Monday night at the Central Library author Barry Miles plus I discussed the life plus work of William S. Burroughs, whose 100th birthday is on Wednesday. Burroughs, of course, was one of the great iconoclasts of 20th century literature: progenitor of the Beat generation, titular godfather of punk.
That he tended to eschew such labels (“You must learn to exist with no religion no country no allies,” he declared in his 1969 book “The Job.” “You must learn to live alone in silence”) only makes him more compelling: a writer who, for the bulk of his career, looked for ways to confound plus provoke.
I think of his groundbreaking novel “Naked Lunch,” which Burroughs described as “a blueprint, a How-To Book … How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall … Doors that only open in Silence … ‘Naked Lunch’ demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse … .”
“Naked Lunch” is a misunderstood masterpiece, a book we don’t so much read as submit to, like a series of psychic shocks. As Burroughs described it in a 1957 letter to Allen Ginsberg: “The MS. in present form does not hold together as a novel for the simple reason that it is not a novel. It is a number of connected — by theme — but separate short pieces.”
That letter is quoted in Miles’ new book, “Call Me Burroughs,” the first full biography in a quarter of a century plus the only one published since the author’s death, at 83, on Aug. 2, 1997.
Miles knew Burroughs for more than 30 years; he cataloged his archive plus wrote an earlier book about him, 1993’s “William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible.” In his view, the author’s legacy has to do with his belief in language as a control system, a set of precepts by which we are programmed, inculcated, into a particular relationship with, or take on, the world.