'In an age that coined the word "togetherness" as a synonym for family values, the Beats, each in his own style, mounted the first open, sustained assault in American history on the masculine role as a heterosexual spouse, father and grown up provider. In the midst of the cold war crusade against all deviations from the masculine norm, in the era that could almost be said to have invented the idea of classified information, they openly addressed homosexuality, bisexuality, and masturbation in their work, declassifying the secrets of the male body, making sexuality as complex as individual identity, and pushing their chosen forms to new limits in the process'
~ James Grauerholz.
I always see Kerouac and Burroughs as being two aspects of a single persona, like they projected onto each other the aspects of themselves they could not bring to conscious awareness or were physically unable to perform.
Its really bizarre if you examine how they lived and wrote their lives by proxy, a symbiosis and synthesis that created the romanticism and psychological violence of the beat movement.
Burroughs, ever the sophisticated WASP, who always manifested his 'Patrician aura' in whatever jungle backwater or urban drugs den he found himself in. Kerouac, the embodiment of machismo: ladies man, star football player, merchant seaman, forest worker, uncomfortable with homosexuality, and of course his sentimental mother fixation and Catholic upbringing.
Whenever I read Kerouac, it always seems to me like he wants to be someone else. The Dostoyevsky reading petty convict, Dean Moriarty is his idol in a lot of the works and Kerouac writes about him like a goofy lovestruck teenager - Moriarty is what Kerouac would love to be, but can never go that extra half mile in body and soul to perform the extreme excesses of his friend.
Kerouac settled for being a Bhodisattva, he went all spiritual, like he could never let go of the magic and ritual of his Catholic upbringing, Nirvana for him was about being at peace, death of the self, big empty spaces. He always wanted to be an heroic cowboy, a drifter. Kerouac was always a romantic.
Burroughs was ever the anti-hero, the geek who always wanted to know more and more stuff, a lifelong autodidact, a collector of urban tales, myths, religions, scientific and linguistic theories, self-defence techniques and always a physical engagement with, and immersion in, whatever culture in whatever part of the world he found himself in.
Burroughs called himself and Bryan Gysin 'Les Voleurs' when they were both living in Paris: The Thieves. He was the first true postmodernist, above the actual physical cutting and pasting he was the master of irony and pastiche and 'knowingness'. From the multi-genre fiction splicing of gangster noir, science fiction, Westerns and the boys own adventure, we have diary's and travelogues and confessional auto-biography.
But as James Grauerholz has said, where Burroughs differed from the post modernists was his belief in the responsibility of the individual to awaken and practice what Chomsky calls 'intellectual guerilla warfare'. Also like Chomsky, he showed what a vicious weapon simple common sense could be when used against the insidiousness of the control machine.
Burroughs inspired us from the 60's onwards to be pro-active and smash the facade of the 'Reality Studio' by using 'tape recorders' and 'film camera's' to record the sights, sounds and smells that we almost always miss when passing through the most seemingly banal everyday environments. He always advocates taking time to stand and stare.
In an age when homosexuality was illegal and still really beyond the pale even for the average self confessed 'straight' bohemian, to be a practicing gay man (Although Burroughs hated the label 'gay') was to become inducted into the criminal classes by default.
The drift into the world of petty theft and drug use was more inevitable than it is now and seems postively quaint.
Burroughs travels to Europe in the 30's, where he studied psychology enabled him to observe the rise of Nazism, and his attendance of the lectures of the linguistic philosopher Korzybsky during these years were to provoke his interest in hieroglyphs, and as Robert Anton-Wilson did later, he examined the dichotomies and trickery of the verb and copula structure of the English language, which also stirred his lifelong interest in the Mayan culture.
Burroughs was entering middle age before he really found his voice, before he had uploaded enough hard won experience and drama - both intellectual and personal - to even begin to imagine formatting that imagery into somekind of intelligible whole. From childhood trauma, to the shooting of his own wife, inprisonment on more than one occasion and the horror of being a 'Junky', Burroughs reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut when he came to write Slaughterhouse 5 in the late 60's.
Vonnegut too, had to find a new voice, a deadpan "so it goes" genre mix to describe his experience of Dresden in the second world war. A traditional narrative in this context would have seemed a contrived sentimentality, an insult to the original experience.
Ironically, despite his often 'promiscious' homosexuality and extreme drug use, Burroughs was never a 'drop out', or wished to drop out like Kerouac, he was always inside the system by virtue of his somewhat privelidged upbringing and his much talked about private income - one of the perks of his family's Adding machine business.
Unlike Kerouac who often had to work eat (or occasionally borrow money from his mother), Burroughs income, although not a great deal, always enabled him during his early life to be a pure observing consciousness, a psychic and physical tourist, untainted by the vulgar financial pressures to 'get a job', except of course for the sake of gaining material for his writing.
Burroughs was known to the rest of the Beats as the theorist and intellectual storehouse of alternative ideas. He exalted them to read as much as possible and "edify your mind young man". He was the internet for the analogue age, a psychic website, as James Grauerholz has said:
"for those whom the respectable is synonymous with boredom and terror, if not crime, who regard the ongoing social order as suffocating, unjust, and unreal, who believe that honesty can still be reinvented in a world of lies and that the answers, if there are any, lie not in the political realm but in the quest for new forms of self-expression and creative collaboration across all traditional class, race, and ethnic boundaries, in fresh recuperative imaginings of ourselves and our country, in physical, spiritual, and metaphysical explorations of roads still left to try."
Burroughs wrote just before he died: "We make truth. Nobody else makes it. There is no truth we don't make."
