Well, William Seward Influential Writer Commissioner of Sewers King Junkie Wife-Killer Teenboy Lover Cut-Up Master Finger Joint Amputator Shotgun Painter Beat Poet Etcetera Etcetera Burroughs may have been dead since 1997, but his fractured literary and general artistic legacy lives on and thrives like a demented opiate hothouse flower, as evidenced by the two books under discussion here, one by him and the other one about aspects of his work.

’The Yage Letters Redux' is a contemporary update of 'The Yage Letters,' a lesser-known Burroughs epistolary text (or pseudo-epistolary text - more on which in a moment) from 1963. It mostly takes the form of letters from Burroughs to his lover and literary cheerleader Allen Ginsberg when, after the death of his wife Joan in the notorious much-debated shooting accident, Burroughs takes off to South America on a fractured internal amnesiac quest in search of Yage (pronounced 'Ya-hey'), the supposed 'Final Fix' (a powerful draw for such a hardcore drug addict) used by brujos for prophetic effect. In the letters the Harvard-educated junkie-cum-ethnobotanist describes the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of the country, giving us a vivid, sweatsoaked travelogue of the place and the people and places he finds there.

'Redux' is edited by Oliver Harris, who edited an excellent book of letters by Burroughs from 1945-1959, and for anybody interested in El Hombre Invisible it's a fascinating, revolutionary version of a revelatory text that is definitely worth checking out. Containing 40 new pages of text, it encompasses pieces of writing from 1953-1960, including some by Ginsberg, the book has a very tangled, complex literary history (expertly unraveled by sui generis Burroughs scholar Harris in the introduction). Long presumed to have been genuine letters between the two men, the epistolary nature of the text turns out to be an elaborate literary construction by Burroughs (hoping for a book that could have been published as a companion piece to 'Junkie,' published by Ace Press), to try and sell piecemeal material. In retrospect it's easy enough to see this when it's pointed out. Take, for example, this for a description of a priest from a 'letter' from Burroughs dated January 30th:

“There was no mistaking the neurotic hostility in his eyes, the fear and hate of life. He sat there in his black uniform nakedly revealed as the advocate of death. A business man without the motivation of avarice, cancerous activity sterile and blighting. Fanaticism without fire or energy exuding a musty odor of spiritual decay. He looked sick and dirty - though I guess he was clean enough actually - with a suggestion of yellow teeth, unwashed underwear and psychosomatic liver trouble. I wonder what his sex life would be.”

That is far too studied and crafted a passage to merely be a passing comment on a person the writer met. And nobody but Burroughs would wonder what the sex life of so unappealing a character would be! And only he would write musings about music heard on his trip like “A phylogenetic nostalgia conveyed by this music - Atlantean?” because only he could believe that he could be nostalgic for music supposedly heard in Atlantis.

There are many examples in the text of upper class Burroughs being the ultimate rich 'Ugly American' abroad, and his condescension towards the South American natives he encounters is very obvious and sneering and supercilious, though becoming more ambivalent as his experience amongst them goes on and he becomes educated to their tardy ways. However. The text herein is divided into three sections: 'In Search of Yage' (1953), 'Seven Years Later' (1960) and 'Epilogue' (1963). Right at the end of the first section Burroughs takes Yage and experiences a complete literary and psychic overhaul. I was deeply surprised to encounter practically verbatim the 'The Market' section from 'Naked Lunch' here, written when Burroughs is under the influence of Yage and obviously inserted into the text for that seminal novel at a later date. It's an incredibly beautiful, strange, stunning piece of writing, visionary and exotic and unknown and unsurpassed (to my mind) and, in case you don't know what I'm talking about, I present here, in case you haven't seen it, one of my all-time favourite prose poetry passages in the English language, and one which has proved deeply inspirational to me in my own writings (the version here being slightly different to the one in 'Naked Lunch'):

“Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, cut antiobiotics, Tithonian longevity serum; black marketers of World War III, pitchmen selling remedies for radiation sickness, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit taken down in hebephrenic shorthand, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states; a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy; sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will; doctors skilled in treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human hosts, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit.

A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum. Larval entities waiting for a live one.”

I could go on and on about that passage, and others in 'Naked Lunch,' (notably 'Atrophied Preface: Wouldn't You' and the description of the Composite City, the latter of which is in here too; these few passages alone make buying this book worthwhile) one of my all-time favourite books, for hours, content and structure and imagery and obsessions laid down and on and on and on, but I won't, so don't worry. But knowing that that beautiful, damaged, disturbing sequence was from Burroughs's South American adventure, and not from Tangiers, as I had always assumed, was an eye-opener, as was the knowledge he wrote it under the influence of Yage and that this drug and writing forever changed his outlook and writing style. It certainly comes off as being visionary, otherworldly writing, Burroughs out of his head on drugs and communicating back to us from the dense dripping green rainbow-bird primeval evil eye jungles of South America what the grinning sweating knowing mentally flying brujos have been getting off on for centuries. Gorgeous stuff indeed, and language unlikely to be replicated again in such a dreary regimented age of non-experimentation and drug paranoia and fear of the Unknown. But at least we had mad old Mr. Burroughs there to document it for us.

Some of the other stuff in the book is not so hot, ie a couple of letters from Ginsberg where he writes of drug trip and manages to waffle tedious fractured semi-religious nothing-meaning white syllabic noise for page after page – “- but God knows I don't know who to turn to finally when the chips are down spiritually and I have to depend on my own Serpent-self's memory of merry visions of Blake - or depend on nothing and enter anew - but enter what? - Death? - and that that moment - vomiting still feeling like a Great lost serpent-Seraph vomiting in consciousness of the Transfiguration to come - with the Radiotelepathy sense of a Being whose presence I had not yet fully sensed -” and blah blah blah and on and on and on. There's a Burroughs cut-up passage here too, 'I am Dying, Meester?' and that's pretty pointless as well, ultimately. I never ever liked Ginsberg and all his religious psychobafflebabble, and the cut-up is, to me, a pointlessly alienating parlour trick. But I suppose it's all literary history and we would never have heard of Burroughs without Ginsberg, so I suppose it all balances itself out. Sort of.

Then again, if we had never heard of Burroughs, we would not have had to endure works like 'Retaking The Universe: William S Burroughs in The Age of Globalization' - and that might not necessarily have been a bad thing. This is a book of criticism on the theories (as opposed to literary criticism, talking about language and structure and whatnot) Burroughs presented in his work to supposedly combat control, the government, sterile society, anti-drugs hysteria, linear literature, etc etc etc.

Divided into three sections: 'Theoretical Depositions,' 'Writing, Sign, Instrument' and ‘Alternatives: Realities And Resistances', it includes essays by 16 (apparently) leading scholars on subjects like Burroughs and his connections to the Situationists, Alexander Trocchi, the Frankfurt School; the effect of having a typewriter as a go-between medium between him and the page; the grotesque and humour in his writing; cut-ups; the similarities between Burroughs and Aleister Crowley, amongst other things.

A couple of things come across very strongly when reading this book. The first, which need hardly be stated to anybody conversant with Burroughs's work, is that he was a super-intelligent man, and he synthesized several strands of cutting-edge-for-the-time capitalist-critical schools of advanced thoughts into his work, but not particularly intelligibly. He was definitely an interesting person and artist, but what comes across most strongly in this book is that he inspires some of the worst, most ludicrous polysyllabic waffle that any artist is ever likely to bring to the fore.

Because Burroughs is a highbrow writer (ie elitist; not many can understand him, ie most people couldn't care less) with a great deal of intelligence his serious critics tend to be the same. Thus we have 16 people you wouldn't want to meet at a party stuck in the same book expounding their, quite frankly, sometimes utterly ludicrous head-up-their-arse polysyllabic theories about the man's work and what it supposedly 'means' and says about life in a 'hyperreal, ultra-commodified society of control' (to quote the back of the book).

Look, it's like this. Here's a random quote from Allen Hibbard in the book's first chapter (talking about another writer): “As he puts it, '(t)he amodernist alternative to (post)modernism, briefly, shares the modernist and postmodernist suspicion of representational art and politics, but rejects both the constitutive asymmetries of modernist mythmongering and the postmodern abandonment of critique in the face of the progression of simulacra.” Have you ever read such utterly meaningless, worthless SHITE in all your life? That's not words as communication, it's esoteric syllabic grandstanding, of the kind evinced by both academics and lawyers; they speak this thick bullshit because it keeps them in a job because they are the only ones that can speak it.

But that doesn't mean it necessarily MEANS anything though
And don't tell me I don't understand
it because I understand it
only too well
believe you
me.
If you don't want to read a book full of the kind of language quoted above then avoid this one, trust me. I came to this book interested in expanding my knowledge of Burroughs and his wordwork, because of the effect it had on my own words and me. I came away from the book thinking one thing: thank fuck that's over and I will NEVER read another book of Burroughs criticism (of which there are many, and no doubt many more to come) OF ANY KIND again in my LIFE. And if this sounds unfair to the writers yes, well, I suppose it is - but it's also the truth, at least from my point of view.

And you know, my reaction to this book is a shame. I really hoped to learn something useful and interesting. And I did, but only very, very occasionally, having to wade through endless reams of massive words (everybody here is waving their intellect's cock size, even the women!) to get to them. The two most useful, interesting (to me at least) things I learned were that Gysin did not invent the cut-up method (that dubious 'honour' belonged to the Dadaists in 1920) and, much more importantly, that Burroughs was diagnosed as schizophrenic. John Vernon (saying that Burroughs mentions his schizophrenia in the introduction to 'Queer,' which I have not read) notes this deeply important fact in an otherwise-wanky chapter (ironic it should fall to a reprinted chapter from 1972 to provide one of the book's most interesting genuine insights), comparing some of Burroughs's writing to that of another anonymous schizophrenic, and the similarities are quite striking.

But that's the ultimate problem with Burroughs, and one I came to realize more and more as I read this book. The man has not left a straightline, linear legacy to be studied, because his head was ALL OVER THE PLACE, what with schizophrenia, hardcore drug abuse, misogyny, orgone boxes, Scientology, misanthropy, etc etc etc. Trying to analyse what a genius-cum-madman was trying to say in his work thus becomes a quixotic exercise in baseline nopoint futility, and any theories presented by critics of his work are pure Rorschach blot mirrors which say much more about the writer and their own personalities and beliefs than about anything that Burroughs may or may not have meant in his writings.

You can talk and talk and talk about the man until the cows come home, and personally I would do so to a degree, but ultimately not even HE knew what he was all about or going on about because he was so off the bloody planet half the time. Sometimes an asshole is just an asshole. Yes, he was clearly an extremely intelligent person. But he was also clearly a deeply disturbed and damaged one and one, to me, whose scribblings will remain forever a source of surreal mercurial Braille for the academics and critics and artwanks to run their procrustean vague vogue theories-du-jour through. Bottom line: he was fucking nuts and wrote some beautiful, interesting stuff - and a lot more crap, okay?

And I don't think we need to say anything more than that.

Message deceived and
misunderstood over
and out of my
mind so
Bye
Bye -

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.