Book Review & Analysis: I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Harlan Ellison

      I’m trapped and there’s no way out. That’s the common theme in Harlan Ellison’s collection of short stories, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream. It is possible that even death won’t end your problems.

The titular story is one that resonates well today. We stand in the shadow of a looming AI tech revolution. Silicon Valley wants to create sentient supercomputers that can think, act, and calculate in mass scales too big for our tiny human brains to comprehend. The thought that computers might dominate and even destroy us is improbable as of now, but it is plausible enough to cause dread and fear in the minds of anybody who thinks about it for a few minutes. In Ellison’s story, an omniscient and omnipotent computer called AM has been created. It learns to hate the human race and kills everybody save for a small group of people. AM keeps them alive simply to torture them. They are imprisoned inside the computer and spend their lives searching for food. None of them like each other. They are also prevented from dying because AM doesn’t want to allow them to escape their pain through death. Since the narrator can’t commit suicide, he does the only thing he can think of to hurt AM. Read it for yourself to find out what happens.

This story is short and direct. It’s like the horror of learning that your head and body will continue living after being guillotined, even though the two are no longer attached. It’s emblematic of a man who feels imprisoned by his own mind and sees no way of solving his problems. The theme of an omnipotent computer isn’t the point of the story; this is really just an allegory about a man who feels overwhelmed by his own self-loathing and mental instability. A deep analytical dive isn’t necessary to understand this. If it has any definite message though, it is that mortality is a necessary part of life.

In one way or another, all the other stories in this collection are about entrapment anddeath. “Big Sam Was My Friend” is about a circus performer who goes in search of his true love. The search makes him miserable and when he finds her, she doesn’t want him. “Eyes of Dust” is about a boy living in a world where anybody who isn’t beautiful gets put to death. The boy is born blind and his parents hide him away in a secret cellar room where he has visions of beautiful things that other people on the planet can’t see. “World Of the Myth” tells the story of a middle aged man who lives a mundane life as an office worker. He fantasizes about an afterlife where he is a heroic dragon fighter, but when he dies he is denied access to this paradise because he hadn’t earned it. He spent his life dreaming instead of pursuing his dreams and so he gets nothing in the end. “Lonelyache” involves a divorced man who seeks liberation from the prison of marriage in extreme promiscuity only to find that sleeping with tons of woman is nothing more than another kind of prison. In “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, a prostitute dies in a casino and her spirit enters into a slot machine. One man begins playing the possessed machine and finds it to be the loosest slot in Las Vegas. He hits the jackpot every time he pulls the lever. Since he is a lonesome drifter with no money, this is like a dream come true. But winning against the odds is just another trap with no way out except death.

Two of these stories, “Eyes of Dust” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, have a bit more depth than the other three which are more surface level and self-explanatory. “Eyes of Dust” is set in a city named Light located on the planet Topaz. Initially the city and its people are described as being purely beautiful. The aforementioned blind boy, hidden away in a cellar, is physically unattractive, therefore his parents keep him secret to prevent him from being killed. He is more soulful and able to access beauty through education and imagination. But when the house he is hidden in burns down, the people of Light discover him and burn him at the stake for not being good looking. This appears to be a direct reference to the way the medieval Catholic church burned heretics and witches during the Inquisition.

At the end of the story, Light is described as an ugly place even though the city itself has not changed, When the existence of the blind boy is revealed, the ugliness of the people of Light is revealed since the execution shows how they are possessed of no inner depth. The blind boy has inner vision which allows him to find inner beauty, but the others lose that possibility by sacrificing him for the sake of maintaining the shallowness of the status quo and the over-valuation of surface appearances. Their exterior beauty is only achieved by suppressing their inner ugliness. At the end of the story when Light is described as ugly, the inner darkness of its inhabitants, as revealed through burning the boy at the stake, causes the subjective perception of ugliness to override the superficial appearance of perfection. We see how the people of Light are trapped by their own lack of depth just the blind boy is trapped because of his blindness even though he can actually see a lot more than they can. Beauty is only skin deep. It’s a cliché, but it is a cliché that is well articulated in this allegory.

“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” tells the story of Kostner, a loser who rolls into Las Vegas to spend his last bit of money gambling, and Maggie Moneyeyes, a Native American prostitute who crosses his path in a sense. After growing up in poverty, Maggie enters the world of prostitution as a means of class mobility. When she finishes serving a repulsive client in a Las Vegas hotel, she goes down to the casino to spend her money on the slots. But she dies and her spirit enters the machine she is playing.

This can be interpreted as a bit racist since the association of Native people with mystical powers if a way of fetishizing and exoticizing them. Endowing Maggie with magic powers by turning her into a spirit that possesses a slot machine could be a way of denying her humanity. White people have a tendency to write about non-white people as though they are mysterious creatures found in some distant galaxy in a show like Star Trek. But then again, many Native Americans openly embrace their spiritual traditions and culture. The question to ask is if this story would still have the same impact if Maggie Moneyeyes was written as a white character. I’ll allow you to answer that for yourself.

Anyhow, Kostner enters the casino and plays the slot machine that is possessed by Maggie Moneyeyes’ spirit. And he wins. In fact, he wins big. Then he wins big again and again. Every time he plays he hits the jackpot. Kostner becomes a media sensation and attracts large crowds who watch him win repeatedly. The casino management is suspicious that he is cheating, but they believe the attention to be good publicity for drawing in more gamblers and let him stay. But when Kostner stops playing, he dies.

Maggie and Kostner are thematically linked by their poverty. Both of them end up in the casino because they see having money as a way out of their problems. For them, money is a magic key that opens the doors of their figurative prison cells. I recall Karl Marx saying in Capital that money is a kind of magic that makes people believe they can get whatever they want. But while money may relieve the two main characters from their poverty, it just moves them into another prison cell rather than freeing them. Kostner loses everything when he stops playing and ends up dead; Maggie can only live by being entrapped inside a slot machine. Kostner is the body and Maggie is the soul and through the medium of the slot machine the two are joined.

Maggie is sexualized in her role as a prostitute and Kostner, pulling the lever and depositing coins into the machine, could easily be interpreted as sexualized as well. The big payoff at the end of every attempt could be interpreted as the sexual climax. Playing the slot machine almost has an element of Pagan fertility folk magic in the way that ceremonially seeding an agricultural field field brings forth a harvest. The stronger the magic, the bigger the harvest. Both Kostner and Maggie are sexual outsiders. Remember that Kistner’s marriage failed. It is through their erotic connection, sublimated through the act of playing the slot machine, that they fulfill their needs for both money and companionship. This fulfillment is possible for Kostner in his interaction with Maggie who is both sexualized and supernatural, a meeting place where magic is believed to be possible. But without the slot machine they no longer connect. Therefore their luck and their lives end. The only way out of their trap is death.

Ellison writes an introduction to each story in this short collection. He explains that these were all written as therapy during a time of crisis in his life when he struggled with failed relationships, heavy drug and alcohol use, and other unspecified mental health issues. The connection between his frustrations and the themes in these stories is easy to see. I do, however, find it anooying when an author explains the meaning of their own work as a part of the work. He tells you about the sources of these stories without giving the reader a chance to encounter them on their own terms. This is a small annoyance though. In any case, I think Ellison, with his prickly personality, enjoyed annoying people.

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream doesn’t offer any profound thoughts. These stories aren’t philosophical screeds. More than anything they are brief outbursts of anger from a man who feels there is no way out of the problems he has. In that sense it succeeds. If you’ve been there before, you can relate. Existence is a prison, but the worst prison of all is the one inside your own mind. Maybe Harlan Ellison could have followed George Clinton’s advice: free your mind and your ass will follow. Sometimes music and dancing are all you need.

 

Book Review & Analysis: IQ 83 by Arthur Herzog

IQ 83

by Arthur Herzog

      By the end of the 20^th century, psychologists had discovered something called the Flynn Effect. This meant that intelligence levels had been rising steadily and rapidly over the past century. If we fast forward to the 2020s, psychologists have discovered an alarming trend. Over the past two decades, the Flynn Effect has been reversed and intelligence levels are now dropping at an alarming rate. There is no consensus to why this is happening; the most obvious causal indicator appears to be the introduction of the internet, but as of yet, this connection is inconclusive. One thing is for sure: with the immediate problems of climate change, economic instability, a collapsing educational system, and the threat of political totalitarianism working in conjunction with AI systems, this is not a good time for all the intellectual and scientific progress we have achieved over the centuries to retreat.

If we backtrack a bit, there were artists who saw this trend coming before anyone else. The dystopian 2006 movie Idiocracy porrayed a world where popular culture has made people so stupid that their existence is threatened because they forget how to grow food. It’s a silly comedy that mocks the kinds of people who would find it funny. Maybe it’s worth watching once. 1968’s Planet Of the Apes was a more serious science-fiction dystopia that showed human evolution going in reverse, with an upsurge in religion and despotism, after the banning and forbidding of science. Then there is Arthur Herzog’s overlooked novel IQ 83. Written in the 1970s, it is a hard science-fiction story showing what happens when an experimental virus escapes from a laboratory, spreads throughout the whole population, and makes everybody’s intelligence level decline rapidly.

James Heaaley is the central character. The story is divided between his family life in their New York City apartment and his employment as the head of a research team in a hospital in Central Manhattan. The research team is trying to save a girl named Cathy who is a permanent patient in the children’s ward. She should be of normal intelligence, yet she contracted a disease that caused her IQ to drop. As the biologists’ work brings them closer to a cure, experimental gene editing brings Cathy’s intelligence level back up to normal. But just when Healey makes plans for Cathy’s discharge so that she can attend public schools, everything goes to hell.

Wallon is a Belgian lab technician working on Healey’s project. Since creating a vaccine for the disease involves the use of a virus as a vector, precautions are imperative. Yet Wallon thinks the safety regulations are too stringent so he cuts corners during his work, doesn’t follow safety procedures, and accidentally takes the airborne virus out of the lab and begins spreading it throughout New York by coughing and sneezing.

After Wallon visits the Healey family for dinner, James Healey begins noticing some unwanted changes in everybody, including himself. He has problems with his memory and nonsensical thoughts from his childhood intrude into his thoughts, disrupting his concentration and making it difficult to work as a scientist. His wife Ruth becomes hypersexual and his two academically gifted children start struggling at school.

As Healey grows more aware that something isn’t right, he meets with Orenstein, the hospital psychiatrist. They discuss the possibilities and potential consequences of a sudden drop in intelligence across the whole world. Of course, the prognosis is not good. They agree to test their hypothesis by administering IQ tests to all the members of the research team. To their dismay, they find that everybody’s IQ had dropped and that it will continue to drop with the progression of time.

Healey contacts the hospital director, a doctor with an IQ of 200 and the curious name of Herman Hermann. The director, by this point, has already begun to succumb to the virus. Rather than expressing grave concern over the crisis, his defenses drop and he sees this as an opportunity to conquer the world, becoming a totalitarian leader who enslaves all those who he decides are inferior to him. But since the virus has taken hold, he resembles Healey in the way nonsense intrudes into his thoughts. Only with Hermann, the nonsense intrudes into his speech as well. As he holds meetings and conferences laying out his plan to dominate the world, he constantly interrupts himself in Turrette Syndrome-like attacks where he belches out obscene limericks and makes a fool of himself. This is not only a little comic relief, but also one instance of the author making social commentary. There is no doubt that Arthur Herzog believes fascism to be a form of politics for fools and clowns.

Subplots and social commentary run throughout the whole novel. There is a wide range of characters and each offers their own angle on society. What happens with most of them is that, like Herman Hermann, their inhibitions drop and their true motivations are revealed. James and Ruth Healey’s marriage is falling apart while Wallon is sexually pursuing Ruth. Healey’s son drops out of high school, takes up a marijuana habit, and becomes a biker. In Healey’s nuclear family unit, his bourgeois lifestyle sinks into the hedonistic excesses of the American counter-culture scene. Also the once harmonious multi-ethnic lab technicians become irritable and make racist comments towards each other. Rather than addressing this issue constructively, they bicker and match insults with insults. Similar things happen with the female nurses on the children’s ward. Before the virus struck they were dedicated, honest, and nurturing in the way good nurses should be, but afterwards they fall into petty man-hating and irresponsibility. Feminists start complaining in the letters column of a scientific magazine about the word “helix”, insisting this is sexist and should be changed to “herlix”. Herzog’s message in all this is that the social reforms of the 1960s are legitimate, but when approached without intelligence and proper analytical thinking, these issues of social justice can’t be approached in a meaningful way. Notice how he anticipated the childish arguments surrounding politics we find on the internet these days.

This social commentary is most developed in the character of Vergil Buck, a labor union leader and ambulance driver who makes impossible demands on the hospital management during a strike that happens just as the low-IQ virus begins attacking all of New York. During collective bargaining sessions, Buck demands that hospital employees get paid massive amounts of money without being obligated to do any work. He is inflexible in his proposal and refuses to negotiate. Later when James Healey goes to a rural retreat to develop a vaccine for rhe virus, Vergil Buck kidnaps him. Buck is the kind of person who thinks the world owes him something because he was born white, dumb, ugly, and poor (thanks to the Butthole Surfers for that description). He is also an annoyingly arbitrary character, more of a literary device than a meaningful symbol of the socially discontent. Herzog uses him to inject some action and suspense into a novel that doesn’t have much of either.

Herzog brings real science into this fictional story. The process of editing DNA to cure the disease that Cathy suffers from is described in detail early in the story. If your knowledge of genetics and virology are limited, these passages might be off-putting. Even with some knowledge of these disciplines, they are still clunky and out of place as though the author just wants to show off how much he knows about science. Some of the information does become relevant at the end when James Healey is struggling to find a cure for the idiot disease his team has created.

Of greater significance to the story, and your own education as well, is the chapter where Healey and Dr. Ornstein discuss the science of intelligence. Ornstein gives a detailed explanation of what an IQ test measures, what it doesn’t measure, and why it isn’t the most important metric for human intelligence and human worth there is. Still, a class of people with higher intelligence and expertise are necessary to maintain the stability and progress of a society. A decline in the average collective intelligence level could make a population barely functional and constantly on the verge of collapse if they survive at all. Then Dr. Ornstein and Healey have a discussion about their high IQ’s. Honestly though, listening to two men comparing their IQ scores is a lot like listening to two men comparing the length of their johnsons. It doesn’t impress anybody except the dumbest people who get preoccupied with things like that.

But the story recovers ground when Healey takes an IQ test to see if his intelligence quotient has dropped. What’s clever about this passage is that we see the test through his eyes while being aware of our own ability to answer the questions. We see Healey, a man with a higher than average IQ struggling to answer test questions that most readers would be able to answer. But you can’t feel too superior over this since as the test gets harder and Healey gets more and more answers wrong, we get hit with a vocabulary question that is so difficult it would be impossible for most intelligent people to answer. So the reader gets humbled and can only sympathize with Healey as we realize our own intellectual limitations. It’s a unique and effective way of harmonizing the reader with the main character through the use of scientific methodology.

Otherwise James Healey is out of step with the logic of the novel. Herzog does well in depicting the rapid decline of intelligence in the other characters while this stripping away of their higher intellectual functioning reveals their inner personality cores. Healey doesn’t follow this path to such an extent though. While other subjective symptoms of the illness are shown, he doesn’t display such a big drop in intellectual functioning as the other characters do. His character remains stable throughout the whole story which feels like a serious flaw in the narrative.

The novel is also flawed in that it is such a formulaic work of writing. It’s the story of a hero who is racing against time to save the world from imminent disaster. It’s a basic story-telling template that has been used seemingly forever. But at least half of the material used to fill in that template is interesting enough to carry the whole novel. The only other major problem is some of the dialogue. You’ve heard of hammy acting before, but some of the conversations here are like hammy writing. You know a writer has made a mistake when their dialogue is so over the top that it is unintentionally funny. Occasionally that happens here.

IQ 83 was published in 1978. It’s been almost three decades since scientists have learned that the Flynn Effect is operating in reverse while digital technology and AI appear to be infecting the minds of the young. If you look at the way people interact on social media, you get a clear sense that Arthur Herzog knew what he was talking about when explaining what the effects of a drop in the collective intelligence level could result in. On top of that, it’s only been a short time since the COVID pandemic hit and that certainly brought out a lot of stupidity in people, spawning all kinds of conspiracy theories, social dislocation, and a noticeable decline in critical thinking skills. Add in the election of a mentally challenged president twice with the fanatical devotion of his followers and the future of humanity is looking pretty grim at the moment. Arthur Herzog had no way of predicting any of this. He was writing a book based on observations of the time he was living in. IQ 83 has its many flaws, but when he gets things right, he really gets them right. This is an underrated novel that should be given reconsideration despite its weaknesses. It certainly feels relevant to the times we live in, even if it does depend on formulas and cliches to get its message across.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs

      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.

 

Book Review & Critical Analysis: The Job by William S. Burroughs

The Job

by William S. Burroughs

      Do you have trouble understanding William S. Burroughs? That’s not exactly your fault. A lot of his writings throw you into a labyrinth of sewers without a life jacket or a set of instructions. You may be able to grasp ahold of whatever chunks of garbage float by, but those will dissolve soon after being touched. If you are perceptive enough, you will know somewhere in the back of your mind that there is something being said, however. It just isn’t obvious. So it might be helpful if you have some sort of roadmap or outline to make all the filthy mess a little more comprehensible. That is where The Job comes in.

The Job is mostly a collection of interviews Burroughs did with Daniel Odier, a Swiss author and teacher of tantric yoga. The interviews are blended in with essays, short stories, and pieces of experimental writing in a way that is true to Burroughs’ desire to explode the traditional forms of writing. The lines of demarcation between the passages aren’t clearly marked so the writing drifts from one passage to the next like globs in a lava lamp. Burroughs’ himself said this book is intended to read the way you might experience a documentary film. The form reflects the function since a big part of Burroughs’ theories is that boundaries of any kind are soft and mutable; any kind of rigid structuring is arbitrary, resulting from a sick desire to control and dominate the nature of reality.

Topics covered include the usual things Burroughs always discusses. The nature of narcotics usage and addiction to opiates fill up one section. If you think he intends to glamorize morphine or heroin use, you’ve missed the point. Burroughs would be the first to tell you to stay as far away from heroin as you possibly can. Having said that, he also advocates for addicts by claiming they are essentially harmless people who interfere with nobody else as long as they have access to their drugs. Given the hallucinatory nature of his writings, it’s interesting that he doesn’t like LSD.

He also explains the cut up method and the dream machine for about the thousandth time. Fortunately he doesn’t dwell on these for too long since they have been explained in depth in so many other places. Other topics covered are the biological function and meaning of viruses, ancient Mayan society, and the relationship between matriarchy, family, nations, and control. As he sees it, matriarchies are inherently authoritarian since families are dominated by mothers and nations are essentially extensions of the family unit. His belief is that control and domination can be eliminated by destroying the family which will inevitably makes nations an impossibility. Reproduction should be asexual and children should be given over to the state to prevent parents from passing their neuroses down to their children.

You might be tempted to say that Burroughs’ misogyny is rooted in his relations with his parents, but that is a little too easy. It is true that he had an overbearing mother and an effeminate father, but he is said to have had a warm and loving relationship with them. Familial conflicts were minimal. He was also deeply attached to the family’s nanny who introduced him to witchcraft at a young age and biographers have say that he used to have temper tantrums when she wasn’t around to watch over him . The source of Burroughs’ misogyny is a mystery that can’t easily be traced back to the places you would ordinarily think to look such as childhood trauma or poor family relations. But of course, this is William S. Burroughs and his program is that of chaos magic. He immerses you in a cyclone of filth then leaves you alone to see what is left after the storm has passed. It’s not about making sense in the conventional meaning of that term.

The big ideas in The Job relate to the connection between sound and image, and the language virus as a mechanism of control. Regarding sound and image, Burroughs claims that how we interpret what we see is dominated by what we hear. Sound is a dominant force and shapes vision and imagery without our conscious consent. He gives the example of a film clip showing people in a city running to catch a bus. By removing the accompanying soundtrack and replacing it with a recording of machine gun fire, the viewer will see the running crowd in an entirely different light, one in which they are running for their lives.

Any film maker will tell you this is a truism, but Burroughs’ extends this idea into the realm of experimental art with his tape recorder experiments. Peoples’ perceptions of reality and time can be altered by using his cut up method to randomly splice sound and image recordings together. But Burroughs doesn’t stop with film studio experimentation. He advocates taking the technology into the streets by hiding tape players on body under a trench coat and walking along crowded city streets while they play. The tapes should have the sounds of riots. The idea is that the sound of riots can override the reality of what people see and cause them to act as if a riot is really happening. Any skeptic would deny the possibility of this working and the ethics of carrying out such an experiment are dubious. Still, it makes you wonder what would happen if you tried it. More importantly, the undertone of humor in this should not be ignored. Burroughs may be pulling your leg, but then again maybe not. He probably would say that disregarding the illusions of linear time and causality make magic possible. Or is that theory just the drugs speaking? Iny any case, he draws out attention to the way that media channels like film, TV, and radio are designed to manipulate our perceptions and behavior while conditioning us for obedience.

His concept of obedience is lifted directly from Scientology in what is dubbed the Reactive Mind or RM as he calls it throughout the text. The RM is the impulsive, motivational center of our mind. It reacts in response to external stimuli, but it is fractured and rendered ineffective through contradictions accumulated during childhood. The contradictions are encoded in the RM with language and as long as these contradictions remain fossilized in the RM, the individual is limited in their potential for self-determination. Therefore, erasing the language codes in the RM will liberate the person, making them less vulnerable to control from outside forces.

This brings us back to Burroughs’ concept of the language virus. His theory of language is heavily influenced by the linguist Alfred Korzybski who is considered to be a founding father in the branches of semantics and semiotics. Korzybski articulated the arbitrary connection between signs and what they signify. There is nothing in the nature of a cat to determine that the signifier “cat” is an accurate representation of the signified animal. But a drawing of a cat bears a closer resemblance to the authentic nature of a cat than the word we use to described it.

Since language, sound, and image can be so easily manipulated to control human perceptions and behavior, Burroughs’ solution is to disconnect language from any signified images. Burroughs suggests liberation by utilizing either a pictorial language in which images without connections to sounds are used to communicate or else a scripted language that doesn’t signify visual images can be used as well. He demonstrates the latter in an experimental writing piece that makes it impossible to attach an images to the written words he uses. You could argue that this kind of abstract writing doesn’t communicate anything at all though, making the purpose of language ineffective, maybe even making communcation impossible. Enter Jacques Derrida. The ultimate goal is to think solely in images without any words attached to them. Burroughs belives we should evolve to replace spoken and written language with telepathy. This could be the next step in evolution, something that won’t take place until we leave the planet. It’s kind of like a sea animal evolving into a land animal by losing its fins and scales and evolving into gorwing lungs and limbs to adapt to its new environment.

Another linguistic concept of Burroughs involves the elimination of binary opposition which he says limits the human capacity for interpreting reality. Pairs like hot/cold or tall/short foreclose the possibilities for any kind of nuanced understanding. But he completely ignores the use of other words and concepts we use to describe temperature like freezing, burning, warm, cool and so on. Also concepts of tall and short can vary depending on who you are considering. Being five feet in height would be tall for a three year old, but if that individual is still five feet at the age of forty he would be considered short by American standards. So the meaning of tall and short is nuanced and dependent on context. I would say that eliminating pairs of binary opposites would further limit our ability to express concepts rather than heighten our awareness of nuances since it would provide less language to work with.

He also wants to eliminate the pairings of the definite and indefinite articles “the/a” and use only the indefinite article “a”. But he doesn’t recognize that those articles each represent different categories of specificity and generality. “A book is good to read” has a different meaning than “the book is good to read”, the former referring to any one unspecified book out of all books in existence while the latter refers to one specific book, the title of which was presumably given in a previous sentence. Thus eliminating the definite article “the” would greatly reduce our ability for nuanced discussion rather than liberating us from semantic restrictions. Burroughs also doesn’t appear to know that many languages, especially Slavic languages, don’t contain any articles at all so unless he wants to argue that people who speak Slavic languages are dominated less than people who speak Latin or Germanic languages, or even Arabic or Albanian, he doesn’t have much to go on here. Russian was the language of the Soviet Union, so drawing a direct connection between the semantics and syntax of a language and the degree of individual liberties possessed by the speakers of the language isn’t a connection that can be made.

Burroughs’ knowledge of linguistics was superficial, but we aren’t talking about ontology here; we are talking about literary theory combined with fictional world building and in the context of his science-fiction novels it clarifies some of what he is trying to accomplish, or at least it indicates why some of his writings are deliberately meant to perplex you.

The universe Burroughs’ creates is one that is deterministic. Humans have no free will as we are motivated internally by genes, hormones, and unconscious drives. We are pushed and pulled through life by reacting to external stimuli in our surrounding environments and the ones who have the most control over our environments have the most control over us. And their motivations don’t take our welfare into consideration. Humans, as biological agents, have very little free will and very little chance of escaping from the prisons of our lives. If we decimate all systems of linearity, logic, and mechanization then we might have a chance to build on whatever shapes emerge from the ruins. But probably not. Burroughs doesn’t think it’s likely, but we might as well try. There is nothing better to do. You have to wonder how much of his philosophy is meant to convey the truth as he sees it and how much is just the result of being unable to control a drug addiction or alter his sexual orientation. I have long wondered if William Burroughs was a solipsist.

The Job is important for anyone who wants to understand Burroughs. All of the ideas contained in this book are theoretical frameworks for his fiction which can be disorienting and sometimes hard to follow. He says the same things here that he says in all his other books; he’s just laying it all out in plain language so you can grasp ahold of the concepts more readily. It is a good strategy to read his biography, read his fiction, and then read The Job. After that, go back and re-read his fiction. It will be easier to see how it all fits together and when you come to the parts that are incomprehensible, just remember that incomprehensibility is a part of what he is trying to express. Don’t forget to look for hidden messages though. Sometimes there are signals submerged in all the noise. Sometimes those signals emerge in part or in whole.

In conclusion, The Job is a key text for those who are serious about studying William S. Burroughs. It is like a Rosetta Stone that unlocks the meaning of all his other fiction. His explicitly stated literary theories and philosophical worldview are supplemented with short stories and essays nested within the interviews. This succeeds in clarifying some his more obscure ideas. And if you don’t agree with some of it, or any of it, don’t despair since his ideas are all about world building in the realms of science-fiction and surrealism. That may be a cop out when it comes to defending a system of unjustifiable beliefs, but it functions well when you want to interpret the more evasive aspects of his literature. You have to understand it before you can accept or dismiss it. If you don’t make the effort to interpret it, you can’t contribute much of any value in a discussion on what its value is. Besides, being the stubborn individualist that William S. Burroughs was, you can conclude that he probably didn’t want you to agree with a lot of it anyways. His philosophy can be seen as a defensive measure against the riff raff of humanity so if it was easy to understand and easy to agree with, it wouldn’t be strong enough to serve its purpose.

As clearly articulated as the ideas in The Job are, I only have one major complaint. If you’ve heard William S. Burroughs speak, you know that he was avuncular and authoritative in his mannerisms. You might have found it hard to disagree with him when in his presence. When these interviews are written out in text, his unique form of magnetism is partially lost and the words lose the kind of gravity they carry when he speaks. Therefore, it may be more convincing to listen to him explaining his ideas rather than reading them in this book. But whatever works best for you is what works.

Now if only I can get my head around the idea of an author whose intention it was to eradicate language...

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs

The Soft Machine

by William S. Burroughs

      By the time William S. Burroughs wrote The Soft Machine, the first novel in the Nova Trilogy (sometimes called the Cut Up Trilogy), he had developed a coherent world view and theoretical framework for his literature. It is a world view that incorporates linguistic theory, sexuality, gender relations, drugs, altered states of consciousness, secret agents, space aliens, a dark view of science, and the conflict between control and chaos that will eventually lead to planetary demise. Yet while his world view takes on a semblance of consistency, its realization in his fiction is anything but orderly. That’s all a part of his artistic vision. In contrast, the conventional linear narrative of his first novel Junky is pure autobiography while his most famous novel Naked Lunch is a montage of vignettes depicting the misanthropic hellscape of life for modern humans. It introduces Burroughs as the inventor of a new style without providing any definite hypothesis for how he views the world. The Soft Machine initiated the next phase of his literary career and set the tone for everything that would come after.

Like Naked Munch, this novel is in part a series of vignettes that are grotesque and arresting in their impact. None of them are complete stories in the ordinary sense of the word, but more like situations that only on occasion contain a narrative arc. The plot is as basic as it can be. Alien forces have invaded the Earth, operate through authoritarian systems of control, and manipulate people through the use of words and images. Another alien force, the Nova Mob, is engaged in constant warfare to create chaos and destruction in an attempt to drive the world to self-annihilation, probably with nuclear weapons. In the middle, there are the Nova Police who try to balance the control and the chaos to prevent global catastrophe. On first encounter, this plot is evasive and takes some effort to see. Some background information on Burroughs’ life and theories does a lot to make it easier to understand how the different pieces of the novel fit together. Or does it fit together? Part of Burroughs’ intention is to disrupt the lines of communication being utilized by the controlling machine to enslave us. Therefore, disrupting the linear patterns and structures of language are meant to be liberating. Despite this intention, patterns do emerge even if they are rough and incomplete.

The vignettes are easy enough to follow in the beginning. Some junkies meet in a Manhattan restaurant to buy and sell heroin. A secret agent beats up a gay drug user in a subway bathroom claiming this violence to have been ordered by his superiors while admitting he doesn’t know where the instructions came from or what the larger purpose of his mission is. In a vision of near-paradise, a multi-racial group of youths have an orgy in a river.

Then things take a turn towards the bizarre as two separate passages depict a man who travels back in time to Yucatan to live among the Mayas. In the first passage, he joins up with some agricultural workers, finding out that they are being controlled by priests who own codices full of hieroglyphs and calendars that are utilized like knobs to manipulate the population’s behavior. In the second passage, a man takes hallucinogenic drugs that allow him to return to the Yucatan so that he can liberate the workers from their slavery. Crab men, priests dressed in lobster costumes, and a foul smelling giant centipede are part of the action.

The meaning of the Soft Machine as a metaphor for the human body is revealed in a night club where a man changes into a woman while being covered in gelatinous ooze. An audience of men in a movie theater masturbate while watching movies of men ejaculating while being hung from a gallows; a technician makes the audience speed up and slow down by operating a control panel as if they are on a film strip. A junky, suspecting that the two detectives who have come to arrest him, are undercover agents from the Nova Police, kills them just as he is about to shoot up. At the heart of the novel is the classic sequence where the battle between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police becomes so fierce that the Nova Police recall all agents and the notorious Doctor Benway is called in to restore order and exert control over the crowd. Memorable passages towards the end of the book involve the destruction of a control machine located in the office of a news agency and the invasion of a virus from outer space that attacks the larynxes of primates, causing them to make sounds in agony that will later evolve into language. Burroughs portrays a world that is strange, disturbing, and permeated with paranoia. But every once in a while he gives us a glimpse of a better world and if you really look closely enough, you might conclude that he is motivated by a hidden morality. After all, Burroughs isn’t celebrating all the filth, violence, and absurdity he portrays; instead he is showing us how humanity has failed miserably to live up to its potential for freedom and dignity.

These vignettes are separated by, and sometimes overlapping with, passages of cut ups, surrealistic imagery, and nonsense. My favorite image was of a man ejaculating Montgomery Ward catalogs while sitting in an outhouse. These parts may be frustrating at first, but the effect of orderly or semi-orderly narratives alternating and emerging out of an back into the non-linear language has an interesting effect. If anything, the cut ups, which are made by splicing together texts that have been cut into four pieces and reassembled forming random word patterns, provide some interesting imagery. If you are already familiar with the texts being used in the cut ups, it feels like reading scrambled messages or codes that emerge and fade away before you can fully grasp their meanings. I’ve often compared the cut ups to French Symbolist poetry which is meant to convey pure emotion through imagery without any interference from rationality, but French Symbolism is composed deliberately while cut ups are experimental and any meaning that emerges out of them is random, accidental, and purely by chance. Thus Burroughs has no control over the outcome of the cut ups. There can be no semantic connection between the sender and the receiver of the language. The signals carry minimal content, if any. Burroughs believes that by cutting the lines between the sign and the signified object, we become less vulnerable to control by outside forces. I can’t say this is scientifically valid, but it does illustrates an artistic vision, supplementing the easier to follow prose of other passages. And keep in mind that Burroughs is an author of fiction, meaning he has less restrictions on his portrayal of reality.

This novel is a satire of human society. My interpretation is that institutions like government, media, corporations, and law enforcement seek to control and dominate society. Meanwhile, people pursue freedom from this domination in drug use, sex, dreams, altered states of consciousness, crime, insanity, imagination, art, literature, and nature. But the pursuit of these means of liberation carry their own risks and can enslave or destroy us in other ways if we aren’t careful. Thus, true liberation from the forces of domination is an impossibility. We are stuck in the mechanized slime pits of the world whether we like it or not so we might as well have a dark sense of human and write a book or two. In the middle of it all is the single human being, the Soft Machine, the body and mind that are malleable enough to be shaped by the Control Machine, but also malleable enough to shape itself in ways that don’t fit with the Cotrol Machine and can possibly even disrupt or destroy it. The idea that the Nova Mob, the Nova Police, and the language virus all originated in outer space and invaded the Earth, thereby creating all the problems of human existence, conveys the sense that we aren’t living as nature intended us to be. We got hijacked by alien forces beyond our control and those forces are preventing us from living out our true potential. Finally, I think the theme of secret agents says something about who the author is. A secret agent is a shadowy figure, operating clandestinely in a foreign land to transmit and receive coded messages that possibly have grave significance for the course of the world. He operates between worlds, taking on different disguises and personae to accomplish his tasks. It is a lonely, solitary life too and full of risk. Could you possibly think of a better metaphor for an author or a better symbol for the gay, heroin addicted author that Burroughs was?

The Soft Machine is one of William S. Burroughs’ best novels. It takes a re-reading or two in order to see that though. It’s one of those books that demands multiple attempts in order to really make sense of it even though you probably will never understand it in entirety. That’s by design. And I highly recommend hunting down a British impression of this book since it contains chapters that were never included in the American editions; those extra chapters really do a lot to tie the whole chaotic literary mess together. By the way, did I happen to mention that William S. Burroughs was completely nuts? Knowing that will help you to unlock the enigmas of his writing.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Cities Of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs

Cities Of the Red Night

by William S. Burroughs

      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 17^th century pirates alternates every two chapters with the 20^th 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 17^th 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 17^th 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.

 

Book Review & Literary Analysis: The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs

The Place of Dead Roads

by William S. Burroughs

      The later works of William S. Burroughs have attracted less attention than his earlier writings. By the 1980s, Burroughs was living off his reputation more than his art. He was living in an abandoned YMCA in Manhattan, hanging out in his orgone accumulator and talking to ghosts. He was also hanging out in CBGB’s with Patti Smith who claimed she admired him so much because he was so difficult to get into bed. Well y’know Patti, a gay junky pushing 70 probably isn’t the best horse to bet on, even if you are a woman with hairy armpits (see the cover of her Easter LP).But he hadn’t been forgotten. Musicians in the punk and first wave industrial music scenes had taken interest in him and his earlier works remained perennial classics in the underground art and literary scenes. He was in desperate need of money so he decided to revive his career. The Nova Convention brought him back into the public eye and he even did an introduction for the opening of a Saturday Night Live episode. Along with this he published a trilogy of novels that were not entirely palatable to most readers of the time. But Burroughs being Burroughs has never been specific to one particular time or place. It may be time for a novel like The Place of Dead Roads to be reconsidered, especially considering our current political climate.

William S. Burroughs always defied categories. Whether he could be classified as a Beat Generation or a science-fiction author can be infinitely debatable. Burroughs would have advised you to not waste time on such distinctions since categories are arbitrary by nature. But you can’t deny that, up to a certain point, this novel is a western. But, just as much, it is a science-fiction novel although nobody else has ever written science-fiction the way Burroughs did. In fact no one else every wrote a western the way he did either. But neither of these categories hold since it could just as well be a work of surrealism, romanticism, pulp crime, gay fictions, utopianism, dystopianism, postmodernism, or anything else you could possibly think of. Burroughs is just a category unto himself.

But true to his own style, his 1980s novels defy his own niche that he created in the earlier years of his writing. Most of his earlier works had no plot or character development. They were mostly series of dream sequences and vignettes with characters that extended no further than what they did in each scene. On the other hand, in The Place of Dead Roads there is both plot and character development. This is definitely new territory for this most unconventional of all unconventional authors.

Kim Carsons is a young man who inherits a plot of rural land after his parents die. When arriving in the nearest town, he buys an arsenal of guns which get excessively described in pornographic detail. The eroticism of guns is firmly established early in the story. Kim brings another boy to his rustic cabin and the two look over his guns before having sex. Soon after, Kim goes out to the woods, sets up targets, and begins shooting. While doing so, a faun appears and then they have sex. But the sex is a kind of foreplay for gun shooting which they do in between bouts of intercourse.

Kim begins to attract a group of followers, all male and gay. They indulge freely in carnal pleasures and have gun fights with those who don’t respect them, primarily homophobic bullies and Christians who won’t leave them alone. They also practice sex magic rituals in which ejaculations function like guns, shooting psychically charged deadly venom at their visualized enemies, killing them from a distance without leaving a trace of evidence. The boys quickly gain a reputation for being outlaws and expert shootists who should never be messed with. They dub themselves the Johnson Gang and live by an ethos of everyone minding their own business. This means they demand the freedom to live close to nature, far from the modern world of technology, where they can indulge in sex and drugs. Anybody who intrudes on them has basically signed their own death certificate. The descriptions are explicit and brutal; Burroughs writes about violence with as much passion as he writes about guns and sex. To the chagrin of most feminists, this novel is a celebration of phallo-centrism to an extreme and the vision is one of a masculine society free from the presence of women. Burroughs doesn’t express any animosity towards women. It’s just that they barely exist in the world he writes about.

One interesting passage near the beginning, when Burroughs describes Kim’s childhood and relationship with his artist father, involves the boy writing a science-fiction story and submitting it to Boy’s Life magazine for publication. The story is about some half-human/half-giant insect creatures on a search and destroy mission in a jungle river gorge on Venus. (This passage seems to parallel a chapter in Cities Of the Red Night where the pirates invade Panama City) This bizarre story is so far from anything that would ever be published in the vanilla teenage magazine that it serves to illustrate how distant Kim feels from boring, mainstream America at the onset of his adolescence. Incidentally, Kim travels to Venus in some later chapters of this novel.

Later on, Kim leaves his rural property and travels around America, sometimes with the Johnson Gang and sometimes without them. He liaises with various members of an underground network of gay criminals. Sometimes he is involved with hit jobs on the Mafia. The already thin plot begins to wear even thinner. But then we hear from a visitor from outer space whose space ship crash landed in the desert and released a virus into the world. This takes on significance later.

Meanwhile, Kim travels to Europe and begins working as a secret agent, taking on different identities as he goes along. If you think you can read any Burroughs novel without getting thoroughly confused at some point, you are wrong. It becomes hard to tell when Kim is Kim acting under an assumed identity and when a character isn’t Kim at all. Watching him change personas is like watching a blackjack dealer shuffle a deck of cards; you can briefly see what each card is but they go by so fast they all blur together. Even more disorienting is the way Kim can be at a dinner party with spies in France one minutes, then he opens a door and comes out as someone different in Morocco. Any sense of linearity or stability of character disappears. We get led around the world to Burroughs’ favorite haunts like Ecuador, Colombia, London, Paris, and Tangier. Kim shoots up heroin and methadone, visits exotic weapons dealers in North African bazaars, receives coded messages from secret agents in Gibraltar, and goes to a high level drug dealer’s party and gets seduced by a woman who changes sexes. All the while he’s probably some kind of secret agent being contacted by entities in outer space. Who knows what it all amounts to, but the hallucinatory nature of it all makes you question if Burroughs is expressing the feeling of shifting in and out of altered states of consciousness while using drugs.

The most baffling passage is when Kim is living on Venus with his boyfriend. The two live together in a cabin that is described as being similar to the cabin he inhabits in Missouri at the beginning of the novel. This kind of overlapping is a key feature in many of Burroughs’ writings. He leaves to walk around a tourist resort which he at first says is in Egypt, but as he goes away, unauthorized, from the designated resort, he wanders into a nightmarish world where he finds houses full of dwarfs. Centipedes are emerging from the dwarfs’ heads and shedding them as if the little men are cocoons for the monster insects. Kim can do nothing but shoot them and burn the place down. It’s hard to interpret this, but centipedes show up throughout most of Burroughs’ writings as symbols of fear and anxiety. The dwarfs, being small men of slight stature, give birth to this symbol of fear possible meaning that it is the people of lesser value who unleash the most evil into the world.

By destroying these monstrous creatures, Kim is eliminating something that makes his world terrible. Furthermore, the incomprehensibility of the scenario illustrates what it feels like to live in a world where you can’t connect with others, and in fact wouldn’t want to, and feel nothing but alienation, disconnection, and confusion. It is a hostile and incomprehensible place. You can see why a gay heroin addict, and one who had difficulty even relating to other gay men, would feel a desire to destroy everything that creates the psychological oppression of dread, This is a sadistic, ultraviolent fantasy of a man who wants to live someplace where he can be left alone in peace. The extreme violence of Burroughs’ writing is like an artillery shield that protects a vulnerable man from everything that seeks to destroy him. If you read Burroughs carefully, he does express ideas of what it would be like to live in a peaceful and beautiful world. It is a world without persecution and one where everybody minds their own business.

Another baffling passage comes near the end when Kim, in the guise of a secret agent, gets assigned to visit the desert crater where the aforementioned space ship landed. It is secretly guarded by the American military because the last surviving ancestors of the missing link live there. They are the vectors that came between earlier primates and the human species, the vectors that contracted the virus that mutated into human language. Burroughs always had a thing for viruses and his hypothesis that viruses are used by entities from outer space to control humans is lifted directly from Scientology. Actually, if you think about it, language does bear a superficial similarity to a virus in that it survives and replicates by moving from host to host. It is through language that bad ideas spread throughout society, sometimes in the form of memes as Richard Dawkins defines them. A junky high on heroin can lie for days in bed without thinking a single thought. In the absence of language, they would be impermeable to any ideas bad or good. It would be like a womb of silence without any intrusions from words, similar to the way that the Johnson Gang lives on their private plot of land without any intrusions from the outside. This would be an appealing state to be in when confronted by a hostile and alien world that seeks to destroy you for no other purpose than that is what the world does. Life is a killer. Rub out the word. In any case, the primates in the crater let out a virus that spreads to the nearby military base and presumably beyond. How Burroughs got us from a farm in Missouri populated exclusively by gay outlaws to a crater in the desert populated by the missing link is far from clear. But that’s just the way William S. Burroughs rolls.

These are the easiest themes to digest in this novel. There are so many others that it would be impossible to interpret all of it. You don’t have to pursue every element that enters into the story though; in a Joycean sense, you can only grasp on to whatever you can and let everything else flow by especially when everything else is as appealing as vomit and raw sewage. In fact, the worst part of this book is that it is so jam packed (fudge packed?) with information that you might feel exhausted before getting to the end. But what a wild ride it is.

Burroughs’ final novels deserve some reconsideration. If the lack of traditional literary formulas frustrated you when reading his earlier works, The Place of Dead Roads might be a good place to pick up Burroughs again. It is more structured and fine tuned without losing any of the transgressive qualities that made his writing so notorious to begin with. Maybe readers in the 1980s weren’t ready for this kind of book. Maybe they still aren’t. Maybe someday the human race will catch up to this genius writer. Maybe by then everybody will have learned to mind their own business. We aren’t there yet.