Ah Burroughs is here

In The Quietus, Darran Anderson on William Burroughs’ centenary.

William S. Burroughs was a high modernist and a writer of complete trash; the two are by no means mutually exclusive. He was a genius and a bullshit artist. If his books prove anything, it’s that profundity and inanity can skip along merrily arm in arm. Sometimes his work was heavyweight, sometimes dumb. To borrow a Freudian analogy, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar and sometimes a man who taught his asshole to talk really is just a man who taught his asshole how to talk (what it’s saying and why is a different story). The paradox of the freest writer being a lifelong junky is really no paradox at all. As a user and pedlar, he understood the mechanics of how it all worked and kindly pointed it out to us, even as he was picking our pockets. He was a stiff morose patrician figure in a suit (so much so his friend Herbert Huncke initially took him for an undercover agent) with books and a history full of debauchery and depravity. If there seems a contradiction there, it’s in the eye of the beholder. What makes Burroughs’ work seem prophetic is that he was perceptive enough to see that people don’t change, the secret to all successful prophecies. We’re still continually re-enacting Greek myths on a daily basis and always will. Psychosis may mirror the zeitgeist (whether it’s paranoia of witches, Jews, communists, drug fiends, Islamists or whoever next) but its essential character doesn’t alter. The bugs and the feds are always with us and there’s only so much one man can do, calling door to door with an extermination kit.

Perhaps that toad fashion will tire of Burroughs and the revisionists will come along. He’ll be called a degenerate, a misogynist, a phoney and a hack, as if being any of these things could exclude him from also being a great writer. His more esoteric interests will be taken at face value and ridiculed, whether his claim that language is an alien virus, the future can leak out from cut-ups, there are no such things as accidents or dying mobsters are capable of glossolalia. “In my writing” he claimed at the 1962 International Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh, “I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.” There are more interesting things than reason, whether they are true or not is an issue only for pedants. Terra Incognita is, after all, a fictional place and there is a poetry and freedom in exploring it, which is the essence of Burroughs’ work and where it might lead us. “Most of the trouble in the world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business” he reminds us in The Adding Machine, “because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. “Yet another world is possible. “Drunks slept right on the sidewalks of the main drag” he wrote in the introduction to Queer, “and no cops bothered them. It seemed to me that everyone in Mexico had mastered the art of minding his own business. If a man wanted to wear a monocle or carry a cane, he did not hesitate to do it, and no one gave him a second glance. Boys and young men walked down the street arm in arm and no one paid them any mind. It wasn’t that people didn’t care what others thought; it simply would not occur to a Mexican to expect criticism from a stranger, nor to criticize the behaviour of others.” The utopia of being left the fuck alone might be the only utopia we deserve.