Wonder what he would think of the human centipede?
Must. Gouge. Out. Mindâs. Eye.
Thanks for this great consideration on how ideas can burrow in our brains.
I wonder why he missed the obvious explanation. Burroughs thought centipedes are horrible because theyâre horrible. This is no idee fixe, itâs just observation of the natural world. Have you ever seen those things?
Burroughsâs fiction is famously a genre unto itselfâa literary mash-up of âroutinesâ modeled on the wisecracking patter of petty criminals; Conradian accounts of colonial depravity; Kafkaesque visions of nightmare bureaucracies; block quotes from scientific literature, such as the lengthy excursus on centipede venom in The Western Lands; and, most obviously, genre gimcracks lifted from boysâ adventure tales and westerns and, above all, the hardboiled detective stories and pulp science fiction of the â20s and â30s: deadpan voiceovers, corrupt politicians, cops on the take, viruses from outer space, mutants, alien invaders.
You forgot to mention the thick vein of guilt that runs through everything he ever wrote. None of it makes any sense if the death of Joan Vollmer at his hands isnât taken into accountâŚhe never got over it, it informed everything he did, and the memory of it, the senseless why of it, hounded him until his death. Iâd even go so far as to say that if William S. Burroughs hadnât shot his wife in the head, today hardly anyone would know who he was.
Five days before his death, he wrote,
A centipede can be seen as a test upon which Love, like St, Francis used to make, would shatter
[âŚ]
Felicity, describing me to someone holding tickets I needed:
âWhen you see someone who looks like the saddest man in the world, thatâs him.â
How can a man who sees and feels be other than sad.
Everybody remembers the centipedes, the grey junkies, and the ectoplasmic viral freakshow. Hardly anyone remembers the saddest man in the world.
Unfortunately, that theory attracts the many species of qualia that nest in the damp crevices of theory of mindâŚ
The passage in question doesnât address authorial psychology; itâs an on-the-fly analysis of the formal aspects of Burroughsâs fictionâthe authorial voice, a synthesis, in Burroughsâs case, of the American vernacular, various American argots, and the narrative conventions and voiceover cliches of some quintessential American genres, with the odd nod to Graham Greene, among other Brits. I will say, though, that Iâm not entirely convinced by Burroughsâs Ugly Spirit Theory of Creative Exorcism. Itâs a little too self-serving. More to the point, too many of Burroughsâs themes and motifs are political, ideological, social-satirical; itâs hard to hear the echoes of that gunshot in Mexico City, all those years ago, in his Korzybski-ite theories of language, his ravings about Scientology, his fulminations about Control, his mordant takedowns of âBibleâ Briggs, FDRâs stacked Supreme Court, Reagan, Southern lynch mobs, bible-banging homophobes, and the like.
It probably has something to do with whatever hallucinations he had during withdrawl.
Certainly, if youâre gonna be all formal about it. >_> And thereâs a point beyond which authorial psychology is little more than a particularly fuzzy form of hermeneutics (a point Iâve already cheerfully sailed right past). However! My sense - as an addict and occasional wrangler of self-defined âdemonsâ - is that although the whole âI must write my way out!â shtick is just that, the intensity and recurrence of his various lifelong chemical derangements mark them as both wards against personal horror and fuel for the unique expression of his theories, ravings, fulminations and takedowns. The lack of a need for such heavy and continuous warding might well have reduced the availability of the fuel. So itâs not in the themes and motifs themselves that I hear the echoes, itâs in the peculiar fervor of their execution. Which is an admittedly personal interpretation, and perhaps too charitableâŚsometimes I think he was only a wretchedly depraved upper class narcissist, eternally slumming and on stage, other times, I think he might be all of that and something else. Hence the fascinationâŚ
Thatâs your high quality literary criticism right there, thank you!
Well said.
I completely agree. Of all Burroughsâ obsessions, the William Tell incident can be felt at times as an underlying drive for creation, not explicitly present or necessarily expressed in the final output.
And he was still thinking about it at the end of his life:
â âShoot the bitch and write a book! Thatâs what I did,â William
Burroughs suddenly shouted, standing up fast.â [âŚ] This improbable outburst
occurred before astonished visitor George Laughead Jr. in March 1997,
just a few months before Burroughs died. âDid he just say what I think?â
Laughead reports whispering in his account of the meeting. In reply James Grauerholz, Burroughsâ longtime friend and amanuensis, commented: âItâs so out of character.â
Or as he apparently put it in 1981:
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joanâs death, and to the realisation of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the ugly spirit, and manoeuvred me into a lifelong struggle in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.
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