Recent Forerunners, William S. Burroughs

Evident in Bradley the Buyer of Naked Lunch, a nervous energy pervades Burroughs's writing style and makes the reader pretty uncomfortable. Throwing himself on the ground, begging for his job, "thrusting" fingers into his mouth, smiling horribly. Very distasteful but intriguing. The number of characters Bradley affects (in/directly) is impressive for a short excerpt: Lupita, the boys, colleagues, the District Supervisor, the Judge. People talk about it, fight it, and perpetuate it.

Burroughs was 60 during this interview, an age in which he seems dulled to earlier ideas of political disdain. Of (or preceding) the Beat generation, he is someone I consider a persuasive opponent of capitalist ideals but during the interview (and perhaps because of the direction of the interview itself) he comes off as a much more secure and resigned in his ideas of literature, spirituality, and drug rehabilitation. Much less paranoid anyway. I liked his sticking up for Eliot: how does anyone think he wasn't a verbal innovator? And his confidence that all is illusion.

All of these writing excerpts are examples of transgressive literature. The junkie that eats the DS, the doctor that dances with scalpels and his patients lives, the "cut up" poetry: they all exemplify a different understanding of mental processes and desire to portray something very unlike the usual. Burroughs leads with something familiar and ends with something horrifying but not necessarily false, just "wrong."