Can You See a Virus? The Queer Cold War of William Burroughs

Abstract

He has fertilized an A to Z of postwar creativity, quite literally from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa; he has acted as godfather for literary countercultures from the Beats to the Cyberpunks; he has haunted our media zones as an icon of iconoclasm – and William Burroughs has remained a critical curse. Leaving aside what Burroughs' academic marginality tells us – about Burroughs or academia – the main reason he has hexed his critics is also the key to the proliferation of his image and its power of mimetic magic: those he does not repel, Burroughs fascinates. This is the basis to his distinct iconicity, infectious now across four decades.

Self-styled as El Hombre Invisible, Burroughs fully inhabits Maurice Blanchot's construction of fascination as “the absence one sees because it is blinding”: “Whoever is fascinated doesn't properly speaking, see what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance.” Unable or unwilling, Burroughs critics have done little with such knowledge other than to pass it on. Robin Lydenberg, author of the ground-breaking study Word Cultures (1987), could go back twenty years to quote Joan Didion praising Burroughs for “a voice so direct and original and versatile as to disarm close scrutiny of what it is saying”; so too, Robert Sobieszek in his artwork catalogue Ports of Entry (1996), could go back twenty to cite Philippe Mikriammos' formula, “vox Williami, vox monstrorum,” to account for the sound “which ultimately seduces the listener.” A voice that disarms scrutiny; a voice that seduces. In the critical context, to approach Burroughs disarmed and seduced has meant taking him on his own terms – and being taken in by him. Burroughs resists power to the extent that he also exercises it, understands power so well precisely because he has always worked from its deep insides. From the outset, this WASP scion of American big business (public relations on his mother's side, adding machines on his father's) was born to live out power's painful contradictions. His life as addict, homosexual, and writer literalized that undesired inheritance with a perverse vengeance, queering the legacy of “Poison” Ivy Lee and Burroughs computers by reincarnating it as a pathogenic cultural virus. And so Burroughs dedicated himself to immortality by becoming what Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976), called a “meme”: “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” which propagates analogously to the genetic code and the parasitism of viruses, and is more than metaphorically “alive”. If memes survive by parasitizing human minds, so, reciprocally, can the mind survive through parasitic self-replication: the viral programme “simply says ‘Copy me and spread me around.’” This is Burroughs: “all poets worthy of the name are mind parasites, and their words ought to get into your head and live there, repeating and repeating and repeating.” He could scarcely be more explicit. And so to exempt Burroughs from the terms of his own critique is to miss the whole point of his textual politics – that is, not only his texts' analysis of power, but their own relation to it – since complicity in all he opposes is the condition of his work's extraordinary brinkmanship. As I have argued elsewhere, it may well be those who would gladly burn Burroughs who have best understood the unique force of his work, a force at its maximum in his two crucial decades, falling either side of The Naked Lunch (1959).