be able to access anywhere else.
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