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. plausibly no other major American writer ever authorized 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(predicate) with Burroughs work) could dismiss this oeuvre as druggy experimentation and Burroughs audience as exclusively adoring cultists. Other obit writers, hearing of sleep unitedly-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 chronicle and was somehow written without standard narrative prose. What does it say about the hegemony of graphic modes, and publishers niches, that a book, rootage published in Paris almost 40 years ago, still poses such a threat to establishment arbiters that it mustiness 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 pit bands, his influence on writers and literature is harder to find. He left no school, a few(prenominal) followers, no imitators. He was as unique as Joyce. But whereas unfathomable writers all over the world attempted to incorporate Joycean techniques, few keep up picked up on Burroughs. Even back in the mid-60s, the task of down 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 paperbacked edition of Naked Lunch. Its publisher, Grove Press, the most important and most mettlesome publishing house of that time, knew what it had to do, a nd subsequent works like Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, and The tardily Machine were all pointedly labeled a novel. Yet Burroughs thusly and always was merely writing books. He was not necessarily act 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 quest rubes and marks--politicians, presidents of anti-fluoride societies, script-writing old saw bones lecturing on the viral reputation of bureaucracy and the State.