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TONY TANNER
trying to do. He is working to sabotage the main lines of communica–
tion which the occupying army will otherwise use. False meanings
come trooping down the open roads into our heads. Strategy? Destroy!
An interesting observation by Norman Mailer from another context is
not out of place here.
"As
cultures die, they are stricken with the
mute implacable rage of that humanity strangled within them. So
long as it grows, a civilization depends on the elaboration of meaning,
its health is maintained by an awareness of its state; as it dies, a
civilization opens itself to the fury of those betrayed by its meaning,
precisely because that meaning was finally not sufficiendy true to
offer a life adequately large.
The aesthetic shifts from the creation of
meaning to the destruction of it"
[Italics are mine]. And he says of
surrealistic writing in general: "The charge comes more from sound
than from meaning. Opposites and irreconcilables are connected to
one another like pepper sprinkled on ice cream. Only a palate close
to death could extract pleasure from the taste; it is absurd in our
mouth, pepper and ice cream, but at least it is new." It remains to
be seen whether Burroughs' later work can escape this indictment of
surrealist random writing; whether, in fact, it is solely devoted to the
"destruction of meaning."
Certainly, from one point of view, in the realm of language
Burroughs is acting rather like an underground resistance group in a
country occupied by foreign powers. "They" have taken over the
language of the world:
he
retaliates by blowing it up. Of course,
this
way we will also lack our roads and bridges-but at least the enemy
cannot use them, and we can survive in an impenetrable territory of
our own. "Sabotage" Burroughs certainly has undertaken. He has cut
up Conrad's
Lord Jim
(I confess I have not seen the result); he
takes bits of Shakespeare, Joyce, Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, and minces
them in with some of his own words. True, Eliot and Pound also
used to juxtapose fragments from past literature with their own words,
but presumably the effect was calculated. It brought back past
imaginations into dynamic proximity with present realities. But in
Burroughs these fragments are not clearly juxtaposed: they are
scrambled.
To be fair, Burroughs does not regard cut-ups only as a way of
destroying language; he also sees them as a way of revivifying and
