Tuesday, November 19, 2013

William S. Burroughs


Wow, that was one bad book. 

I'm not sure whether I missed something here, but Naked Lunch struck me as almost entirely incoherent: here's a book that lacks even most the most basic narrative structure, even the most cursory attempt at character development.   

And I think what I disliked most about Burroughs's work is that is draws immediate comparisons (I guess) with Henry Miller's Tropics. But of course, those works are so much better, and far more transcendent. 

Don't get me wrong, there were moments when Burroughs constructs some hulking sentences - full of muscle and life: "An elderly gourmet with the insane bloodshot eyes of a mandrill is fashioning a hangman's knot with a red velvet curtain cord." That's good.

...But the rest was a daze. Nothing compared with Tropics, and nothing, I don't think, compared with Kerouac's Subterraneans, which is actually a pretty good book. Certainly my favorite among the Beat authors.

Burroughs does explain himself a bit toward the end of Naked Lunch when he argues that the writer can only express "what is in front of his senses"; he functions, in effect, as a "recording" instrument for what's around him. Burroughs has no particular concern for "story, plot, or continuity." Instead, he's a sponge for experience: but again, with no obligation to give that experience shape or definition. 

That is where I think Burroughs is wrong: authors can be as experimental as they like. But to endow their work with meaning, it must adhere to some semblance of form. And more: to some internal dialectic that builds on itself to the point of coherence. 

Burroughs's work does neither, and the result is a book with an interesting premise that fails to deliver on its lofty ambitions. It's a book that shows, in the end, how devastating, and complex, and bewildering, addiction must be. 


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