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Retaking the Universe: William S Burroughs in the Age of Globalization
Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh (Pluto, 2004)

Only disconnect
Review by Shaun de Waal

The presence of the word "globalization" in the title of this book is cause for some mild alarm. One is never sure precisely what is meant by "globalization" - which is perhaps part of its nature. That very definitional haziness, however, is a possible excuse for letting it mean a range of different things, which could be a good thing and could be a bad thing. Indeed, there are many moments in Retaking the Universe when it slides. Sometimes it means the "triumph" of capitalism, and thus a new global order of the simulacrum and/or the regime of hyperreality; the extension of consumer culture ever further over the world, in the context of a post-McLuhanite world of global communications and what Slavoj Zizek has called "the plague of fantasies". Sometimes it seems to be a new word for what Lacan called "the imaginary" (perhaps best referred to as "the political imaginary") or "ideology" in the Althusserian sense. Maybe "globalization" means all of these things. We seem to live at least part of the time, perhaps much of the time, in an Interzone of virtuality. Sometimes, indeed, Burroughs folds easily into the business of talking about "globalization" because the term can mean no more than what Burroughs himself would have referred to as "the Establishment". (That would have been in one of his more sober moments; his usual short-hand is Control.)

But perhaps a sliding signifier such as "globalization" is useful in teasing out what Burroughs was and is about; he himself is, in many ways, a great slider of signifiers - a cutter, in fact, of the "word lines" that give us syntax and thus meaning. He took a Stanley knife to texts ranging from James Joyce to the daily newspaper, and saw in this activity an assault on reality itself. At least one commentator (Oliver Harris) in Retaking the Universe has made the link between Burroughs's Stanley knife and the rudimentary box-cutters wielded by the hijackers of the American jets that were flown into New York's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Those do-it-yourself martyrs were also conducting their own assault on "reality" - the reality, presumably, of "globalization", meaning to them a vast evil speedily taking Control of the world, and to us something along the lines of what Frederic Jameson called "late capitalism". (Let's just call it American imperialism, shall we?) Late capitalism seems not so late after all, not even moribund: it seems to have been able to transform itself, to find - as Burroughs might see it - new ways of inhabiting other hosts, hosts that are mutating, as they are colonised by and become symbiotic with the virus-like organism of capitalism and/or global control, into something else. You can even find Richard Dawkins and "memes" in this.

It is good, at any rate, to see Burroughs being read and being used to read the world. When I was first at university nearly twenty years ago (as I have had occasion to mention elsewhere),¹ I was practically forbidden to write an honours dissertation on Burroughs. He had not yet "settled into the canon", was "insufficiently literary". Since then, the critical literature on Burroughs has grown immensely; Retaking the Universe is simply the latest and, it would appear, one of the best to take him on, to put the Burroughs virus in the laboratory, introduce it to other viruses and see what happens. It's one of the best within its remit, that is - Retaking the Universe is largely silent on sexuality in Burroughs, the area explored by Jamie Burroughs in the recent Queer Burroughs. That book is mentioned approvingly by a couple of the writers here, aligning it with "queer theory", though it is in fact a relatively conservative and unqueer reading of Burroughs. Russell contributes to this volume an essay on Burroughs's film work, where he is on more solid ground.

By 1986, when I wanted to write on Burroughs, he was in the triumphant resurgence of his career. But for that resurgence, we might have forgotten him; he reached his first peak, after all, as long ago as 1959, with the publication of Naked Lunch. He (and his collaborators - there were always collaborators) parlayed that notoriety into a couple of decades' worth of publication, though always Burroughs remained marginal, the perennial outlaw. The heroin addict, the wife-killer, the author at schoolgoing age of "The Autobiography of a Wolf". In the mid-1980s, the now-aged Burroughs (with the help of his then lover and secretary, James Grauerholz), was given a new lease on fame. He was a long way from his most radical eras, but still "out there", and the cult began to solidify into myth - and then go global. Specifically, his books were picked up by a major mainstream publisher. Photographs old and new, and appearances in movies such as Drugstore Cowboy (the title alone could be a Burroughs work), helped the myth-virus mutate and grow: he allowed his image to stand for some ideational complex we could call Burroughs and oeuvre, or at least to provide a (stunningly apposite) visual correlative for the persona(e) that emerge from, and that speak, his fiction. My romance with him had begun (in the early 1980s) because he was mentioned by people such as David Bowie, who tried producing song lyrics via cut-up, and because his notorious books were banned in South Africa - though, oddly, several tatty old paperbacks were to be found in second-hand shops in places like Hillbrow; that's where I got Naked Lunch, Exterminator, and others. The Wild Boys was in Wits's WartenWeiler Library (in hardcover), but it was not in fact deeply surprising that the Wits English department of 1986 didn't think Burroughs a good subject for an academic dissertation.

So he had little standing in academe then; we were probably ten years behind the United States in that. Yet other fiction-writers were always interested in Burroughs, going right back to his vital associations with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; the former is in ways Burroughs's primary collaborator and mentor. In the 1980s and 1990s, fellow fiction-writers such as JG Ballard, Martin Amis and Will Self met the icon and made their pronouncements on him and his work. For Self, appropriately, Burroughs's project was to voyage into the unconscious and bring back specimens for our examination. For Ballard, he was the iconic "hombre invisible", the visionary trailing a murderous mythology of his own. But there are many Burroughses; he is also the "hombre divisible". Amis, for instance, has little interest in the Ballardian visionary Burroughs and takes a hard literary line on the fiction. As a writer, Amis says, "Burroughs has vacated the control tower, if indeed he ever went up there." In this reaction to Burroughs's haphazard method of composition from the late 1950s on, Amis raises the question of what used to be called "intentionality". This question is largely left in a state of suspension in Retaking the Universe, though as it hovers there it helps make a distinction between two types of Burroughs criticism: for his form (Amis) or for his content (Ballard). But what is Burroughs's "content"?

The radical implication of the cut-up (or fold-in, or grid, or whichever) method is the withdrawal of traditional writerly intentionality - the writer is not crafting and controlling his material, but simply appropriating it from elsewhere, applying disarticulating or splintering procedures to it, then reassembling pieces in a haphazard way. Meaning, a new kind of meaning, thus comes into being in random(ish) ways. As one writer in Retaking the Universe says , only partly correctly, authorial authority is being suspended. The form itself gives rise to another kind of displaced authority, and the link to the prophet Burroughs is immediate: Burroughs himself (along with his collaborator Brion Gysin, who was into all sorts of occult procedures) declares that when you "Displace linguals - Cut word lines" you not only free yourself of the control of the parasitic virus that is language, but you allow the words themselves to speak, as it were from their own subconscious - to send you messages from some space between or beyond their existence as words, perhaps from the very cut you have made, semi-arbitrarily, in the received text. Contra EM Forster's dictum "Only connect", Burroughs seems at this point to have taken as his motto the opposite -- "Only disconnect".

The Amis view just can't take this seriously as a literary endeavour. The whole Control obsession can be dismissed as an extrapolation of drug paranoia. Yes, there's the echo of what the Dadaists and Surrealists did - a conscious link on Burroughs's part, as Jon Longhi's essay makes clear, while John Vernon brilliantly shows how fruitful the method was for Burroughs. But cutting up texts at random and expecting the results to be pleasing or meaningful in a big-message way is not what Amis thinks of as writing. (In fact, he is echoing Gore Vidal, who much earlier had called Burroughs's style "cretinous".) And, indeed, it has to be said that the pleasure of reading Burroughs is not, or not very often, that of the mot juste, the well-turned sentence, or the achieved architecture of the modern novel. Cut-up works such as Nova Express can be unintelligible for page after page. Whether one persists and finds the nuggets that make an almost otherworldly kind of sense is probably a function of how old or young one is. Of course, not all Burroughs is cut-up jumble; much of it is reasonably understandable if you accept it as a fairly chaotic, multi-layered and fragmented narrative. He can be easier to read (and understand) than, say, the hyper-intentional James Joyce. Oliver Harris ("Cutting up Politics") shows how the initial method worked best for short poem-like texts such as those contained in Minutes to Go, while it was simply not adaptable in a thoroughgoing way to novels such as The Soft Machine, where the initial cut-up material underwent substantial revision, turning it into a (slightly) more conventional narrative. Later in his career, Burroughs abandoned formal cut-up methods and simply allowed his texts to accrete in a shambolic sort of way. In the end, the cut-up idea dovetailed with a looser, montage-based fictional practice.

But the first purpose of the cut-ups was not primarily literary, insofar as Burroughs would see any difference between literary and "real"; at any rate they are, as Harris notes, more fun for the putative writer to do than for the reader to read. So a different kind of intention is at play; not the Amisian shaper of language into graceful and expressive forms, but Burroughs the "prophet". The cut-up project is magical, in the strict sense (and Ron Roberts's essay here reads Burroughs and Aleister Crowley together, very interestingly). With the cut-ups, as Harris and others show, Burroughs's actions are simply the ritual that allows the oracle to speak - the oracle is elsewhere, in the empty space made by Burroughs's (or Gysin's or Corso's or Beilies's or any of the other collaborators') slice. It is clear that for Burroughs himself, guided it seems by Gysin, there was a clear and simple magical act being performed. This thread runs all the way through Burroughs's work, up to the late paintings or art objects (the primary tool being the shotgun): in the present volume, Dennis McDaniel ("New World Ordure") refers to a Burroughs's artwork called The Curse of Bast, featuring Nancy Reagan. The title invoking the ancient Egyptian cat-goddess (and we know how mystic Burroughs felt about cats) could come from the Book of the Dead, which is filled with spells. Burroughs has commented, in another context, that the danger of placing a curse on someone is that it can easily boomerang; in the case of the then First Lady and figurehead of the "war on drugs" (now what does that echo?), he apparently deemed the risk worth taking. McDaniel doesn't say, but it seems unlikely that Burroughs would have taken the time to paint an actual portrait of Nancy Reagan; he presumably stuck a picture of her on to one of his possibly already painted boards and blasted a gaping hole in it with his shotgun.

Here is the Burroughs who believed in magic in some way. He certainly had a lot of weird beliefs or ideas; but then, as JM Coetzee noted in Elizabeth Costello, maybe beliefs are just the motors of our ideas. Burroughs put out all sorts of odd stuff about aliens, Scientology, orgone machines, viruses, and so forth - how much is science-fiction hocuspocus and how much is a rational proposal? Burroughs's "ideas" used to be dismissed as put-ons, but most of the essays in Retaking the Universe treat them as metaphors for "globalization" in one of the many forms the concept can take. Burroughs's thought can be shown to echo the Frankfurt School (Walsh), the French Situationists (Murphy), Michel Foucault's notion of how power works (Morelyle), and so on. Burroughs was obviously a man of his time. And clearly the Burroughs virus is only too capable of melding and mutating with other word-viruses; he no longer seems such an outsider, but increasingly central, or at least widely infective. The co-mapping of the Burroughs and other viruses is done, here, in sober but always readable and informative academic style, except for two pieces, each of which functions as an investigation of Burroughsian ideas as well as a sort of pastiche or epigone. The essay "Lemurian Time War", credited to the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit or Ccru, produces not an essay but a report based on testimony given by a shadowy character on Burroughs's involvement in the "Lemurian Wars", which have to do with alien interaction with humans and human (and lemur) history. Just as you can't be quite sure how serious Burroughs is about any of his utterances at any particular time, you can't be sure what is fictional and what isn't in the Ccru piece. It's hard to know which plane of reality we're on; but then part of Burroughs's persistent ideas was that it was Reality itself that was up for grabs.

This is what makes him seem the seer of postmodernism. Like so many of the roughly contemporaneous French post-structuralists (and we need an essay examining how much concrete influence they had on Burroughs, or he on them), Burroughs is obsessed with the relationship of language and reality, the degree to which they are separate things at all. (Between them is only the gap in the cut-up page?) Much in Burroughs directly echoes, though in his unique voice or via his personal metaphor repertoire, ideas in Lacan or Derrida, Lyotard or Baudrillard. This is to read Burroughs as Ballard does, for his "content" - as an ideas man. Few of the pieces here deal in any detail with Burroughs the writer of fiction, Burroughs the storyteller. Maybe that's been "done", but it's weird to find him treated predominantly, over a whole book, as a gnomic philosopher - while the imaginative context of his "philosophies" is all but ignored. It's the other way round to how he used to be read, but it's also as though his narratives were just vehicles for his ideas, or transparent media through which his thought is apparent. Obviously, doing this makes it more possible to co-map or intercut Burroughs and "globalization", but (for all the brilliance of the results), it does do the old madman something of a disservice. In a bizarre way, it makes him more consumable.

Footnotes:

^1.Shaun de Waal: 'A bit out of line: William Burroughs and the queer reading the queer' (in Queer Readings, Queer Writings; MA thesis in progress) References: Martin Amis, The Moronic Inferno (Penguin, 1986) JG Ballard, A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (Flamingo, 1997) Will Self, Junk Mail (1995)