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TONY TANNER
tion of a Factualist. Perhaps we should see him as a Factualist who
almost succumbed to the various powers of the Liquefactionists,
Senders, etc., but who has returned with his diagnosis of the dread
force at work through all of them- the Human Virus. His books,
then, are an effort to "isolate and treat" that virus.
One more point needs to be made about the relation between
Burroughs' experience with drugs and his vision of a decaying and
dying universe blighted by the evil virus. Early in the book he says,
"Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets" and
he refers to the feeling of yage-taking Indians that "their self-destruc–
tive trends" are due to "the manipulation of alien and hostile
wills."
One can well imagine that to live in the junk world is to feel oneself
surrounded by all sorts of invisible powers to whom you are in a
state of thralldom and powerless subservience (peddlers), or of whose
punitive powers you are afraid (police). And the actual taking of
drugs is, in effect, a ceding of your own consciousness and self-control
to something more powerful that mysteriously enters you and takes
you over. Thus, the experienced addict may well come to share that
primitive feeling that he
is
being manipulated by "alien and hostile
wills." And I think Burroughs shares this demonology. His people do
not destroy themselves: they are taken over. The evil is external–
waiting in the land. The relevance of stressing this
will
be clearer
when we come to
Nova Express,
in which the evil forces come from
another planet. Here it is enough to say that Burroughs emerges as
an exemplary Factualist with an imagination haunted by a sense
of alien demons dedicated to usurpation, dissolution and death.
Burroughs made the point very clearly in a recent interview.
First he said, "I don't think anything happens in this universe except
by some power-or individual-making it happen. Nothing happens
of itself. I believe
all
events are produced by will." The interviewer
then asked
if
he believed in God. "God? I wouldn't say. I think there
are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God
is
a little tribal
god who has made an awful mess. Certainly
forces operating through
human consciousness control events"
[Italics are mine]. So we can see
Burroughs' work as an attempt to sight and resist those dark demonic
forces which operate through human consciousness in order to trans–
form complex life down into a mere mess of matter. Now
this
has
been done before. Pope's
Dunciad,
for instance, shows a world
