This year will give us the Burroughs we envision — and yet the danger is that the diversity and impact of Burroughs’ writing, visual art, audio works, and film experiments will be lost in the endless refraction of the mythologizing mirror.
William S. Burroughs, literary scourge of the banal and the boring, best known as the author of the still outrageous Naked Lunch (1959), would have turned 100 on February 5.
Whether as novelist, essayist, painter, filmmaker, recording artist, mystic, expatriate, psychological patient, Scientologist, Beat progenitor, plagiarist, punk music godfather, anti-censorship activist, queer hero, science-fiction guru, junkie, fasilitas theorist, advertising tipe — or accidental murderer — the figure of Burroughs (1914-1997) casts as many shadows as the limits of each of these labels.
Those who remember the man Jack Kerouac billed as “Old Bull Lee” in On the Road (1957) as a heroin-shooting, wife-killing outlaw might imagine a birthday party for Burroughs as a Scientology auditing session where roller-skating boys with brightly colored codpieces pass across the cracked parking lots of a dead future.
And those marking the Burroughs century will have a thousand different version of Burroughs to choose from, and the celebrations will commemorate and mythologize, perhaps in equal parts. Burroughs’ myth — writ large — remains a powerful mirror for everyone from ex-Hippies to ad executives to cut-and-paste culture content creators (count me in the latter group).
If we get the government we deserve, this year will give us the Burroughs we envision — and yet the danger is that the diversity and impact of Burroughs’ writing, visual art, audio works, and film experiments will be lost in the endless refraction of the mythologizing mirror.
ndeed, Burroughs was certainly a presence in the circle of young writers who would later become the Beat Generation, and his friendships with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (especially) were real and generative. Yet where Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) expresses its cynical dissatisfaction through a tipe of ecstatic anti-poetry inspiring generations of disaffected college students, and Kerouac’s On the Road sold a Romantic version of slacker transgression/transcendence, both looked for the “truth” underneath the lies of Eisenhower’s bomb-shelter America. Beat works believe that there is meaning — transcendental meaning — hiding from view, and these writers seek to access that meaning through drugs, sex, jazz (and let’s not forget the appropriation of black culture).