Burroughs on the Right?

Brett Stevens at Amerika has a piece Why conservatives should celebrate William S. Burroughs:

The final point made by Naked Lunch is that the real damage of drugs, beyond everything else, is that it steals your time. A good conservative would know that this is why we stand against control: it is destructive, but also, it steals away life and replaces it with ideology and mania.

When all the cards are counted, Burroughs will be remembered as one of the good guys. Relentlessly un-PC, pro-gun, violently independent and critical of all control structures, Burroughs was the ultimate advocate for a society free of the diseases of modernity.

I suspect that Stevens is probably a long-time fan of Burroughs, as I was, but I think he's stretching to call the author "one of the good guys." Burroughs was a talented writer, an insightful thinker and a determined misanthrope. He deserves respect but I don't think there's any reason to draft him to the right posthumously.

Maybe Stevens is making the same mistake that most sane people make when they look at heroin-related art:  they believe that all the filth makes addiction unattractive. The article that prompted Stevens' response, by Kevin Williamson, suggests this fallacy, calling heroin use "a social convention within a certain milieu." The truth is that those attracted to heroin are attracted to the dirty, tiny world that heroin creates. The ugliness of heroin-chic is an advertisement, not a warning.

Stevens emphasizes Burroughs' resistance to "control structures," which is true, but his main resistance was to the structures of family and religion. He wrote a diatribe criticizing NASA for using church-going family men as astronauts when space offered an opportunity to create a world without traditional ties.

But I think Stevens was more upset that Williamson called Burroughs "a poseur and a hack." I believe Burroughs reputation is just fine where it is, as a writer who dazzled but doesn't always hold up under close examination. He's not a hack or a poseur but his contributions weren't as important as some would like to say. His influence has been more harmful to young writers than good.

His classic, Naked Lunch, is really just a series of dark jokes wherein powerful and respectable people reveal themselves to be depraved. They revel in drugs, violence and pederasty ad nauseum. The wave of imagery and language is striking but the book looks worse with each reading.

Burroughs is a good example of the "liberation" of the arts throughout the mid-century. He was the last major author on the line through James Joyce and Henry Miller, authors who turned their talents toward the seedier side of life. Joyce and Miller pushed hard against the restrictions of what was allowed in literary fiction. Burroughs burst through them.

For a minute or two, it appeared that those restrictions really had been restraining capital-A Art. But all that pushing had produced a lot of creative energy. When the bonds were broken some interesting work emerged but the energy didn't last. Transgression became a substitute for meaning. When you jump off a cliff, for a split-second you're flying. Then you begin falling.

Burroughs was a talented, intelligent man with a good education (he came from the Burroughs adding machine fortune). Though he rejected the Western tradition, he was still formed in it. The artists that came after the iconoclasts don't have a foundation to reject or build upon. The astronaut floating in space has nothing to hold himself to or push against.

Anyway, Burroughs is no longer in fashion. His peak influence came in the 70s and 80s, when hipsters rhapsodized about murder, mind control and drug use in the abstract. An era when the ravings of Charles Manson and Carl Panzram said something real about this sick world, man. For a time, his reputation was something like an urban secular mystic, a cynical Timothy Leary trying to change reality with tape recorders. By the early 90s, he'd become a cool old junkie, as evidenced by his associations with Kurt Cobain and Al Jourgensen, not to mention a cameo in Drugstore Cowboy.

Burroughs didn't suffer fools gladly and he didn't like people telling him what to do. But a conservative he wasn't.