DEMONOLOGY
555
and distorted images of the effects and workings of evil, there is an
ominous blankness about the
source
of it. One passage alone offers
a burst of sinister clarity on the problem. "America is not a young
land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the
Indians. The evil is there waiting." Evil is a virus; it reduces people
to the deplorable state of "total need." It is clearly something that
ferociously works against independent, self-sustaining life; some hide–
ous inexplicable impalpable pressure toward decay, disintegration,
destruction and death. And where does it come from? "The evil is
there waiting."
In Interzone we also meet some very amusing people, or rather
we overhear some amusing voices (the world of the book is, as much
as anything, a world of voices-not communicating, but talking all
at once, all the time, to themselves-of which we hear unlocated
scraps). We hear the Professor, the Prophet, the Party Leader
bumbling on about
"Ordinary
men and women," some of whose
complaints we then overhear. Like the American Housewife who
protests that she is being sexually accosted by her kitchen gadgets;
and the Hustler who complains that his customers want to take over
his life ("they wanta merge with my protoplasm ... they wanta take
over my past experience and leave old memories that disgust me")
and so on. It is a world best summed up by the story of the man
who was taken over by his "asshole," which is not merely obscene,
but a parable of matter in a state of hideous revolt. For the man is
gradually covered by a jelly of Undifferentiated Tissue which seals
off everything but his eyes- because the blind anus needs the eyes,
but not the human brain behind them. It is in this world that the
doctors talk about replacing the complexity of man with "one all–
purpose blob."
Now this idea of matter returning to lower fonus of organiza–
tion-entropy-is at the heart of the book. All the various addictions
break life down to a lower level (hence the recurring use of the
word "ectoplasm"). The brain taken over by the anus is only a
paradigm for all the low fonus of life who devour higher fonus of
life throughout. Humans regress to animals, vegetables, even minerals.
(In a later statement Burroughs said: "I felt that heavy metal was
sort of the ultimate expression of addiction, that there's something
actually metallic in addiction, that the final stage reached is not so
