The eighty-odd tacos he got to William burroughs They are the clear demonstration that, once you have managed to abandon God through all kinds of excesses, you manage to make yourself invisible to him, and you no longer die except as an old man. If you don't believe me, remember to Bukowski, who almost reached his eighties in a constant challenge to medicine.
Burroughs's case is more aberrant than Bukowski's. If a certain touch of humanity is sometimes distilled from the literary work of the second, in Burroughs all is darkness and denial. Counterculture to the last consequences, nihilism and the search for self-destruction (which, it seems, was opposed by its cells, resistant to all kinds of violent stakes).
It is true that although the trend down the road to perdition was already well marked in Burroughs, the death of his wife Joan Vollmer ended up declining it even more. In large part because he was the one who shot his brains out in some crazy game. What happened was never completely clear. But the fact would accompany him forever.
And still, he wrote. Or perhaps precisely because of that. No one can live among delusions and demons without seeking from time to time a window for reason. In the written anger and hatred, in every sentence, in every twisted plot, and every depraved scene, Burroughs survived a little.
3 Recommended Novels by William Burroughs
Naked lunch
Science fiction writers present us with dystopia, futures where the human being was atrophied, alienated ... Burroughs considers that the present is already that dystopia from which it is impossible to escape. The perception of a world locked in a labyrinth.
Summary:"Naked Lunch", one of the most mythical novels in American literature, is a descent into the hell of drugs and a horrified and sardonic, dreamlike and hallucinatory denunciation of today's society, a world without hope or future. Burroughs shoots his arrows against religions, the army, the university, sexuality, corrupt justice, cheating traffickers, colonialism, bureaucracy and psychiatry represented by the sinister Dr. Benway, the great manipulator of consciences, the expert in Total control.
“A book of great beauty, with a wild and deadly sense of humor, as imperturbable and implacable as taxes. Burroughs is the only living American writer possibly possessed by genius. "
Junkie
That Burroughs hovered over the tragic from the time he reached the use of reason until his last days as a hated octogenarian is evident. But that all this does not mean that an absolutely black humor would flow from him on certain occasions, it is also true.
Laughter is free, and from time to time it can arise from the most rugged, macabre or wicked. Especially in a mind without any kind of moral filter like Burroughs's.
Burroughs junkies are not going to be saved either, in that they are similar to those who touched us (ours) and those who have followed. Defenseless meat, a rock going around the street, in the bars, to see what happens, to see what he catches. Robbing drunks in the subway, believing that they have taken off forever while they put the final one. Because junkies definitely live every day. Every generation contributes its addicts.
The one that Burroughs portrays in this novel is doubly survivor, as it is made up of a staff that has come out alive (I was going to make it unscathed, what nonsense) from World War II. They carry their own minefields in their arms. It is the ruined brotherhood that also appears in other titles of those days, for example in The Man with the Golden Arm, Algren's novel and Sinatra's film. Junkies in a white shirt and an old blazer. Ours were in tracksuits and fanny packs, well, that was at the end, when they were consumed by their mothers' arms. But when I read this novel they were still wearing cocks and jerks.
In Burroughs junkies, I mean, in the way they tell it, there flows a literature that will not be Burroughs's but that of his time. Burroughs will immediately go to another writing, he will not let himself be trapped except by himself and by what he has already gotten him. This book is closer to his friends than to him. It is inhabited by the people of On the Kerouac Road, and Ginsberg's Howl. But a junkie has no friends, and Burroughs was a lonely writer.
Queer
In an immense suburb, which Burroughs would later define as the "Interzone" and which spans from Mexico City to Panama, an alter ego of the writer, Lee, weaves his love fabric around Allerton, an ambiguous young man, indifferent as a man. animal. He wanders through increasingly sordid places, and on those excursions he gives us his very black humor.
Lee sets out with his friend in search of ayahuasca, an absolute drug capable of giving total control over brains, and for that very reason coveted by Russia and the United States… and by every lover. You know that with Allerton you won't be able to find what you want, but you can't give it up. In this novel, that hallucinatory landscape that is the private world of William Burroughs emerges for the first time.
