Book Review & Analysis: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James

      Reggae music exploded in popularity during the 1970s. At the forefront of this musical movement was Bob Marley. Not necessarily the best reggae musician but certainly a great one and the most famous, he was perfect as a leader when it came to bringing reggae to the world. A lot of his softer pop songs had commercial appeal without being shallow or fake like so much top 40 music of the era. But he also had an angry side that was steeped in politics and the mysticism of the Rastafarian religion that appealed to young people moving on from the hippy movement without abandoning their counter cultural stance. Rastafarians were proponents of marijuana smoking and had a distinctly cool image with their dreadlocks and colorful clothes. As Bob Marley’s fame grew internationally, so did interest in Jamaica as an emerging nation, a country with a vibrant music scene and a tourist oriented economy. Reggae also had a strong influence on the punk, ska, and new wave music scenes that began in the mid to late 70s. A lot of reggae lyrics called for peace and love along with laments about violence and political injustice. Probably most reggae listeners weren’t aware of the events and political climate of Jamaica in the 1970s that served as inspiration for those lyrics. Gangs tied to Jamaica’s two political parties were fighting in the streets and Kingston could possibly be thought of as having a low level civil war at the time. Marlon James portrays the violence between Kingston gangs and their relation to Bob Marley in his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Bob Marley is at the center of this novel...kind of. Without being mentioned by name, he is referred to exclusively as The Singer from beginning to end. The novel’s plot lines all relate to an assassination attempt on his life to prevent a free concert, his attempt at ratifying a peace treaty between Jamaica’s gangs, and his death. The Singer’s life is more of a framework for the novel and functions more as the narrative device we call a McGuffin.

This book is all about characters and situations, of which there are many. It is not a plot driven novel. The large number of people introduced to the story shouldn’t bother you. Most of them play peripheral roles and only stay around for a short time after their introduction. But there is a moderate group of central characters that stay around for large parts of the story.

One of the central characters is Papa Lo, the don of the Copenhagen City gang. Copenhagen City is a neighborhood in Kingston with ties to the right wing Jamaican Labor Party or JLP headed by Edward Seaga. They are in constant war over territory with other gangs tied to the People’s Nationalist Party or PLP headed by the democratic socialist and prime minister Michael Manley. While these gangs are politically affiliated, the parties play only a minimal role in the story. Anyways, Papa Lo is reaching middle age and starting to be concerned about surviving. He notices that there are hardly any elderly Jamaicans and he is growing weary of the gang violence even though he tells other people he isn’t. He begins taking interest in the message of the Rastafarians and is in dialogue with The Singer who has hired him to manage security for an upcoming concert. The Singer is affiliated with the left wing PNP in opposition to the Copenhagen City gang, but his intention is to bring peace to the city.

Second in command of the Copenhagen City gang is Josey Wales, named after the outlaw from the Clint Eastwood western movie. Josey Wales recognizes that Papa Lo is aging out of his position. He starts plotting behind Papa Lo’s back to lead a gang of dugged up teenage assassins on a mission to assassinate The Singer. The origins and purpose of this plot are murky, but it is clear that Josey Wales has ties to the CIA who provide him with weapons, drugs, and guidance. Josey Wales’ liaison with the CIA is the freelance asset Doctor Love, a Miami Cuban exile and Bay of Pigs veteran. Doctor Love is an explosives expert who helped to blow up an airplane over Barbados in an anti-communist terrorist attack. Doctor Love also has ties to Colombian drug cartels who he later introduces to Josey Wales. This part of their relationship is of later importance in the chapters that come after The Singer’s death.

The two other characters that carry the most weight are Alex Pierce and Nina Burgess who subsequently changes her name twice before the book concludes. Alex is an American journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, sent to Jamaica to cover The Singer. He is a rogue journalist though and breaks with Rolling Stone to pursue a more lurid story about CIA connections to gun running and gang activity in the Kingston ghettos. As he pursues his story, he ends up being one of only a handful of people who know that Josey Wales is the ringleader of the hit squad that attempts to assassinate The Singer. This has consequences for him later as Josey Wales sends hitmen out to kill anyone who has knowledge of the failed assassination attempt. The danger follows Alex to New York City where he continues working as a journalist covering the Jamaican gangs, called “posses”, that are responsible for the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.

Nina Burgess is a young, middle class Jamaican woman who wants nothing less than a chance to emigrate to America. After being seduced by The Singer at a party, she deludes herself into thinking he loves her and hangs around outside his house, hoping she can convince him to get her a plane ticket and a visa out of Jamaica. She thinks her own country is too backwards and dangerous for her. Nina is all about class mobility.

We later find her working as a prostitute in Montego Bay under the name Kim Clarke where she hooks up with an American businessman named Charles who works for a bauxite mining company. She moves in with him. The two of them use each other. Charles uses Kim for sex and as an unpaid domestic servant. Kim doesn’t love him but pins all her hopes on his promises to marry her and take her to live in America. When the Jamaican government raises taxes on bauxite exports, the American company closes down its Jamaican operations, Charles leaves and doesn’t take Kim with him. Nina/Kim later shows up in New York under the assumed named of Dorcas Palmer.

Then there is Weeper, a character of lesser importance in the beginning, but one that becomes more significant in the later New York City chapters. Weeper is an educated man, an atheist and reader of Bertrand Russell, and he is also gay. He tries to follow the honest path of education upwards out of the Copenhagen City ghetto, but gets arrested and tortured in prison by the police. After getting out, he becomes Josey Wales’ closest associate and later moves to New York to oversee the crack dealing operations there.

Otherwise there is a large cast of peripheral characters. Most of them are gangsters or gang affiliated. Despite the large numbers, there isn’t a wide range of characters though. One of them is, however, the duppy, or ghost in Jamaican English, of a man who died in the West Kingston Wars of the 1960s. Unseen by the other characters, he gives surreal narratives of murder scenes, telling us what happens before the killing and what happens to souls on the other side.

The plot, as explained above, is simple. The subplots are a bit more complex, but not by much. The complexity is in how interwoven they all are. But this novel is less about plot and more about character. More specifically, it is about Jamaica as seen through different subjective points of view. And the subtext of the novel is about thwarted ambitions for class mobility. The Singer, for instance, seemingly at the top of Jamaica as a type of prophet or king, is thwarted in his ambition to bring peace to Jamaica. First assassins try to rub him out and then gangsters use violence to make his peace treaty fall apart. After that he dies and the text carries a heavy suggestion that the CIA had a hand in his demise.

Papa Lo’s desire to retire and live to old age in peace is thwarted when he gets killed in a police ambush, probably orchestrated by Josey Wales who takes over as don in the Copenhagen City gang. Both Josey Wales and Weeper initially tried to move up in life through channels of vocational work training and education, but were beaten down by the police and found no other outlet for their desire to grow other than in criminal gangs. Josey Wales does succeed in expanding his operations by working with Colombian drug cartels to traffic cocaine to America, but meets his match when he crosses a competitor in New York. Weeper also gets killed. In New York, he finds liberation because he is able to live with minimum hassle as a gay man, unlike in the oppressively homophobic society of Jamaica. But he dies in a gang hit there too.

The desire for class mobility is further emphasized in Josey Wales when examining his motivations. As mentioned before, he tries to advance himself by learning a skilled trade, but then gets shot five times during the wars of the 1960s. As he rises to the position of don, we learn small details like how he wants a flush toilet in his house, something given to him as a payoff from the JLP, and how he refuses to talk about the business of killing and drug trafficking before finishing his morning tea. At the end of his life, his son attends a prestigious private school. His aspiration is for a middle class existence like the family that Nina/Kim comes from. And she wants to escape her middle class life by fleeing to America to escape from the crime that plagues Jamaica, making it unsafe for middle class people.

After The Singer dies, the last two sections of the novel mostly take place in America, sometimes in Miami but mostly in New York. Jamaican posses that deal crack are the central part of these back end sections.

Nina/Kim, however, does achieve her dream when she takes on another fake name, this time Dorcas, and emigrates to New York. She finds herself, in a way, by working as a caretaker for a man with amnesia. The significance is that every day, he forgets who she is and she wants nothing more than to forget her past and become someone else. This becomes another thwarted ambition since people recognize her Jamaican accent no matter how hard she tries to lose it. She later becomes an emergency room nurse and realizes something big is happening because Jamaican posse members keep showing up with bullet wounds. In the end this shows how her Jamaican-ness is a permanent part of her no matter how hard she tries to hide or eliminate it.

It is in New York City that the white journalist Alex Pierce shows up again too. While continuing to work as a journalist and author of a biography about The Singer, he meets with an inmate of Rikers Island prison. Tristan Phillips is a member of the Ranking Dons, the coke dealing posse that rivals the Storm Posse which is the American arm of the Copenhagen City gang led by Josey Wales. Tristan is a fallen Rastafarian who is a signatory to the peace treaty The Singer tries to uphold back in Kingston. Alex uses his journalist credentials to get in touch with Tristan, but he has a hidden motive. Alex fears for his life because he is one of only a couple people who knows that Josey Wales is the man who orchestrated the assassination attempt on The Singer. He also lives in fear because he killed the man who they sent to murder him in a bid to eliminate everyone who knows Josey Wales’ secret. Alex looks to Tristan for inside advice on his safety. It is through Tristan that the novel takes on a meta-narrative quality since he insists on Alex writing a book about the Kingston gangs and how they tried to assassinate The Singer. Alex, the white journalist, thereby becomes a literary persona representing Marlon James, the Jamaican author of this novel. The novel’s title is also a reference to an article written by Alex Pierce.

After Tristan assures him he is safe, Alex returns home to find a gang of Jamaican thugs waiting for him. Alex has been writing a serialized work of investigative journalism about a massacre in a Brooklyn crack house. The articles are revealing too much about the posses in involved. After a brutally violent confrontation, Alex learns that he will be allowed to live only if he continues writing articles that are approved of by the Storm Posse. This may be good news, but his wings are clipped so that his ambition to be a truth-telling journalist is thwarted. To a certain extent, all the major characters in this book get only a fraction of what they want. That fraction doesn’t go far for any of them. The theme of thwarted ambitions reminds me a bit of the poem “Dream Deferred” by the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

The most amazing part of this novel is how it is written. Every chapter is told in the first person by a different narrator. That way we get a subjective, kaleidoscopic view of everything that is happening. The story lines and subplots are interwoven into a web of multi-dimensional perspectives so that we see each character from both their own subjective point of view and the subjective point of view of others. It’s an amazing accomplishment that this writing, in all its subtlety, is so easy to follow.

It’s also amazing how effectively this works in character building. Each of the main characters are so distinctly written that it is easy to tell them apart. They really come to life as individuals through their narratives. You might notice in the beginning that each chapter heading is the name of the character speaking. By the end of the book, these chapter headings are absent and yet it is still obvious which character is speaking. This is even more interesting in how Nina/Kim/Dorcas takes on three different names in three different locations, yet it is clear that she is all three people without the author ever explaining this. He never explicitly says, “and then Nina changed her name to Kim.” He just shows us how she is as she is and allows for us to make the connection of our own.

And the stand out narrative for me is when Tristan is talking to Alex in prison. The only speech in these passages is that of Tristan; the speech of Alex isn’t written into the text. It is like sitting next to Tristan in a prison visitor’s booth where he is separated from Alex by a plexiglass window as they communicate over a telephone. These passages are especially good because of the change Tristan goes through during the conversation. At first he is hostile towards Alex, but after learning about Alex’s secrets, Tristan becomes relaxed, interested, and friendly. This is done by showing us only Tristan’s side of the conversation and his change in mood is delieverd so effectively because of the actual language used. Again the author shows us this change without explaining it.

One other great thing about this novel is the crafting of the language. It is mostly written using Jamaican English or Patwa as it is sometimes called. Marlon James, being a Jamaican author, has a natural understanding of the language and he writes it so well that he captures its rhythms and nuances in pronunciation and vocabulary. In fact, the shifting narratives give it the feel of reggae music. When listening to reggae you will notice the instruments don’t all play at once. Pauses and empty spaces in the rhythms create a depth that can’t be achieved in other ways. You might notice the call and response patterns in reggae rhtyhms too; the horns play a line of notes then stop to allow the bass and keyboards to run for a measure then stop to allow the horns space to play again, so on and so forth. The structure of shifting and alternating first person narratives operates with a similar logic. You will also learn some new vocabulary too if you read this. Words like “raascloth”, “battyboy”, “pussyhole”, and “fuckery” are repeatedly used throught the text. If you finish this and “fuckery” hasn’t been permanently etched into your brain, you probably weren’t paying much attention to what you were reading.

Finally, this book is not about the CIA’s involvement in Jamaica, but that element is a root cause of the problems being portrayed in the story. The novel starts fourteen years after Jamaica gained post-colonial independence from Great Britain. Within less than a decade, the CIA began a destabilization program in this small West Indian nation that was struggling to get on its feet and stay there. When the democratic socialist PNP party came to power in a landslide election, the CIA armed JLP affiliated gangs with heavy ammunition and the result was disastrous in two ways: the brutal violence of a rapidly escalating crime rate and a growing narcotics trade. Both of these problems spilled over into America and may have permanently damaged Jamaica as a nation. To paraphrase Josey Wales, America creates monsters and then acts surprised when they act monstrous. All this is in the name of fighting communism although I’m convinced the American government doesn’t actually care about fighting communism. They scapegoat communism for the purpose of imperialism and hegemony. If this is the case, maybe we deserve some of the crime that drug cartels have brought to our shores. Our meddling in other countries’ affairs is only perpetuating the problems we claim to be fighting against.

A Brief History of Seven Killings fills a gap in people’s knowledge of Jamaican history and culture. If you search around for books covering this subject in the decades of the 1970s to the 1990s, almost nothing can be found. Yet people worldwide are familiar with Jamaica through its music, most especially the monumental work of Bob Marley. Although this novel is fiction, most, if not all, the events in it really happened. This can be corroborated by checking a wide variety of legitimate academic sources. Marlon James crafts all that information into a novel and makes it accessible to the general reader. The Jamaican Patwa and the descriptions of extremely brutal violence might make it difficult for some people to read, but it is possibly the most important book about Jamaica that has been written so far.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Harder They Come by Nichael Thelwell

The Harder They Come

by Michael Thelwell

      In 1972, the Jamaican produced film The Harder They Come was released in American theaters. Starring reggae singer Jimmy Cliff, it told the story of a country boy who moves to Kingston and makes a hit record. But the grim circumstances of life in Kingston’s Trench Town ghetto hold him back, so he turns to the life of an outlaw in search of freedom. The movie was a hit, drawing attention to the island nation of Jamaica, becoming a popular staple of the midnight movies, and growing to the status of a cult classic as well as a classic of Third World cinema. It also inspired a lesser-known novel of the same name, written by the Jamaican-American author Michael Thelwell. While it’s unusual for a movie to be the basis for a serious work of literature, the novelized version of The Harder They Come proves it can be successfully done.

The protagonist of the story is Ivanhoe Martin, usually called Ivan but also referrred to by his nickname Rygin. If my understanding is correct, “rygin” is the Jamaican pronunciation of “raging” and has a sexual connotation. As a boy, Ivan is given the nickname Rygin by the other kids in his village because he is a bit more reckless than the others. Ivan lives in a hillside shack near the seashore. He lives with his grandmother and helps her run the family farm. They are poor, but live a satisfying life. With just enough food to eat, Ivan spends his youth doing the kinds of things you would expect a kid to do in the jungle and on the beach. It’s a life of playful adventure and discovery, the kind of life you could look back on as an adult with fond memories. That has implications for a passage that comes later in the story.

The other villagers provide a strong sense of community. Both agricultural folk customs and church are a part of this, although the church community does not play a prominent role in the story. Another important part of the community is the village elder, an old man named Nattie who takes a liking to Ivan. Nattie is a proud man who was a member of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA when it existed. While being educated and worldly, he also acts as a link connecting the village to Jamaica’s past.

When Ivan’s grandmother dies, the boy, now a restless teenager, sets off for Kingston where all the action is. Nattie gives Ivan some advice about how to find meaning in life, but the transition is overshadowed by the Pocomania spirit possession ceremony at his grandmother’s funeral. The spirit that possesses its host foreshadows the events of Ivan’s life at the end of the novel.

This opening chapter is fascinating. It paints a vivid picture of life in the Jamaican countryside which the author romanticizes without over-emphasis. The village isn’t portrayed as utopian, but it is celebrated for its unique and satisfying qualities. It also gives the reader a chance to understand who Ivan is and where he is coming from. As his age progresses throughout the novel, his character is built layer by layer and a lot of those layers are rooted in his experiences during childhood. As a literary character, Ivan goes through changes while remaining the same person in his core. Given how his story ends, it is imperative that the reader feels sympathy for him from the start. Both the world-building and character building in this novel are top notch.

The next section finds Ivan riding a bus from his village to Kingston. This seems like a long and unnecessary diversion at first, but looking back, It functions effectively as part of the narrative and Thelwell’s portrayal of Jamaica. What this chapter does is draw attention to the relations between the people in the countryside and the capital city of Kingston. It shows how the bus passengers exist between two worlds, the two different sides of Jamaica, and how intertwined those two worlds actually are. It also builds up to the problems the naive country boy Ivan has when he arrives in Kingston.

Ivan has a rough time. After having his baggage stolen, he arrives at his mother’s single room apartment, finding her too poor to take him in. He fails to find work and ends up homeless and hungry before a church minister allows him to stay providing he work in the church’s repair shop. The shop is run by an ex-criminal named Longah who has only changed superficially since Preacha rescued him from the streets. Also staying in Preacha’s care is Elsa, a young oprhaned girl on the brink pf coming of age who Ivan falls in love with. This is where the novel really starts to take off.

The further course of Ivan’s life turns on two narrative hinges. One is his relationship with Elsa. The other is a bicycle. While working in the shop, Ivan fixes up and old bicycle frame. After being repaired, polished, and rebuilt, he takes Elsa out for a day of riding around Kingston and visiting the beach. The bicycle acts symbolically as a means of liberation. At least temporarily, Ivan is able to find happiness and relief from his poverty and disappointment. Of as much importance is the sense of achievement he gets from fixing up the bike and befriending Elsa.

But the liberation he finds through the bike is short lived. Preacha doesn’t approve of Ivan and Elsa’s friendship so he spends a whole night verbally abusing her and later kicks Ivan out of his premises. Longah later tells Ivan that Preacha intends to marry her when she gets old enough. But Longah also confesses that he plans to rape her. Later when Ivan returns to retrieve his bicycle, the only thing he has left, Longah refuses to let him take it. The two of them have a fight and Ivan stabs Longah which gets him into trouble with the law. His career as an outlaw has begun.

The narrative is layered so that all these events overlap. All the while, Ivan has been teaching himself to sing. When he gets an opportunity to record a single, he gets ripped off by Hilton, the bigshot businessman who controls the Jamaican music industry. Hilton prevents the record from being distributed to Kingston’s record stores, and forbids radio stations and dance club DJ’s to play the song. All this is simply because Hilton doesn’t like Ivan for being assertive. Hilton, the police, and Preacha are Baylon, the downpressers, as they would say in Jamaican English, the establishment that keeps people from moving up in society. Ivan is being pushed by these downpressers into a confrontation with Babylon.

When Ivan first arrives in Kingston and shacks up with Preacha, he becomes fascinated with the nearby movie theater. He spends his evenings watching American made Westerns, demonstrating how these films influence future generations of Jamaican gangsters. At the movies he makes friends with a gang in Trench Town. The kids in the gang aren’t so bad. Sometimes they get involved in petty crime or occasional street fights, but mostly they just hang out and smoke ganja.

Later, after Ivan gets arrested and sent away from Preacha’s shop, he turns to more serious gangsterism, getting involved in the ganja trade. He meets up with his mentor Jose who puts him to work. What we learn through Jose is that the Trench Town ganja dealers get protection from the police who not only benefit from payoffs of protection money, but also by keeping the illegal drug trade under control. There is a chain of command with the police at the top, Jose and other wholesale dealers in the middle, and street level pushers like Ivan at the bottom. As long as the chain of command is kept intact, nobody has any problems. Ivan, who is tired of being poor and unimportant, is concerned with finding freedom so you can see where this is leading.

Jose connects Ivan to Ras Pedro, sometimes alternatively called Peter, a Rastafarian ganja seller who has a sickly son with a medical condition named Man-I. The illness is treatable, but Ras Pedro often doesn’t make enough money for the food or medicine needed to keep his son healthy. Elsa leaves Preacha’s house and follows Ivan to Trench Town and moves in with Ras Pedro and Ivan. She becomes a mother to the boy and the four of them live communally like a family, surviving on the wages of ganja profits. Ras Pedro also acts as a conscience for Ivan, counseling him to avoid violence and stay out of trouble. When Ivan wants to buy guns, Ras Pedro tries to talk him out of it but leaves the decision to him.

Another big turning point comes when Ivan has become a successful ganja merchant, buys some flashy clothes and motorcycle, and drives back to the village where he grew up. Eager to show off how he has made it in the big city, he is disappointed to find out that almost everyone he knew is gone or dead. Even worse, the village has been turned into a resort town overrun with rich white people who have no interest in the real Jamaica. Therefore, Ivan has lost his roots and the anchor in tradition that has kept him stable through all the difficult times. Sullen, angry, and disappointed, he returns to Kingston ready to explode.

Wishing to rise in the ranks of the drug dealing underworld, Ivan proposes to Ras Pedro that they farm their own ganja crops and expand their trafficking business to America. But the downpresser police and military crush the plans. Everywhere Ivan goes, there are obstacles to his social mobility. He gets into a gunfight resulting in the death of a policeman and then he goes on a rampage. After another shootout, Ivan becomes a local folk hero and Hilton capitalizes on this by releasing his record which is soon heard everywhere. As Ivan becomes more desperate and violent, he becomes more famous.

The police are not happy about Ivan. Not only are they humiliated by his crime spree and escape, but they also fear that he will inspire others to resist the domination of Babylon. Kingston ghettos are a powder kegs of young people who are bored, frustrated, and angry, feeling as if they have no future. The Jamaican police don’t want an uprising or a crime explosion. Ironically that is exactly what happened to Jamaica in the 1970s even though those events are outside the scope of this novel. What the police do is cut off the ganja supply at the wholesale level and redirect it to America. The message gets out that there will be no more ganja in Jamaica until Ivan is brought in dead or alive. This wrecks the microeconomy of Trench Town. The ganja trade is so pivotal in the cash flow of the ghetto that people begin starving. Man-I is in need of medical attention and keeps getting sicker. Elsa and Ras Pedro know that Ivan has a bounty on his head so they do what they have to do with regret. In a way, the killing of Ivan is heroic. He has to die so that Man-I can live. The sun has to set so that it can rise again later.

Thelwell’s novel works so well because of its complexity. Ivan is written so well that we can see how the different layers of his persona interact with the different layers of Jamaican society and his situation. The same can be said for other characters in the story. He isn’t a bad person. He may be reckless and mischievous as a boy, but he has a sense of pride and justice. He also has ambition and the curiosity necessary for exploring the world. He doesn’t want to live a dull life like so many millions of other average people. Later in Kingston, he tries to make it as an honest man as can be seen in the story of the bicycle and his attempt at a career as a reggae singer. But everything he works for gets taken away for no good reason. Out of frustration, Ivan turns to crime as a means of liberation when he sees no other paths forward, You don’t have to be Jamaican or a gangster to relate to his feelings of frustration, disappointment, and containment. Through Ivan, Thelwell channels a universal theme of thwarted desires. Finally Ivan becomes a hero because he has the guts to do what others are afraid of. All this results from the society he lives in which is marked by complex layers of corruption and injustice. Those layers affecting him are tied to forces of the disfunctional establishment, international economics, and even colonial history itself.

The language used is also of interest. Thelwell uses Jamaican Patwa liberally throughout the text. This might slow some readers down at first and it is worth looking up some basic information about Jamaican English. It actually isn’t hard to understand once you get a handle on it. The language, in both its third person omniscient narrative and the first person dialogues, weaves in and out of Standard English and Patwa. This makes the reading challenging but not impossible. It does place a lot of demand on the reader to reorient how they apprehend and interpret English. It does affect the cadence and prosody of the language at both a micro and macro level. The descriptive prose is vivid and detailed too. It almost feels Victorian in its attention to detail and setting. The prose does move along at a slow pace, but it is a leisurely and steady pace. It is a lot like being in Jamaica where being in a hurry will get you nothing but stress and you have to adapt to the breezy way of life which is nothing like being in a big American city.

Finally something should be said about Thelwell’s portrayal of religion. The first contact between Ivan, outside the folk practices of Pocomania in the village, is with Preacha’s Pentecostal church. On the surface, Preacha appears to be doing some good by taking in homeless teenagers and rehabilitating Longah. But as we find out, the change in Longah is only superficial. Preacha is a problematic man too. His severe religious discipline doesn’t change Elsa or Ivan on a deep level either. Preacha isn’t necessarily a malevolent man, but his devotion to God and his sexual repression blind him to what is going on in front of his face. His intention of marrying the much younger Elsa when she gets old enough also indicates he is sexually and emotionally immature. This is not a favorable portrayal of the Christian church in Jamaica.

Also of interest is the presence of the Rastafarian counter culture religion that weaves in and out of the story. Ras Pedro is portrayed as a good-hearted man who wants peace and justice, all the while acting as a counselor of wisdom to Ivan in his rowdier days. And then there is the Rastafarian rally that Ivan attends one night on the outskirts of Trench Town. The Rastafarians march on downtown Kingston, using mystical ceremonial chants and prayers to exercise the evil out of Babylon. But instead the police come and beat them up. Thelwell apears to be saying that the Rastafarians are good people and possibly a force for positive change at the cultural level, but their practices are ineffective politically. With both the Rastafarians and the Pentecostals, Thelwell is saying that religion is not a solution to Jamaica’s problems. The sense of hopelessness with the two religious organizations increases the atmosphere of frustrated ambitions that permeate the Kingston ghettos and feed into Ivan’s desire for freedom through violence.

In a way it isn’t fair to compare the movie and book versions of The Harder They Come. The movie uses cinematic language to convey ideas in ways that the written word cannot. The novel also conveys ideas using the written word in ways that a film cannot. Michael Thelwell uses the film as an outline for the novel while filling in the backstories of its characters and presenting a broader view of Jamaican society. Both the film and the book are equally successful in different ways. The best thing to do is to indulge in both and see how they enhance one another. This is one film and book combination that can stay with you long after you finish them.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

 

Play It As It Lays

by Joan Didion

      There’s an old joke that goes, “How do you say ‘I love you’ in New York? Fuck you. How do you say ‘fuck you’ in California? I love you.” That’s the cultural climate in which Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays takes place. But while that cultural climate is important for the story, it isn’t the main point the author addresses.

Maria is one problem of a woman. She addresses the reader directly in the first person during the opening monologue. From that we learn about the novel’s two elemental metaphors: gambling and rattlesnakes. Maria approaches life as a game of chance. The gambler at the roulette wheel acts without agency over the ball; it just lands where it lands and the player has to accept the result whatever that may be. The gambler “plays it as it lays”. The other, more subtle metaphor is that life will bite you whether you like it or not. Rattlesnakes are hiding, biting anyone who is unlucky enough to cross their paths. But rattlesnakes don’t ordinarily attack people. They only bite when provoked so the best way to avoid getting bitten is to play it as it lays. Just avoid getting involved. Knowing this puts Maria into a permanent state of anxiety. After getting bit once, she is expecting another bite to come at some random time. One other detail we learn from Mariah’s opening monologue is that she doesn’t care at all about motivations or explanations. What happens happens and the reason behind it doesn’t matter. Everything is on the surface. Joan Didion, as a master of irony, uses Mariah’s monologue to explain what motivates the protagonist to approach life without the understanding of her own motivations.

Maria’s opening monologue is followed by two other monologues. One is that of her closest friend Helene. The other is that of her husband Carter. From these two we learn that neither of them understand Maria, but they both perceive her as mentally unstable. And although they are the two closest people in her life, both of them are emotionally distant and more like caretakers who put up with her out of a sense of duty more than from genuine interest. There are also subtle foreshadowings of the affair between Helene and Carter, as well as the death of Helene’s husband BZ, all of which culminate at the end of the story.

As a writing technique, the three separate introductory monologues function effectively in presenting three separate perspectives on Maria. This may sound too obvious to be worth mentioning, but what is unique about it is the way the novel shifts back to Maria in the first person throughout the rest of the book. Keeping this in mind, the reader follows Maria’s subjectivity through the lens of two other characters who see her from inaccurate perspectives she can not see herself. Considering that Didion’s style in this novel is called minimalist by some, the perception of depth and multi-dimensionalism in the narrative are heightened. This minimalist irony is taken a step further in that the people surrounding Maria in her life aren’t much more introspective than she is. They aren’t deep thinking. They aren’t analytical people. They just do what they do and when Maria doesn’t make sense to them, they leave her to herself and do soemthing else.

So who are these people? Carter is a film maker. Maria is his wife. They live in Los Angeles. Maria has starred in two movies, but mostly she doesn’t do much. In a haze of tranquilizers and alcohol, she lays by the pool or drives endlessly on the LA freeways in her corvette while listening to the radio. The main source of meaning in her otherwise pointless life is her daughter who lives in a home for mentally disabled children.

One movie Maria starred in was a short experimental film made by Carter. The whole film is close up shots of Maria going about her daily life. She is the only element of the film. The other movie she starred in was made by BZ, Helene’s husband who is also a film maker who sometimes delves into directing pornography. The latter movie stars Maria as the woman in a biker gangbang. BZ describes it as a movie where the female subject is nothing more than a prop since the gangbang is all about the bikers using her body to fulfill their homosexual desires for each other.

Both films are pivotal in understanding Maria because they negate her as a human being in two fundamentally opposing ways. Carter’s film is entirely about her surface, showing only how she appears and what she does with no examination of her subjective life. In the other film, her humanity is negated because, as BZ describes it, she disappears in a screen full of cocks. Inexplicably, Maria claims that BZ’s biker movie is her favorite because it is the one in which her character has the most agency. It is an ironic statement coming from a woman who convinces herself she is refusing to exercise agency in her own life. I say “convincing herself” because she actually does display agency all throughout the book.

Maria does exercise agency when she goes to visit her daughter unannounced at the home for disabled children. The caretaker at the home, however, berates her for not making an appointment because a spontaneous visit like that disrupts her routine and can upset the girl’s stability. Maria also chooses to take her daughter to a Christmas celebration at her ffriends’ mansion, but this results in disaster when her daughter becomes violent.

Maria also exercises agency when she takes trips to Las Vegas to escape from the miseries of life in Los Angeles. On one trip, she randomly encounters her godfather in a casino. The man gives her his phone number and post office box address so she can contact him later. On another trip back to Las Vegas, she tries calling him only to find out the number is invalid. She tries to contact him again by waiting at the post office for several days in hopes he will show up to retrieve his mail from his PO box. But after waiting, Maria learns that the box is rented, not by her godfather, but by an insane woman who doesn’t know him.

Another significant example of Maria exercising agency is when she gets pregnant while cheating on her husband. Carter gives her a choice between having an abortion or divorce. He qualifies the latter option by telling her that he will get custody over their daughter if she chooses to break up with him. Although Carter’s intention is manipulative, he does offer a choice. Since Maria’s daughter is the only thing she cares about in her life, she chooses the abortion. That procedure, illegal at the time of publication, proved to be psychologically traumatic for Maria. Here we see how a pattern in her life emerges: every time Maria tries to exert control over her circumstances, something rotten happens as a result. Every time the rattlesnake bites.

That is a pattern that explains why Maria is the way she is. She runs away from choices and responsibilities because every choice she makes damages her. She numbs the pain with drugs and alcohol in an attempt to erase her mind and emotions. She becomes anhedonic, unable to feel pain or pleasure, living the life of a lobotomy victim or a zombie. For her this is a defense mechanism against the entanglements of the world; for the others in her life, it is a sign of mental illness in a woman having a nervous breakdown. Probably both perspectives are accurate.

And yet another side of Maria is revealed when she visits the supermarket. In the store, she recognizes a crowd of other Southern Californian women whose lives are just as empty and pointless as hers. She recognizes them because they all pirchase the same grocery items. Therefore she consciously chooses to buy groceries that differ from them in an attempt to differentiate herself. It is a form of camouflage. She wants to conceal her similarities to the other lonely shoppers, but there is also a touch of pride in her cover as though she wants to individuate herself in some way. Since the other people in the store can’t see her motivations, if they even notice her at all, this can be little more than a private pleasure. No matter how trivial it is, it is still an attempt at clinging on to some sense of self-worth. Maria also takes a small turn in her rejections of casual sex in Las Vegas towards the end of the novel.

But any subtle changes in Maria are destined to go unnoticed by Helene, Carter, BZ or anybody else around her because they are inattentive to her feelings to begin with. Her husband and friends go out to a remote location in the desert of Nevada and drag her along with them because Carter worries she is losing her grip on reality. Once there, they leave her in the hotel room during the days when they are on a movie set filming a western. Maria mostly stays in a drugged stupor while staying in bed. She finds common ground with BZ who comes to her in despair because Helen and Carter are having an affair and not trying to hide it. Both BZ and Helene have hit rock bottom and BZ tries to convince Maria to overdose on pills with him. He dies in bed beside her but she lives because she refused to kill herself. Suicide would entail taking control over her situation so she does nothing. Ironically, playing it as it lays is what saves her in the end.

On one level, this novel is about the shallow lives of rich people in Hollywood working in the film industry. Maria is surrounded by friends and family acting out of self-interest and brute instinct without any awareness of what is going on with the people around them. Maria’s relationship to them is toxic and dysfunctional. It is through their ignorance that they negate her humanity, treating her like little more than an appendage. And yet they say they love her. Joan Didion’s opinion of the upper crust in California is made clear. On another level, this novel is a character study of a woman who doesn’t have much character whilE in the middle of an existential crisis. But Maria isn’t really on a downward spiral because she was at the bottom to begin with. That’s a shocking statement about somebody with wealth, privilege, and an endless amount of leisure time. She also tries to negate her own humanity by refusing to take control by avoiding choices and letting life happen to her. Despite that, her humanity keeps emerging. Her attempts at self-negation are deliberate, but what I think Joan Didion is demonstrating is that there is something about humanity that can’t be submerged, negated, or denied out of existence no matter how hard people may try. Maria attempts to delude herself into thinking she has no self-awareness or capacity to choose, and yet she keeps making choices in matters that reveal she does have some kind of self-knowledge, albeit self-knowledge that is partially hidden from her conscious mind.

Play It As It Lays could be a 1970s American echo of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, the novel I would argue is the most sadly misinterpreted book of the 20^th century. Maria is a lot like Mersault in that she lives the life of a nihilist. It is a life that lacks quality because, like Mersault, she avoids taking control and minimizes her willingness to make choices. Both characters live a pointless, empty existence. But just as so many readers misinterpret Mersault as being some kind of hero, I fear a lot of readers will misinterpret Maria as being a woman who is hopelessly lost in the world. It all depends on how conscientious you are in paying attention to subtle details. If you pay close enough attention, you will notice the abundance of times Joan Didion mentions rattlesnakes in this story. If you read quickly and don’t pay attention, you won’t. If you read carefully enough to be aware of all the rattlesnakes, you should be able to see all the subtle signs that Maria has more agency than you realize. In that there is humanity and in that there is hope. If you only see Maria through the eyes of Helene and Carter then you haven’t understood Joan Didion’s message. The less like them you are, the better off you will be in life anyhow.

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 & Interpretive Analysis: Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch

by William S. Burroughs

      The 1950s were a time of repression, or at least that’s what popular media would have you believe. Married couples on television shows had separate beds in those rare instances when bedrooms were allowed to be shown. When people got shot in the movies they didn’t bleed. Elvis Presley could only be shown on TV from the waist up. Interracial social relationships of any kind were forbidden while lynchings were common in the South. But they would never put that on the evening news. Politics were a taboo subject. Simply saying you disagreed with certain politicians could get you labeled a communist and your career could be ruined even if you weren’t actually a communist. Any discussions about sexuality of any sort were censored either by law or by choice. The use of narcotics was hidden from public view and Cold War era paranoia about the nuclear bomb was rampant and even encouraged by the government through the spread of propaganda.

But all this was going on fifty years after the publication of Ulysses. The ideas of Freud and Nietzsche were no longer new. People were aware that a chthonic, underground world existed and there was a whole lot more going on in America just beyond the surface of what was socially acceptible. But things were bubbling up to the surface. One of them was the Beat Generation, a new manifestation of the bohemian tradition in which poets and criminals listened to jazz, experimented with drugs and free love, and lived the life they wanted according to their own rules. Out of this counter culture came the gay, heroin addicted author William S. Burroughs, who may or may not have accidentally shot his wife in Mexico City, and his ground breaking novel Naked Lunch. The title says a lot because it is a work that reveals the hidden and the suppressed without restraint in all its naked glory. But glorious it isn’t, and in fact most would say it is a literary expression of all that is vile and repulsive.

Burroughs started out writing short pieces that were like bursts or explosions of verbiage depicting the underworld life he was familiar with. Some are like vignettes or prose poems. Sometimes they are almost like stories. But Burroughs couldn’t get his life together enough to put a whole novel together so Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin pieced some of these into a montage that came to be known as Naked Lunch.

The book begins with descriptions of heroin addiction and the lifestyle that accompanies it. The unpleasant tactile sensations and smells of filth, grime, slime, stickiness, and bodily fluids are ever present. Insects and other vermin are more numerous than people. The difference between people and vermin is hard to distinguish at times. Also the boundaries between the body and all the rotten mess is permeable and sometimes hard to identify. The reader is immediately plunged into a pool of sewage.

And as far as ugly creatures go, some of the ugliest are the Mugwumps. These are humanoid beings straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting that are half insect and half man. They secrete a substance that is addicting to some other creatures that suck it off their skin. This may be a metaphor for the relationship between the drug pusher and their buyers with a gay element thrown in. If that creepy image is what Burroughs meant to represent, you might say he isn’t comfortable with fitting into either category. The term “mugwump” by the way, refers to a constituent of voters in the 19^th century at the end of the Reconstruction era. They were disgusted with both the Democrats and Republicans and insisted on voting according to a candidates policies and moral character rather than partisan alliance. The word itself is derived from an Algonquin word meaning “superior man” or “boss”. It’s hard to tell if a political statement is intended here, but the concept of Mugwumps as a voting bloc would fit in with the passages later in the novel that satirize American political parties, none of which are made to sound appealing from Burroughs’ point of view.

As the passages take on more form, we are introduced to the recurring character of Dr. Benway, the sleazy surgeon who massages a patient’s heart with a toilet plunger while dropping cigarette ashes into the incision. He gives an unnamed narrator a tour through his hospital where he performs arbitrary operations of no medical value whatsoever. The tour ends with a visit to a locked ward where patients have been reduced to a vegetative state of idiocy because of Dr. Benway’s experiments with behavior control. The passage ends when inmates of a psychiatric ward break out, have a riot, and do all kinds of foul and disgusting things to each other and the people on the street. In another scenario, Dr. Benway does surgery on a stage in front of an audience as if he is a practitioner of the performing arts just as much as he is of the medical arts. The term “operating theater” actually goes back to the Renaissance when surgeries were performed for educational purposes in front of an audienc. But Dr. Benway’s arbitrary and pointless surgery is interrupted by what we might call a heckler with a scalpel.

Dr. Benway is the crux of a lot of Burroughs’ writings post-Naked Lunch. He is an agent of control whose medical practices serve two purposes. One is mind and behavior control, although he usually fails in this by either destroying his patients or unwittingly causing outbreaks of chaos. The other is art. Dr. Benway performs surgery for surgery’s sake the way artists creates art for art’s sake. He is amoral, unethical, has no interest in helping his patients and his surgeries make no sense from a rational point of view, but he does them because that’s all he can do. He doesn’t know how to do anything else. He is just an agent, an elementary force who acts out of inner necessity. You can say a lot of artists, especially in the modern era, do the same, channeling what they do, letting the artistic process guide their hands rather than creating with definite intention.

Dr. Benway makes a further appearance near the end of the book when he brings Carl Peterson, another recurring character in Burroughs’ works, into his office to run some tests designed to uncover any hidden traces of homosexuality in the ex-soldier. Carl struggles to repress any evidence of an affair he had with another man while in the military. Here again we have the element of control and chaos because Dr. Benway represents the attempted institutional control over sexual behavior while Carl Peterson’s sexual orientation is something outside the scope of psychiatric domination. For lovers of obscure literary references, the passage ends with Carl trying and failing to approach a green door; the term “green door” is a military terminology meaning “top secret” or “highly classified”. Carl wants to open the door and reveal his sexual secret but he is unable to because he is a rat caught in Dr. Benway’s maze. The theme of control through repression is on full display here.

On the other side of the control through repression theme is the continual outbreaks of sex and violence that permeate the novel. The riot resulting from patients’ escaping from Dr. Benway’s psychiatric hospital has already been mentioned, but other passages have things like “Hassan’s Rumpus Room”, where a surreal, unresrticted orgy takes place, and the film introduced by Slashtubitch is shown. (I’ve read this book several times and still have no idea who Slashtubitch is supposed to be. Hassan is possibly Hassan I Sabbah, another recurring character in later works) The film is pornographic and shows a love making scene between Mary and Johnny involving the use of the Steely Dan dildo. And yes, the rock band Steely Dan did lift their name from Naked Lunch. The film ends with Mary hanging Johnny who ejaculates when he dies. Burroughs is obsessed with this image since it appears ad nauseum in almost every book he ever wrote. Mary then eats his face reminscent of the way a female praying mantis eats the head of the male after sexual intercourse, something that also preoccupied the Surrealist pioneer Andre Breton. Here we have another recurring theme in Burroughs’ works, that of the female as a destructive force of control. His portrayal of women is unapologetically misogynist and his obsessive, hyper-masculine writings about guns and exotic weaponry can be interpreted as a defense against what he perceives to be the controlling instincts of women.

One other interesting chapter is that of “The Talking Asshole”. A man discovers that his asshole can talk. At first the novelty of this amuses people and he becomes famous, but then his asshole takes over his life and he turns into nothing more than a giant asshole that never shuts up. This is obviously a satire of people who “talk out their ass”, be they politicians, drunks, college students, or other varieties of know-it-alls who don’t know what they’re talking about. The internet is bursting with these types and in the days of Fox News and the Trump presidency, the Talking Asshole rings more true than ever. In the twisted mind of Burroughs, there is also an element of opiate addiction in this passage since the asshole starts out by being amusing and then grows so large it consumes the man’s entire life. Kind of like heroin addiction. What Burroughs is getting at is that talking, especially bullshitting, can be an addiction like anything else. This comes back to Dr. Benway who is characterized as a control addict with the commentary added that control serves no purpose other than control in the same way that heroin addiction serves no other purpose than addiction. Burroughs may be projecting his own problems onto the world, but when elements of his problems correspond to reality, it feels like a revelation.

On the surface, a lot of Naked Lunch appears to be little more than obscene drivel. It’s true that some parts are nothing but surreal imagery, nonsense, and literary diarrhea. By the way, this was written before Burroughs began using the cut up technique so anything that confuses you is done on purpose; it is meant to be disorienting. But then the passages about control are those that are most clearly written and those are surrounded by other passages of explosive violence and chaos. The explosive nature of those passages serves to illustrate the results of repression. Burroughs’ obsessions with guns, orgasms, orgies, defecation, dismemberment, hangings, and all other outbursts of violence can be seen as the repression of his homosexuality and drug addiction coming undone and bursting out into plain sight. The repressive nature of American society creates a pressure cooker leading to explosions of everything we aren’t supposed to see. The more American society tries to repress the underground cultures of sexual expression, drug use, and criminality, the more those cultures try to undo their repression and the result is the rise of counter cultures concerned with free expression of desires and artistic projects like the novel that is Naked Lunch.

This novel doesn’t represent Burroughs’ best writing. What makes it so great is that it introduces so many themes that pre-occupied him in his later years when he went in the direction of more science-fiction type books. It is also a lot more accessible than his later works, at least for the first time reader. Even if you don’t understand everything written or struggle to put it together as a whole, it still has a strong impact that will stay with you for years to come. Even after 70 years, the wild and untamed nature of this legendary book can still blow your hair back the other way. Burroughs’ ability to write great sentences that create imagery is first rate as well. The language he uses is like a mixture of surrealist poetry and bare bones, pulp crime novel directness. In fact, during the obscenity trial in which the government tried to censor and ban this book, one of the things that saved it was the lyrical use of vocabulary that sometimes captured snippets of haunting beauty.

Finally, I’d like to address a couple stray thoughts. The first is that of the racism depicted in the book. Some people have complained about it, but I feel they are misreading what Burroughs is saying. The racist comments are sick, but you have to consider the context and who is making them. They entirely come from the mouths of police, bureaucrats, rednecks, and other boorish kinds of people. If you understand the author, you know that he despises these kinds of people. Their offensive racist humor is depicted here as more shit and garbage flowing through the sewer world being portrayed. He isn’t celebrating the world he is writing about; he is showing us how terrible it all is.

The other stray thought is related to some obscure details regarding Burroughs’ wife Joan, the one he shot in Mexico City. In one paragraph, and without any context, Willy Jr. gets angry because the unnamed narrator eats his sugar skull on the Day Of the Dead. Then the narrator says that after he moved to Tangier, someone told him that his wife had died. Those in the know will recognize the reference to the unwanted son Burroughs had with his wife and his move, minus his wife, from Mexico to Tangier. Another subtle reference to Joan comes when Carl Peterson is in Dr. Benway’s office being accosted about his gay tendencies. Dr. Benway says that sometimes gay men get married and the result is...here Dr. Benway’s speech trails off with the implication that gay men who marry women sometimes murder their wives. It is fair to consider that William S. Burroughs is arguable one of the most autobiographical authors in history, something that becomes clear if you know his biography and understand how to decode his writings. But if this is so, why are there so few references to the killing of his wife as some critics have said? The answer is that they are there all over the place. He hides it in plain sight and if you understand how psychological displacement operates, you can see it more clearly.

Naked Lunch is an ancestral work that rides on the coattails of Freud and James Joyce. Freud said that being a member of society means suppressing the selfish desires of the individual where they get left to fester as the id, sometimes breaking into consciousness in the form of dreams. James Joyce in Ulysses used stream of consciousness writing to turn away from the public and go inwards to portray the inner workings and linguistic free associations of the human mind with no restrictions on what that might be including any bodily functions or disturbing thoughts. Naked Lunch is an expression of the id, the inner landscape, the unconscious, and everything we aren’t supposed to see in public. William S. Burroughs ingested elements of human society, disgested them in the inner workings of his mind, and then expressed them in the dream state of writing without holding anything back. It’s too easy to say it’s all a projection of his inner landscape onto the world because what he projects is a product of what he experienced in the world. He reminds us that vomit and feces started out as food. In this way, Naked Lunch is like shitting on a plate and serving it to you as a meal as to remind us of what we do that we wish to hide. Hell isn’t in some dimension we go to when we die. It is in the hidden recesses of our minds and all around us wherever we go and in whoever we meet. You are a part of it, like it or not.

 

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.