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.
