Read Online Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter - Free Book Online

Connolly’s remark about closing time in the gardens of the West.
    Unless Burroughs is practising some complicated double irony (and I wouldn’t put it past him), the West of Connolly’s usage has nothing to do with the Old West of Burrough’s obsession, site of his last novel,
The Place of Dead Roads
, which was second in the trilogy of which
Cities of the Red Night
was first and this the last. The ‘Western Lands’ of Burroughs’ title are, mythologically speaking, where the dead live. That is, the place beyond death.
    Essentially we are talking about immortality, the immortality promised by the poet to Mr W. H., which is no longer compatiblewith the weapons that cause ‘Total Death. Soul Death’. ‘Well, that’s what art is all about, isn’t it? All creative thought, actually. A bid for immortality.’ Who is talking about immortality? William Seward Hall, for one, old man and blocked writer, who decides to ‘write his way out of death’ just as old novelists, like Scott, wrote themselves out of debt.
    But, both in and out of this transparent disguise, Burroughs is talking about immortality, too.
The Western Lands
is structured according to an internal logic derived from an idiosyncratic reading of Egyptian myth; immortality, in its most concrete form, greatly concerned Egyptians.
    In spite of a series of discontinuous story lines featuring a variety of heroes, the book often resembles a nineteenth-century commonplace book. The most urgent personal reflections are juxtaposed with jokes, satires, quotations, essays in fake anthropology, parody, pastiche, and passages of Burroughs’ unique infective delirium – piss, shit, offal, disembowellings. This is slapstick reinterpreted by Sade.
    Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can’t be ironic
all
the time.
    The method is eclectic and discrete and it is important, and essential, because Burroughs is doing something peculiar with the reader’s time. He’s stopping it. Or, rather, stop-starting it. Taking it out of the reader’s hands, anyway, which is where we tend to assume it ought to be.
    He’ll give you a paragraph, a page, even three or four pages at a time, of narrative like a railway down which the reader, as if having boarded a train, travels from somewhere to somewhere else according to an already existing timetable. Then – the track vanishes. The train vanishes. And you find you don’t have any clothes on, either. While all that’s left of the engine driver is a .disappearing grin.
    This constant derailment of the reader happens again and again, shattering the sense of cause and effect, whilst all the time one is reassured in the most affectingly disingenuous manner: ‘How can any danger come from an old man cuddling his cats?’
    You cannot hurry Burroughs, or skim, or read him for the story. He likes to take his time and to disrupt
your
time in sucha way that you cannot be carried along by this narrative. Each time it tips you out, you have to stand and think about it; you yourself are being rendered as discontinuous as the text.
    In fact, Burroughs’ project is to make time stand still for a while, one which is more frequently that of religion than of literature and there are ways in which Burroughs’ work indeed resembles that of another William, the Blake of the self-crafted mythology of the Prophetic Books, although it must be said that Burroughs is much funnier.
    He is also the only living American writer of whom one can say with confidence he will be read with the same shock of terror and pleasure in a hundred years’ time, or read at all, in fact, should there be anybody left to read.
    (1988)

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William Burroughs:
Ah Pook is