Implicating the Confessor: The Autobiographical Ploy in William S. Burroughs’s Early Work

Abstract

A final glossary, therefore, cannot be made of words whose intentions are fugitive. --Burroughs (Junky 133) So disinterest yourself in my words. Disinterest yourself in anybody's words. --Burroughs (White Subway 51) In one of most innovative studies of William S. Burroughs's experimental writing, Robin Lydenberg identifies Burroughs as a precursor to deconstructionist movement and argues persuasively that Burroughs strived for the obliteration of (5) far before likes of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Nevertheless, Lydenberg substantiates her claims by citing ambiguously extratextual prefaces, postscripts, and appendices, as well as interviews and letters, in which Burroughs reluctantly acknowledges his allergy to allegory, his skepticism of dualities, and, most pertinently, his intentions to counter academic and popular cultural reification of author. Like majority of Burroughs scholars, Lydenberg appeals to Burroughs's extratextual claims to prove that he intends to make authorial intentionality irrelevant to literary text. Whether Lydenberg's approach is paradoxical or just plain misguided is, however, largely beside point. Rather, tendency of scholars to incorporate biographical data and extratextual claims even to prove an intended abnegation of authorial intentionality, agency, and authority demonstrates extent to which critics of Burroughs s work cannot avoid looking beyond internal evidence of text. The pervasiveness of intentional fallacy in Burroughs scholarship exemplifies not an impoverished field of criticism but instead degree to which Burroughs's work figures author as end to which text is merely a means. Despite their consistent challenge to notions of a singular, unified self and a monolithic, univocal author, early works of man who earned moniker of Invisible Man nevertheless employ numerous extratextual (especially paratextual) ploys in order to present themselves as autobiographical. In this light, tendency for Burroughs scholarship to approach his writing from perspective of author appears to be an effect of early works' self-proclaimed genre. For although literary critics were quick to celebrate and analyze Burroughs's bending of nearly every other popular genre (from western and detective fiction to erotica and sci-fi), scholars have too frequently overlooked and underestimated, by accepting at face value, significance of genre, autobiography, that most structured, and limited, their interpretations. Recent work by Oliver Harris, however, suggests trend may finally be moving away from reading Burroughs's texts on his terms, much less taking him at his word when he pontificates in extratextual appendages and extraneous documents (40). Instead, scholars are beginning to ask not what Burroughs's extratextual claims are simply about, but rather what his extratextual claims do. By figuring his early work as confessional, Burroughs's extratextual claims interpellate unsuspecting reader to play role of confessor who analyzes text in order to discover and judge deviant desires of author. Indeed, by ostensibly confessing to what contemporaneous public of Cold War America considered deviant and managed through surveillance, interrogation, public approbation, and even incarceration, Burroughs appealed to reader's preconditioned response to abnormality. The public outcry against not only Burroughs's most obscene work, Naked Lunch, but against Burroughs himself was due in large part to his extratextual claims triggering a mode of reading already appealing, if not naturalized, for an audience steeped in Cold War culture of surveillance and containment. However, scholars' earnest recuperation of Burroughs's authorial intentions over last fifty years cannot be justified as merely an attempt to defend author against false or misguided accusations. …