A William Burroughs Reader

William S. Burroughs & John Calder (editor)
A William Burroughs Reader (1982)
This was my first Burroughs, and actually the first I ever saw in a high street store, proving for me that the man existed in the real world beyond the limits of Throbbing Gristle fandom. The high street store - or more accurately shop - from which I purchased this book for £2.50 was Midland Educational in Stratford-upon-Avon. I know this because the receipt fell out from between the pages as I was reading on Friday the 11th of November, 2022, and I was interested to note that I'd bought the thing on Thursday the 11th of November, 1982. So I bought the book, read it, and then exactly forty years later to the day, I plucked it from the shelf more or less at random and decided to give it another look.

Weird, as Burroughs himself would doubtless have said whilst pulling that boggle-eyed face which people do when they've just noticed something weird.

Arguably weirder still, is that this sampler is quite a tough read, where the novels from which the various excerpts were lifted generally aren't; and given Billy's love of jamming random slabs of text together, you would think this might have been the bestest Burroughs book ever. The most surprising realisation I draw from this is that Burroughs' writing is less effective out of context, where you might think it wouldn't matter. One possible reason may be psychological in that for all their scrambled narrative, his novels tend to be quite breezy - never more than a couple of hundred pages with large type widely spaced. A William Burroughs Reader on the other hand crams everything in with type so small it could be an anarchist pamphlet from the eighties. It feels heavy, and it feels uphill, which works against what is communicated - or at least the means of its communication - by emphasising the disorientation. I suppose it could be argued that one is expected to dip into a sampler such as this rather than dutifully plough through the whole thing from cover to cover, but that's not how I read.

As a greatest hits of sorts, I was expecting to glean an overview, some sort of perspective on the shape of Burrough's career; which emerges albeit in a vague sense, and although the selections communicate why one might like to read The Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night, and most of those which came between, this remains a surprisingly poor second to making the effort with the actual novels.

It was nice to find a few chapters from The Third Mind included given that it's presently out of print, but otherwise I guess Burroughs is simply one of those authors who doesn't translate well into shorthand.