Memorandum on William Seward Burroughs II, aka "William Lee"

“Hitman for the apocalypse in trench coat and snap-brim fedora, William Burroughs steps out of his life and into his fiction like a secret agent charged with the demolition of all bourgeois values.” What a sentence. I'll never get the chance to be the one who it wrote now because J.G. Ballard did it first, back in 1991 at the start of his review of Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of...

And maybe it's a good thing I won't be able to write that sentence, because in a sense it belongs to a time that was already passing away when Ballard penned it (literally; he wrote everything longhand). It is probably accurate, though, because Burroughs—as beloved as he is to me—belongs mostly to an imagination, to a set of dreams, that is gone. We've moved past the viability of “the demolition of all bourgeois values;” wouldn't it be nice if things were still that simple? If they ever were.

Reading Burroughs now I can see that, like many other writers of speculative fiction, too many and too few of his waking nightmares and fever dreams have come to pass: we live in a world where “One Nation Under CCTV” is spray-painted on a public building and then hailed as art, without any corresponding alteration in the status quo (the UK continues to be the most surveilled state in the world, 63 years after Orwell finished 1984 on his deathbed: take a look at this):

You can run a government without police if your conditioning system is tight enough but you can't run a government without bullshit.

Not that that should be taken as too emblematic of Burroughs' writing. Although nobody is likely to accuse him of subtlety, subtlety sort of doesn't enter into it: Burroughs speaks to each reader to the degree that they will listen. Burroughs' novels (or books, whatever they are) are, as Umberto Eco writes “machines for generating interpretations”—these are truly “open works,” his specially-engineered “soft machines”.

Burroughs himself might have been disappointed to see his aura of impenetrability and subversiveness dissipating on the Fiction & Literature shelves at Barnes & Noble, but then again he probably would have seen it as symptomatic of a certain mode of civilization, which is true. However, the very ubiquity of various of the great postmodern raconteur's ramblings—for example, the free online availability of literally hours upon hours of his voice reading or lecturing or babbling—gives credence and potency to two of his favorite images: the virus and the tape recorder. In a sense, history and William Burroughs seem to have proved William Burroughs right.

“Do you understand your orders, Mr. Lee?”