Burroughs’s fiction is famously a genre unto itself—a literary mash-up of “routines” 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 boys’ adventure tales and westerns and, above all, the hardboiled detective stories and pulp science fiction of the ‘20s and ‘30s: 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 isn’t taken into account…he never got over it, it informed everything he did, and the memory of it, the senseless why of it, hounded him until his death. I’d even go so far as to say that if William S. Burroughs hadn’t 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
[…]
Felicity, describing me to someone holding tickets I needed:
‘When you see someone who looks like the saddest man in the world, that’s him.’
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.
