The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Wising Up the Marks:The Amodern William Burroughs by Timothy S. Murphy
David Seed

Timothy S. Murphy. Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Univ. of California Press, 1998. 276 pp. $45.00; paper: $17.95.

“Burroughs’ work,” Timothy S. Murphy declares, “constitutes an exacting critique both of the social organization of late capital and of the logic of representation or textuality that abets it.” He substantiates his thesis by taking bearings from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and by repeatedly drawing comparisons between Burroughs and the theoretical positions of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. These comparisons work well on the whole and underpin a critical commentary which has many insights to offer into the experience of reading Burroughs. Thus Murphy rejects the simplistic view of Burroughs as a “revolutionary” writer by arguing that the addict in his early work is antiproductive. Murphy also brings out clearly Burroughs’s view of the interdependence of police and criminal as personified in the paradoxical figure of the addict-agent. Burroughs emerges from this account as a kind of literary trickster, manipulating media expectations in Naked Lunch and combining science fiction with the detective novel in his Nova trilogy. An unusually detailed section explores the significance for Burroughs of Haasan I Sabbah, the founder of the Assassins, who figures as an author-surrogate or subversive opponent of autocracy. Murphy stresses the importance of The Wild Boys as introducing a new genre to Burroughs’s work (the book of the dead) with the purpose of evoking a fantasy destruction of the world as a prelude to political change. Burroughs’s late trilogy, a “paradoxical group fantasy,” explores utopian themes and describes the process of writing as a forging of alternate histories. Murphy takes care to stress the performative nature of much of Burroughs’s narratives, coining the term amodernist to denote the latter’s opposition to extreme postmodernism. Murphy accordingly presents in Burroughs a writer who constantly exploits paradoxes, simultaneously scrutinizing the systems of his culture and expressing the desire to destroy those systems. Murphy joins such recent Burroughs critics as Richard Dellamora in presenting Burroughs as a shrewd critic of homophobia as well as political repression. This valuable new study concludes with an examination of Burroughs’s collaborations with the British film director Antony Balch, his cut-ups, and his sound