Death, Take Over
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING Death, Take Over By Raymond Rosenthal William Burroughs' chief qualities as a writer of fiction are: a long memory for third-rate surrealistic prose of the Blaise Cendrars...
...and they dropped away, benumbed, confused, crushed...
...It is enough to remain oriented toward God to surmount it, otherwise all grace turns into hate, as in conversion all evil turns into love Beauty solicits the sadist as it does the saint: 'The concupiscence,' Weil explained, 'inspired by the beauty of a face and a body is not the love that beauty deserves, but a kind of hate that grips the flesh before that which for it is too pure: Plato understood this.' " Significantly, the use of primitive rituals in Burroughs is as fake as it is in de' Sade...
...Junky, and in parts of Naked Lunch, is a direct imitation of that obsessed, rationalistic propagandist for romantic destruction...
...In fact, Burroughs' entire literary production is the application to human life of the crowdman's garbled version of science on so perverse and mind-benumbing a scale it is hard to believe that level-headed realists like Mary McCarthy and tough dialecticians like Leslie Fiedler could be taken into camp by it...
...Only in mercantile society does pornography or the violation of taboos appear not felt as such, or felt only to the end of getting a more intense pleasure by means of a psychological game that presupposes the isolated, unhappy individual, divided in himself, who treats himself with the same cold manipulation as he does his subordinates and objects...
...Pathetic victim of the machine age, he can only envisage the utopia of sanity and health as a smooth-working machine in the hands of puritanical fanatics like himself...
...Attention, contemplation, love, are the only ways out of the sadistic labyrinth...
...Where on earth does she find all this...
...Their usual justification for Burroughs is that the situation is grave, he mirrors that situation, and therefore his failures as a writer can be overlooked...
...Swift's excremental vision, we are informed, makes Burroughs a buddy in psychopathology...
...God forbid...
...Burroughs, we are told, represents a terminal point, a harbinger of the end...
...All that is worth taking seriously in Burroughs' writing has been lifted straight from de Sade...
...For de Sade the abandonment to providence has no meaning, he demands a plan, a line of conduct...
...A 'perfectly organized' oppressive society could not help but follow sadistic preachings, and has in fact followed them in recent times...
...As Elemire Zolla, the brilliant Italian critic, pointed out in his essay on de Sade, "sadism signifies an acceptance of the world of force which few people succeed in living consciously...
...and it would seem that the critics who praise and promote him are quite willing to undergo the apocalypse he predicts, provided they are permitted to explain it (and him) right up to the very end...
...In the very heart of sadistic man," Zolla explains, "is installed the principle of mechanical civilization: the sense of the unbearableness of his destiny...
...Burroughs' humor cannot be enjoyed straight from the page, like the humor of Ring Lardner or Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh or Ronald Firbank...
...a tin, nay a plastic, ear for lingo...
...Behind his jumbled prose one glimpses the immensely pathetic tragedy of a generation...
...What slight intellectual interest there is in his work, outside of the interest naturally aroused by his straight documentation of junky existence in his first novel...
...Sade's image of the unendurable pleasure of an orgasm obtained by hanging recurs like a monotonous refrain throughout this latest novel...
...How different it is we learn soon enough: "And I sloughed with the iron glove and his face smashed like rotten cantaloupe three commuters across the room huddled in gabardine topcoats and grey flannel suits under that strangled him straight-away with a soapy towel...
...His recently asserted opinion that words are "an ox-cart way of doing things" is only to be expected, the natural expression of ham-fisted rancor for that graceful, life-enhancing skill which he can never hope to attain...
...And why mention Swift...
...It is here only in fragments: "Dead on arrival 'What did she die of?' 'End.' Dead on the surplus blankets Sailor hanged to a cell by his principals: 'Some things I find myself doing I'll pack in is all' Death, take over...
...The title, of course, refers to the human body, with all its curious, outmoded apertures and inefficiencies, which Burroughs' scientific zeal finds so unsuited to the sado-masochistic pleasures of the future...
...He cannot escape the magic circle of de Sade's logic which claims that nature is inherently evil, only power exists, and man's good instincts are but sophisms to conceal his love for pleasurable destruction...
...most of his friends are dead...
...Burroughs has not even heard of them...
...And yet they were...
...But Swift also had a noble vision of life which, in every word he wrote, was counterposed to the spectacle of man's stupidity and viciousness...
...And if this unrelieved, gibbering violence palls, Burroughs can always be depended on to perk up the proceedings with a splash of threadbare surrealism: "Out of junk in East St...
...Without the titillation of such a special occasion, Burroughs' writing is pretty thin stuff...
...an obtuse acceptance of, all the stalest clich?©s of sadistic literary demonism of the romantic-decadent school, trimmed out to look new with the husks of verbiage culled from reading the ads and watching television...
...Louis sick dawn all dawn smell of distant fingers to greet the garbage man and the dawn the neon sun sinks in the sharp smell of carrion coughing and spitting in the fractured air tentative crystal city iridescent in the dawn wind adolescents ejaculate over the tide flats the stale streets of commerce a Hey Rube switch brings a million adolescents swinging out of the jungle with Tarzan cries, crash landing perilous tin planes and rockets, leaping from trucks and banana rafts, charge through the mountain wind like death in the throat...
...His latest novel, The Soft Machine (Grove Press, 182 pp., $5.00), will give his fans a little trouble, for it is a limp rehash of his two previous books, Naked Lunch and Nova Express, obviously not the creation of an effervescent genius bursting joyfully into ever-new territory...
...That his mouldy, cheap, second-hand, utterly boring and lifeless amalgam of literary rubbish has been taken seriously by a good number of prominent critics is, to my mind, a scandal in our intellectual life that vies with the scandal of the atom bomb in our social existence...
...Pure sadism has a demonic character, that is, it is a perception of the divine turned inside out since, as Simone Weil observed: 'When the supernatural enters a being who does not have sufficient love to receive it, it turns into evil...
...It is the central ritual of Burroughs' underground religion, borrowing its d?©cor and appurtenances from primitive life: "They were going to hang me and when I shot my load and died I would pass into his body They stripped me and lashed by body with special sex nettles rigged up as a gallows silver light popped in my eyes like a flash bulb woke up the lookout different whole whore house section built on catwalks over the mud flats entirely given over to hanging and all kinds death in orgasm young boys need it special These quotations are a fair sampling of Burroughs' style, his main obsession, and his muttered hopes for the future: "the lookout different...
...Compared to e. e. cummings' brilliant gags or Joyce's inspired puns, his wit is nowhere and will remain there through eons of literary time...
...The trouble is that their explanations explain nothing...
...they had only a tenuous connection to life...
...Perhaps...
...To the protest of the man who says: 'I have abandoned myself and I enjoy felicity and quiet,' the religious man replies: 'You cannot be truly abandoned, since you have thought to obtain something thanks to your abandon.' This divine irony is incomprehensible to the sarcastic de Sade [and Burroughs...
...Example: "The paws do not refresh...
...Artistically, he is more a victim than a creator...
...The sadist, the opposite of the saint (who accepts the world of force only as a test and in order to detach himself from it) is almost impossible to find, in the pure state, in daily life...
...His flat, mumbled witticisms seem to require a particular setting and delivery...
...Real primitive rituals, as Zolla says, were aimed at a "process of death and rebirth, not just to satisfy a need of excitation or to exercise power with self-indulgence, provoking pain When sacrifice no longer has the value of expiation, the overcoming of guilt, it is interpreted as a sign of social prestige, a symbol of power...
...But only an effort of attention could have prepared him to tell that story...
...His is the sort of science one absorbs by reading the National Enquirer or Readers' Digest, and his "popularization of disgust," his nausea, is not one whit different in its essentials from the reading matter that provoked it...
...a drag party, say, with Charles Laughton in ballet costume reciting Burroughs' lines, might possibly give them the oomph they lack in bare print...
...and, finally, an honorable discharge from the sex-anddrug war which he is expert at exploiting...
...WRITERS & WRITING Death, Take Over By Raymond Rosenthal William Burroughs' chief qualities as a writer of fiction are: a long memory for third-rate surrealistic prose of the Blaise Cendrars and Pierre MacOrlan variety...
...But good lies precisely in perpetuating, insofar as it is granted, the state of contemplation without mixing it with will or letting it be moved by destiny...
...One can only rub one's eyes in amazement after reading Mary McCarthy's analysis: humor, satire akin to Swift's, a new pattern of art based on the latest scientific breakthroughs, true science fiction as opposed to the shoddy entertainment sort...
...Why draft this prestigious figure from the past, especially to put over such a violent breaker of precedents, such a scorner of all the past...
...All spiritual progress implies that one receives more of the supernatural than one has love...
...Burroughs swallows whole both de Sade and the modern, competitive world saturated with sadism, but he does not redeem his horrendous picture of that world by either the distance of irony or pathos...
...Burroughs has nothing to counterpose, except for some idiotic blabber about imminent biological change, a future in the galaxies, an apocalyptic somersault that depends for its efficacy on taking over the machines, the so-called control system...
Vol. 49 • March 1966 • No. 7
