570
TONY TANNER
so on. At first sight this all seems like a curious regression. The
portrayer of demons and nightmares turning to a sort of passive
inclusiveness of attention. Indeed, some of these statements sound
rather like Sherwood Anderson, even Whitman: they suggest the
deliberate adoption of an attitude of unselective wonder, the use of
the all-including "naive" eye which has for long attracted American
writers as an important way of reestablishing a pristine contact with
reality. "Why are people bored? Because they can't see what is right
under their eyes right in their own back yard. And why can't they
see what is right under their eyes?-(Between the eye and the object
falls the shadow)-And that shadow, B.
J.,
is the pre-recorded word."
(St. Louis Return).
The idea that other peoples' words (which in–
cludes other literatures) can serve as a shadow, coming between the
eye and the world and preventing any original contact between the
seeing self and reality, is one which
is
deeply ingrained in American
thought. From one point of view, it is pure Emerson.
It
seems a
remarkable coincidence that at the moment when Burroughs is mak–
ing a literal return to America (to his birthplace, St. Louis), his writ–
ing should tum to an attitude and aspiration so basic to American
literature-the desire to establish an original visual relationship with
things, to discover for oneself the "new world." Notice the contrast
he draws between himself and Beckett. Beckett, the European, is going
inward and downward (to the mud), which mayor may not be true
of Beckett, but is true enough of what happened to Burroughs in his
years of addiction in foreign places. This new desire to go outward,
to rediscover the whole teeming plenitude around him, seems to me
like a continuation of his escape from that small death room
in
Tangier. It remains to be seen whether, in his quest for "complete
awareness of surroundings," Burroughs will simply assemble more and
more data, more photographs, more scrap books, more heaps of un–
related memories and sense impressions; or whether he
will
discern the
lineaments of hidden dramas.
Hofmannsthal once noted: "Each epoch has its own sentimen–
tality, its specific way of over-emphasizing strata of emotion." It
is
as
possible to sentimentalize one's sense of evil as it is any other emo–
tion-by overemphasizing it and inflating it to the exclusion of subtler
considerations. Thus the Gothic novel can often be sentimental inas–
much as it deals in vague horrors rather than specific threats. It
is
one
