Old Bull Lee

When discussing or pondering the Beats, the word “obscurity” may come to mind. They were social outcasts in a conservative society, but one of them stood out more so than the rest of the pack.

William S. Burroughs, the third of the beat generation godfathers, was a strange fellow. He was an intelligent man with a Harvard education who grew up financially well off from his family’s business. But something was off.

Perhaps it was his personal “William Tell” moment that best defines his strange aura. As William Padgett recollects in his Suite101.com article on Burroughs, it was an event “that would cause Burroughs’ mysterious reputation to mushroom.”

After the “accident” that left his wife dead from a spousal-inflicted gunshot wound, Burroughs rededicated his life toward a career in writing. What better outlet for a strange man hell bent on opiate addiction and homoerotic fantasies?

Padgett tells of Burroughs’ lifestyle as a heavy handed influence into his work, even going as far as saying that at times it “overshadowed” his work.

One of his most famous novels, Naked Lunch, was largely driven by drug use and homosexuality, both well known character traits associated with the author. However, Petri Liukkonen further dissects the novel in a deeper, more literary perspective.

“It also tries to find from the use of drugs and homosexuality a philosophical statement - addiction is seen as a metaphor of the human condition” says Liukkonen.

When you further look into Burroughs’ work, you may find it more extreme in pushing of the boundaries of the literary world than most of his contemporaries. However, they all sought the same end goal: destruction of the restrictive conformity that plagued their times.

Before the days of the beat generation, and even during their maturing years, America was stuck in its ties to tradition. It was a very conservative life and time.

New strides were destined to be made in the literary world, and Burroughs and the clan would be the ones setting the pace.

While in Tangier, Burroughs lived on a bender at a male brothel, writing frantically on scraps of paper. When Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg went to visit him, they found the various loose pages and notes Burroughs had been writing away at.

With a lot of ideas and no reseblence of order, Ginsberg began to piece together the pages as Kerouac helped him rewrite it, presumably while Burroughs laid on the floor, high as a kite.

Burroughs would later move to Paris and befriend a painter by the name of Brion Gysin.

According to Liukkonen, Gysin influenced Burroughs to write in his infamous “cut-up” technique, using it to cut up and blend random text in an attempt to “restructure the readers consciousness.”

This style was rather reminiscent of the creation of Naked Lunch, making Burroughs a cult hero to a growing generation of anti-conformists.

Sources

Padgett, William. (2009, August 4). William S. Burroughs: Revisiting the Life and Fiction of the Beat's Phantom Elder. Retrieved from http://americanfiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/william_s_burroughs.

Liukkonen, Petri. Retrieved from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wbburrou.htm.