William Burroughs and the Virus (2)

 

The disease makes its first appearance in Naked Lunch, where it is called the climactic buboes:

It started in Addis Ababa like the Jersey Bounce, but these are modern times, One World. Now the climactic buboes swell up in Shanghai and Esmeraldas, New Orleans and Helsinki, Seattle and Capetown.  But the heart turns home and the disease shows a distinct predilection for Negroes, is in fact the whitehaired boy of white supremacists.  But the Mau Mau voodoo men are said to be cooking up a really dilly of a VD for the white folks.  Not that Caucasians are immune:  five British sailors contracted the disease in Zanzibar.  And in Dead Coon County, Arkansas ("Blackest Dirt, Whitest People in the U.S.A.--Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On You Here") the county Coroner come down with the buboes fore and aft.  A vigilante committee of neighbors apologetically burned him to death in the Court House privy when his interesting condition came to light.  "Now, Clem, just think of yourself as a cow with the aftosa." . . . . ""Don't crowd too close, boys.  His intestines is subject to explode in the fire."  The disease in short arm hath a gimmick for going places unlike certain unfortunate viruses who are fated to languish unconsummate in the guts of a dying jackal slobbering silver under the desert moon.  And after an initial lesion at the point of infection, the disease passes to the lymph glands of the groin, which swell and burst in suppurating fissures, drain for days, months, years, a purulent stringy discharge streaked with blood and putrid lymph.  Elephantiasis of the genitals is a frequent complication, and cases of gangrene have been recorded where the amputation in medio of the patient from the waist down was indicated but hardly worth while.  Women usually suffer secondary infection of the anus.  Males who resign themselves up for passive intercourse to infected partners like weak and soon to be purple-assed baboons, may also nourish a little stranger. . . . Until quite recently there was no satisfactory treatment.  "Treatment is symptomatic"--which means in the trade there is none.

Though written during the mid-1950s, 25 years before the first recorded outbreak of AIDS, this  passage not only seems to describe AIDS, it already incorporates the myth which in the American 1980s will ascribe its origins to Africa, and it dramatizes the hysteria of right-wing reaction with the grotesque comedy in Dead Coon County, Arkansas. 

The AIDS-like disease is only one of the prophetic elements of Naked Lunch.  The book repeatedly refers to LSD, for instance, a drug that had yet to impact on the U.S., much less find its prophet in Timothy O'Leary.  It is also interesting to note that the motif of orgasm-by-hanging, once considered such a "revolting" aspect of the novel, has achieved near respectability. The use of partial asphyxiation to intensify sexual climax has entered the repertoire of middle class thrill seekers, and it is discussed on TV talk shows and performed for mass delectation in mainline Hollywood productions like Rising Sun. 

These developments, surprising though they seem, are no more so than the fact that Beat outlaws like Burroughs and Ginsburg have become members of the American Academy of Letters.  Yesterday's radicalism is today's sitcom.  Testimony to Wilde's dictu that life imitates art?  Or is it, as Pound had it, that artists are the antennae of the race?  More likely, the explanation has more to do with capitalism's insatiable appetite for the new and its endless capacity to co-opt and sanitize the radical and revolutionary. One might well wonder if AIDS itself, with the right movies and PR spin, could not become respectable.  But, no.  Playing with neck scarves titillates the privileged classes because it offers itself as an addition to the tool box of technique, and thus fits readily into the technicism which dominates modern and postmodern sexuality.  The noose is a refinement, extending the technical reach from orgasm to life itself.  But AIDS finds no place in these developments because it continues to be represented only in terms of the sexually and racially unassimilable Other.  

(To be continued)