I received William Burroughs's seminal (in more sense than one!) novel
Naked Lunch as a form prize when I was fifteen. I read it with a
distinct sense of horripilation, as if the vile secretions it described
might ooze through the pages and the orgiastic rituals it depicted were
subject to incorporation into my own, fevered imagination.Burroughs's
influence on me as a writer has been impossibly confused with the impact
of his writing. From his life I took the dubious message that in order
to nurture a standpoint of fearless detachment -- from country, from
class, from all allegiances -- it was permissible to indulge in the most
irrational derangement of the senses. Yet while this was the pose, its
enactment was one of steely-eyed perspicacity. If there was the
Burroughs of Nova Express, Dead Fingers Talk, and The Last Words of
Dutch Schultz, willfully employing his unconscious as a test bed for the
most exuberantly unpleasant of visions and ideas, then there was also
the harsh empiricism of Junky to act as a corrective.
But the main lesson the gestalt of Burroughs's life and his work taught
me was that there exists a sinister congruence between the control
systems implicit in capitalist societies (with their obsessional
manufacturing and their compulsiveconsuming) and the uncontrollable
psyche of the drug addict. It was Burroughs's great contribution to
twentieth-century literature to merge his own psychopathology with the
collective malaise. Truly, to paraphrase his friend Jack Kerouac, he
made us all look at what was on the end of our forks.
