Betrayal of the Mind

...He has tried them all in every conceivable combination or mode of ingestion...

...Here, as elsewhere, it seems Burroughs might be happiest in one of those prep schools where adolescents are initiated into the tender mysteries of discipline, pederasty and masturbation...

...The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit...

...The interviews make no pretense of continuity...

...Indeed, his view of the function of his academies is more or less the avowed purpose of the Scientologists and the Free University...

...But characteristically, the distinction is smoothed over in Burroughs' determination to bring us to his state of silent transcendence...

...every bureaucratic decision is either random or the result of "vested interests...

...interlocutor Daniel Odier is depressingly happy to endorse Burroughs' madnesses in a French-English prose with sentences of Proustian length...

...Drug hysteria, racism, Bible belt morality, Protestant capitalistic ethic, muscular Christianity, have spread everywhere, transforming this planet into an annex of hell...

...In sum, there is very little in The Job that is not trivial or crazy, or both...

...and the same replies tend to recur monotonously to only marginally varying questions...

...everything is intimately related, and all conspires to our impending doom...

...We have, moreover, reached a point where we are given so much information to cope with that the result is a thorough confusion and the impoverishment of language...

...Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organizations...

...They're becoming more and more stupid, more and more incompetent and they're more of them...

...You take a formula like Nationalism-Army-Police-Trouble with other stone age tribes and when they start using atom bombs instead of stone axes . . .closing time gentlemen...

...He prescribes indiscriminate rioting as the only viable strategy against the Establishment, with the help of such aids as ultrasound machines, which produce immediate and prolonged vomiting and headaches for a considerable distance around them...

...Newspapers and television, for example, have created a "control system" that conditions responses the same way the Mayan calendar used to...

...His motives are a mixture of an absurd more-silent-than-thou competitiveness ("to travel in space you must leave all that old verbal garbage behind") and a feeling of acute claustrophobia—a sense that silence is the only thing left to us after the daily rapes perpetrated on our spirits by the media...

...The critics who treated the work as serious science fiction, or saw it as a tract against capital punishment, were really off the track...

...Luckily, the whole thing is too badly written to be worrisome, and too mad to inspire anyone to follow in the directions it indicates...

...He was apparently inspired by two communitarian groups nourishing at the time in London, the Free University and the Scientologists...

...Reviewed by Nicholas Fraser The idea of William Burroughs prescribing "techniques of discovery" in a self-appointed role of sage and mentor may seem somewhat strange, but this is what he has done in The Job, a collection of interviews and journalistic pieces assembled in 1968 and initially published in French...

...men can get on with the serious work of exercising well enough without them—leaving off, of course, to have an occasional bit of sex...

...This is a device for lessening or neutralizing response, though Burroughs can never make up his mind which...

...He goes on to attack pushers, who epitomize capitalism in the sense of creating needs where they do not already exist and then raising the prices, and the police, who use the narcotics issue to extend their cancerous authority, reproducing more of their kind until they "choke the host...

...Thus, all the verbal collages in the book are meaningless without being interesting, while an attempt to create language on tape by recording animal noises, playing them backward, and further distorting the sounds by rubbing the tape is equally dreary...

...According to Burroughs, this constitutes a form of psychic liberation, a transcendence over al...

...The notion that he should now be called on to to save us is weird, to say the least...

...Finally, Burroughs' short stories and articles, intended as "fade outs and flash back illustrations," merely confuse instead, inserting long stretches of discontinuous prose into the already muddled framework...

...For if he feels the act of destroying language and putting it together in a randomly chosen pattern constitutes a revolutionary measure, he also has a commitment, portentously stated, to silence...

...Drugs would admittedly be a problem, but they're getting very tolerant about this sort of thing nowadays...

...Junkies are the "like-minded individuals...

...If you sit there for hours?or even days—the adrenalin will go down, and you will have effectively Not-ised the object out of existence...

...the fact that language is a code in which "labels are not the things they stand for...

...Health Department (arbitrarily, of course...

...He comes on with an avuncular style in The Job, full of old saws and homely wisdom, to warn us of our condition...

...America...

...The quality of the human stock is declining disastrously...

...The idea is to "Not-is" your problems by seeing the object of your anxiety projected on a screen while a machine marks your adrenalin count...

...Of particular interest is one of head Scientologist Ron Lafayette Hubbard's inventions, banned by the U.S...

...the insignificant emotions—like love, fear and anger...

...A fresh look at Naked Lunch confirms the suspicion that only a small portion of it is enduringly readable...

...The further betrayal of the mind that this development has led him to is another matter...

...It is a measure of the author's literary criteria that when the fictional strategies are removed and his opinions are set down in ordinary prose, the effect is either ludicrous or profoundly depressing...

...Burroughs sees the state as an extension of the tribe, the tribe as an extension of the family, and women as the true source of the whole damn mess...

...Since words do not, indeed cannot, mediate with reality, the writer's sole option is to move them around in different combinations and see what happens...

...For his proposal, a string of academies throughout the world offering an assortment of courses on subjects as diverse as Tao, Karate, Weaponry, and Hieroglyphics, is merely a variation of the eclecticism that characterizes the beliefs of both existing cults...

...The solution offered is a hieroglyphic alphabet with virtually no abstractions and a fixed word order, an expediency that would put us in the situation (metaphorically, that is) of Swift's mad scientists, who need a sack of objects as heavy as themselves to communicate the simplest things...

...Extreme situations call for extreme remedies, and old Uncle Bill has a number of suggestions...

...To this end, the therapeutic activity favored at his academies is to be an interminable sequence of exercises that teach the angst-ridden to put their clothes on properly, in the right order, and with no wasted effort—motions which, correctly performed, will bring calm and order to their lives ("overall defeat in life is made up of many small defeats...

...Drugs are Burroughs' only specialty, a subject to which he applies himself with the obsessive zeal of a master gourmet...

...Another bright idea is a proliferating series of subversive institutions known as mobs ("my own business"), exact replicas of various units of the System that destroy society from within...

...Yet it is clear that Burroughs' aversion to language has murkier origins...

...There is, however, little or nothing of the mystic in all this...

...Most of the book's substance is filler, turbulent nonsense from which meaning is only fitfully allowed to emerge...

...And this brand of anarchism is consistent with the principles Burroughs expressed earlier in Naked Lunch: "Democracy is cancerous...

...Whether this was done consciously or not is beside the point, for what results is a language which, like Burroughs' view of human life, is violent and self-destructive, twitching febrilely across the page and exhausting itself in spasms of cruelty and nauseated sexual excitement...

...That is the road to follow...

...and] have no clear-cut reference" makes unambiguous communication impossible...

...The earlier sections of The Job are devoted to the author's ideas about language, which he feels has little validity as a means of communication...

...His scheme of things has no place for women...

...One of the recent scientific developments he finds most comforting is that they are no longer "necessary to reproduction...

...the withdrawal of like-minded individuals into separate communities within nations...

...Burroughs does not believe in science, but he does have a penchant for gadgetry...

...It is not surprising, then, that having kicked the habit, Burroughs finds his new home in the international student movement, appearing at a number of meetings as a sort of assistant scientologue trying to sell his beliefs to a lot of incredulous students...

...About the population explosion...

...All aberration is based on verbal formulation...

...A cooperative on the other hand, can live without the State...

...Very dear to the author, too, is the notion of the invisible man, unobtrusive but effectively hostile, a cross between a science-fiction fantasy and a craving for anonymous efficiency...

...And the prospects of survival...

...Burroughs has no sense of the individuality of events...

...The author's conception of "experimental writing" puts the term outside the usual categories...