556
TONY TANNER
much vegetable as mineraL")
It
is all a downward, deathward slide.
It is no wonder then that, like Norman Mailer in a different context,
Burroughs uses cancer as another crucial metaphor: the rampaging
cells which destroy the helpless host. Thus: "Bureaucracy is wrong
as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction
of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous
action, to the complete parasitism of a virus." Seeing evil as a virus,
Burroughs makes a parenthetic comment that is nearly a key to the
book. "(
It
is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more
complex life forms.
It
may at one time have been capable of in–
dependent life. Now it has fallen to the borderline between living and
dead matter.
It
can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using
the life of another-the renunciation of life itself, a
falling
towards
inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.)" I imagine
that Burroughs learned a lot of this lying and dying in the utter
stillness of his room in Tangier. Looking through his own experi–
ence of addiction he now sees a world in which the forms of life
are lived by the forces of death. This is the evil. And the evil was
waiting in the land.
To summarize the diagnostic vision of the book I want to recall
the different parties of Interzone. These are described in one of
those passages of almost direct exposition or scientific observation
which often occur between the abandoned, black-circus sort of high–
jinks which make up much of the book. On one side there are the
Liquefactionists, Senders and Divisionists-all in their various ways
hostile and threatening to spontaneous individual life. The Liquefac–
tionists dedicate themselves to activities of dissolution and absorp–
tion, while Senders believe in completely dominating people's minds
by various methods of control, but they are "notorious for their
ignorance of the nature and terminal state of sending." That is, they
have no end values to justify their means of control.
"You see control
ca'n never be a means to any practical end.
...
Control can never be
a means to anything but more control .
..
like Junk,')
asserts a warning
voice. The idea is broached that "ultimately the Senders will use
telepathic transmitting exclusively" and of course the important thing
about a Sender is that he must not "receive," "because if he receives
that means someone else has feelings of his own," and that would
"louse up his continuity." Theoretically "one Sender could control
