William S. Burroughs :: Biography Biographies Essays

William S. Burroughs      Ã‚  Ã‚   William Seward Burroughs died recently at the age of 83 in the quiet of Lawrence, Kansas. Probably no other major American writer ever received such viciously damning "praise" upon his death. Whereas the once ridiculed Ginsberg was eulogized as a major American bard, obit writers like the New 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-up techniques and randomness, seemed drawn to the cut and paste icons of their PCs, with which they cobbled lit crit phrases into gibberish. Thus, for the Associated Press, Naked Lunch "unleashed an underground world which defied narration" and was somehow written "without standard narrative prose."      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   What does it say about the hegemony of realistic modes, and publishers' niches, that a book, first published in Paris almost 40 years ago, still poses such a threat to establishment arbiters that it must be continuously misrepresented. The literary world, after all, is not likely to be flooded by Burroughs wannabes. Though he has influenced experimental filmmakers, conceptual artists and rock bands, his influence on writers and literature is harder to find. He left no school, few followers, no imitators. He was as unique as Joyce. But whereas countless writers all over the world attempted to incorporate Joycean techniques, few have picked up on Burroughs'.      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Even back in the mid-60s, the task of mass marketing Burroughs necessitated pigeonholing his work within familiar 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 important and most courageous publishing house of that time, knew what it had to do, and subsequent works like 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. Reading 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.