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. When confronted with the rediscovery of the known image, the reader experiences a reminiscence of the prior occurrence, which under certain conditions can feel like travelling back in time in respect to the textual instrumentality.
The cut-up and fold-up techniques were essential for Burroughs' experimental period which lasted through the 1960s. In this era, Burroughs cultivated this writing approach and an output of his endeavour was The Nova Trilogy also called The Cut-Up Trilogy. This trilogy was a peak of experiments using the techniques of text manipulations. It wasn't until the 5 1980s that Burroughs started to slowly abandon those techniques to an outcome of his last three novels which are often called The Red Night Trilogy.
The last Burroughs' trilogy consists of Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead
Roads and The Western Lands. In contrast to Burroughs' previous works, The Red Night
Trilogy stands out as the writing style shows a slight but noticeable shift towards more traditional way of approach to a narrative. As Burroughs confess: "I don't think there's any substitute for [narrative structure]. I mean-people want some sort of story in there. Otherwise they don't read it. What are they going to read? That's the point" (Burroughs qtd. in Punday
36). Burroughs' last three novels are such balanced literary works that combine Burroughs' specific experimental writing style and at the same time manage to satisfy the reader's innate demand for a plot.
The first book of the trilogy Cities of the Red Nights operates with three main subplots. Two of them are written in a form of a narrative diary style and the third one is somewhere between descriptive and expository style. Although for the most part Burroughs uses more or less common narrative style, he interpolates the text with descriptions of dreams or hallucinations:
Stage with a jungle backdrop. Frogs croak and birds call from recorder. Farnsworth as
an adolescent is lying facedown on sand. Ali is fucking him and he squirms with a
slow wallowing movement showing his teeth in a depraved smile. The lights dim for a
few seconds. When the lights come up Farnsworth is wearing an alligator suit that
leaves his ass bare and Ali is still fucking him. As Ali and Farnsworth slide offstage
Farnsworth lifts one webbed finger to the audience while a Marine band plays
"Semper Fi." Offstage splash (Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night 11).
The text cited above functions as a detached commentary on the narration of the story. The reader accepts Burroughs' tale about Farnsworth and his companion Ali, to be unexpectedly 6 pushed outside of it. Suddenly, Burroughs deconstructs the reality of the description by suggesting a staged version of the scene which is being acted out for an imaginary audience.
The sentence succession of the text carries a resemblance to a film or a theatre script and therefore it pushes the reader to visualise it as a movie clip or a short theatre act. The primarily proposed reality of two travelling men is deflated by the notion of dreamlike description of staged scene with reproduced sounds of nature and marching band music. On the other hand, the content of the scene, the symbols and the language that Burroughs uses here, succeed to have an alarmingly intense feeling likewise that of a bad dream. The whole cited part succeeds to intensify the perception of the text and it also changes the reader's view as it demand another point of view by altering the scene and deconstructing the primarily accepted textual reality. The dreamlike passages are important because Burroughs considers dreams to be an essential part of human experience. The relevance of dreams to Burroughs' work will be discussed in the next chapter.
Repetition is a stylistic device that Burroughs uses extensively and functionally.
Characters of the novels often experience notions of sounds, colours, smells or feelings repeatedly. Sometimes an idea or simple image emerges at different moments. In Cities of the
Red Night a sound of a flute or a pipe appears over and over again and it is usually connected with a notion of cryptic and unknown: "Captain Strobe stood on the poop deck playing a silver flute, the notes seeming to fall from a distant star" (Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night
69) or "I caught a whiff of perfume and a sound of distant flutes" (Burroughs, Cities of the
Red Night 97). In The Place of Dead Roads it is a symbol of arrowhead: "It had a creator long ago. This Arrowhead is the only proof of his existence" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead
Roads 11) or "The boy reins up the horse, swings down and comes back with a beautifully chipped arrowhead in pink flint" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 52). The arrowhead functions here as a metaphor for mankind flying through the time. 7 Burroughs' narrative style, in general, shifts through different tiers of dynamics and angles which help to propose ideas throughout the storyline. However, the basic storyline, which possesses attributes of a third person descriptive narrative, very often serves as a material fabricated entirely as a basis for Burroughs' subsequent and direct in-text commentary. In general, Burroughs tends to sketch a setting, the characters and a basic plot that possesses structural consistency. This apparent consistency is then more and more disrupted, distorted or de-constructed. The characters and the situations serve as a material for Burroughs' first-person in-text contemplations and suggestions: "...Burroughs's characters seem to fall into patterns of development that have little to do with their own individual goals and choices" (Punday 44). Those patterns of development are often controlled by extraneous forces such as political power, disease, sexual urge, dreams, magic and death.
As mentioned above, Burroughs' writing is to a great extent influenced by cinematic or visual approach. Pictoral quality of the written text is a quintessential part of Burroughs' style. Common descriptive narrative is systematically interrupted and shifted towards passages which posses the qualities of a film script. Such passages of Burroughs' texts then require the reader's active approach towards a particular part of the text. The reader is driven to imagine the sequence as a short film sketch. In The Place of Dead Roads Kim finds a photo of passenger pigeons:
Five passenger pigeons in a tree ... CLICK: "The Last Passenger Pigeons."
KAPOW! The birds drop and flutter to the ground, feathers drifting in dawn wind.
The Hunter looks about uneasily as he shoves the birds into his bag. It's been a
bad day. He turns to face the camera.
CLICK: "The Last Passenger-Pigeon Hunter."
8 Spelling out... August 6, 1945: Hiroshima. Oppenheimer on screen: "We
have become Death, Destroyer of Worlds."
"Doctor Oppenheimer!"
CLICK.
Hall reflected that he was himself the end of the Hall line, at least by the old-
fashioned method of reproduction.
"Waahhhh!"
CLICK
"Awwwwwwk!!!"
CLICK. (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 88).
Burroughs sets a scene and constructs it as a film sequence. The direct transition between individual lines acquires an effect of the film cut. To underline the visual film quality of the sequence, Burroughs' adds interjections of a camera shutter. The whole experience of reading such text can be lived through in the readers mind. Sometimes it is necessary to read the particular part repeatedly and to imagine it again with attention to details provided by the writer.
To Burroughs, the emphasis of the visual attributes of the text is not just a simple stylistic whim. The technique coheres with the writer's opinionation against language and its potentiality to control via certain usage of words: "Language for Burroughs, became dangerous when it lost its connections with visual referents and the verbal virus replicated, and it now threatens to consume its host. Burroughs' method is one of aggression as he attacks the instability and inaccuracy of language and attempts to explore new verbal dimensions" (Skau 403). According to Burroughs', language is a parasitic instrument used to control by using generalisations, obscurities of expression and ambiguous phrases which are intentionally depraved of visual qualities. Such type of language then imposes abstract 9 constructions which are disconnected from reality and which prevents an individual creativity: "What is a writer trying to do? He's trying to reproduce in the reader's mind a certain experience, and if he were completely successful in that, the reproduction of the experience would be complete. Perhaps fortunately, they're not that successful" (Skau 402).
In short, Burroughs is very critical about the language itself and its dangerous potential, on the other hand, as a writer he uses words to convey a message or an idea that hopefully can reproduce a human experience.
Burroughs' endeavours to be as visual as possible within the mantinels of writing and language relate to his specific understanding of the reality which we as human beings experience every day. Modern technology allows us to record the manifestations of the reality and to manipulate it:
" Mechanical devices exteriorize the processes of the human nervous
system.... A tape recorder externalizes the vocal function, a computer externalizes
one function of the human brain, the faculty that stores and processes data. See human
history as a vast film spread out in front of you" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead
Roads 218).
Burroughs then proposes an idea of a "prerecorded universe":
"You can run it backward and forward, you can speed it up, slow it down, you
can randomize it do anything you want with your film. You are God to that film
segment. So "God," then, has precisely that power with the human film" (Burroughs,
The Place of Dead Roads 218).
The whole idea of a prerecorded universe that creates the reality film is interconnected with
Burroughs' attitude towards language and writing or vice versa. Language corresponds to the reality film, written text corresponds to a recording of a manifestation of the reality film and manipulation with these recordings corresponds to Burroughs' cut-up technique. In either 10 case, the aim is to overcome an existing status that is to some extent restrictive. According to
Burroughs, the limitations of the word-virus and a material existence in linear time both need a radical transition: "We might say that the next radically new concept biologically speaking will be the transition from Time to Space. This transition consigns the entire Time film, a whole prerecorded universe, to the scrap heap, where we hope it will have the consideration to rot" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 219). Burroughs' radical experimentation with language and writing is then strictly connected to a broader idea of human subjectivity and existence in limitations of what is generally perceived as reality. In Burroughs' works, the idea of film qualities works in relation to his writing attitude and to his peculiar philosophy.
Being permeated with explicit imagery of unconventional sex and violence or idiosyncratic ideas dealing with complexities of language, duality of human existence, resistance to imposed control, mutations, deadly viruses, diseases and precariousness of material existence, Burroughs' prose does not lack (although very often black) humour. The serious and frequently pessimistic tone of Burroughs' writing is counterbalanced by offbeat sense of comic deliverance.
To achieve a humorous effect, Burroughs often employs the literary device called malapropism: '"Your attitude is commendable, Jones. How does 'Head Porter' sound to you?' 'Like the music of the queers ... I mean the spheres, boss.'" (Burroughs, The Western
117). The music of the spheres, an ancient religious concept of harmonic movement of celestial bodies is frivolously corrupted by the notion of homosexuality to create a humorous effect.
Exaggeration and satirical tone are essential devices of Burroughs' writing style. In
The Western Lands, Burroughs proposes a catastrophic scenario of controlled extermination of human souls by employing atomic device called a "Super Soul-Killer" (Burroughs, The
11 Western Lands 8). The scenario is followed by highly hyperbolic presidential speech in television:
'"We categorically deny that there are any [crack] so-called Fountain-of-Youth drugs,
procedures or treatments [crack] that are being held back from the American people
[crack]." He flashes a boyish smile and runs a comb through his abundant, unruly
hair. "And I categorically dismiss as without foundation rumours that I myself, the
First Lady, my fag son and my colleagues in the Cabinet are sustaining ourselves by
state-of-the art vampiric technology, drawing off from the American pimples [crack
giggle] so-called "energy units"!" His hair stands up and crackles, and he gives the
American people the finger and barks out: "I got mine, fuck you! Every crumb for
himself" (Burroughs, The Western Lands 9).
One more time, notice the accent on the visual. Again, Burroughs provides sound effects to create or produce a film-like sketch experience. As Burroughs' president speaks it is more and more obvious that the "rumours" are true. At the end there is no doubt that the president is a liar and also that the situation is serious as he completely steps out of his role. The way
Burroughs constructs the whole scene make the whole presented situation humorous or ridiculous in relation to the context of a platform of presidential speech. However, as he often does, Burroughs draws the attention towards the darker side. Human mind can be easily manipulated through media and it very often happens. The conveyed misinformation is clear and it is very difficult to do anything about it.
When analysing any Burroughs' work from any angle it is crucial to understand his writing style as it is interconnected with his philosophy and his attitude towards language and reality. Burroughs fights against the "word-virus" using techniques of deconstruction while trying to point out the finality and temporality of the imposed language schemes. Using the cut-up method, Burroughs tries to break those schemes and to provide a new possibility of 12 transition. The notion of transition is also highlighted in his ideas considering the possibilities of human existence in space out of time-an existence that could be called posthuman.
13 2. Burroughs and Posthuman
In a BBC Radio 4 profile called Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted which was released in 2008, Burroughs himself can be heard saying: "What are you here for? We're all here...we're all here to go. We're all here to go, that's what we're all here for" Such an answer to the question of a mere reason of the existence of human beings summarizes
Burroughs' basic viewpoint on the human condition presented in The Red Night Trilogy. This chapter intends to analyze Burroughs' attitude towards the problematics of our existence in the universe, as presented in his work, and to juxtapose his ideas with a discourse and concepts of school of thought called posthumanism.
As implied above, Burroughs' last trilogy of novels deals with questions of purpose, specifics and possibilities of human existence. In relation to the thematic content of
Burroughs' last three novels it is necessary to talk about science-fiction genre. Within the broad boundaries of literary fiction, science fiction is the genre that deals with the concepts of human condition it our universe most extensively. The central point of science fiction literature is mostly a human being pictured as an intelligent, self-aware and naturally social animal, capable of introspection in connection to its consciousness, and extrospection in connection to its proximal and remote surroundings. Science fiction literature then raises questions concerning the origin, purpose, sustainability and possible future of various more or less sophisticated human-based societies. Consequently, the questions that science fiction ponders always tend to contain philosophical, scientific, theological or spiritual overlap. As
Lars Schmeink writes in his 2016 book, Biopunk Dystopias: "Especially the defining questions of humanism 'What constitutes human nature?' or 'What does it mean to be human?' have thus been a central concern of science fiction exploration" (Schmeink 33).
Dealing with Burroughs' fiction and science fiction in general, it is crucial to mention the 14 term humanism. As much as any work of fiction that possesses basic elements and tropes of science fiction, Burroughs' last trilogy deals with the human condition to a great extent, and therefore it has to deal with the problematics of anthropocentrism.
As much as Burroughs tackles the matter of human condition throughout the trilogy, he definitely cannot be suspected of anthropocentrism as his position towards humanity is rather misanthropic. The basis for criticism of humanity stems in Burroughs disillusion with the state of humanity which over the time of its existence lost its purpose and became a product of control mechanisms created by restrictive societies. In The Place of Dead Roads
Burroughs contemplates the origin of human beings:
"So perhaps the human artifact had a creator. Perhaps a stranded space traveller
needed the human vessel to continue his journey, and he made it for that purpose? He
died before he could use it? He found another escape route? This artifact, shaped to
fill forgotten need, now has no more meaning or purpose than this arrowhead without
the arrow and the bow, the arm and the eye. Or perhaps the human artifact was the
creator's last card, played in an old game many light-years ago. Chill of empty space"
(Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 11).
Burroughs essentially admits that the creatures that he labels as "the human artifact" once might have played a role in an ancient cosmic game. However, its significance is now lost as it currently exists as sort of a residue of unfulfilled purpose or a project launched by an unknown "space traveller". This notion which deals with the human origin delicately suggests Burroughs' stance towards anthropocentrism as it deconstructs its basic idea. To
Burroughs, human beings are not in any way special as they lost its primary purpose. Later in the same novel, Burroughs articulates the same idea in more pregnant manner:
15 "Look at Homo sapiens.... Before they went into mass production there must have
been some good models lost in the shuffle and for whaf. (Burroughs, The Place of
Dead Roads 216).
Burroughs intentionally uses the taxonomic name of the species which allows him to utilize a scientific tone: "In fact, Burroughs explicitly recognises the continuation of the hierarchy of godliness in natural scientific taxonomies, and the damage thereby done to animals when
Man places himself at the top of the evolutionary pyramid..." (Land 239). Burroughs also uses third-person plural when addressing human beings. This is an example of Burroughs virtually excluding himself as an author of the text since he can't possibly be excluded from the great club of human beings. By doing that, Burroughs stands aside and seemingly functions as a mere mediator of words that seem to come from an unknown source of intelligence.
On the other hand, the reader cannot be sure if Burroughs does not really think of himself as of a member of different species. The whole situation is even more complicated due to the fact that Burroughs conveys the message through the words of the fictional character named Kim Carsons, which is a pen name for another fictional character named
William Seward Hall which is evidently Burroughs' non de plume. Kim Carsons' origin is alien and he is aware of it: "Kim wanted to explore them all....He longed for new dangers and new weapons, 'for perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.' For unknown drugs and pleasures, and a distant star called HOME" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 101). It is this multilayeredness of authorial ambiguity that in the end allows Burroughs to step out and let the text stand for itself. As Punday says: "The real meaning of Burroughs's text does not rest in the plot structures themselves, but in how those structures provide a pattern for a reading of linguistic play that is beyond Burroughs's or our own control" (Punday 54). To
Burroughs, everything that happens is a part of "pre-recorded universe" and so are his texts. 16 In consequence, it is not Burroughs who writes as he is a mere mediator of the prewritten or external ideas:
"Given that amongst Burroughs' central themes control, language and identity figure
large, it is important to recognise that his writing was simultaneously an attempt to escape
from control by the word, and an exploration of systems of control (including language)
through words. At times this brought him to the recognition that as an author, he was as
much written as writing" (Land 107)
Vague lines and indistinctions between such basic literary relations as author x written word create a postmodern basis for fuzziness in stratification of conveyed ideas. Burroughs uses the rules of this linguistic game to his own benefit, since by following this theory he is not really the one who writes. Therefore, paradoxically, he can write anything and criticize the humanity from a position of a third party. As Burroughs himself repeatedly quotes
Nietzsche's Zarathustra: "NOTHING IS TRUE, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED"
(Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night xviii). By accepting this idea, Burroughs is free to suggest what humanity is and more importantly, what it might or should become. This is where Burroughs ideas about human condition to some extent correlate with the ideas of posthumanism.
It is now time to return back to anthropocentrism-the school of thought that holds human being as a central creature in the universe. This basic idea is problematic as it might induce a stationary regime or even a dead end if accepted in full connotation. As discussed above, Burroughs does not accept anthropocentrism. Oppositely, his main theme or concern in connection to human condition is transition or transcendence. In his 2003 journal contribution called Theorizing Posthumanism, Badmington writes about anthropocentrism:
"Anthropocentrism always already contains the conditions of its own transcendence. Its structure, to use Derrida's words, 'bears within itself the necessity of its own critique'; its 17 inside turns itself inside out" (Badmington 19). This statement contains a positive attitude towards anthropocentrism. Badmington in fact says that anthropocentrism possesses mechanisms of self-reflection that in some way could help transcend or transform the human condition by incorporating critique. It could be admitted to some extent. However,
Burroughs' view is different: "A problem cannot be solved in terms of itself. The human problem cannot be solved in human terms. Only a basic change in the board and the chessmen could offer a chance of survival" (Burroughs, The Western Lands 27). Burroughs in his viewpoint does dismiss critique or self-reflexive potential as formative forces capable of change in terms of human condition. He proposes ideas that go much deeper in the problematics of materiality and forms of human existence in the universe. Those ideas cohere with ideas of posthumanism.
Posthumanism is a school of thought that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. Ever-present social, political, economical and mainly technological development had a distinct effect on theorizing the human condition. The cornerstones of traditional humanism were questioned as the modern society grew and shifted towards new technologies, media, politics, ecology etc. This development led the theorists to raise questions concerning the newly emerging state of human condition. The newly conceived theories analyzed the dynamic progression of technologies in relation to what was the generally accepted perspective of human situation. The outcome was an inevitable realisation that the definition of what it means to be a human being changes along with quickly evolving technologies. It was time to redefine the view on humanity and to determine the possible future that comes after the era of outdated humanistic viewpoint: "'Questioning', as Heidegger once insisted,
'builds a way', and I think that questioning humanism-pothumanism itself-begins to build ways for being different in the future. 'We' have nothing to lose but 'our' selves"
(Badmington 22-23). This "questioning" automatically brings the necessity to re-scrutinize 18 the perception of humanity. It initially enforces a transition which would surpass the human condition for the price of the necessity of completely reinventing the human position in the universe, which would consequently mean leaving human behind and becoming posthuman.
Transition, along with control and language, is a fundamental theme in Burroughs' last trilogy. As mentioned above, Burroughs work can- to some extent-be called science- fiction. As a genre that keeps an eye on a development of humanity, science fiction generally deals with ideas concerning humanism or posthumanism:
"In a sense, one could argue that the concerns with and conceptions of (post)humanist
thinking lie at the heart of science fiction. After all, the genre's 'ur-text,' the first
novel to 'contain every major formal characteristic that can reasonably be held to
mark science fiction as a genre', Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reflects upon the
constitution of human nature as one of its main concerns" (Schmeink 32).
Marry Shelley's Frankenstein is a great example of a narrative with posthumanistic glimpses as it deals with questions asking what constitutes a human being. It refers to a Promethean myth which theme is based on the duality of the material body and spiritual mind.
Frankenstein's monster is a man's creation that is capable of living and that makes the reader wonder where the border between a human being and its creation is. Undoubtedly, one of the themes of Frankenstein is a tension between forced embodiment and consciousness. This tension is also at the centre of posthumanistic theories: "As a term of cultural criticism, posthuman aims at dismantling the many binaries endorsed by Western dualism: body/mind, self/other, culture/nature, gobal/local, and so forth" (Remshardt 135).The body/mind duality is also an essential theme of science fiction literature. Not surprisingly it is at the thematic viewfinder of Burroughs' work.
The theme that reappears throughout the whole trilogy is concerned by limitations that come with the necessity of material existence of human beings. However, similarly as 19 Burroughs tries to vindicate the obsoleteness of language, he also complexly attacks the idea of necessity of the existence of the material human body-at least in its natural form. To
Burroughs, our planet is a "spaceship" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 161).
Analogically, he considers the human body to be a space vessel too: "Look at this body. It is a spacecraft designed to accommodate one person" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads
192). The metaphor describing human body as a spacecraft and the human being as a person inhabiting such vessel, clearly indicates that for Burroughs, an existence of a conscious being is not conditioned by possession of material body. More importantly, Burroughs-similarly as posthumanists promotes the necessity of leaving the body behind. Land says:
"...the new generation of posthumanists and Extropians emphasise an quantitative
evolutionary logic of development where one can be "more" or "less" evolved, wedding
neo-Darwinism with the more familiar Cartesian dualism and Judeo-Christian, even
Gnostic, ideals of transcendence beyond physical. Along the way, the material world and
the body are left behind, both in the sense of being denigrated as less important or more
base, and in the sense that the body is a burden to be escaped from or evolved beyond"
(Land 101).
Burroughs proposes the idea of leaving the body behind and evolving into a different form of existence. However, such drastic transition would necessary inflict a collapse of the pillars of western culture which is based on the universal idea of dualism. Burroughs is aware of such conflict and so he describes the corporeal abandonment transition as a process that as a by• product-more or less subversively-overcomes those cultural boundaries.
In her book issued in 1999, called How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles formulates four assumptions that should answer the question of what the posthuman is. The first assumption being: "First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that 20 embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life" (Hayles 2). This basically means that the existence of the posthuman being is not conditioned by immediate possession and control over a human body. The human embodiment in its current form is therefore only one of many possible forms that could serve to hold an information-an equivalent of a conscious mind.
Hayles' first assumption coheres with Burroughs' commentary on the human body in its natural form: "Kim knew he was in a state of Arrested Evolution: A.E. He was no more destined to stagnate in this three-dimensional animal form than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 40). Similarly as Hayles, Burroughs suggests that the corporeal form is not necessarily connected with ontological possibilities of the human subsistence. Burroughs promotes a concept of an evolutionary cul-de-sac, which means that the human is an animal in a state that does not allow a further progression. His general outlook on the human race is misanthropic: "...mute evidence that at one time a
Creator with skilled, delicate and loving fingers drew breath on planet Earth, before the bad animal, Man, put an end to creation and so brought evolutionary process to a halt"
(Burroughs, The Western Lands 41). According to Burroughs, human beings in their natural evolutionary form are at the dead end. As a result, Burroughs propose a necessity to transcend and to leave the imperfect corporeal form behind, otherwise we could meet an inevitable destiny:"Man is an unsuccessful experiment, caught in a biologic dead end and inexorably headed for extinction" (Burroughs, The Western Lands 41). To Burroughs, the only way out of the biologic "final impasse" (Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night 26) is an escape plan that would incorporate drastic changes on the basis of reconstructing the quintessential qualities of humanity.
It is important to highlight here, that seeing Man as an animal is an aspect of correlation between Burroughs ideas and ideas of posthumanists. Humanism with its 21 anthropocentrism sees humans as a superior being. As discussed above, Burroughs and posthumanists consider humans to be at the same level of existence and importance as animals:
"Rather than abandoning or avoiding the term humanity, however , posthumanism
expands our understanding of what is human into areas which have traditionally been
deemed to be the opposite of our constitution - namely, other species, such as animals or
plants, and technological apparatuses such as machines. Posthumanism contaminates the
human with what traditionally been seen as its opposite: the animal and the machine"
(Mack 192).
Posthumanists as much as Burroughs, propose an idea that the corporeal form of human beings is imperfect and insufficient. By admitting that we are nothing more than intelligent animals we open new possibilities for future changes. For Burroughs, Man is an animal that can be reconstructed on the terms of biology. Land says:
"This idea of a failed experiment, or "biologic dead end" recalls Burroughs discussion of
the salamander who is incapable of quite making the evolutionary step from water to land.
Unable to get rid of its gills alone, along comes a scientist with a hormone injection and
the gills fall off: salamander makes it to air breathing. For Burroughs, man is in a similar
position. Caught in the dead end of humanist hylomorphism man needs blueprints, not as a
map to use as a model for reproduction, but more as a guidebook to aid escape." (Land
239).
According to Burroughs the "biologic dead end" can be overcome by enforcement of biologic alteration to the human body which can be described as an analogy of an induced evolutionary step from water to land in the realm of animalia. The reason why Burroughs proposes such alteration in relation to human beings is his basic conviction that we should evolve to be able to escape time and exist in space. 22 At the beginning of the second book of the trilogy titled The Place of Dead Roads,
Burroughs starts with a surprisingly positive prologue where he says: "The only thing that could unite the planet is a united space program..." (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads).
The prologue presents an idea of an international collective endeavour aiming to achieve a common goal which is space exploration. In this Utopian prologue, Burroughs comes up with an idea of society that is able to function on the basis of a shared objective: "Happiness is a by-product of function. The planetary space station will give all participants an opportunity to function" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads). By further reading of the book it is more and more clear, that Burroughs does not mean a space program involving space suits and rockets. Burroughs' idea of a space program is quite different from that as he talks about leaving the three-dimensional form behind and existing out of the borders of time: "The water we live in is Time. That alien medium we glimpse beyond time is Space. And that is where we are going" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 41). Burroughs repeatedly uses the analogy of an animal evolving from water to land. In the same manner, human being is destined to evolve by leaving the restrictive medium of time to a condition of existence in a potent medium of space:
"...Burroughs rejects the idea of time entirely and turns his attention to a rethinking of
space, not in terms of geometry, but as outer-space: the final frontier. If it is the word-
image lines that lock us into identity and tie us to the ground, then cutting these lines can
let us escape the bounds of the Earth - most primitive of the three sociuses - and move
into space" (Land 135).
The existence in space out of the borders of time is a Utopian idea that proposes the final and perfect human condition. However, it cannot be reached immediately. Burroughs therefore presents various ways of biological, mental and spiritual alterations to the human being which
23 would eventually lead to an approximation to the condition of "the final frontier" or that would at least make a Burroughsean society possible.
To achieve a further explanation of Burroughs' conception of space escapism it is necessary to analyze individual quotes, since throughout the trilogy, Burroughs suggests different strategies and fantasies that possess various literarity:
"Indeed, at times when he is discussing space travel, Burroughs seems to be talking about
a more abstract conception of space that extends to include the inner-space achieved
through meditation. At other times however he seems more literal, and it is this literal
insistence upon escape that has led many critics to count Burroughs along with the
posthumanists like Hans Morovec or the Extropians, who seek to escape the bounds of the
Earth through a disembodied downloading of consciousness into technologically advanced
robots and computer based communication systems" (Land 135).
The parts where Burroughs as Land says, seems to be "more literal" function as a basis for
Burroughs critique of the orthodox ways of conquering space. Burroughs analyses and attacks the traditional manner of scientific approach to space travel. The problematic part of such approach to Burroughs is the assumed necessity to move the body to the inhospitable space in its original form. The basic mistake being that with the help of technologies, the human body travelling to space is being preserved by the presence of artificially created conditions that correspond to the conditions on Earth:
"My God, here they are light-years from the Earth, watching cricket and baseball on
Vision Screens (can you imagine taking their stupid pastimes light-years into space?). Yes
sir, the fish said, I'm just going to shove a little aquarium up onto the land there, got
everything I need in it" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 41).
Burroughs dismisses the idea of the physical kind of space travelling for the reason that it does not carry a necessary human transition. The usage of space suits, rockets and space 24 stations preserves the human being in its original form moving it from place to place in the universe. The Man therefore travels through the universe while sustaining the impasse that
Burroughs calls "Arrested Evolution."
Hayles' third assumption on posthumanism in How We Became Posthuman addresses the problem mentioned above in this manner: "...the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born"
(Hayles 3). Posthumanism essentially share Burroughs' concept of regarding the human body as a vessel. Hayles' term "prosthesis" is simply interchangeable with Burroughs' term artifact. This terminology concerning the corporeal allows both Hayles and Burroughs to consider the body as something that can be changed or improved externally: "Both the posthuman dream of becoming cyborg, and Burroughs' ideas on space-travel, share a common interest in the forced evolution of the human beyond itself (Land 136). This Land's quote captures the point of intersection between Burroughs' ideas presented in his last trilogy and the general ideas of pothumanistic school of thought. Both Burroughs and posthumanists consider the problematics of embodiment-and its enhancements-to be a central point connecting the theories concerning future possibilities of change of human condition.
Importantly, Hayles also states:
"Whether or not interventions have been made on the body, new models of subjectivity
emerging from such fields as cognitive science and artificial life imply that even a
biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman. The defining characteristics
involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components"
(Hayles 4).
It is necessary to state here that concerning the last Hayles' quote, Burroughs
predominantly focuses on the "construction of subjectivity" rather than on enhancement of 25 the human body by connecting it to artificial and external technology. Although, there is
an exception, that will be discussed later, Burroughs in his overall focus on the possible
change of human condition highlights mental and spiritual qualities of human beings:
"Look around you on the street and what do you see, a creature that functions at one-
fiftieth of its potential and is only saved from well-deserved extinction by an increasingly
creaky social structure... (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 216). By the "potential",
Burroughs means mental and spiritual qualities which are connected with the non-material
part of the human being.
Throughout the trilogy, Burroughs never questions or doubts the existence of soul. In fact he is sometimes more concerned with describing ways how to completely destroy or erase it: "... weapons for a new type of warfare, weapons aimed directly at the driver instead of the craft, the soul instead of the body" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 105). Again,
Burroughs uses a vessel analogy. Within a concept of duality, the body is a passive shelter for the soul-the operator. Burroughs does not question the existence of spiritual part of the human being and clearly prefers to examine its potential in order to accomplish a transition of human condition.
The body/mind duality could be taken as two sides of one coin metaphor for what constitutes a human being. Burroughs finds the link between body and mind in dreams.
Existence of dreams is a scientific fact. For Burroughs, dream is a medium that connects the mind with space. In fact, dreams, according to Burroughs, possess a potential that could prepare us for the upcoming existence in space: "A REM ream researcher concluded that 'the function of dreams is to train the being for future conditions' Burroughs believes people to be genetically designed for space travel, so dreams are 'training for space conditions'" (Hume
125). Hume refers to a research that concludes that an animal deprived of an REM (Rapid
Eye Movement) sleep phase eventually dies. REM sleep phase is a dream phase of sleep, 26 therefore Burroughs deduce that: "dreaming is a biologic necessity" (Burroughs, The Place of
Dead Roads 41). Burroughs believes dreams to be a connection between embodiment and spirituality. Beings deprived of that connection become figuratively-culturally or literally dead:
"Kim sees dreams as a vital link to our biologic and spiritual destiny in space. Deprived of
this air line we die. The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the
whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar
spirits" (Burroughs, The Place of dead Roads 42).
Burroughs clearly sees a potential in mental capacities of human beings. To him, dreams are sort of a gateway to spiritual world which existence is crucial for human beings. Technically,
Burroughs does not only mean the dreaming during phases of sleep. In broader terms,
Burroughs refers to a basic spirituality which defines and influences many aspects of cultural manifestations and behaviour. Extensively, dreams are necessary to preserve the essential spiritual side of human beings. With this notion also comes a critique of spiritually emptied white supremacy. Burroughs sees white man as a destroyer of dreams and consequently the whole spiritually based culture of native people.
With regards to the subject of transition from "Time to Space" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 219), Burroughs definitely considers dreams to be the vehicle that would make the transition possible. When confronting the idea of moving the material body into space in rockets and life preserving suits, Burroughs argues:
"'Think, my little Earth slobs, about what you propose to transport. I have brought up the
question of weight. We have at hand the model of a much lighter body, in fact a body that
is virtually weightless. I refer to the astral or dream body. This model gives us an
indication of the changes we must undergo. I am speaking here not of moral but biologic
27 imperatives and the dream gives us insight into space conditions'" (Burroughs, The Place
of Dead Roads 41).
The transition that Burroughs proposes coheres with Hayles' notion that a posthuman being is not necessarily nonbiologically enhanced creation. Burroughs' posthuman is a biologically altered spiritual (non-corporeal) being, capable of existence in space conditions. Existence of dreams makes such transition possible. Material body is thrown away in favour of a spiritual or dream-astral body. That constitutes the basic and ideal Burroughsean posthuman.
The word "ideal" in connection to Burroughs' posthuman was used intentionally. As mentioned above there is one exceptional character in Burrouhgs' trilogy which correspond to posthumanist's fantasies of non-biologically enhanced beings. In her fourth assumption on posthumanism Hayles' states:
"Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures
human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the
posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily
existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot
teleology and human goals" (Hayles 3).
Posthumanism is to a great extent concerned with artificial and nonbiological enhancements of human body. Application of technology, interchanging natural body parts with robotic parts or even loading the human mind into the computer are essential themes of posthumanist thinking. Posthumanism delimitates the line between nature and technology and consequently analyses the fuzzing border between what is a human and what is a machine: "Crossed with animal and machine, the human dissolves as its borders can no longer be policed" (Land
242). The fact that Burroughs considers humans to be animals was already mentioned. It is now time to pay attention to the posthumanistic idea of fusing the human body with
28 technology. There is a single character in Burroughs last trilogy which illustrates such fusion and he is called Joe the Dead.
Joe the Dead is a character which appears repeatedly throughout the trilogy. He possesses qualitative elements of a posthuman being enhanced by technology. The transformation from human to posthuman state began with Joe beating death:
"Joe the Dead was saved from death by morphine, and morphine remained the only thing
holding him to life. It was as if Joe's entire body, his being, had been amputated and
reduced to a receptacle for pain. Hideously scarred, blind in one eye, he gave off a dry,
schorched smell, like burnt plastic and rotten oranges" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead
Roads 129).
Joe won a fight with death, nevertheless his body is irreversibly maimed and incomplete. To overcome the limits of his damaged body, Joe uses artificial technology in order to compensate his weaknesses. However the technology that he comes up with consequently brings improvements or upgrades to his body that allows him to experience a whole new set of perceptions: "He had constructed and installed an artificial nose, with gold wires connected to his odor centers, and a radio set for smellwaves, with a range of several hundred yards. Not only was his sense of smell acute, it was also selective. He could smell smells that no one else had ever dreamed, and these smells had a logic, a meaning, a language"
(Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 128). By contaminating his body with technology, Joe is able to understand new contexts of perception.
In her Cyborg Manifesto from 2016, Donna J. Haraway comments on merging the body and technology: "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics." (Haraway 7). Considering Harraway's idea,
Joe functions as a cyborg whose "politics" is affected by the fact that he beats the death and is 29 able to improve his imperfect body. Joe is an assassin who transforms his own body into a dangerous weapon: "Joe had a number of devices that he could fit into a socket just below the elbow of his severed arm. One was a shock unit, with two long, needle-sharp electrodes that could be jabbed into an opponent to deliver the shock inside" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead
Roads 36). More importantly, Joe's "politics" concern a battle against the scientific principles concerning the human knowledge nature: "Joe the Dead belongs to a select breed of outlaws known as the NOs, natural outlaws dedicated to breaking the so-called natural laws of the universe foisted upon by physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists and, above all, the monumental fraud of cause and effect, to be replaced by the more pregnant concept of synchronicity" (Burroughs, The Western Lands 30). Burroughs' posthuman being Joe not only reinvents himself, he also aims to change a broad spectrum of scientific paradigms as he challenges the basic law of causality in favour of the Jung's concept of "acausal connecting principle" (Cambray 409) called synchronicity: "...the magical universe presupposes that nothing happens unless someone or some power, some living entity wills it to happen. There are no coincidences and no accidents" (Burroughs, Place of the Dead Roads 217). Joe the
Dead thus operates as a posthuman being working on a quest to complete shift and deconstruction of the scientific foundations of western culture.
When analysing Burroughs character Joe the Dead it is unavoidable to come across the theme of death. Throughout the trilogy, the topic of death emerges very often and the last book The Western Lands is practically dedicated to it. After analysing Burroughs' ideas that could be to some extent called posthumanistic, it is necessary to examine the importance and specifics of the topic of death as presented in his last trilogy.
30 3. Death, Sex and Immortality
In his 1974 book called The Denial of Death an American cultural anthropologist
Ernest Becker analyses the complex human relationship to death. In the first part of the book called The Depth of Psychology of Heroism Becker says: "...the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity-activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man" (Becker ix). No wonder that the topic of death is at the centre of
Burroughs' thematic focus throughout the whole trilogy. He analyses death from multiple viewpoints, revealing an interesting attitude towards it as he does not question death to be a final destiny while he at the same time challenges the idea of its fatality. Concerning the ideas presented in the trilogy, a specific attitude towards death might solve the problem of the ever stagnating human condition.
This chapter is connected to the previous one as it also analyses the concept of duality. The topic of death relates to the problematics of posthuman existence and the body/mind duality. Burroughs is absorbed by the idea of escaping the material world and its limited potential: "This planet is a Death Camp ... the Second and Final Death" (Burroughs,
The Western Lands 254). The existence in the material world is a dead-end and human beings-until the moment of death-are negatively affected by its imperfection concerning the body: '"Is this supposed to be life? How do they dare to serve me such wretched fare? Shit, piss and stink until you get to like it. Life, my dear, is fit only for the consumption of an unprivileged vulture. What am I expected to do here' (Burroughs, The Western LandslSl-
188). In this quote, Burroughs highlights the flaws of bodily functions such as excretion etc.
Those uncomfortable bodily manifestations are in contrast to the qualities of mind. Becker says: "The inner self represents the freedom of thought, imagination, and the infinite reach of 31 symbolism. The body represents determinism and boundness" (Becker 42). It is exactly boundness and determinism of the corporeal that Burroughs desperately needs to overcome in favour of liberty and limitlessness of the spiritual. In order to do so, Burroughs analyses potentials of death as a basis for the transformation.
As was mentioned above, Burroughs considers the existence of the human soul to be a fact. In order to overcome the faulty existence within the body and its flaws: '"Well, space is here. Space is where your ass is'" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 305), Burroughs promotes the idea of a soul: "Tow have souls. You can survive your physical death!"'
(Burroughs, The Western Lands 8). It is precisely the idea of a soul that outlines Burroughs' belief that death is not fatal but transformative:
"To be sure, primitives often celebrate death-as Hocart and other have shown-because
they believe that death is the ultimate promotion, the final ritual elevation to a higher form
of life, to the enjoyment of eternity in some form. Most modern Westerners have trouble
believing this any more, which is what makes the fear of death so prominent a part of our
psychological make-up" (Becker ix)
For instance one of Burroughs' main characters, Kim Carsons, is aware of transformative potential of death and therefore he sees it as an instrument of "ultimate promotion". The fact that he relates to this "primitive" opinion on death allows him to use the ignorant fear of death in his favour. Burroughs calls it identifying with death: "Kim trains his men to identify themselves with death. He takes some rookie guns out to a dead horse rotting in the sun, eviscerated by vultures" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 95). Kim teaches his men not to fear death but to become death through being its bearer: "We always ride into town with the wind behind us, a wheeling cloud of vultures overhead, beaks snapping. The townspeople gag and retch: 'My God, what's that stink?' 'It's the stink of death citizens.'" (Burroughs,
The Place of Dead Roads 95). The characters' identification with death creates positive 32 attitude towards it. It is obvious that Burroughs sees death as a phenomenon that is not to be feared but recognised and explored. This Burroughs' positive view on death sometimes gets extreme connotations. In The Western Lands Burroughs says: "Death is incidental to function. When function is accomplished, death occurs. So instead of joining the retarded medical profession and desperately trying to keep Death out, why not let Death all the way in" (Burroughs, The Western Lands, 61). In this quote Burroughs' misanthropic attitude emerges. The idea of not fighting death leads us to Burroughs' darker side. In Cities of the
Red Night Burroughs goes even further in his positivity towards death: '"...a selective pestilence is the most humane solution to overpopulation and the attendant impasses of pollution inflation, and exhaustion of natural resources. A plague that kills the old and leaves the young, minus a reasonable percentage ... one might be tempted to let such an epidemic run its course even if one had the power to stop it'" (Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night 86).
Here, Burroughs implies that death can be easily controlled via virus and that it is possible to use it to eliminate the population of the planet.
In order to analyse Burroughs' attitude towards death and its transformative potential it is necessary to inspect his complex and profound relationship to sexuality. In Burroughs' texts, death and sexuality are very strongly interconnected. Burroughs sums it up in one sentence: "Sex is the basis of fear, how we got caught in the first place and reduced to the almost hopeless human condition" (201). To Burroughs, fear of death is connected to sexuality. However, Burroughs quote has an additional layer. Being homosexual, Burroughs has a specific view on sexuality and its potential to allow breeding. Becker says:
"The horror of sexual differentiation is a horror of "biological fact," as Brown so well
says. It is a fall out of illusion into sobering reality. It is a horror of assuming an immense
new burden, the burden of the meaning of life and the body, of the fatality of one's
incompleteness, his helplessness, his finitude" (Becker 42). 33 Becker's sexual differentiation basically stands for duality of sexes. When analysing
Burroughs' work it is impossible not to notice his specific relationship to the female sex. In most cases, women are depicted in a negative manner. For instance:
"Suddenly a Lophy Woman slithers out, huge mouth gaping to show the incurving teeth
fine as hairs. They eat into the victim's face to block his breathing as they feed in oxygen
through their gills. So the lethal mating is consummated. She absorbs first his head and
brain, keeping his body alive with her bloodstream. Kim shoots her in the mouth with a
shot load and blows the top of her head off..." (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads
273).
This extreme example of Kim's encounter with a female being sums up Burroughs misogynistic viewpoint. The creature is called a "Woman", however it is not human at all as it possesses fish physiognomy and sexual behaviour. The phrase "lethal mating" indicates that Burroughs to some extent deplores male-female sexual act.
Burroughs also talks about the act of birth: "And the thought of delivering babies was enough to turn a man to stone" (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 19). It is obvious that
Burroughs relationship to the female sex is not positive. In the last trilogy, Burroughs often creates visions of Utopian societies that functions preferably without the need of female aspect: '"If, on the other hand, the Western Lands are reached by the contact of two males, the myth of duality is exploded and the initiates can realize their natural state. The Western
Lands is the natural, uncorrupted state of all male humans. We have been seduced from our biologic and spiritual destiny by the Sex Enemy'" (Burroughs, The Western Landsl5). For
Burroughs the man/woman sexual duality is a biologic trap that needs to be overcome by promoting the non-dualistic homosexual relationships which doesn't serve to procreate but to transform through the potential of orgasm.
34 Burroughs describes fantastic societies that function on the basis of interchanging bodies where the vehicle is a death-orgasm phenomenon: "Death is enforced separation from the body. Orgasm is identification with the body. So death in the moment of orgasm literally embodies death" (Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night 114). In Cities of the Red Night,
Burroughs comes up with the system of re-birth control that incorporates death in the moment of orgasm to achieve the transition of soul to the newly conceived body: "To show the system in operation: Here is an old Transmigrant on his deathbed. He has selected his future
Receptacle parents, who are summoned to the death chamber. The parents then copulate, achieving orgasm just as the old Transmigrant dies so that his spirit enters the womb to be reborn (Burroughs, The Cities of the Red Night 154). In the book, the system was developed to allow the Transmigrants to obtain immortality. However, its goal was not achieved as the
Transmigrants were still dependent on sex and embodiment.
Becker says: "The only way in which mankind could actually control nature and rise above her was to convert sexual immortality into individual immortality" (Becker 230).
Burroughs, aware of this issue in the end comes to a confession that immortality can be achieved through writing: "No one can apply unless he breathes in a writer's prose hills and faraway Western Lands... (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 202). Leaving the theme of transition of human condition behind, Burroughs in self-referential manner of post• modernists draws attention to the word again: "The old writer couldn't write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. And then?
(Burroughs, The Western Lands 258). Therefore, according to previous Becker's quote, the immortality lies within the matter of individual techniques, style and extraordinary content of
Burroughs' writing, as he pioneered the unknown areas of language and thought process in literature.
35 Conclusion
Burroughs last trilogy is a complex and multilayered comment on the problematics of control, language and human condition in general. The analysis of the trilogy proves that
Burroughs shares some fundamental ideas with poshumanists. His outlook on the body/mind duality is very similar to ideas presented by posthumanistic school of thought as it also deals with possibilities of transition of human condition. Same as posthumanists, Burroughs propagates basic corporeal changes-involving biology and technology-to reinvent the fundamentals of human existence in space. Burroughs cannot be called a real posthumanist however, analysing the similarities of Burroughs' ideas and the ideas of posthumanism will help to understand his position towards mankind and its history and possible future.
To fully understand Burroughs' viewpoint on human condition one needs to analyze his relationship to death. By doing that, this thesis attempts to prove that Burroughs texts propagate a positive attitude towards death. To Burroughs, death in connection with sexuality has a transformative potential which might lead to transition of human subjectivity and subsequently to immortality.
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38 Summary
This bachelor thesis deals with William S. Burroughs last trilogy of novels sometimes called The Red Night Trilogy. It consists of Cities of the Red Night first published in 1981,
The Place of Dead Roads first published in 1983 and The Western Lands first published in
1987. The main aim of this thesis is to analyze Burroughs' viewpoint of the problematics of human condition in connection to ideas of a school of thought called posthumanism.
The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter deals with Burroughs' specific relationship to language and control. Mainly it analyzes Burroughs' methods and style of writing while highlighting his visual or cinematic approach to constructing single scenes and the whole narrative.
The second chapter of the thesis focuses on Burroughs' relationship to humanity and its condition and subjectivity. It deals with Burroughs' overlook on the problematic concept of body/mind duality. In this chapter, the thesis compares Burroughs' ideas to basic ideas of posthumanism and analyzes them.
The third chapter of the thesis is dedicated to an analysis of the transformative potential of death as presented in the trilogy by Burroughs. It also focuses on the connection between sexuality, death and immortality.
The last part of the thesis is a conclusion that states that Burroughs' ideas are very similar to ideas of posthumanism. It also mentions the fact that Burroughs' has a positive attitude towards death and its transformative potential.
39 Resumé
Tato bakalářská práce se zabývá poslední trilogií románů Williama S. Burroughse, která je často nazývána Trilogie rudých nocí. Trilogie se skládá se z Města rudých nocí, poprvé vydáno v roce 1981, Místo slepých cest, poprvé vydáno v roce 1983 a Západní země, poprvé vydáno v roce 1987.
Hlavním cílem této práce je analýza Burroughsova pohledu na problematiku stavu
člověka ve spojení s ideami myšlenkové školy zvané posthumanismus.
Tato práce je rozdělena do tří kapitol. První kapitola se soustředí na Burroughsův specifický vztah k jazyku a kontrole. Zabývá se převážně Burroughsovými metodami a spisovatelským stylem zatímco zdůrazňuje jeho vizuální či filmový přístup ke konstruování jednotlivých scén a také celého vyprávění.
Druhá kapitola této práce zabývá Burroughsovým vztahem k lidstvu a jeho stavu a subjektivitě. Soustředí se na Burroughsův pohled na problematiku duality těla a mysli. V této kapitole, tato práce porovnává Burroughsovy myšlenky se základními ideami posthumanismu a analyzuje.
Třetí kapitola je věnována analýze transformativního potenciálu smrti tak, jak je představen v Burroughsově trilogii. Soustředí se také na vztah sexuality, smrti a nesmrtelnosti.
Poslední částí práce je závěr, který říká, že Burroughsovy myšlenky jsou velice podobné myšlenkám posthumanismu. Závěr také zmiňuje fakt, že se Burroughs vyznačuje pozitivním přístupem ke smrti a jejímu transformativnímu potenciálu.
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