Wild Bill

Burroughs gets boxed

by Gary Susman

Four decades after its publication, William S. Burroughs's classic novel Naked Lunch is still as daunting to most first-time readers as Finnegans Wake. The book sought to explode language wide open, to find the fugitive meanings suppressed by the tyrannies of syntax, metaphor, and linear narrative. Its deliberate absence of plot, its cast of hundreds of walk-on characters, its images created by arbitrary associations of words, all tend to frustrate readers. And if Naked Lunch is difficult, Burroughs's later books, which feature the cut-up method -- randomly splicing fragments from newspapers or other novels into his own text -- can be nearly impenetrable.

Still, readers can glimpse between the cracks Burroughs's grotesque, dystopian view of America. Using heroin addiction as an analogy, his fiction depicts a society whose members, from top to bottom, are addicted to all forms of control. The objectification of others is expressed through all kinds of degrading behavior (much of it involving sex, drugs, or torture), a dehumanizing trend that leads ultimately to mutation, where the human species is transformed into something more like machines or insects.

Given how bleak and paranoid Burroughs's books read, it's often harder to grasp how satirical, dryly witty, and out-and-out funny they are -- unless you hear them read by the author himself. Burroughs, who died last year at 83, had the flat, dry voice of an old Midwesterner (like T.S. Eliot, another excellent reader of his own work, he was born in St. Louis). But those prairie cadences also suggested the sly wit of Mark Twain. His croak was the voice of a carnival barker, an old-time radio newscaster, a traveling salesman, whose seeming respectability was a thin veneer masking a con man's guile, a spy's cunning. Imagine Walter Cronkite crossed with Jack Nicholson. Despite its limitations as an instrument, it was well suited to the author's parade of jaded detectives, subversive secret agents, corrupt officials, medical quacks, scheming junkies, and crapulous Republicans.

Burroughs mastered his vocal persona over decades of touring and recording. At many readings, he was taped by John Giorno, the poet and founder of Giorno Poetry Systems, which has recorded Burroughs and many other writers. Giorno has now culled the best recorded versions of dozens of passages for a four-CD boxed set, The Best of William Burroughs, from Giorno Poetry Systems (Mercury/Mouth Almighty). Most of these recordings were made between 1971 and 1987, but they are presented in the order that Burroughs wrote them, from the 1930s to his final years. And though most of this material has been issued on previous GPS albums, some is being released for the first time.

Hearing Burroughs read before an audience is a revelation. The humor is apparent, and the listeners laugh often. There is no music or sound effects to distract, as on many Burroughs recordings. And the focus on performance quality rather than crowd-pleasing familiarity allows more obscure work ("Ah Pook Is Here," "Port of Saints") to take its rightful place alongside better-known stuff like Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, both dealt with quickly on the first disc.

Presenting the passages in chronological order makes clear the evolution of Burroughs's work. As with many satirists, his writing became more overtly political and even more bitter over time. Allegories like "Twilight's Last Gleaming" (Burroughs's first short story, with the Titanic representing America) give way to manifestos like "Just Say No to Drug Hysteria" and "Sexual Conditioning." Always, however, Burroughs is on a mission to teach his audience how to avoid thought control, how to subvert the power of the word.

Some of his earliest attempts in that direction were the reel-to-reel tape cut-ups he did with painter Brion Gysin in the early 1960s, which led to the use of cut-ups in Burroughs's fiction. GPS released an album's worth of these sonic experiments in 1981 called Nothing Here Now But the Recordings, which is included here in its entirety. Like much about this five-hour boxed set (whose handsome booklet of liner notes and rare photos includes pictures of Burroughs in his coffin and an exhaustive catalogue of the items placed in it), this material is for hardcore completists only. Then again, Burroughs believed language was a virus, and this set inoculates listeners with massive doses of his gene-spliced language antibodies. That such medicine provokes so much laughter is a happy side effect.