Burroughs As a Political Writer?
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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 18 (2016) Issue 5 Article 20 Burroughs as a Political Writer? Alexander Greiffenstern University of Duisburg-Essen Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the American Politics Commons, American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Reading and Language Commons, and the United States History Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Greiffenstern, Alexander. "Burroughs as a Political Writer?." 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UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck- Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Langua-ge Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monog-raph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Volume 18 Issue 5 (December 2016) Article 22 Alexander Greiffenstern, "Burroughs as a Political Writer?" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol18/iss5/22> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18.5 (2016) Special Issue Beat Studies Go Global. Ed. Oliver Harris and Polina Mackay <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol18/iss5/> Abstract: In his article "Burroughs as a Political Writer?" Alexander Greiffenstern discusses political elements in William S. Burroughs's work. Greiffenstern looks at Burroughs's text "The Coming of the Purple Better One" written for Esquire about the Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968. By writing a surprisingly personal text, Burroughs might have captured something about the significance of the convention that many later historical accounts miss. In the end, Burroughs leaves the critical reader no other choice than to attempt a historical and political analysis. Alexander Greiffenstern, "Burroughs as a Political Writer?" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18.5 (2016): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol18/iss5/22> Special Issue Beat Studies Go Global. Ed. Oliver Harris and Polina Mackay Alexander GREIFFENSTERN Burroughs as a Political Writer? In August 1968 William Burroughs returned to Chicago, the city where he once worked as a detective and exterminator, to cover the Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine together with Jean Genet and Terry Southern. Afterwards, he wrote a short text called "The Coming of the Purple Better One" that was published by Esquire and which can also be found in the collection Exterminator! (1973). If one looks at texts about the convention, Burroughs is mentioned sometimes, but his text is never quoted, and for good reason. Reading interviews with Burroughs from the 1960s, or The Job (1970), one is confronted with the question: to what extent should we perceive Burroughs as an intellectual with certain political views? If one focuses on Burroughs's aesthetics, which of course entail a certain ethics, should one take his political opinions into account and put them in historical perspective? How to deal with Burroughs as a political writer is a question with which most critics struggle. For The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas (2006), Rob Johnson researched the time Burroughs spent as a farmer in Texas and shows how it influenced his writing. He explains how Burroughs at that time regarded himself in many ways as conservative. In his letters to Ginsberg "Burroughs was refining his worldview—what we would today call a 'conservative' or 'libertarian' view or what Ginsberg styled 'libertarian conservatism'" (101). Evidently, Burroughs took some of his ideas from popular conservative commentator Westbrook Pegler. In a footnote Johnson explains: "Burroughs' famous routine 'Roosevelt after Inauguration,' for example, closely resembles in content and style Pegler's 'Pop Bottle Barrage,' both of which are absurd routines about Roosevelt's stacking of the Supreme Court in order to fast-track his New Deal legislation" (179, note 25). "Roosevelt after Inauguration" was written as part of "In Search of Yage" (1953, published 1963), but was omitted from the first City Lights edition due to its offensive content. Naked Lunch (1959) contains another routine that Johnson takes a closer look at in his essay "William S. Burroughs as 'Good Ol' Boy': Naked Lunch in East Texas." Johnson argues that the "County-Clerk" routine shows how much Burroughs had internalized the Southern version of racism and anti-Semitism. Even if one reads Naked Lunch as a book without any clear moral judgment about, for example, the use of drugs, "it's obvious to anyone reading the "County Clerk" routine that while Burroughs appears to be having a bit too much fun telling these racist and anti-Semitic jokes, he is hardly condoning such opinions" (51). But questioning or fighting such statements was clearly not on Burroughs's mind either when he wrote this routine; the whole scene with the county clerk is strangely matter-of-fact. Lee is not part of the county-clerk culture, but he knows the right "password" to get what he needs. In the sense of a critical assessment of language, the cut-up projects of the 1960s presented a major shift in Burroughs's attitude towards a politically engaged writing. Nevertheless, the presence of anti-Semitic remarks in Burroughs's work is something we should not overlook, as Oliver Harris points out in his Introduction to Nova Express: "Burroughs' absolute immersion in the cut-up project, his evangelical promotion and daily living it, had a dark side— unleashing for a while an ugly megalomania, misogyny, and anti-Semitism—but it is integral to the power of his texts and our experience of them" (xxi). In his article "Cutting up Politics" Harris tries to answer, "To what political analysis were cut-up methods an answer?" (177), and he comes to the conclusion that Burroughs's project was rather anti- political. There is no doubt that the texts engaged with political issues and at some moments became political pamphlets that tried to animate the reader into action, but the goal was rather to destroy politics as such. This is especially true for Nova Express, and in his recent introduction to the new edition, Harris stresses the political statements of the book but wonders why there is no apparent change in the manuscript to restore a reference that would have prophetically invoked the Cuban Missile crisis. He writes: "For Burroughs, 'Present Time' was not determined by public events or the official historical record but was a point of personal intersection, and from many pages of cut-up newspaper source material he chose to keep few fragments of 'historical' significance for use in Nova Express" (xiv). To offer a new perspective on Burroughs as a political writer, it might be helpful to take a look at a small text like