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Call the next witness
Our mystery columnist puts three legal thrillers on trial.
By Jacqueline Carey
[02/25/00]

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"A Trip to the Stars" by Nicholas Christopher
A kidnapped little boy, his lost aunt and a fantasy about people finding themselves in the days of flower power.
By Polly Morrice
[02/25/00]

Pros and amateurs
One way or another, men still expect to pay for sex -- and women pay for it, too, by keeping their financial goals low.
By Ann Marlowe
[02/24/00]

Forced crossing
An involuntary traveler across the gender line -- and the first man who went under the knife to become a woman.
By Pam Rosenthal
[02/24/00]

Ivory Tower
Priceline U.
Make me an offer: At eCollegebid.org, students name their price for tuition. You may get a cut-rate deal -- at a no-name school.
By Brian Braiker
[02/23/00]

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Of course, they rarely do deliver. Writers are such costumed creatures, so adept at creating (or distorting) who they are, that even a work written with one foot in the grave often conceals as much as it reveals. And even when a late work does shed some light on a writer's biographical "truth," that truth is often irrelevant or, worse, boring. The simple fact is that most of the time, the creation is more interesting than the creator.

Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs Edited and with an introduction by James Grauerholz Grove Press, 273 pages, Nonfiction

But we're drawn to swan songs for another reason. Revelatory or not, first-rate or not, they are a record -- good, bad or indifferent -- of the universal human encounter with The End. And that is one scene we never tire of watching.

"Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs" holds out a special interest. For Burroughs was singularly enigmatic, and anything promising to shed light on him is hard to resist.

Burroughs is one of the weirdest writers ever to graduate from Harvard, become a junkie and shoot his wife in the head while playing William Tell in Mexico City. Michel Foucault, an odd duck himself, could have had Burroughs in mind when he closed "The Order of Things" with the famous line imagining a future when "man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." Burroughs' claim to literary greatness is inextricably tied to the shocking inhumanity of his fiction, its quality of notes found in outer space. That alien feeling is heightened by his famous "cut-up" technique, which shattered his authorial persona into thousands of linguistic fragments.

But the true source of Burroughs' weirdness wasn't his avant-garde style (which in any case he abandoned) -- it was his mind. He is one of the most obsessive writers of the 20th century, returning again and again over a period of more than 40 years to the same scenes and fixations, composed of equal parts sexual wish fulfillment, rage at authority and pure, nihilistic glee. Feral homosexual boys battling an ominous, quasi-metaphysical "Control System"; hanged men ejaculating; extraterrestrial villains letting loose grotesque sexual viruses upon the planet; hideous centipedes chewing through screaming human flesh -- these riffs pop up with such regularity that you can almost set your watch by them.

It's natural, after stumbling with glassy eyes through this bizarre yet increasingly monotonous 50-hour movie (Burroughs never came close to equaling his awe-inspiring 1959 masterpiece, "Naked Lunch"), to wonder to what degree the author actually believed in his fictional world. Was he as out in the ozone as L. Ron Hubbard or Elijah Muhammad, whose sinister, vaguely Gnostic cosmologies resemble his, or was he a wild satirist who immersed himself profoundly in his science-fiction world but knew that it was all made up?

More the latter, surely, but enough of the former to move into that familiar area where genius is inseparable from ridiculousness. The question of what Burroughs "rationally" believed goes to the mysterious heart of his creativity. For Burroughs, rationality was the enemy, a tentacle of the Control System dragging its victims toward the sucking maw of the Terminally Normal. It seems likely that he could never have created the amazingly original world of "Naked Lunch" unless he believed, at some impossible-to-locate level in the galactic parking structure of his mind, that the world he was writing about was real. Psychosis? No. Controlled psychosis? Yes.

Next page | "Abandoned here on this planet, ruled by lying bastards …"