Rub Out the Past: Nostalgia and the Cut-Up Works of William S. Burroughs

Abstract

William S. Burroughs’ cut-up texts of the 1960s have been read as a representation of the author’s attempt to escape the repressive hold of nostalgic memory. I show that this reading is flawed and argue that the treatment of memory in Burroughs’ cut-up works can be more successfully read in terms of Svetlana Boym’s concept of ‘reflective nostalgia’. Through examining Burroughs’ 1965 text ‘St. Louis Return’ alongside a page from his contemporaneous ‘Black Scrapbook’, I provide a reading that counters earlier critical responses to the cut-ups: firstly, by belying the assumption that Burroughs’ use of the cut-up technique enabled the author to overcome the allure of nostalgic memory; secondly, by demonstrating the importance of the nostalgic theme across Burroughs’ body of work; and thirdly, by challenging prevailing conceptions of nostalgia as an inherently sterile and reactionary impulse.     

Wilfred Bion,Ernie Kovacs,and the Oracle of Dewey Decimal System

ABSTRACT

In considering a Bionian primal scene, the author first reflects on adult sexuality as it was shown and known to him in childhood through The Ernie Kovacs Show, an innovative television show from the 1950s. The pleasurable emotions evoked during that writing were complicated by the emergence of highly disturbing memories of his discovery and consumption of early psychoanalytic texts on male homosexuality. This desire to discover his fate occurred in a context of familial preoccupation with the Holocaust and a child’s experience of the threat of nuclear annihilation. This imbrication led to an expansion of his limits regarding the work of the primal scene as a psychoanalytic concept.     

Allen Ginsberg’s Blakean Albion

Abstract

Focusing on a selection of poems written during Allen Ginsberg’s visits to Britain between 1958 and 1979, an attempt is made to show how Ginsberg’s British poetry might productively be read in the context of William Blake’s mythopoetic system, particularly in so far as it relates to the Blakean figures of Albion and Jerusalem. Ginsberg’s poetic vision of a Blakean Albion is revealed to be more complex, and more problematic, than might be supposed. This is partly because Ginsberg’s own position is conflicted; as a key representative of American Beat poetry and later of American counterculture, he is nonetheless engaged in these ‘British’ poems in re-envisioning and reshaping Blake’s Albion. Such nationalist tensions are not, however, restricted to Ginsberg’s work; they can also be linked to similar conflicts between nationalism and internationalism which already exist within Blake’s own vision of Albion.     

‘Everything is permitted’: William Burroughs’ Cut-up Novels and European Art

Abstract

This essay suggests that during the 1960s William Burroughs was as much an avant-garde European artist as he was an American novelist. It argues that the nature of his cut-up novels requires readers to situate them within the context of twentieth-century European art — specifically collage — as well as American literature. Burroughs held the view that ‘if writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for some time past in painting’. This attitude towards his writing led him back into the rich, experimental half-century of European art which had gone before him, and into which his resulting cut-up work must be incorporated if its profoundly confusing and anacathartic effects upon readers are to be in any way tempered.     

Mutable Forms: The Proto-ecology of William Burroughs’ Early Cut-ups

Abstract

The extent to which ecocriticism can engage the early texts of William Burroughs is explored in order to identify the problems in attempting an ecocritical interpretation of the writer’s experimental writing with its lack of coherent narratives and shortage of recognizably relevant environmental content. The suggestion that early cut-ups from Minutes to Go and The Yage Letters can be considered a move towards proto-ecological writing forms is explored. Example fragments from Burroughs’ early cut-ups ‘VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?’ (1960) and ‘I am Dying, Meester?’ (1963) are examined to establish whether there are any connections between ecology and Burroughs’ cut-up method, and to illustrate the evolution of the cut-up method. The Yage Letters are shown to connect the cut-up method and ayahuasca as radical techniques of reality transformation, which means the undoing of Western assumptions about identity. The differences between Burroughs methods and those of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara are also discussed.     

Editorial

Abstract

Examining the poetry of Allen Ginsberg in the light of that of John Keats, the possible connections between ‘Siesta in Xbalba’ — a long poem by Ginsberg that received much more critical attention in the eighties than today — and Keats’s so-called Great Odes are investigated. ‘Siesta’ is here read as a composite mainly recycling ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, whose themes and motifs Ginsberg both preserves and subverts. This is the first attempt to conflate ‘Siesta’ with Keats’s Great Odes.     

Tarzan the German-Eater

Abstract

This article raises questions about methodology in the study of transnational popular writing by examining the international popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan novels. Critical anti-imperialist analyses have found in Burroughs's fiction a dangerous metaphorics supporting imperialistic US foreign policies. In Weimar Germany, resistance to the Tarzan novels emerged that all but eliminated the market for these otherwise internationally popular fictions. Yet the German reaction shows how the idea of 'empire', embodied in tropes of race and gender, could continue to function in debates about international popular literature. At the same time, Burroughs was forced to adapt to international markets by tempering his imperialistic fictions. Burroughs's work after the controversy shows a shift in the depiction of national 'others', yet it had little radical potential because Burroughs had turned his imperial gaze inward, towards the internally colonized: Native Americans.     

‘The Rule of Men Entirely Great’: Republicanism,Ritual, and Richelieu in Melville’s ‘The Two Temples’

Abstract

This article explores the complex and multifarious reasons behind Herman Melville’s decision to refer to the English playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1839 work Richelieu, or The Conspiracy in his 1854 diptych ‘The Two Temples’. It responds to a critical consensus that has seen the reference merely as a sarcastic attack on William Macready (whose rivalry with the American actor Edwin Forrest was the nominal cause of the bloody 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York), by contextualizing the play within traditions of antebellum American Anglophilia. By using a combination of new critical work on Anglo-Americanism and anthropological ritual theory, I show how Bulwer-Lytton’s play was significant to Melville’s artistic development. In particular, I demonstrate how the play influenced his increasing engagement with republican and theatrical forms of expression that emphasized the importance of filial relationships between America and Britain in a period of increasing hostility between the two nations.     

A strange lobster tale of self-sacrificial transversality: or,transversal poetics flourishes in the spectral ether of Deleuze,Bataille, and Shakespeare

ABSTRACT

Written from the perspective of Transversal Poetics, this essay involves an exploration of the theory’s various selves in the context of a self-immolating spectacle staged at London’s New Globe Theatre by the theory’s progenitor, Dr. Bryan Reynolds. The essay outlines the history of this scandalous affair, which was inspired by the work of Rodrigo Garcia (Accidens: Matar Para Comer), Deleuze and Guattari, and George Bataille. Transversal Poetics travels with Reynolds to London and is shocked and appalled by the lurid transgression that unfolds on stage as Reynolds is hung on a massive hook and then dismembered for the adoring crowds. Exploring the complexity of its own reactions to this new initiative by Reynolds – and his attempt to conceive an ‘offspring’ with Bataille through a highly questionable and outrageous Deleuzian approach – Transversal Poetics is itself subtly transformed. It casts a powerful light on the urban milieu surrounding the New Globe (Southwark, the City of London) as it brings the era of neoliberal financialization to a close. A lobster-city that combines both ‘central place’ and the ‘maritime’ qualities (as identified by Christaller), London turns out to be the perfect location for the demolition of the Deleuzian taboo against the sacrificial.     

The bothersome details of the world: Richard Byrd,Little America,and the problem of retreat

Abstract

In 1934, Admiral Richard E. Byrd retreated from his crew at the remote Little America encampment in Antarctica to an even more isolated setting: a small underground shack on ‘the dark immensity of the Ross Ice Barrier, on a line between Little America and the South Pole’. Byrd remained there in solitude for a little over four months and later wrote about his ordeal in Alone. This essay considers Byrd’s account alongside his earlier Antarctic writings in order to ask what they reveal about the difficulties of retreating and maintaining critical distance from ‘civilisation’.     

History,Politics, and the Cartography of Sexed Bodies in Iurii Illienko’s A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa

Abstract

This article explores the “corporeal” dimension of Iurii Illienko’s reconstruction of cultural and historical discourses in the 2002 film Molytva za het'mana Mazepu [A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa], which focuses on the hetman’s drama, his relationship with Peter I, and the defeat of Swedish and Ukrainian joint forces at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 that signified Ukraine’s submergence into a supranational, imperial community. Illienko’s cinematic space, in which plots of history and sexual politics are mapped onto one another, allows for conceptualizing the body as a site of political and cultural construction, contestation, and radical resistance. Demanding an intertextual approach that involves an open exchange between his cinematic domain and a “universe” of intersecting historical, cultural, ideological and political discourses, his multilayered re-memoration strategies expose both the fictionality and the political dogma surrounding the inherited mythologies. As a decentred reflection of the past, the film poses critical questions about competing histories and the dynamics of historical agency in colonial and postcolonial contexts, thus making a contribution to the protracted process of decolonization in Ukraine.     

The Defeat of the Guitar Army: Don DeLillo,John Sinclair,and the Rock Revolution

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street is seldom analysed as a serious engagement with the rock music and countercultural politics of the 1960s, yet these constitute its historical context, its subject matter, and its central concerns. An historicized reading positions the novel as an intervention into contemporary debates about the causes and consequences of the defeat of the 1960s ‘rock revolution’. These debates were most thoroughly synthesized by the rock culture’s chief agitator and organic intellectual John Sinclair in his 1972 book Guitar Army. Like Guitar Army, Great Jones Street dwells on the connections between the political failure of the rock revolution and the provenance and validity of rock’s anti-rational aesthetic. Sinclair finds political hope in re-emphasizing rock’s anti-rationalism, rooted equally in black music and the psychedelic experience. More sceptical, DeLillo offers a very different reading of the rock culture’s view of African American aesthetics and its use of psychedelics.     

MYTHOLOGIES REVISITED: ROLAND BARTHES AND THE LEFT

This essay arises from the author's scepticism about the received notion, prevalent both in literary and cultural studies, that Roland Barthes's work of the 1960s constituted an abandonment of the previous decade's social critique. The paper develops the argument that, to the contrary, understanding Barthes's socio-cultural development following World War II and in the French cultural context helps to situate the political engagement of his writings in the 1950s and to clarify the continued political commitment of this work from the 1960s onward. This essay addresses a series of questions: what was Barthes's relationship to the 1950s French intelligentsia that prepared his active participation in the heterodoxical Marxist journal, Arguments, a forum for many of the urgent intellectual debates between 1956-62? What is the relationship of this activity to his writings of the early 1950s, developed into Mythologies in 1957, as well as to the shift toward semiology and structuralism and to the purported abandonment of social critique betokened by this shift? How do these phases inform the different readings of Barthes's work developed in more recent interpretations of his writing? It is argued that we would do better to view the structuralist phase and especially the ‘later’ Barthes (from the late 1960s onward) more fully and deliberately in relation to the early, explicitly political period. This revised perspective, one not limiting Barthes to works such as Mythologies, will help us better comprehend Barthes's continuing legacy for sociosemiotic critique both in literary criticism and in cultural studies and to create new ground for interdisciplinary dialogue that is very much needed in an era of questioning the limits and borders of this field.     

Actors,others, simulacra: a Deleuzean minority report on the early modern Dubrovnik stage

ABSTRACT

A playwright in the minor and marginal culture of renaissance Ragusa, Marin Dr?i? (1508–1557) has often been compared to Shakespeare, despite the obvious impossibility of influence in either direction. There is however an aspect of Dr?i?’s legacy which has received a scarce critical interest in Croatia, although it could also be discussed along the lines of Shakespeare studies: early modern Dubrovnik acting practice, culture, and style. Dr?i?’s actual and meta-theatrical treatment of acting will here be interpreted through the lenses of Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘One less manifesto’. In this essay, Deleuze expands his notion of ‘the minor’, arguing for a kind of acting practice that would rely on variation, movement, becoming, and a perpetual linguistic deformation, forces that hinder absorption into the discourse of ‘the major’. I will further suggest that Marin Dr?i?’s exposure of the anti-theatrical prejudice of his contemporaries – clothed in a mock-version of Genesis and elaborated in the prologue of his comedy Uncle Maroje – could be read as an exemplary inversion of Plato’s method of argumentation that makes a Deleuzian case for the actor as the ultimate, troubling Other, the simulacrum of true being, a promiscuous and metamorphic kin of marionettes, animals, and women.     

Work,culture, and play in the neoliberal condition

ABSTRACT

Foucault’s [2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the collège de France 1978–1979. New York, NY: Picador] lectures on neoliberalism present a powerful challenge to the Marxist critique of capitalist work as alienating and dehumanizing. Foucault suggests that neoliberalism allows work to be seen in terms of an individual’s pursuit of personal happiness. Seminal cultural theory in Hoggart [1957/2009. The uses of literary: Aspects of working-class life. London: Penguin] and Williams [1961. The long revolution. London: Chatto & Windus] view working-class culture as a matter of tacit rules and a ‘structure of feeling’ that permeates everyday life. Adorno’s critique of the capitalist ‘culture industry’, by contrast, suggests that a culture of neoliberal capitalism would be an oxymoron. This perspective is self-defeating, I argue, as we then essentially give up the task of understanding how neoliberalism translated into a pervasive social psychology. Following Richard Sennett’s [2008. The craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 2012. Together. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press] work on craft and cooperation, I examine some elements of such neoliberal culture. Across many contemporary cities, there is a clear trend of local small-scale production that stands at odds with the aesthetics if not the underlying reality of the globalized economy. This suggests that utopian counter-currents to neoliberal governance are better drawn from reconfiguration rather than abandonment of work.     

French Friends,American Allies: Ethnic Dynamics in the Writing of Jack Kerouac

Abstract

The way the scroll text of Kerouac’s On the Road creatively manifests the writer’s unconscious concerns about his dichotomous hybrid French– Canadian–American heritage is analysed. The characters of Gabrielle Kerouac, Henri Cru and Neal Cassady are shown to operate metaphorically to symbolize Kerouac’s tumultuous relationship with the various elements of his genealogy. How the writer’s depiction of, and the protagonist’s allegiances with, these characters, who, respectively, represent French– Canadian maternity, European respectability and American unreliability, betray Kerouac’s covert attempts to reconcile his autobiographical feelings about the dualities implicit in his identity and mirror his efforts to navigate disparate cultural ideologies is examined.     

Agamben and the poetics of indifference

Abstract

Agamben’s overall method as detailed in The Signature of All Things is named by him as philosophical archaeology. Said archaeology addresses the large-scale concepts that organise discursive structures over time and place and reveals their common metaphysical basis. In particular an impossible to sustain economy between a founding common and a founded proper which constantly change place so that the clear distinction between that which founds and that which is founded becomes impossible to discern. It becomes, in his terminology, indifferent. The signatures of Power, Life, Potentiality and Language are well known in Agamben’s work, as is his love for poetry. What has not yet been commented on is that for Agamben Poetry is a signature and so must be subject to the same method of suspensive indifference as the more nefarious discourses of power and domination. In this article the signature of Poetry is defined as the economy between the semantic, or prose as founding common, and the semiotic, or poetry as founded proper. That Agamben gives so much attention to the signature Poetry is because it is central to the suspension of the basis of all signatory constructs, Language as pure communicability as such. Yet more than this Agamben’s indifferentiation of poetry in terms of the perceived tension between semantic and semiotic, opens up complex and powerful forces at the heart of the poetic.     

Introduction to critical perspectives and emerging models of inter-American studies

Abstract

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) has been the subject of much critical attention, but the original story upon which it was based and its author, Cornell Woolrich, less so. This article examines ‘Rear Window’ (1942) in the context of Woolrich’s writing and his life more broadly, in order to reveal the privileged role of fenestral imagery in his work. Through a process which starts with surveillance through glass, and a creative interpretation of ‘real’ events consumed in terms strikingly similar to mass media entertainments, Woolrich’s marginalized protagonist assumes the role of the detective and, in doing so, his identity is enhanced. The Woolrichian window reifies abstract social boundaries. It serves, simultaneously, as a symbol of urban alienation and a fantasy of social integration. It also becomes a trope of consumption and popular culture. Hitchcock’s film has sometimes been praised for the self-conscious way in which it aligns the image of the window with the cinema screen in order to implicate viewers in the protagonist’s voyeuristic practice. This article extends such an analysis to Woolrich’s story, but also takes it a step further, to reveal the ways in which reading similarly might be regarded as a voyeuristic form of cultural consumption.