Burroughs Lost in Space

...The Queen stabilizes the whole stinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top...

...While full of the breathless, ellipsis-strewn lyricism of Burroughs' earlier works, The Place of Dead Roads contains nothing so startling as, say, the line mNaked Lunch that impressed Norman Mailer: "Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flashbulb of orgasm...

...There are, of course, scattered efforts at Deep Thinking: "We might say that the next radically new concept biologically speaking will be the transition from Time to Space...

...it is simply bad writing...

...Life is an entanglement of lies to hide its basic mechanisms...

...Apart from this obligatory and unrevealing postmodernist flourish, Burroughs shows far less interest in issues of authorship or identity than in avidly chronicling Kim's gunfights, his time and space travels, and most of all his endless copulations with a variety of partners, sometimes multiple ones...

...Burroughs ruminates on mummification, cloning, viruses ("what we call evil is quite likely a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area"), and "gun-smithing...

...Burroughs has used mass art in his writings before...

...Paris "is like a painting that moves," and we are told of "the narrow twisting streets" of an Arab town...

...If dream sleep, REM sleep, is cut off, the subject shows all the symptoms of sleeplessness...

...It's a terrible sight to see a Schmun smelling its way in, its whole body writhing in peristalsis, steaming caustic saliva dripping from its fangs...

...Kim gets an injection of Arabic—"as the shot takes effect, Kim can feel the language stirring in his throat with a taste of blood and mint tea and greasy lamb"—to prepare him for his "Arab assignment...

...Heknows more, and is willing to write more, about hand guns, dum-dum bullets and hair triggers than one could ever hope to read outside of a small-arms manual...

...As mNakedLunch, there is amad scientist (but who could be as mad as Dr...

...In-gloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire...

...The bands dress in "Shit Slaughter" uniforms, and carry out "Shiticides...

...a flabby, toothless fascism, to be sure...

...Rather, it suggests the author's exhaustion...

...But even if it were so easily assimilable, the author of The Place of Dead Roads is not the man who could convince us...

...In fact, the style is surprisingly and deplorably lax...

...In that piece for the Times, Burroughs chided reviewers for pigeonholing him as the "writer of drug addiction," asserting, as he has many times in the past, that "from the beginning I have been . . . concerned, as a writer, with addiction itself (whether to drugs, or sex, or money, or power) as a model of control, and with the ultimate decadence of humanity's biological potentials...

...No such purpose attaches to the Western and science fiction narratives in his latest offering, nor are they intended as satire or for some higher purpose—unless you believe Burroughs when he claims, as he did recently in the New York Times Book Review, that he "writes for the Space Age...

...the last third of the novel features Kim as an anti-Venusian agent...

...he wishfully predicts the evolutionary triumph of young male homosexuals, who will be able to do without women through the use of "artificial wombs...

...Apparently for Burroughs, as perhaps for the faithful who continue to buy his books, the world is a simple place, divided between a "them"—bigots, replicants, "arch conservatives"— and an "us...

...In the past, Burroughs has given the impression of being at a number of weird forefronts...

...I find shocking, even if dumb, his fulmi-nations against England and the English: " God save the Queen and a fascist regime...

...The "antihero" of this weary amalgam is Kim Carsons, really an all-purpose fantasy figure—a turn-of-the-cen-tury "shootist," and leader of homosexual robber bands...

...We have seen what this talk of "biological potentials" amounts to...

...Elsewhere, Burroughs is less mysterious about what he thinks of as biological advance...

...The saving remnant turns out to be those bold spirits willing to entertain, along with Burroughs, fantasies of "a united space program...

...The shoot-'em-ups are followed by invaders from Venus...

...The English have gone soft in the outhouse...

...Reviewed by Oliver Conant Contributor, "New Republic," "American Book Review," "Book Forum" This is a repellent novel that cannibalizes some of the stalest, least interesting formulas of mass entertainment—the ritual violence of subliterary Westerns, the body-snatching and "replicants" of '50s science fiction...

...Although nothing in The Place of Dead Roads ever quite rises to the level of an idea, there is diffused in it, however inchoately, a feeling about what the world is like that has several points of resemblance to the dopier aspects of '60s counterculture ideology—despite Burroughs' Nazoid touches...

...The imaginative poverty, the simplifying ideology, the violence and pornography that appear in Burroughs show him to be no more than an index to our unhappy contemporary culture...

...In Naked Lunch women were referred to as " gashes...

...suffice to say that the depth of Burroughs' bloody-mind-edness surfaces in an extended and perfectly disgusting dog-shooting episode...

...The awfulness of the new novel, though, can hardly be attributed to its consecutive narrative...

...The laxness of the new novel cannot be explained away as deliberate, as an avant-gardist's subversion of cliche...

...As if recognizing how little there is in The Place of Dead Roads that is in any way real or challenging—after all these years, and after so much of the freedom and license called for by the Beats has been sanctioned—Burroughs endeavors nevertheless to shock, or at least to sicken...

...Their resemblance to Hitler's SS seems to bother Burroughs not at all...

...The science fiction bits include a section on the planet Venus, full of the sort of parallel flora and fauna so common in unimaginative SF: "The Schmun is a predator with the powerful hind quarters of a hyena and the hyena's bone-breaking jaws...

...As for addiction, it seems to me far less easily assimilable to other kinds of human experience than Burroughs would have us believe...

...Etc...

...here the sex is unvaryingly mechanical and repetitive...

...Never go too far in any direction is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built...

...Homosexual reveries, as much as heterosexual ones, can make for fine fiction...

...No doubt for prudential reasons, Burroughs has dropped this objectionable usage, as well as the often cruelly funny characterizations of homosexuals found in both Naked Lunch and Junkie...

...Benway...

...In this he succeeds, at least for me...

...These bands go on rampages against those Burroughs refers to as the "shits of the world," the "bigoted ignorant basically frightened middle-class...

...who has perfected "language shots" that enable one to acquire a foreign tongue...

...There the resemblance ends and indeed this foul beast beggars description...

...I got off Burroughs' bus along about The Ticket That Exploded, but the naturalism of Junkie and the surrealism of Naked Lunch do demonstrate stylistic range...

...The novel begins with the death of a William Seward Hall (the first two names are Burroughs' own), a writer of Western stories who uses the pseudonym "Kim Carsons...

...England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead...

...This has something to do with the Venusian attempt to take over speech centers, but I suspect it has far more to do with North Africa's local color, the delights of kif, and young Arab boys...

...its] controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons...

...Strictly speaking, there are no ideas in The Place of Dead R oads either, only obsessive, private concerns of a pseu-doscientific cast...

...I find sickening the gratuitous gore involving humans that is directed at animals, too, notably horses and dogs...

...Junkie, a powerful book, employed a consecutive narrative...

...For evidence one could turn to Burroughs' own first books, in which he bore powerful witness (I do not say responsibly or humanly) to the uniqueness of the drug addiction experience...

...in their very different ways, Junkie and Naked Lunch employed the idiom and attitude of hard boiled detective fiction as a means of rendering the underworld reality of drug addiction...

...His cliches, in contrast to the bureaucratic or scientistic jargon spoofed in Naked Lunch, are his own: "October' s bright blue weather is at its best in the Ozarks...

...No, it is the distance Burroughs has put between himself and the desperation of drug addiction and the drug addict' s world—a reality he was once intimately acquainted with—that explains the unreality of The Place of Dead Roads (where drugs are, as they say, "strictly recreational...

...The excrementitiousness is representative...

...So have most of the great novels...

...None of this serves any satiric purpose...

...his ethnographic fantasies were diverting, and his knowledge of a vast variety of exotic drugs certainly tested...

...I will spare the readers of The New Leader lengthy quotations...

...Burroughs' well-known "cut-up" technique, the more or less random assemblage of prose fragments, may have quickly become unreadable for all except his most devoted followers, yet it conveyed, most memorably in Naked Lunch, his singular vision of fragmentation and apocalypse, of an America given over to excess...

...the earth becomes a space station and war is simply out, irrelevant, flatly insane in a context of research centers, space ports, and the exhilaration of working with people you like and respect toward an agreed-upon objective, an objective from which all workers will gain...

...This time out he is content to present such startling observations as the following: "Recent research has established that dreaming is a biological necessity...

...Thus, in expanding upon his science fiction theme of invading aliens, he notes that the Venusians, who take over the minds and bodies of humans, have been given a "vast reservoir" of "arch conservatives" and "stupid bigoted, uncritical humanhosts" created by the "Industrial Revolution, with its overpopulation and emphasis on quantity rather than quality...

...Television has numbed us to the violent ends of gunfighters, but the suffering of animals retains its power somehow...

...The same rock-steady hands, cool nerve, and timing that make Kim deadly in a gunfight also make him an excellent practicing surgeon...

...Women, it goes without saying, have no part in the novel, except as the focus of fear and barely concealed loathing...

...Ultimately, Burroughs looks forward to the abolition of separate sexes, the production of "a-sexual offspring," and soon...

...Blind, entirely silent and devoid of vocal chords, they are guided by scent perceptors that cover the entire body, which is a pale pink, pitted and porous like a pumice stone...