William S. Burroughs :: Biography Biographies Essays

William S. Burroughs William Seward Burroughs died recently at the age of 83 in the quiet of Lawrence, Kansas. Probably no other major American author ever received such viciously damning praise upon his death. Whereas the at once ridiculed Ginsberg was eulogized as a major American bard, obit writers corresponding the natural York Times Richard Severo (someone enormously unacquainted with Burroughs work) could dismiss this oeuvre as druggy experimentation and Burroughs audience as merely adoring cultists. Other obit writers, hearing of cut techniques and randomness, seemed drawn to the cut and paste i flurrys of their PCs, with which they cobbled lit crit phrases into gibberish. Thus, for the Associated Press, Naked Lunch unleashed an subway world which defied narration and was somehow written without standard narrative prose. What does it learn about the hegemony of realistic modes, and publishers niches, that a book, frontmost published in genus Paris almost 40 years ago, still poses such a flagellum to establishment arbiters that it must be continuously misrepresented. The literary world, after all, is non likely to be flooded by Burroughs wannabes. Though he has influenced observational filmmakers, conceptual artists and rock bands, his influence on writers and literature is harder to find. He odd no school, few followers, no imitators. He was as unique as Joyce. But whereas countless writers all over the world attempted to structured Joycean techniques, few have picked up on Burroughs. Even back in the mid-60s, the task of mass marketing Burroughs necessitated pigeonholing his work within acquainted(predicate) genres. The only American novelist living today who might conceivably be possessed by genius, Norman Mailer proclaimed on the cover of the first American paperback edition of Naked Lunch. Its publisher, Grove Press, the most grave and most courageous publishing house of that time, knew what it had to do, and subsequent works li ke Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, and The Soft Machine were all pointedly labeled a novel. Yet Burroughs then and always was merely writing books. He was not necessarily trying to change or explode the form of the novel. In Burroughs books, routines, raps, skits and rants are held together by the sinews of sharply etched narrative prose. learning him when he first appeared was like listening to a Lenny Bruce monologue. The characters who appeared were all carny voices--barkers, pushers, con men seeking rubes and marks--politicians, presidents of anti-fluoride societies, script-writing old saw bones lecturing on the viral nature of bureaucracy and the State.