RealityStudio.org

There are some points in this "reassessment" of WSB with which I disagree, but it's a thoughtful job by somebody who ultimately admires the man.

http://blurt-online.com/features/view/1137/

I agree. A very sympathetic portrayal of a complex man. I've come to see self-hatred as the key to understanding WSB.

I can't comment on Didion, but how anyone can argue that Norman Mailer (a literary poseur who really had nothing new to offer in style or substance) and Philip Roth (a neurotic, walking Jewish stereotype) showed great depth is beyond me. Roth never had anything to say apart from whimpering and whining about his persecution complex.

Essentially, Burroughs can only be seen as lacking depth in comparison to Mailer and Roth if you judge literary merit solely by the standards of plot and character development. These were largely lacking in Burroughs, but this was intentional. Criticizing him on these grounds is like criticizing Stravinsky for not sticking to tonal music.

Among Burroughs' contemporaries or near-contemporaries (writers who did most of their work post WWII), the only others who I would put in the running for being remembered in 100 years time are Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut.

P.S. Is there any particular reason why this was posted in "Burroughsian" rather than "Burroughs Discussion"?

I agree that comparing Burroughs with Mailer, Roth, Didion et al is misguided. Burroughs is a multi-media artist not just a writer. His contemporaries were guys like Warhol and John Cage. It is precisely the work that the reassessment largely dismisses, the cut-ups and related work, that puts him in that company. This is yet another case of the cut-up trilogy being taken as the primary example of the cut-up technique. It is not. In fact as the letters clearly show, Burroughs returned to narrative before The Wild Boys etc and injected narrative into the entire Grove cut-up trilogy. In my opinion the reason the Grove novels fail is this injection of narrative.

What is missing from the letters is the story of the cut-up as Burroughs practiced it throughout the 1960s. The letters to Haselwood are welcome and some of the best in the entire book on the one hand because they reveal his belief in the commerical elements of the cut up. This is not silly as the world of art was focused on the type of work Gysin and Burroughs was doing at this time. That is why Burroughs appears in magazines with a concrete, new realist and lettrist bent in this period. If you look at the MOMA's 1961 Art of Assemblege show which features the hottest art with museums and collectors, Gysin and Burrough fit right in as does the Dream Machine. There is a method to the seemingly mad idea that the cut-ups could be big commercially. Also the Haselwood letters highlight that Burroughs cared deeply and what involved in the production of his books and in his books as objects.

The letters to Gysin on the cut-up are fine but I wondered where all the letters to little magazine editors were. The letters to Iain Sinclair (as mentioned in the incredible chapbook by Beat Scene), the letters to Nuttall, the letters to Weissner, or even people like Dan Lauffer of Brown Paper. In these letters Burroughs describes the technique in detail.
The new volume of letters just told the same old story unlike Oliver Harris's Volume of Letters which told the hidden story. Maybe there
was no story to tell in the new volume.

Yet another dull essay detailing the life and times of William S. Burroughs. It does what critics all around the world of Burroughs do, and that run from his work. When they can't understand it, they return to his biography. Not only does he return to his biography, but he is factually incorrect: he writes that Gysin discovers the cut-up technnique and that Burroughs develops it. However, if he had done his homework, he would discover that Tristan Tzara was, in fact, the founding father of the cut-up technique. In his poem "To Make a Dada Poem", he writes: 'Take a pair of scissors/ Take a newspaper'. Thus, implying that one should cut up the newspaper. Essentially, Tzara's idea was to create random juxtapositions in the rearrangement of composite texts.

I apologise, but this is not inciteful, or in fact, a reassessment of Burroughs work or his life. Dull! Dull! Dull!