Louis: I heard Burroughs speak at a rally in Grant Park, Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, after the first police violence broke out. He was brilliant and penetrating. See the issue of Esquire in late 68 on the convention for more from the old reptillian reprobate. Ethan Young At 09:09 AM 8/5/97 -0700, you wrote: >William S. Burroughs' death has been on my mind. Long before I was a >Marxist, I was a youthful member of the beat generation. In 1960 I read >Jack Kerouac's On the Road and a year or so later I read Burroughs' Naked >Lunch. These two works deepened my outsider identity. It was the 1960s >radicalization that transformed my outsider status into one of >revolutionary as I became conscious of the social and economic forces that >were arrayed against me and the working class. > >On the Road and Naked Lunch are two dialectically opposed works that add >up to a penetrating critique of the Eisenhower era. On the Road emphasized >the sunny, Whitmanesque, positive aspects of America where the open road, >truck-stops, jazz clubs and automats serve as proof of the wonders of this >country as long as you look in the right places. After reading On the Road >I dedicated myself to a search for these right places. > >Naked Lunch offered a completely different view of the world. It was a >cold-turkey nightmare of urban decay, sexual perdition and self-loathing. >When I read Naked Lunch I was attuned to the essential clarity of >Burroughs' vision. Yes, this also was America. From that moment on, I was >always sensitive to the Kerouac-esque and Burroughs-esque dual nature of >American society. What America certainly was not was the television lies >of "Leave it to Beaver" or "Life With Father." > >Burroughs' literary landscape was inhabited by grotesque mechanical >objects that took on a terrifying life of their own. Surgical instruments, >suppositories, diesel engines, radios, etc. were transformed into ghoulish >objects capable of torture and death. They grew arms and legs and stalked >about the miserable apartments that the Naked Lunch characters--such as >they were--inhabited. > >Oddly enough, there is a certain affinity between Naked Lunch and the >gothic novels of Stephen King. King's novels' central device is to take >inanimate objects and invest them with ghastly qualities, such as the >homicidal car Christine. Certainly one can imagine the influence of >Burroughs on King. As a English major at the University of Maine, he was >taught by instructors who consciously identified with the beat movement. >Occasionally you will see epigraphs to the chapters of his novels that are >drawn from this outsider literature. > >Burroughs' relationship to the left was non-existent. As the ultimate >misanthrope, it is difficult to imagine him speaking from the platform of >a peace rally like Allen Ginsburg. It is also impossible to imagine him as >a reactionary like Kerouac in his dying, alcoholic latter years. > >What Burroughs did articulate was a savage hatred for the destruction >industrial society wrought on the United States. There is a powerful video >that I saw once that simply consists of William S. Burroughs sitting on a >chair ruminating on Thanksgiving. It is a jeremiad against the destruction >of the Indians, buffaloes and forests in the name of Progress. The New >York Times obituary concludes in this vein: > >"To the end of his life, Mr. Burroughs remained pessimistic about the >future for mankind. In 'Ghost of a Chance,' he lamented the destruction of >rain forests and creatures and wrote: 'All going, to make way for more and >more devalued human stock, with less and less of the wild spark, the >priceless ingredient--energy into matter. A vast mudslide of soulless >sludge.'" > >Louis Proyect > > > > > > >
