WILLIAM BURROUGHS & THE VIRUS

Original title: DEATH IS GOD AND WILLIAM BURROUGHS IS HIS PROPHET

by Wayne Pounds, 2002

Reflections on the Antiquity of Microbes

Adam

Had 'em.

--Strickland Gillilan

Some will allow no Diseases to be new, others think that many old ones are ceased; and that such which are esteemed new, will have but their time:  However, the Mercy of God hath scattered the great heap of Diseases, and not loaded any one Country with all:  some may be new in one Country which have been old in another.  New Discoveries of the Earth discover new Diseases...and if Asia, Africa, and America should bring in their List, Pandoras Box would swell, and there must be a strange Pathology.

--Thomas Browne, "A Letter to a Friend, Upon Occasion of the Death of his Intimate                                                     Friend"

He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia.

--Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment

Surgeons must be very careful

When they take the knife!

Underneath the fine incisions

Stirs the culprit--Life!

--Emily Dickinson

I.

Jean Baudrillard has described the four major fascinations of the postmodern present as terrorism, AIDS & cancer, transsexuality, and crack cocaine.  We are no longer obsessed with sexual liberation, political protest, organic illnesses, or even conventional warfare, because we've had all those already.  Our true phantasies lie elsewhere--in terrorism, AIDS, transsexuality, and dangerous drugs.  Each of these fascinations arises from the chaos which results from a skewed basic operating principle in the political, sexual, genetic, and metabolic levels respectively.  But "the high degree to which AIDS, terrorism, crack cocaine or computer viruses mobilize the popular imagination" tells us that they are more than anecdotal occurrences.  They contain within them the whole logic of our system, and they are the system's spectacular expression. They all follow the same agenda of virulence and radiation, "an agenda whose very power over the imagination is of a viral character." 

That the virus has become a factor in Baudrillard's formulations, providing the reproductive mechanism of the four horsemen of the present apocalypse, suggests that theory, in its inching way, is now entering territories plotted by the artist's intuition decades earlier.  At least since Naked Lunch, published in 1959 but largely written between 1955 and 1957, terrorism, sexually transmitted viral disease, transsexuality, and dangerous drugs have been the dominant subjects of William Burroughs' fiction, and the virus the central organizing concept.

The virus provides a fundamental symbolic code in Burroughs' work, for it is the prototypical parasite, and his house of fiction rests on a tripartite structure of parasitism.  Parasitism divides first into a controlling elite of parasites and a controlled mass of hosts.  The two compose a comprehensive symbiosis, but a third group stands outside it: the boys camps, or Wild Boys, whose members know the facts of the parasitical symbiosis and withdraw from the game of control.  Expressed in this way, the three groups are distinguished by their relation to knowledge.  The parasitical elite know, and they exploit their knowledge in networks of power that produce control.  The mass of hosts simply do not know and are helpless.  The Wild Boys and their counterparts in later novels know, but they do not exploit.  Their knowledge frees them, and in the full consciousness of their freedom they choose perpetual war against the parasitical system of control which would enmesh them as well as the faceless billions of the hosts.

That is the grand Venusian conspiracy which is Ur-plot of Burroughs' roman fleuve.  Mixed in this mile-wide river of words, like a current of blood, runs a sexually transmitted viral hemorrhagic fever which with the help of hindsight we now recognize as a prototype of AIDS.  The disease first surfaces in Burroughs' work in Naked Lunch, and from there the contagion flows steadily down to his last attempt to write himself out of the biological trap of mortality, the St. Louis trilogy of the 1980s:  Cities of the Red Night, 1981,  The Place of Dead Roads, 1984, and The Western Lands 1987.  (I call these three novels the St. Louis Trilogy because they have St. Louis as their geographical center, a localization which arises as Burroughs increasingly uses autobiographical material drawn from his childhood there.)  

(To be continued.)