William S. Burroughs: Thought Control, Aesthetic Weaponry, and Dystopian Modernism

Once the notoriety of his reputation is set aside, critics and scholars have generally agreed that William S. Burroughs is one of the most innovative experimental writers and visual artists of the twentieth century, yet few critics and scholars have examined the nature or measured the scope of that innovation in the variety of media in which he worked, literature, film, sound tape and live performance, and none has fully explored the symbiotic relationship between archive or "word hoard" and the varieties of its published, performed and exhibited outcomes, from collaged and printed texts, to performances live and recorded, to gallery exhibitions. Such projects, both creative and critical, moreover, simultaneously critique the nature of texts, textuality and performativity--such interventions, engagements and reengagements acutely central to Burroughs's creative enterprise.

Burroughs's work, furthermore, at root, in all of its media and the variety of its voices, is bitingly, acerbically, ruthlessly comic and even satiric, its techniques repetitive, recombinant and performative from the first, his themes or targets social control (racial, sexual, chemical) and resistance to it, his mode of expression neither the novel per se, nor even the book as a discrete unit, but the cut-up, the "routine," the fragment and their performance as writing and its extension through bodily expression. Those routines, those pieces, those fragments, pre-existing from multiple sources, internal and external, ratiocinative or chemically induced hallucinations, were often collected, organized and collaboratively edited by others into wholes like Naked Lunch. This study takes the measure of Burroughs' impact as a cultural force and pays particular attention to the almost unknown Burroughs archive at Florida State University.