DEMONOLOGY
569
intelligent writer who should be taken seriously; but also because it
spotlights a basic problem in his work. Are the forces of evil and
good somehow external to man in their origins? Do we need a super–
human doctor to ward off the threat of the superhuman virus?
If
so,
what is the status of the merely human-is he simply the patient on
the table hoping that technology can save him before cancer devours
him: is he simply the pawn of embatded demons, some benevolent,
some malign? There is something distincdy medieval or primitive in
this view; and, indeed, Burroughs' work does have more than a trace
of the old morality play (interestingly enough his next book is to be
a Western-which is, after all, the modern equivalent of the morality
play). Certainly, the morality play was often a very graphic medium
for showing the bemused state of man, his vulnerability and plight;
but it was the later dramatists who placed the contending forces deep
inside the human individual, who gave us the more penetrating in–
sights into the problems and mysteries of conscious life. Iago is more
profound (and more chilling) than the old Devil in the morality
plays from whom he descends; Macbeth is a more complex and
revealing figure than either as we watch him trying to suppress or
outrun the good "natural" impulses that arise to confuse a mind try–
ing to eliminate conscience and self-knowledge altogether. To put it
another way, Burroughs' depiction of The Buyer is genuinely horrify–
ing as the embodiment of a diabolical force which assimilates other
people; yet Roger Chillingworth or Gilbert Osmond are more subtle
studies of the human impulse to thwart and abuse the spontaneous
life of others. It is ultimately harder to write about people than
demons. It's easier to talk of a virus from another planet than to
grapple with dark impulses welling up from the depth of the individ–
ual self.
An interesting afterthought is provided by Burroughs' definition
of the sort of work he now wants to write. "What I want to do is to
learn to see more of what's out there, to look outside, to achieve as
far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings. Beckett wants
to go inward. First he was in a bottle and now he is in the mud.
I am aimed in the other direction--outward." He goes on to describe
his new, somewhat cumbersome techniques: writing in three columns
(what he is doing-thinking-reading), amassing immense amounts of
local data and taking hundreds of random photographs of places, and
