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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Radek Gregor Posthuman and Death in William S. Burroughs' Last Trilogy Bachelor's Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D. 2020 / declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. Author's signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor Stephen Paul Hardy Ph.D., for his patience and encouragement. I would also like to thank my parents for being endlessly supportive. Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. Burroughs' Writing Techniques and Style 3 2. Burroughs and Posthuman 14 3. Death, Sex and Immortality 31 4. Conclusion 36 Works Cited 37 5. Summary 39 6. Resume 40 Introduction William S. Burroughs was a writer well-known for his unusual and experimental concepts of writing and (de)constructing texts by incorporating cut up methods. Those methods were basically aleatoric literary techniques. In his novels, such as Naked Lunch or The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs deals with various ways of mind control by incorporating the cut-up methods where text is cut and then rearranged and edited. His most complex and accomplished work is the latest trilogy of novels, sometimes called The Red Night Trilogy. In contrast to his earlier works, the last trilogy is not wholly based on the cut up technique, which means that it contains more or less complex narratives. In The Red Night Trilogy, Burroughs examines the potential of the human body as well as its crucial limitations. He also criticises modern society and often exhibits nostalgia for times before industrial revolution arguing that it made human beings chase after quantity instead of quality. Characters in the trilogy are often strong individuals with specific morals and subversive plans to completely change society. Those plans include psychical and biological changes and enhancements of human experience and existence. Such experiments should eventually result in transformation, so that it would in the end be possible to exist in space without the limitations of traditional corporeal form or even completely without the body. The narrative of the books is often interrupted by Burroughs speaking. Using a specific and almost scientific language, he proposes ideas concerning human conscious experience, limitations of human body and he also mentions the limitations of the modern society. Human existence should be improved sociologically, biologically and psychically. Burroughs' ideas are connected to ideas of posthumanism which is a school of thought which proposes an idea of posthuman existence, improved by using genetics or technology. Burroughs says that the corporeal form is not able to sufficiently exist after death, whereas 1 the spirit is—and this spiritual separation from the body is the only way to achieve immortality; thus, the human body is a vessel that is left behind at the moment of death. In the last novel of the trilogy, The Western Lands, Burroughs pays a close attention death and immortality. In The Red Night Trilogy, Burroughs constructs a genuine and original view of death and human existence in the universe. A great part of human experience is an idea of religion which is based on quintessential human quality called spirituality which works with the phenomenon of human soul. This thesis aims to introduce Burroughs' methods and style of writing and also analyse the way in which his approach cohere with the content of the final texts. Regarding, Burroughs style it is necessary to mention his specific approach to narrative and also to explore his accent on the visual. The second chapter of the thesis deals with Burroughs' viewpoint on the problematics of human condition. It intends to analyze Burroughs' specific outlook on embodiment and subjectivity that coheres with body/mind duality. Burroughs propagates an idea of transformation or transition of human body. This chapter argues and explains how Burroughs' transformational ideas, concerning what is considered to be human body, correlate with ideas of posthumanism. The third and final chapter of the thesis analyzes Burroughs' perspective on death and its relationship to human body, mind and. It also deals with the problematics of sexuality and its connection to death and immortality. 2 1. Burroughs' Writing Techniques and Style No matter how extraordinary it might sound, a writer can dedicate almost all of his work to overcoming, surpassing and fighting the quintessence of literature-the word itself. This fundamental literary paradox is crucial to grasp and to understand Burroughs' style and methods of writing: I felt the weakness in my chest, silver spots appeared in front of my eyes with vertiginous sensation of being sucked into a vast empty space where words do not exist (Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night 128). For Burroughs, the state of existence without language is only possible in space out of time. Throughout Burroughs' work, language is problematic in many ways. In the last trilogy of his novels, Burroughs deals with the problem of language as much as in any other of his works. One of the main subjects of Burroughs' writing is a problematic theme of control. For Burroughs, language is primarily a vehicle for imposing control either on an individual or a group of human beings. In his last trilogy, Burroughs develops a conspiratorial theory which states that language is a virus from outer space that is spread on planet Earth by parasitic Venusians: "Their most potent tool is the word. The inner voice" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 97). For Burroughs, language thus is a tool for gaining and maintaining control, and more importantly, language possesses a viral quality which subsequently allows to secretly and unscrupulously manipulate the victim-a user of a complex system of communication-and to create discrepancies of the reality. By writing, Burroughs seeks ways to deal with the language virus and to beat it by using its own tools. As Land says: "Making the argument that the human subject is the product of a linguistic control system that operates virally, Burroughs set himself the 3 challenge of escaping from this linguistic control: of writing his way out of the human condition" (Land 19). To escape or avoid this form of linguistic and social control, Burroughs with help of other writers and artist developed methods or techniques of writing or (de)constructing texts. In order to understand the process of development of Burroughs' style, it is necessary to mention an important method of producing text that Burroughs developed. The cut-up method was developed by Dadaist artist Tristan Tzara. He presented the idea in Dada Manifesto in 1918 as a manual called To Make a Dadaist Poem. The cut-up was then reinvented by a French artist and Burroughs' colleague Brion Gysin in the 1950s. Burroughs, fascinated by the potential of the technique, adopted it and used it to create a whole new kind of prose. In his thesis from 2004 called Technologies, Texts and Subjects: William S Burroughs and Post-Humanism, Land describes the technicalities of the cut-up: "With these techniques, a page of text is taken, and sliced or folded down the middle then placed with half of another page. The pieces are then moved around until they line up, and the results are typed onto a fresh page which, depending upon the results, may then be combined with further pages to produce yet more cut-ups. In a sense, the idea is to turn the work into a material thing which can be manipulated like the celluloid film on the cutting- room table, a photo-collage, or the paints on an artist's palette" (Land 128). Burroughs creates his texts by cutting up already existing external content or his own original work. The cut up texts are then mixed up and put together randomly. The passages that come into being are purely aleatory, therefore it is eventually not Burroughs who writes. Quite the reverse-the final texts are created by chance and to some extent the "writer" becomes a mere mediator. When finished, the texts break basic rules of narration and create new dreamlike and surprising sequences, contexts and juxtapositions. Burroughs was convinced that by using this technique he would be able to surpass the language control: "Paradoxically, this 4 escape was attempted through the use of language, or rather words, an endeavour that Burroughs ultimately found self-defeating" (Land 119). As Land suggests, the aspiration to break the control of language through writing is paradoxical. However, Burroughs attempts to change the influence of the language had a certain relevance at least in his proposition of the possible posthuman existence. As was mentioned above, Burroughs proposed an idea that time is connected with language. By cutting up and reconstructing the original, Burroughs produces new temporal and spatial contexts as the narrative becomes vague and both the writer and the reader are obliged to follow these newly arisen associations: "...the techniques are instrumental in facilitating a form of space-time travel whereby the reader experiences an extratemporal simultaneity in the text that escapes the confines of linear time" (Houen 527). In a way, Burroughs deliberately manipulates texts to create a notion of relativity of time. At least he is able to simulate time travelling by using another method called fold-up. As Burroughs himself says: "I take page one and fold it into page one hundred -1 insert the resulting composite as page ten - When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forward in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one" (Burroughs qtd. in Houen 528). The fold-up technique is used by Burroughs to create suggestive and repetitive images which tend to surface - always slightly altered - in different parts of the narrative.
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