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JOHN H. GAGNON
current psychophobia is taking us. In the sense that the novels of
Kafka might be seen as prophetic symptoms of the concentration
camp and totalitarianism, I would suggest, perhaps in an excess of
pessimism, that the essence of the post-Freud, post-Belsen world might
be found in the novels of William Burroughs.
Burroughs seems to capture the failure of verbal connection as
well as the general corruption of language when he says, "To speak
is to lie. . . . Rub out the word forever." In the texture of his
prose, where psychological states are translated into physical meta–
phors or relationships, there is a flight from mental function to
biological function. The psychological dependence of the policeman
on the criminal is transformed into a series of physical relations-the
policeman has a "contact habit," consisting of the contact of his
own mucous tissues with those of the addict. Dr. Benway, the medical
man, is "an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing, and
control." Benway's philosophy of "mind rape," as Burroughs calls it,
means that the subject of control "must be made to feel that he de–
serves any treatment he receives because there is something (never
specified) horribly wrong with him." Burroughs' vision is that of
ultimate excremental society where conformity, fear and death are
the ends of life, not because of some system of control but because
that is the nature of man.
There is an alternative tradition in modern literature that does
not represent intellectual experience as a denial of physical experience
but which positively affirms both. Unfortunately, this is a minor
strain and one that is dying. The dominant ideology is that of the
past, with the mind and the body engaged in a zero-sum game;
that is, what one gets the other must lose. The current tendency is
to mistrust the mind and to use the body to manipulate
it.
In this
I see a special kind of mindlessness which, in an effort to save the
mind, is prepared to destroy the mind and the body.
