158
PARTISAN REVIEW
Shortly thereafter a boat was lowered and it rowed toward us.
Standing in the stern was a slim blond youth , his gold-braided
coat glittering in the sun . Beside him was a youth in short gray
pants and a shirt with a red scarf around his neck. The boat was
rowed by what appeared to be a crew of women, singing as they
rowed and turning toward us to leer and wink with their painted
faces.
The "women" turn out to be "handsome you ths in women's garb" - a
dreamy homoerotic surprise that might be more of a surprise to
some Burroughs readers than to others. This book is a series of
episodes that are neither linear nor collage - in essence, a structure
similar to a
New Yorker
feature piece - and as a whole suffers from a
desultory quality that suggests that it was edited either too much or
not enough .
Of all the books that Burroughs has written since
Naked Lunch,
the most extraordinary, to my mind, is
The Third Mind
(1978), which
is a collection of dry interviews/explanations and audacious experi–
ments done mostly in collaboration with, or under the influence of,
Brion Gysin, the book's ostensible co-author. It includes samples of
his cut-up writing (which is not collage, where the parts are chosen
to affect each other, but systematic, yet aleatoric mixes of words
from different domains). Here Burroughs is broaching a literary
territory that has scarcely been explored; but it is others , not he, who
presently stand at the frontier. I should add that, though likewise a
libertarian, I have trouble with Burroughs's politics, which appears
to base our common social philosophy not on sexual freedom or on
free drugs-two good places to start - but on the right of everyone to
a gun of his choice.
Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs are contemporary
masters-not guys who have pou nded the beat for a lifetime, but the
authors of undisputed masterpieces. Lessness and collage were true
innovations for literature twenty years ago, but by now they are
milestones that, in turn, any avant-garde that is worthy of that name
must decisively surpass .
RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
