SOURCE: Oxenhandler, Neal. “Listening to Burroughs's Voice.” In William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989, edited by Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg, pp. 133-47. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981.

[In the following essay, Oxenhandler examines Burroughs's poetic voice.]

The artist's privilege is to liberate himself from his personal obsessions by incorporating them into the fabric of life, by blending them so thoroughly with other objects that we too are forced to become aware of them, so that he is no longer alone, shut up with his anguish in a horrible tête-à-tête.

—Claude-Edmonde Magny

The “grumus merdae” (heap of feces) left behind by criminals upon the scene of their misdeeds seems to have both these meanings: contumely, and a regressive expression of making amends.

—Sigmund Freud

William Burroughs's five major novels¹ overwhelm us with a chaos of metamorphosing shapes and forms which constantly destroy themselves and rise anew. The novels pulse and glow weirdly with hallucinating lights, they emit strange electronic hums and shrieks. The first impression is of a chaos in eruption, but slowly a sense of design emerges. Burroughs is a poet who knows something about language he can never forget, something about form that he can never eradicate. And he tries. He tries to wipe out order which appears in the chaos, tries to strangle his own voice. But there is something in the work itself which resists and defeats him. He cannot destroy the integrity of his work, even though he tries with maniac frenzy. He tries by disguising it as science fiction, as vaudeville, as travelogue; he forces us to wade through endless pages of gibberish where random accumulations of speech blend with dreams and fantasies that have the ring of authentic experience. Constantly, he tries to keep us from learning the truth which he simultaneously wants us to know.

Burroughs's claim to originality as a novelist rests on the technique known as the fold in or cut in:

Pages of text are cut and rearranged to form new combinations of word and image—In writing my last two novels, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, i have used an extension of the cut up method i call “the fold in method”—A page of text—my own or some one elses—is folded down the middle and placed on another page—The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other—The fold in method extends to writing the flash back used in films, enabling the writer to move backwards and forwards on his time track—For example i take page one and fold it into page one hundred—I insert the resulting composite as page ten—When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forwards in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one—The deja vu phenomena can so be produced to order—(This method is of course used in music where we are continually moved backwards and forward on the time track by repetition and rearrangement of musical themes—

In using the fold in method i edit delete and rearrange as in any other method of composition—I have frequently had the experience of writing some pages of straight narrative text which were then folded in with other pages and found that the fold ins were clearer and more comprehensible than the original texts—Perfectly clear narrative prose can be produced using the fold in method—Best results are usually obtained by placing pages dealing with similar subjects in juxtaposition—²

Burroughs never tells us why he uses the method, preferring to justify it by pointing out analogies with music and insisting that, after all, it doesn't make the work unintelligible. In this he is correct. Although the fold in method does throw irrelevances into the narrative stream, the fact that they return at regular intervals converts them into a kind of refrain. They become the steady bass chord (like an imbecile voice muttering inanities) that counterpoints the deeper rhythm.

Or rhythms. For there are many rhythms, many voices shouting, screaming, weeping, yearning, cursing, coughing in the junk-sick industrial dawn through Burroughs's polyphony. The reader listens as best he can, as long as he can bear it. Long enough at least to know that he is Burroughs's hypocrite lecteur, his semblable, his frère, that in this voice the dark side of our nature stands revealed. For Burroughs (who may not be a great social critic or satirist as some make him out to be) reports on the archetypal night of hell. It doesn't matter that this hell sometimes resembles “a kind of Midwestern, small-town, cracker-barrel, pratfall type of folklore, very much my own background”;³ it is still the real hell, the one Virgil, Dante, and Rimbaud visited.

This is not a personal world of tics or neurotic compulsions, it is more universal than that. Burroughs goes beyond the neurotic and individual to attain the universality of the madman's dream, the prophet's frenzy. There is a deep paradox in this, that in psychosis or delirium—a state in which the individual seems most cut off from others—there is often the expression of profoundly universal dreams, terrors, desires. And so, no matter how strange, Burroughs's voice speaks with a rhythm that we hear as familiar, as somehow déjà vu.

The fold in or splice in technique is an effort to destroy form (and despite the disclaimers it comes close to doing this in the later novels), but even more importantly, it is an effort to conceal. Burroughs, who seems to be telling us “everything” is the most secretive of persons. The ambivalence or bipolarity of his work first becomes apparent in the tension between the desire to hide and the desire to reveal. The fold in method hides, under an accompaniment of irrelevances, the dark truths that the other side of Burroughs wants to reveal.

Burroughs, for many years a drug addict, insists on the state of anomie and withdrawal produced by drugs. The addict in terminal state has need of no one and of nothing except junk: “I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. If a friend came to visit […] I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision […] and not caring when he walked out of it” (NL xli).⁴

If the addict withdraws from the external world, it is because he has no need of it, except as supplier of junk. Junk itself gives him everything he needs. Intoxication, according both to Burroughs and psychoanalytic authorities, becomes a sexual aim; the addict attains what Sandór Radó calls “pharmacotoxic orgasm.”⁵ Distinguished from genital orgasm, this is a state of “euphoria, stupefaction and exhilaration.” In this form of “metaeroticism” the need for the genital apparatus disappears. With the genital primacy demolished, the pregenital organizations come into their own. In other words, there is regression to infantile stages of development. The fantasies of violence and perversion which are the substance of Burroughs's novels have the arbitrary power of visions released from the id-world. A purely aesthetic account of them would be inadequate; and yet, at the same time, a psychocritique must be severely circumscribed.

First, it must be clear that any judgments I make about the novels will touch Burroughs, the man, only obliquely. The data is not clinical but literary—hence incomplete, deceptive, arranged. We can only guess at the genesis of the strange emotional configurations that repeat themselves from book to book. But we can, through a discussion of repetitive scenes and symbols, show how they connect with each other, setting up a pattern of reciprocal relations, with a specific emotional charge and certain human implications. To attempt more than this would be to minimize the complexity of human personality and to ignore the specificity of the literary work.

Burroughs's novels are like a movie screen on which flash repetitive images. These images compose a scene which is deeply sadomasochistic. The scene, characterized by magical role changes, in which now one character, now the other becomes the central figure, usually involves hanging with subsequent orgasm or anal intercourse, or both with variations. A complete reenactment of the scene can be read beginning on p. 96 of Naked Lunch.

The scene begins with “Johnny impaled on Mark's cock.” Mark is mocking and cool. Johnny reaches orgasm, here typically associated with vertigo and premonitions of death: “Johnny scream and whimper. … His face disintegrates as if melted from within. … Johnny scream like a mandrake, black out as his sperm spurt, slump against Mark's body an angel on the nod.”

The scene then changes to another room, like a gymnasium, in which we are going to witness some sexual acrobatics. “Johnny is led in, hands tied, between Mary and Mark.” Johnny sees a gallows which has been set up, and at the sight of it, reaches orgasm again. Now Mary and Mark push Johnny up to the gallows. Mary pulls Johnny off the gallows platform and has intercourse with him while he swings. The hanged boy reaches orgasm, Mark cuts him down, Mary then begins to cannibalize him: “She bites away Johnny's lips and nose and sucks out his eyes with a pop. … She tears off great hunks of cheek. … Now she lunches on his prick. …” At this point, Mark kicks her away from the corpse and attacks her. “He leaps on her, fucking her insanely … they roll from one end of the room to the other, pinwheel end-over-end and leap high in the air like great hooked fish.” Now it is Mary's turn to be hanged. While she struggles, Mark pulls her brutally to the gallows, executes her, entering her at the same time. “He sticks his cock up her and waltzes around the platform and off into space swinging in a great arc. … ‘Wheeeeee!’ he screams, turning into Johnny. Her neck snaps. A great fluid wave undulates through her body. Johnny drops to the floor and stands poised and alert like a young animal.”

Wilhelm Steckel, the great authority on sadomasochism, tells us that every sadist has a basic scene which is indefinitely repeated in his fantasy life. This scene reproduces, through displaced and disguised images, a period of the child's early existence when he experienced intense jealousy and hate. While some later writers on sadomasochism disagree, Steckel follows Freud in insisting that masochism is the obverse of sadism; that is, hostile feelings, originally directed against a person in the family environment, are introjected and turned back against the self. The basic scene may thus very well have both masochistic and sadistic components—this constant shift between the two neurotic solutions is, for Steckel, the chief source of the bipolarity typical of the sadist.

In these fantasies the Narrator may identify himself with the active or the passive figure in the fantasy, or with both.

Sadistic behavior originates both in the oral and the anal stages. In the oral stage, it is associated with the appearance of the milk teeth and aggression against the breast. In Burroughs's fiction we find a certain amount of orally-regressed imagery. Willy the Disk has a powerful sucking apparatus:

If the cops weren't there to restrain him […] he would suck the juice right out of every junky he ran down.

(NL 7)

The Sailor's face dissolved. His mouth undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the black fuzz, vibrating in supersonic peristalsis disappeared in a silent, pink explosion.

(NL 52)

The alternative to junk is alcohol:

At first I started drinking at five in the afternoon. After a week, I started drinking at eight in the morning, stayed drunk all day and all night, and woke up drunk the next morning.

(J 108)

Radó states that “the psychic manifestations of oral eroticism are always present in a marked form even in those cases of drugmania in which the drug is not taken by mouth at all. One received the impression that some mysterious bonds exist between the oral zone and intoxication. …”

Orality and sucking imply a mother who supplies breast or bottle. For the junkie this is the Connection. The Connection, however, is a mean refusing mother who always makes the baby wait:

Sometime you can see maybe fifty ratty-looking junkies squealing sick, running along behind a boy with a harmonica, and there is The Man on a cane seat throwing bread to the swans, a fat queen drag walking his Afghan hound through the East Fifties, an old wino pissing against an El post, a radical Jewish student giving out leaflets in Washington Square, a tree surgeon, an exterminator, an advertising fruit in Nedick's where he calls the counterman by his first name. The world network of junkies, tuned on a cord of rancid jissom, tying up in furnished rooms, shivering in the junk-sick morning.

(NL 6)

Since the refusing mother is unconsciously remembered, she can take any form but her own. In the following quote she appears as a man with strongly maternal characteristics:

So this man walks around in the places where he once exercised his obsolete and unthinkable trade. But he is unperturbed. His eyes are black with an insect's unthinking calm. He looks as if he nourished himself on honey and Levantine syrups that he sucks up through a proboscis […]. Perhaps he stores something in his body—a substance to prolong life—of which he is periodically milked by his masters. He is as specialized as an insect, for the performing of some inconceivably vile function.

(J 100)

Here, in the storing up of a vital substance which the junkie baby desperately needs, is a transparent identification with the mother. Burroughs may even speak of himself as a baby: “suddenly food needs of the kicking addict nursing his baby flesh” (NL 8).

But if the mother does feed her junkie baby, it may be poison. There are many references to junk cut with Saniflush: “Well, I guess one hand didn't know what the other was doing when I give him a jar of Saniflush by error …” (NL 173). Or food may be poisonous or repulsive: “The Clear Camel Piss Soup with boiled Earth Worms […] The After-Birth Suprême de Boeuf, cooked in drained crank case oil,” etc. (NL 149).

Images of orality are few in number compared with the abundance of images from the anal stage of libido development. It is here that the regression seems to stop and attain a degree of stabilization. Freud associated sadism with anal eroticism and traced it to the child's resentment at being forced to give up the symbolic penis represented by the fecal mass. The delight in excrement and repulsive objects and the celebration of aggressive acts of anal intercourse appear as the emotional core of the novels. The following quotation is a finger exercise in mixing repellent motifs:

“Stole an opium suppository out of my grandmother's ass.”

The hypochondriac lassoes the passer-by and administers a straightjacket and starts talking about his rotting septum: “An awful purulent discharge is subject to flow out … just wait till you see it.” […]

“Feel that suppurated swelling in my groin where I got the lymphogranulomas. … And now I want you to palpate my internal haemorrhoids.”

(NL 41)

A variety of causes for the anal fixation may be posited, but since we are not in a therapeutic situation, it is difficult to speak genetically. The child may identify with the mother and wish to be anally penetrated by the father; this is the “negative oedipus” complex. Or he may identify with the pre-oedipal infant who is penetrated by bottle or feces. Or there may be memories of enemas or whippings which are masochistically revived. All we can know here is that we are in the presence of a pronounced anal fixation.

References to anal intercourse are numerous, explicit, pornographic. Various personae for the Narrator are on the receiving end—Johnny, Johnny Yen, Bill Lee, etc. Since one participant is always a boy, the act is heavily laden with narcissism. The narcissism can be taken as corroboration for the view that this is a pre-oedipal scene: mother feeding baby. The passive partner is the baby, the active the mother.

Often these boys are inhuman and reptilian:

The green boy's penis, which was the same purple color as his gills, rose and vibrated into the heavy metal substance of the other—The two beings twisted free of human coordinates rectums merging in a rusty swamp smell—

(TTTE 7)

Whenever sexual contact occurs there is the suggestion of something repellant, poisonous, or viscous—so the green boy moves in swirls of poisonous vapor. The sex act produces images of messing or smearing:

Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. “Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for,” he says. “Some way he makes himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets wet all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax. … I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten cantaloupe.”

(NL 16)

This fascination with smearing or dirtying is commonly associated with anal-sadistic regression and expresses less the impulse to dirty the object than the autoplastic desire to play with excrement. There is an undeniable playfulness and enjoyment in the imagining of filthy messes with which Burroughs entertains us. The psychoanalytic belief that the literary production may be associated with feces, the first “production” of our chronological lives, seems less absurd when we read Burroughs. It is not only the pleasure with which he revels in “dirty” subjects, but the very method he has hit upon (of chopping things up and shifting them about) seems to represent an aimless stirring or messing or playing around, delighted in for its own sake. Why indeed resort to a method of production that so threatens coherence both of meaning and emotional effect, if it were not gratifying, more gratifying indeed than the mere writing of a story?

Sometimes the smearing may spread from the anal region to absorb the entire body:

When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten away by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it.

(J 112)

Several other elements typical of the anally-regressed individual are apparent. These are traits of what Erich Fromm calls the necrophilious individual who is fascinated with corpses, killing, and death.⁶ The scene in which Mary eats Johnny's face is only one of many examples. The necrophile is an anal type—he loves the dead mass of his own excrement which normally becomes repugnant and an object of shame. The necrophiles are cold, distant, remote—as are indeed the characters Burroughs creates. They are “driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things.” They are in addition “devotees of law and order.” There is, throughout the novels, a constant preoccupation with law and order, especially of an authoritarian kind. Mary McCarthy has stated that Burroughs is a moralist. But the competing authority systems in his novels—the Nova Mobsters, Islam Inc., the Liquefactionist Party, the Factualists, the Divisionists, etc.—have no ideological content. They represent the tightening and compressing impulse, typical of the anal-sadistic type; or they may be defenses against guilt feelings; or efforts to control the sadomasochistic drives. Certainly they have nothing to do with any recognizable system of ethics which depends on a stable notion of human nature and behavior. Punishment there is however, enough to revenge all the crimes of the Marquis de Sade.

The anal-sadistic dumbshow occupies center stage in the novels, but for this very reason, were we trying to understand the author of the novels, we would search for deeper, repressed meanings against which the anal-sadistic regression is a defense. But they are not clearly evident, and it would be presumptuous to claim to know what lies behind the horrendous scenes we witness. There are, however, a few clues pointing to what lies even deeper than the anal-sadistic regression and, using the viewpoint of Edmund Bergler as an analytic tool, it is possible to speculate on some of these secondary implications.

The explicit role played by women in Burroughs's fantasies is very small, although they often appear in disguise. The Connection is only the first of these disguises. One explicit appearance is of the chopping or castrating woman. There are many references to vaginal teeth or the castrating vaginal grip:

He was torn in two by a bull dike. Most terrific vaginal grip I ever experienced. She could cave in a lead pipe. It was one of her parlor tricks.

(NL 91)

The flippant tone masks a terror that goes back to an infantile misapprehension. “It takes a long time,” says Edmund Bergler, “before the young child perceives his mother as good, generous, and loving. Before this impression has been formed, the child builds up a ‘septet of baby fears’ in which the mother plays the role of a cruel witch. Fantastic as it may seem, the very young child considers himself the innocent victim of a wicked witch who is capable of starving, devouring, poisoning, and choking him, chopping him to pieces, and draining and castrating him.”⁷

I think it likely that the giant crabs and centipedes who loom up and attack male victims are images of the enveloping or choking mother. She seems to press upon the infant like “the monster crab with hot claws” (NL 29). There is a whole zoology of such creatures in the novels, who might well be the infantile mother.

The infantile response to the giantess of the nursery is, first, the masochistic takeover of the terrors inflicted by her, so that they seem to stem from the self rather than an outside force. Passive suffering now becomes active suffering, and the child is well on his way to the masochistic use of pain. The writer frees himself from the pre-oedipal mother by becoming his own mother and feeding himself with words. This is illustrated by Burroughs who invents images of poison, suffocation, absorption, etc. Maintaining the self-sufficiency of the womb state, and at the same time transmuting passive reception of pain into active enjoyment of it, he feeds himself (and us) with poison words:

The “Other Half” is the word. The “Other Half” is an organism. The presence of the “Other Half” a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. […] The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system.

(TTTE 49)

If for “Other Half” we read “mother” and for “word” we read “milk,” then this curiously archaic passage duplicates the pre-oedipal situation described above: the baby is attached to the poisoning mother and blames her for the damage (castration) to his body.

Explicit attacks on women represent a defense against the masochistic desire to submit and be overwhelmed by the infantile mother:

Mary the Lesbian Governess has slipped to the pub floor on a bloody kotex … A three-hundred-pound fag tramples her to death with pathetic whinnies. …

(NL 127)

Two male homosexuals “know happiness for the first time” when “Enters the powers of evil. …” a wealthy woman. Brad announces that “Dinner is Lucy Bradshinkel's cunt saignant cooked in kotex papillon. The boys eat happily looking into each other's eyes. Blood runs down their chins.”

(NL 129-30)

The traumatic discovery of early childhood, so important for the development of castration terror and the flight from women, is parodied in fag talk:

“Oh Gertie it's true. They've got a horrid gash instead of a thrilling thing.”

“I can't face it.”

“Enough to turn a body to stone.”

(NL 150)

These episodes mean: I don't really want to be overwhelmed by mother. Look how much I hate women! But, as in the typical homosexual pattern, the element of psychic masochism remains the fundamental psychic fact.

The earliest response to the giantess is aggression in the form of breast-biting; but there is little breast imagery in Burroughs. All interest in the breast has been transferred to the male organ (which gives “milk” and can be sucked). This accounts for the intense aggression directed at the penis:

Every night round about eight-thirty he goes over into that lot yonder and pulls himself off with steel wool. …

(NL 175)

Descent into penis flesh cut off by a group of them. […] The boy ejaculates blood over the flower floats.

(SM 115)

The penis canal was a jointed iron tube covered by sponge rubber—Pubic hairs of fine wire crackled with blue sparks—The dummy cocks rose in magnetic attraction of the wall symbols. […] The dummy that was precisely me penetrated him with a slow magnetic movement—Tingling blue fire shot through his genitals transfixed by the magnetic revolving wall symbols—The vibrator switched on as the other watched—idiot lust drinking his jissom from screen eyes—Sucking cones of color that dissolved his penis in orgasms of light—

(TTTE 76-77)

The third quote shows the connection between genitality and machines that appears throughout Burroughs's work. The machine adds an element of impersonal cruelty to the onanistic act. There are many other examples of cutting, chopping, breaking, or otherwise attacking the penis.

The role of masturbation is, not surprisingly, an important one. This happy event takes place in the Eden of childhood:

Wooden cubicles around a hot spring … rubble of ruined walls in a grove of cottonwoods … the benches worn smooth as metal by a million masturbating boys.

(NL 117)

… his plan called for cinerama film sequences featuring the Garden of Delights shows all kinds of masturbation and self-abuse young boys need it special its all electric and very technical you sit down anywhere some sex wheel sidles up your ass or clamps onto your spine centers and the electronic gallows will just kill you on a conveyor belt […]

(TTTE 3)

Or masturbation may appear in symbolic disguise. Here the hand is obviously referred to under the circumlocution “Sex Skin”:

[…] I remember this one patrol had been liberating a river town and picked up the Sex Skin habit. This Sex Skin is a critter found in rivers here wraps all around you like a second skin eats you slow and good.

(TTTE 4)

Masturbation, according to Freud, always has an incestuous as well as a masochistic component. Hence, it is accompanied by feelings of guilt and desire for punishment. One of the most unusual punishments devised in Burroughs's chamber of horrors is found in the passage where we see men changed into “penis urns”:

Carl walked a long row of living penis urns made from men whose penis has absorbed the body with vestigial arms and legs breathing through purple fungoid gills and dropping a slow metal excrement like melted solder […] a vast warehouse of living penis urns slowly transmuting to smooth red terra cotta.

(SM 112)

Obviously this is only poetic justice for the abuse of an organ—the organ takes over the functions of the entire body! This same form of punishment occurs in other passages, where it is the mouth that takes over, or even the anus. This seems to be a situation in which instinctual drives, related to one particular organ, emerge victorious from an internal conflict with the ego; this is a classic neurotic solution.

Perhaps now some pattern may be seen to emerge. First, I have insisted on the sadomasochistic flavor to many scenes. Suffering inflicted and received takes many forms, but seems to appear most often in the image of the hanged boy. In the sadomasochistic situation it is the explosion of affect that changes pain into pleasure. Hence, these death scenes are explosively written. The hanged boy's orgasm produces a spurt of pleasure that erases the element of pain. This intoxication of affect is a repetitive element in the novels. It produces a mixed reaction in the reader who reads about disagreeable incidents presented with relish and enjoyment; the same bafflement occurs when we encounter images of smearing and messing. The insistence on slimy, viscous, ectoplasmic contacts is a sign of anal regression dramatized more explicitly in scenes of anal intercourse. Most often enacted between two boys, this scene draws its emotional charge in part from the negative oedipus—the desire to be overwhelmed by the father. Yet since the protagonists are usually boys, it seems to insist on another, deeper component. This is a rehearsal of the nursing scene. The participants are nursing mother and nursed baby, penis being substituted for bottles and anus for mouth.

Finally, some clues suggest a mechanism described as “psychic masochism,” different from the sexual masochism that demands acts of physical violence. This complex arises from the infantile misapprehension about the mother who appears as the “giantess of the nursery.” Its identification is probably the most speculative or doubtful aspect of this analysis of Burroughs's works.

These various components form a field of emotional forces set up by the books' narrative flow, such as it is. Within this field there is a strong sense of polarization, a pulsing rhythm, a purposeful ambivalence which never relents and comes to be the central fact about Burroughs's novels.

We have already seen ambivalence in the duality of sadomasochism, a duality which resolves in the explosive fusion of affect which accompanies the sadomasochistic scene. Ambivalence also takes other forms in Burroughs's work. Early in Naked Lunch we meet a character whose physical shape is unstable or ambivalent:

The physical changes were slow at first, then jumped forward in black klunks, falling through his slack tissue, washing away the human lines. … In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps forward to snap with transparent teeth … but no organ is constant as regards either function or position … sex organs sprout anywhere. … rectums open, defecate and close … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments. …

(NL 9)

A more purposeful change takes place in the case of the man with the talking anus:

After a while the ass started talking on its own. […] Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. […] After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. […] So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneously—[…] except for the eyes you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eyes on the end of a stalk.

(NL 132-33)

This brilliant anecdote, which shows Burroughs's tremendous power of improvisation, actually illustrates the genetic development of the negative oedipus as defense against psychic masochism. There is, first, the struggle between the oral impulse and the anal impulse. The anal is seen as sadistic and searching for dominance which it eventually achieves. The face (the seat of orality) is sealed off by a wall of tissue, and finally “goes out,” i.e., masochistic attachment to the giantess of the nursery becomes completely unconscious. The domination of anal eroticism then seems complete. However, this domination is only apparent. The buried oral material retains its power and reappears in the forms shown.

Another form of ambivalence is the male-female dualism. The hermaphrodites, the men who become women and vice versa, are probably representations of the couple as witnessed by the child in the primal scene:

A penis rose out of the jock and dissolved in pink light back to a clitoris, balls retract into cunt with a fluid plop. Three times he did this to wild “Olés!” from the audience.

(SM 73)

The fact that the scene is being witnessed suggests the spying child of the primal scene. There are many other examples of characters who change their sex:

They say his prick didn't synchronize at all so he cut it off and made some kinda awful cunt between the two sides of him.

(SM 78)

The Commandante spread jelly over Carl's naked paralyzed body. The Commandante was molding a woman. Carl could feel his body draining into the woman mold. His genitals dissolving, tits swelling as the Commandante penetrated applying a few touches to face and hair—

(SM 109)

Here, the psychic mechanism seems clear: it is submission to the father image (the Commandante) which transforms him into a woman (identification with mother).

The psychological tension is exteriorized—he images a war between the sexes:

The war between the sexes split the planet into armed camps right down the middle line divides one thing from the other—[…]

(SM 157)

But the battle is really inside the divided child, torn between two psychic “strata”—the oral stratum, with its submission to the mother; the anal stratum, with its submission to the father. To this there can be no solution except maturity, a solution Burroughs does not seem to envisage.

All writers are exhibitionists of their fantasy experience, Burroughs more so than most. Even when he puts us on and invents polymorphously perverse scenes out of Krafft-Ebing, he is making complicated demands on us. The demand to reject and revile him, the demand to accept him. Once again we return to the inherent ambivalence of Burroughs's psychic experience; if we can focus our attention on it, it will become clear that this is the source for the pulsing rhythm of his prose and the strange flickering alternation of his vision.

Any appreciation of Burroughs has to answer the question: does he belong in a major literary tradition. I believe that the preceding analysis aligns Burroughs with novelists, such as Kafka and Beckett, whose major theme is ambivalence and indeterminacy. Like these writers Burroughs has created an aesthetic which permits him both to affirm and deny. His characters are simultaneously men and women, simultaneously masochistic and sadistic, simultaneously anal and oral, simultaneously dependent and autarchic, and so on. All psychic phenomena are overdetermined, that is, can never be traced to a single cause; and psychic mechanisms have a way of changing into their opposites, due to the censoring activity of the superego which forces them to assume disguises. The only kind of equilibrium to be found in the emotional world of such writers as Kafka, Beckett, and Burroughs is an equilibrium of alternation, in which emotional states constantly reform opposing patterns. Here the law of contradiction does not apply—an event may be itself yet not itself at the same time. Nothing can ever be affirmed once and for all; no stable emotion, no stable value can be established. The only law is that of flux, and flux is the essence of Burroughs's novelistic style.

Burroughs's use in his later novels of the fold in method contributes both to the indeterminacy of his work and to its basic two-cycle rhythm. Not only does it create a counterpoint or beat, but it produces junctures and discontinuities which are points at which the two-cycle rhythm can shift. Hence, a theme is always prevented from too-lengthy development by a break in continuity which carries the reader off on an opposite current. In this way the powerful ambivalencies of the work are maintained.

Burroughs's novels of ambivalence represent the first truly American contribution to this literature. But this is not all. Far more original than Albee, Burroughs is our only writer of the absurd. Some of his straw hat routines are as American as apple pie. In his wild meanderings across the world, the ubiquitous tourist stopping at American Express to change his traveler's checks into pounds or pesos or piastres so he can buy junk, Burroughs's picaresque hero is a wanderer more cynical and lost than Bellow's Hertzog or Augie March, and he sees deeper into the split psyche that has grown up in this country within sight of the suburban lawns and the progressive schools. Burroughs seems to absorb the environments through which he passes, and like some weird machine of his own invention, his voice modulates with a thousand accents and intonations, producing a style so much no-style that it is entirely his own.

No influence that has affected Burroughs seems to me as important as Rimbaud. Not just the Rimbaud who recounts for us his season in hell. Nor just the Rimbaud of the Illuminations whose brilliant discontinuous style Burroughs at his best sometimes attains to. I am thinking rather of the Narrator of “Bateau ivre” who, after his wild, hallucinating journey, suddenly grows tender and yearns for Europe and the contained world of childhood:

If I desire European waters, it's the puddle
Black and cold where toward the fragrant evening
A child crouches full of sadness and sets free
A paper boat that's frail as a butterfly in May.

There are many moments of such pathos in Burroughs too, moments when he remembers: “that stale summer dawn smell in the garage—vines twisting through steel—bare feet in dog's excrement” (SM 127). Or again: “One morning in April, I woke up a little sick. I lay there looking at shadows on the white plaster ceiling. I remembered a long time ago when I lay in bed beside my mother watching lights from the street move across the ceiling and down the walls. I felt the sharp nostalgia of train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves” (J 107). No more than he has been able to destroy the form of his novels has he been able to destroy that pathos, that tenderness which in an unexpected moment will flash back at us from the page. Instead, just as with Rimbaud, we know that the work grows out of that moment of childish reverie. The work has its genesis there, and even the most violent and aggressive outbursts have something childlike about them.

Like many American writers searching for greatness, Burroughs does not have the stature of Kafka and Beckett, those prototypical writers of the Absurd. There is some intellectual deficiency in his work; and he does not carry as do these two, counterweight to his negating vision, the sense of what the tradition of the West means. There are other crippling limitations. Beckett and Kafka are controlled artists but Burroughs cannot escape—or allow us to escape—from the obsessive monotony of his hallucinations. But a great artist must affirm not only man's bondage but his freedom. Burroughs, returning from the Night with blistered oedipal eyes, crustacean eyes, tender adolescent eyes spewing hate and mistrust, eyes of a sick junkie coughing in the industrial dawn, is unable to free himself from the horror of what he has seen. Conrad's Kurtz died with the words “The horror! The horror!” on his lips; but Conrad threw himself into the hostile element and with his hands and feet kept himself up. Burroughs, carried off on that same tide, turns and shouts over his shoulder the excuse for every unimaginable act ever committed—“Wouldn't you?”

Notes

1. Junkie (New York: Ace Books, 1953); the following published by Grove Press: Naked Lunch (1962); Nova Express (1964); The Soft Machine (1966); The Ticket That Exploded (1967).

2. New American Story (New York: Grove, 1965) 256-57.

3. William S. Burroughs, interview by Conrad Knickerbocker, Paris Review 36 (1965): 31.

4. Titles are abbreviated to initials throughout.

5. Sandór Radó, “The Psychic Effects of Intoxicants: an attempt to evolve a psychoanalytic theory of morbid cravings,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 7 (1926): 396-413.

6. Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man (New York: Harper, 1964) 40-41.

7. Edmund Bergler, M.D., Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York: Collier, 1956) 36.