Sirens, Pasteboard Towns, and Mannish Women:

Rites of “Passing” in the Red Night Trilogy of William S. Burroughs

by

Gerald Alva Miller

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English.

Chapel Hill

2004

Approved by

_________________________________

Advisor: Professor Linda Wagner-Martin

_________________________________

Reader: Professor Gregory Flaxman

_________________________________

Reader: Professor Beverly Taylor

ii

© 2004

Gerald Alva Miller

All Rights Reserved

iii

ABSTRACT

GERALD ALVA MILLER: Sirens, Pasteboard Towns, and Mannish Women:

Rites of “Passing” in the Red Night Trilogy of William S. Burroughs

(Under the direction of Dr. Linda Wagner-Martin)

The term “passing” originally designated the practice of light-skinned African-

Americans pretending to be Caucasians in order to become part of white society; however,

the twentieth century saw the term encompassing other minority groups, particularly the

homosexual community. The practice of “queer passing” becomes a strategy of

revolutionary practice in William S. Burroughs’s Red Night trilogy: Cities of the Red Night,

The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. The trilogy centers around revolutions

that attempt to demolish the control mechanisms of society, and the first step towards this

revolution is the destruction of the boundaries that separate men from women and

heterosexuals from homosexuals. Burroughs’s characters in the trilogy utilize “passing” in

order to work inside these oppressive frameworks while subverting them. From the

revolutionary communities in the first two novels to the afterlife in The Western Lands,

Burroughs’s characters seek to dismantle oppression through such tactics as “passing.”

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS....................................................................................................v

Chapter

1. Nella Larsen and Queer “Passing”:

A Short Genealogy of the “Passing” Strategy.............................................................1

2. Burroughs’s Battle with Binary Logic and the Foucauldian Channels of Control....12

3. Women, the “Other Half,” and Burroughs’s Infamous Misogyny............................20

4. Under the Shadows of the Red Night:

New Revolutionary Praxis in the Late Trilogy..........................................................28

5. Welcome to Johnsonville: The “Passing Proper” in The Place of Dead Roads........46

6. And Onward to the Western Lands: Breaking the Bonds of the Body......................59

7. To Dwell within Interstitial Spaces:

The Social Import of Burroughs’s Gender Confusion...............................................77

BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................81

v

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS*

Bodies Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” by Judith Butler

Cities Cities of the Red Night

Discipline Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault

Freedom “Freedom through Fantasy in the Recent Novels of William S. Burroughs” by

Jennie Skerl

Hombre William S. Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles

Hotel The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963 by

Barry Miles

Gender Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler

History The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction by Michel Foucault

Lunch Naked Lunch

Nova Nova Express

Pook Ah Pook is Here

Roads The Place of Dead Roads

Saints Port of Saints

Soft The Soft Machine

Ticket The Ticket that Exploded

Western The Western Lands

Wild The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead

William William S. Burroughs by Jennie Skerl

* All abbreviations refer to works by William S. Burroughs unless otherwise noted. For full

bibliographic entries on all these works, refer to the bibliography at the end.

CHAPTER 1:

Nella Larsen And Queer “Passing”:

A Short Genealogy of the “Passing” Strategy

“You know, ’Rene, I’ve often wondered why more coloured girls, girls

like you and Margaret Hammer and Esther Dawson and—oh, lots of others—

never ‘passed’ over. It’s such a frightfully easy thing to do. If one’s the type,

all that’s needed is a little nerve.”

-Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s Passing (25)

“Homosexuality is the best all-around cover story an agent can use.”

-William S. Burroughs, from Naked Lunch (195)

Literary critics and historians often bandy about the term “passing” in their

discussions of African-American literature, discussions that center primarily around texts in

which light-skinned African-Americans attempt to “pass” as white, usually in order to attain

the same social privileges enjoyed by Caucasian society. Stories such as these began to

appear in the late nineteenth century; however, the most classic example of such literature

remains Nella Larsen’s early twentieth century novel entitled Passing. Both of Larsen’s two

major novels—Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)—deal with light-skinned African-

American women, but Passing remains particularly influential due to its portrayal of Clare

Kendry’s transcending of the color barrier through her acts of “passing.” Thadious Davis, in

her introduction to Passing, explains how the practice developed out of the landmark 1896

court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, a case which established the precedent for “separate but

equal” and “bec[a]me a justification for the linkage of race to visible difference” (vii-viii).

Thus, in the aftermath of “Plessy vs. Ferguson,” American society began to pay more

2

attention to the visual aspects of people and whether or not these aspects pointed to an

African ancestry.

With race linked so inexorably to qualities of a person’s appearance, many African-

Americans sought to deny their own African heritage through the act of “passing.” Davis

defines “passing” as “the movement of a person who is legally or socially designated black

into a white racial category or white social identity” (viii). In Passing, Larsen represents this

practice of aping white characteristics as a potentially subversive practice which disrupts the

white/black binary that governed racial relations during her lifetime. Larsen’s “passers,” as

Davis points out, “disrupt social meanings and avail themselves of both basic human and

fundamental constitutional rights enjoyed by the white majority” (ix). “Passing,” therefore,

allowed African-Americans to grasp a firmer footing in their quest for equality with their

fellow white Americans. Judith Butler explains the motives of “passing” during her

discussion of Clare Kendry, the central “passer” of Larsen’s novel: “It is the changeableness

itself, the dream of metamorphosis, where that change signifies a certain freedom, a class

mobility afforded by whiteness that constitutes the power of that seduction” (170). Here

Butler lays out the social motives that urge Clare to use her light colored skin as a bridge to

“cross” into the white world, a world where she would be allowed the freedom usually

denied her race. Thus, “passing” serves as an appropriation of the freedoms that are granted

to the norm but denied to the “other,” giving African-Americans a much-needed boost up the

social ladder of the early 1900s.

Although modern society still struggles against the evils of racism, the Civil Rights

Movement, integration, equal opportunity employment, and Affirmative Action have almost

entirely eradicated the practice of African-American “passing.” However, the last half of the

3

twentieth century has seen the rise of a different group of others who have discovered and

appropriated the subversive strategy of “passing”: the gay and lesbian population. Foucault

traces the repression of the gay community back to the “discursive explosion” on the topic of

sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (History 38). During this time, “the

legitimate [heterosexual] couple” began to “function as a norm,” against which all other

forms of sexuality were judged (History 38). Authorities began to focus their gaze upon

what they determined as aberrant—or, as Foucault terms them, “unnatural”—sexual

practices. Society’s attitude towards homosexuals underwent major alterations during this

period, causing heterosexual society to perceive every action of a homosexual person as

being based upon this “certain quality of sexual sensibility” (History 43). Every mannerism,

action, and idiosyncrasy of the homosexual came to be seen as being an effect of his

sexuality; even the outward appearance of a homosexual man had his sexuality “written

immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away”

(History 43). This belief in the supposed outward manifestation of a person’s sexuality

persists into modern times in which our society still marks an effeminate man as a “fag” or a

masculine woman as a “dyke.” According to Foucault, this focus on visible sexual difference

proved to be the moment that our society designated homosexuals as a different “species.”

Modern society has seen the growth and increasing acceptance of the gay and lesbian

population, but discrimination against homosexuals has persisted into present times and

given rise to “passing” as a necessary strategy for homosexual survival. Davis extends her

definition of “passing” to include any concealment of a certain facet of a person’s identity,

thus allowing Larsen’s novel to still speak to modern marginalized groups:

…although within the cultural history of the United States “passing”

initially signified a racial context, in the late twentieth century “to pass” has

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come into general descriptive usage as a general verb indicative of masking or

disguising any aspect of identity, such as class, ethnicity, religion, or

sexuality, implying as well an unmasking or exposing of one viable

construction of cultural identity, particularly gay and lesbian sexuality. (xxx)

Davis, thus, sketches the trajectory that “passing” has followed as a subversive practice from

its inception in the 1890s to its modern incarnation in the gay and lesbian community. As

African-Americans battled the predominant racist attitudes in the United States during the

first half of the twentieth century, the gay and lesbian community experienced its own forms

of prejudice, and flight from the repressive mind-set of the United States further links these

two minority groups during this period. The 1940s and 50s witnessed Paris becoming a

“shelter” for African-Americans “from racism, prejudice, and segregation at home”; at the

same time, it also became a haven for the writers of the Beat Generation (Hotel 4). For the

Beats, including novelist William S. Burroughs, Paris offered an “escape” from “the

conformism and Puritanism of America after the war,” and the city provided the

predominately gay and drug-using Beats with an atmosphere in which they could live their

lives without as much intervention from authorities and without having to experience the

prejudice of the masses (Hotel 4).

Ironically enough, Larsen’s Passing features erotic undertones that suggest lesbian

desire, a desire that was best left hidden in the early twentieth century. Larsen casts Irene

Redfield as the central character of the novel, and, through Larsen’s third person narration of

Irene’s story, the reader becomes acquainted with Clare Kendry and learns of her “passing”

as white in order to enjoy the privileges of white society. Irene’s fascination with Clare

builds exponentially from the very start of the novel, and as Deborah McDowell points out, it

reaches the level of sexual attraction. McDowell argues that the “safe and familiar plot of

racial passing” serves as a cover story to mask the subplot of lesbian desire; therefore, what

5

seems to be the major plot of the novel “passes” in order to disguise Larsen’s true plot, “a

technique” that, McDowell adds, is “found commonly in narratives of Afro-American and

women novelists with a ‘dangerous’ story to tell: “‘safe’ themes, plots, and conventions are

used as the protective cover underneath which lie more dangerous subplots” (xxx). The

novel, therefore, “takes the form of the act it describes. Implying false, forged, and mistaken

identities, the title functions on multiple levels: thematically, in terms of the racial and sexual

plots; and strategically, in terms of the narrative’s disguise” (McDowell xxx). Thus, for

modern readers, Larsen’s novel functions in different ways than it would have for its original

audience during the 1920s. The novel also reveals that the sexual aspects of “passing” date

back further than modern audiences might suspect, and it is these sexual aspects that prove

especially pertinent in our day and age.

In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Judith Butler discusses

both racial “passing,” in her previously cited account of Nella Larsen, and “queer passing” as

well. Her discussion of “queer passing” and drag centers around the film Paris is Burning.

Butler’s concentration on this film allows her discussion of “passing” to remain a question of

race, since the film, as she summarizes it, is “about drag balls in New York City, in Harlem,

attended by, performed by ‘men’ who are either African-American or Latino” (128). These

“men”—in quotations, as is “sex” in the title of the book, to denote Butler’s view on the

slippage possible in this binary division between men and women—conduct not only acts of

sexual “passing” but acts of racial “passing” as well because the “categories” in which these

“men” compete

include a variety of social norms, many of which are established in

white culture as signs of class, like that of the “executive” and the Ivy League

student; some of which are marked as feminine, ranging from high drag to

butch queen; and some of them, like that of the “bangie,” are taken from

6

straight black masculine street culture. Not all of the categories, then, are

taken from white culture; some of them are replications of a straightness

which is not white, and some them are focused on class, especially those

which almost require that expensive women’s clothing be “mopped” or stolen

for the occasion. (128-9)

Butler’s reading of Paris is Burning serves to elucidate how “passing” stretches far beyond

its original racial context to include the disparate areas of identity formation—race, sex,

gender, class, etc.—all of which Butler proves to be “read,” like race and gender, according

to visible difference. Butler proceeds to propose the question of whether or not these

instances “succeed in subverting the norm,” or, alternately, if they are merely “in the service

of a perpetual reidealization, one that can only oppress, even as, or precisely when, it is

embodied most effectively?” (Bodies 129) Utilizing the characters’ final outcomes in Paris

is Burning, Butler portrays how “passing” can cut both ways; that is, it can allow the “passer”

to remain an active part of the repressive society, or it can lead to total destruction, as is the

case with Clare Kendry in Passing and Venus Xtravanganza in Paris is Burning.

In many ways, the outcome of Venus Xtravanganza, one of the African-American

“males” who performs in the drag shows in Paris is Burning, directly parallels the death of

Clare Kendry in the controversial conclusion to Passing. The final chapter of Passing

portrays Clare’s racist husband, John Bellew, discovering her racial background, at which he

exclaims, “So you’re a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!” (111). Clare subsequently plummets

out the window and perishes, but the novel remains ambiguous as to whether she dies from

force, accident, or of her own volition. However, the fact remains that Clare’s death follows

immediately upon white society’s discovery of her “passing.” The discovery of Venus

Xtravangaza’s biological sex also leads to her death: “she passes as a light-skinned woman,

but is—by virtue of a certain failure to pass completely—clearly vulnerable to homophobic

7

violence; ultimately her life is taken by a client who, upon the discovery of what she calls her

‘little secret,’ mutilates her for having seduced him” (Bodies 129-30). Thus, Venus’s story

shows how dangerous “passing” can be for the subject; however, Paris is Burning, as Butler

shows, provides positive, as well as negative, portrayals of the consequences of such a

practice. Willi Ninja, another character in the movie, “can pass as straight,” a strategy that

allows him to become a successful part of the white heterosexual world (Butler, Bodies 130).

Being able to blend in with the normal everyday people in society provides Willi with a

much greater potential for survival; as Butler says, “There is passing and then there is

passing, and it is—as we used to say—‘no accident’ that Willi Ninja ascends and Venus

Extravangaza dies” (Bodies 130). “Passing,” as Butler shows, can be just as dangerous as it

can be liberating; it is a practice that the subject must realize includes the highest penalties

for failure.

William S. Burroughs, who was always infamously forthright concerning his views

on sex and gender and in his depictions of homosexual relationships, mobilizes queer

“passing” as a subversive strategy for his characters in the Red Night trilogy to escape from

the various normative systems they perceive as repressive. While Larsen was concerned with

“Western culture’s stock ambivalences about female sexuality; lady/Jezebel or virgin/whore”

and with “indict[ing] the sources of this ambivalence; the network of social institutions—

education, marriage, and religion,” Burroughs wrote, throughout his lifetime, in an attempt to

break down the entire binary system of thought, which he saw as being the primary

mechanism of control since at least the time of Aristotle (McDowell xxxi). Burroughs came

to view the entire binary system of Aristotelian either/or logic as an oppressive dichotomy, a

dichotomy which he sought to break down through various different methods throughout his

8

career. Burroughs explains his complete distrust of binary thinking in his 1965 Paris Review

interview: “Either/or thinking just is not accurate thinking. That’s not the way things occur,

and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles of Western civilization”

(Burroughs and Knickerbocker 13). Throughout his career as a novelist, Burroughs remained

obsessed with systems of control and with techniques for dismantling these systems, and

“passing” was one strategy with which he experimented as a possible form of revolutionary

praxis in his later works of the 1980s, particularly in the three novels that are usually known

as the Red Night trilogy.

The Red Night trilogy operates within a different mythology than Burroughs’s

earlier—and more famous—Nova books, which include Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft

Machine (1961), and The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). As Jennie

Skerl explains, this second mythology began in 1971 with The Wild Boys and continued

through the Red Night novels: “Burroughs’s second mythology, which I call ‘freedom

through fantasy,’ expresses more hope for the individual and for change through utopian

dreams” (Freedom 190). Indeed, utopian schemes permeate his novels from 1971 through

the end of the Red Night trilogy in 1987. However, unlike the Wild Boys books of the

seventies, the Red Night trilogy offers a more radical and organized system of utopian

revolution.

Burroughs began writing Cities of the Red Night, the first novel of the Red Night

trilogy, in 1974 during his stint as a teacher at CCNY (City College of New York). Allen

Ginsberg convinced Burroughs to move back to New York from London and to take the

teaching position, and he also found Burroughs a secretary—twenty-one year old James

Grauerholz. Grauerholz soon became Burroughs’s lover and editor, and he has continued to

9

edit Burroughs’s posthumous publications, the most recent of which was Grove Press’s 2001

publication of Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. The writing of Cities of the Red Night took

Burroughs seven years due in part to writer’s block (Hombre 205-8). However, Burroughs

soon began writing again but in a different style than his previous works; Barry Miles states

that his move back to New York “brought about a sea change in Burroughs’ writing. The

London period was still European: experimental, related to the avant-garde tradition”

(Hombre 212). “After a difficult beginning,” Burroughs managed to get “a fresh start,” and

all this experimentation “was stripped away” to reveal a new clarity of narrative style that

would be the hallmark of the Red Night trilogy (Hombre 212).1 However, Burroughs still

struggled with the novel when it came time to pare it down and create its final form, a

process that had always given him trouble.2 Despite these endless delays and difficulties,

Burroughs persevered, and Cities of the Red Night was published in 1981 by Holt Rinehart &

Winston. The spillover from the massive editing process became the beginnings of the

second book in the Red Night trilogy: The Place of Dead Roads (Hombre 223).

After checking himself into a methadone clinic, getting off drugs again, and

experiencing the death of his son—William S. Burroughs, Jr., the author of Speed (1970) and

Kentucky Ham (1973)—Burroughs left New York and returned to the Midwest of his

1 Burroughs comments on the monetary aspects of making his novels more readable in an interview

conducted with him on July 3, 1978 in Paris: “If your objective is to have people read your books, then there

has to be at least a line of narrative they can follow. Take the case of Joyce who spent 20 or 30 years writing

Finnegans’ Wake [which, incidentally, does not have an apostrophe after ‘s’; this is a mistake on the publisher’s

part], a book no one can really read. I can’t let that happen. For one thing, I have to make a living. Cities of

the Red Night is a carefully executed novel, constructed a little bit like a roman à clefs: a beginning, a middle

and an end, some connections, and a clear story. If the book’s too experimental, like The Third Mind, he’s not

going to read it. The cut-up technique gets used a bit in the new novel, but for precise enough reasons, in order

to describe a state of mental dissociation or delirium” (Burroughs and Lemaire 401).

2 Naked Lunch, his first great—and most famous—work, “evolved slowly and unpredictably over nine

tumultuous years in the life of its author” and was “continually edited and reedited not only by its author but

also by his close friends Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac” (Grauerholz and Miles 233). Naked Lunch “took its

final shape only when Maurice Girodieas told Burroughs in June 1959 that he needed a finished text within two

weeks, for publication by his English-language Olympia Press in Paris” (Grauerholz and Miles 233).

10

childhood. He moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and, drawing on the hundreds of pages that were

left over from Cities of the Red Night, he wrote The Place of Dead Roads in the fall of 1980.

After Burroughs and Grauerholz had gone through five different drafts of the novel, the sixth

draft was finally selected and published in 1983 (Hombre 217-19). Whereas Cities of the

Red Night was divided into a tri-partite structure that told three interrelated stories (the story

of the utopian pirate commune named Port Roger, the story of the detective Clem Snide, and

the story of the ancient Cities of the Red Night where Virus B-23 originated), The Place of

Dead Roads focuses solely on the western story of Kim Carsons and his desire to create a

utopia free from the constraints of nineteenth century America’s burgeoning industrialism.3

In 1983, using almost 800 pages of manuscript that were left over from The Place of

Dead Roads, Burroughs began writing the third novel of the trilogy, The Western Lands,

which was published in 1987 (Hombre 229). “Considered by many to be his finest work

after The Naked Lunch,” The Western Lands, as Barry Miles explains, “deals with grand

themes: immortality, time, and space” (Hombre 230). Burroughs explains the point of the

novel in his 1987 interview with James Fox: “I am working on novel called The Western

Lands, in which Chauceresque pilgrims—adolescents almost to a man—travel through the

Land of the Dead, the frontier beyond time, learning how to deal with space conditions”

(646). The characters in The Western Lands, thus, wrestle with learning to exist beyond

time. The Western Lands, which is largely set in Egypt and the Egyptian afterlife, is a direct

continuation of The Place of Dead Roads and features Burroughs’s characters learning to

3 In his 1982 interview with Chris Bohn and painter Brion Gysin, Burroughs explains the relation

between the first two novels in his typical comic fashion: “The Place of Dead Roads is a sequel to Cities of the

Red Night. What happened there was like commandos were parachuted behind enemy lines in time and they

sort of cleaned up and drastically altered South and Central America. They did South and Central America and

the Catholic Church, now they’re doing North America and the protestant ethic and the Bible Belt…. It’s really

concerned with weaponry more than anything else. Weaponry at all levels. The whole theory of weaponry and

war. The history of this planet is the history of war, the only thing that gets a homo sapien up off his dead ass is

a foot up! And that foot is war” (573).

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exist beyond the constraints of time that they experience in the earlier two novels of the

trilogy.4 Therefore, this final novel of the trilogy deals with how to achieve immortality,

which Burroughs shows is still shadowed by the forces of control.

The Red Night trilogy represents Burroughs’s attempt to show how control can be

broken down throughout the various periods of history and on into the afterlife by breaking

out of the network of control.5 All three novels feature characters that create utopian

societies or communes that operate from within a control framework in order to subvert it.

“Passing,” both for the characters and their bases of operation, proves to be an essential

strategy in all three books; it allows the characters to engage in their revolutionary plans

without being detected by the mechanisms of power and control.

4 For Burroughs, to achieve immortality means to attain a position beyond the realm of time; to exist

beyond time necessitates an escape from the body which is time bound. In a fascinating discussion with

Timothy Leary on cryonics and preserving the body after death, Burroughs explains why immortality cannot be

achieved through any means that involve the body: “I feel that any sort of physical immortality is going in the

wrong direction. It is a question of separating whatever you choose to call it—the soul—from the body, not

perpetuating the body in any way” (754).

5 After displaying these strategies in two different historical eras in the first two novels, Burroughs

proceeds to demonstrate how the final escape from control comes with the escape from body at the moment of

death, yet even admittance into the afterlife must first be freed from the control of the Egyptian pharaohs and

their priests. However, once one gains entrance into the afterlife, one attains a state of pure freedom from not

only the control mechanism of the civilization, but also from the constraints of time.

CHAPTER 2:

Burroughs’s Battle with Binary Logic

and the Foucauldian Channels of Control

Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering

from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to come out. With your help we

can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and

Monopoly—

-Inspector Lee,

from William S. Burroughs’s Nova Express, 7

State of Hate of the Union

So many [divisions] of America are sunked in the vilest spiritual

ignorance, stupidity and basic [ill intentions] toward anything, any potential

Homo Sap may harbor.

Yet here I sit and write this in comparative (to other countries) safety.

I may add, precarious safety.

The powder trail is there, all it needs is one spark.

-William S. Burroughs, July 18, 1997

from Last Words, 241

Racial attitudes in the early twentieth century were based upon white society’s

“acceptance of a simple binary opposition of white and black in matters of race” (Davis vii).

This viewpoint enabled white society to utilize a simple schema of “categorization” based

upon visible difference in their relations with African-Americans (Davis viii). Such binary

oppositions and categorizations, for Burroughs, prove to be the absolute nexus of the entire

control apparatus that attempts to relegate certain social roles to each individual, roles that

Burroughs consistently sought methods of subverting. Burroughs’s novels always deal

explicitly with the reprehensible nature of control and the disparate normative mechanisms

that direct people’s everyday lives and actions. As Graham Caveney claims, “the fear of

control” proves to be the “one constant running throughout his work” (19-22). Like

13

Foucault, who, in Discipline and Punish, claimed that people are controlled and disciplined

by the “infinitesimal distribution of power relations,” Burroughs discovered control in every

aspect of daily life in the postmodern world, and he continually sought new methods of

freeing humankind from these bonds of power and control (Discipline 216). The world of

Burroughs’s novels exactly parallels the world of Foucault’s Panopticism, a world in which

all people, organizations, and institutions work to create disciplined citizens. Burroughs’s

array of doctors, aliens, drugs, bizarre sex acts, and corrupt capitalists shows how power, in

the words of Foucault, becomes “automatize[d] and disindividualize[d]” (Discipline 202).

Power, thus, no longer can be found situated in one source, such as a monarch or a

parliamentary body, but instead it is dispersed throughout society in various microscopic

channels, creating what Foucault terms a “a ‘new micro-physics’ of power” (Discipline 139).

Throughout his entire oeuvre, William S. Burroughs grappled with—and attempted to

destroy—this “micro-physics of power.”

Viewing Burroughs as a forerunner of Foucault, Timothy S. Murphy aptly sums up

his entire corpus of work when he states that “Burroughs’s literary career is defined by the

central challenge he sets himself: to find an escape route from the linked control systems of

capital, subjectivity, and language” (Murphy 4). Burroughs, again like Foucault, saw the

interdependence of all these disparate systems of control, at the center of which was language

linking them all together into one massive web of power. Writing from the viewpoint of a

reformed drug addict, Burroughs perceived people as addicts to the various ideas and

institutions that controlled them—“the present world condition of induced obedience to every

kind of addictive authority from gods to drugs” (Mottram 22). Continuing with the metaphor

14

of addiction, Burroughs believed that not just religion, but every form of control operated as

Marx’s “opium of the people” (Contribution 54).

Burroughs’s addicts are not just addicted to the obvious physical stimulants such as

sex and drugs, but even the quest for immortality proves to be a controlling addiction in Ah

Pook is Here. Mr. Hart, the central character and villain of this short novel, seeks immortality

through his research into the Mayan Codices; however, his attempt to escape the confines of

death leads to an addiction to immortality fueled by his attempted subjection of the rest of

humanity:

Mr. Hart has to be inhuman because humans as he calls them are

mortal. And Mr. Hart is addicted to immortality. He is addicted to an

immortality predicated on the mortality of others: gooks, niggers, wogs,

human dogs, stinking humans and feeling his own inhuman contempt for these

apes affords him a mineral calm. He is addicted to a certain brain frequency,

a little blue note—feels so good that feeling…he cools to metal. (37)

This “little blue note” appears throughout Burroughs’s novels as a symbol of the satiation

and excitation that an addict feels when he or she feeds his or her hunger for whatever

particular addiction controls him or her. A similar instance can be found in “The Unworthy

Vessel” episode from Nova Express, in which Doctor Benway tries to determine the color of

junk. After trying the color green, Benway decides that “junk is not green but blue,” so he

begins concocting blue junk, at the end of which he creates a drug that is as lethal as it is

powerful: “smell of ozone and a little high-fi blue junk note that fixed you right to metal this

junk note tinkling through your crystals and a heavy blue silence fell klunk—and all the

words turned to cold metal and ran off you man just fixed there in a cool blue mist of

vaporized bank notes” (Nova 33-4). Burroughs, thus, consistently explains addiction in these

musical and color-based terms; the addict, almost without exception, experiences both tonal

sensations and a dulling of his nerves that Burroughs equates with metal. Through the use of

15

such symbols, Burroughs is capable of portraying the relative equality of all forms of control:

from religious systems, such as Christianity or the Mayan belief structure in which Mr. Hart

is interested, to drug use that stems from actual drugs like heroin to strange, sci-fi drugs like

Heavy Metal—not the music, which derived its name from Burroughs’s fictional drug, but a

drug that causes its users to have “near zero metabolism” and to only “shit once a century”

(Soft 157). Burroughs’s addicts thus serve as the foci of the various controlling entities that

seek their total subservience, entities that truly constitute a “‘micro-physics’ of power”

because if they cannot control a subject through one method, then they will find at least one

open channel through which to exercise their power.

Burroughs’s revolutionary theories persistently centered upon this basic conception of

power, yet his ideas concerning how this network of control could be disrupted continued to

evolve through his career as a novelist. This evolution would reach its apex in the Red Night

trilogy. Spanning the whole gamut of human experience, Burroughs consistently portrays

characters driven by their need for everything from drugs or sex to their need for the logic of

the linguistic control apparatus: “His novels display an almost psychotic vigilance for

imprisoning systems, from drugs and desire to religion and language. Yet they also capture

the allure of control, the masochistic bliss of being enslaved by addiction, sexuality, and

narrative” (Caveney 22). Seldom content just to reveal the machinery of control, Burroughs

generally provides new avenues for smashing the control machine and nullifying its effects.

Burroughs’s ideas about how to subvert and destroy the control mechanisms of society

evolved throughout the course of his novels, but, of course, as he said in his 1974 interview

with Gerard Malanga, “all of my books are one book; it’s just a continual book” (Burroughs

and Malanga 201). Burroughs’s “one” work constitutes what could be considered, in Ihab

16

Hassan’s words, an “allegory of a mouldy universe” (Hassan 63). His “one book,” therefore,

represents Burroughs’s quest for a means of demolishing the addictive control systems of the

universe, a quest that forces Burroughs to experiment with and reject various methods of

subversion and revolution, a quest that begins in his earliest great work—Naked Lunch—and

that finally ends with the Red Night trilogy of the 1980s.

In his early writings, especially in Naked Lunch (1959), the apomorphine cure, which

Burroughs took on several occasions as a cure for heroin addiction, became a symbol for him

of a way that subjects—in this case junkies—could break out of the repressive matrices of

power. Apomorphine, as Eric Mottram explains, is “‘a metabolic regulator’ which brings

about a necessary physiological change in the addict and has nothing to do with the power

game of cures and punishments offered by doctors, psychologists, and the agents of the law,

since it has nothing to do with power of any kind” (15). Because of its neutrality in the arena

of power games, apomorphine served as a revolutionary symbol, a weapon that allowed the

subject to escape from social control, which is represented, in this case, by narcotics. With

his next three major novels, the Cut-up trilogy, alternately referred to as the Nova trilogy—

The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964)—

Burroughs turned his sights on destroying binary thinking, which he saw as the origin of all

the world’s sorrows. He makes this purpose clear in The Job (1969), his series of interviews

with Daniel Odier: “I’ve spoken of unworkable formulas and possibly the most unworkable

is the concept of a dualistic universe…. Dualism is the whole basis of this planet—good,

evil, communism, fascism, man, woman, etc. As soon as you have a formula like that, of

course you’re going to have trouble” (Burroughs and Odier 97). Through his new

experiments with language, particularly the cut-up and fold-in techniques, Burroughs sought

17

to dismantle the linguistic hegemony and dualistic thought patterns that he perceived to be

the nexus of all the various control mechanisms operating in modern society.6

After the Cut-ups, Burroughs began to formulate the idea of an alternate society, one

that was not based upon the dichotomous thinking that he perceived as being so intensely

constraining upon individual thought and identity. These utopian social schemas began to

appear in the series of four novels that are sometimes referred to as the Wild Boys

tetralogy—The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1969), Exterminator! (1973), Port of Saints

(1973), and Ah Pook is Here (1979). The group known as the Wild Boys, a recurring group

of characters throughout the four novels, attempts to create an anarchic, all-male,

homosexual society that opposes all the various values of Western society. This series of

novels, in the words of Jennie Skerl, signaled Burroughs’s new “attention…to man’s positive

potential for autonomy, regeneration, and creation” (William 77). These novels signal a shift

back to a less experimental prose style and feature Burroughs developing a completely new

mythology and revolutionary theory. Timothy S. Murphy terms the “figures of resistance” in

Burroughs’s novels of the 1960s as “marginalized” and “highly unstable,” but, in what he

calls “the middle period texts” (a period that includes The Wild Boys tetralogy, The Job, and

The Last Words of Dutch Shultz), he argues that “resistance is almost ubiquitous” and that

these novels offer “a positive or affirmative alternative to capitalist society, and not just a

negative critique of it…a utopian fantasy not bounded by the mythological terms of

modernism or foreclosed by the linguistic terms of postmodernism” (146-7). However, the

saga of the Wild Boys apparently did not satisfy Burroughs’s revolutionary ideals because he

would recast these utopian visions in the 1980s in his final great trilogy of novels, the Red

6 As Burroughs states in his interviews with Daniel Odier, “Image and word are the instruments of

control used by the daily press and by such news magazines as Time, Life, and Newsweek” (Burroughs and

Odier, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs, 59).

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Night trilogy: Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The

Western Lands (1987). Murphy claims that while The Wild Boys displays only a “purity of

destructive force,” the Red Night trilogy offers “affirmative suggestions for the

reorganization of society” (168). The Red Night novels, then, feature more method and less

of the madness of the Wild Boys texts, allowing them to have a more “affirmative”

revolutionary message than had previously been apparent in Burroughs’s works. Murphy

recognizes the new revolutionary potential in Burroughs’s Red Night novels when he states

that the trilogy not only “suggests the active forgetting of power” but also provides a

“positive” re-consolidation of power in the hands of his revolutionary characters (Murphy

72).7 Both the Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads represent such

“positive” restructurings of power in the hands of people who have been marginalized by the

control apparatus. Unlike his previous novels, the Red Night trilogy features a new strategy

of revolution: the creation of subversive utopias that employ the concept of “passing” in

order to dismantle the heterosexual and capitalist hegemonic machinery. By utilizing

“passing” as a means of resistance, the characters of the Red Night novels create homosexual

utopias, and they lash out from these operational centers at all the controlling apparatuses

with which Burroughs concerned himself. By finding a more plain—yet still distinctly

7 Murphy’s study of the entire Burroughs canon provides an excellent overview of Burroughs’s

maturation as a revolutionary theorist. Murphy argues that Burroughs, in the Red Night trilogy, finally achieves

a state of what he designates “amodernism, which he claims is distinct from either modernism or

postmodernism. Building upon the foundation of the theories of Deleuze, Guattari, and Sartre, Murphy

designates postmodernism as “accept[ing] the fundamental premises of modernism, but radicaliz[ing] them

further, and in so doing undermin[ing] the mythological edifice of modernism itself” (35). Postmodernism,

therefore, gives up “the pursuit of unification” that drove the modernist movement (35). Amodernism, on the

other hand, does not seek “permanent escape from unity or from closure, but the construction of a strategic false

unity, fantasmatic totalization, that can provide a material form for investments of desire that, in pursuing their

own ends, also transform the socius” (45). Amodernism, thus, “shares the modernist and postmodernist

suspicion of representational art and politics, but rejects both the constitutive asymmetries of modernist myth-

mongering and the postmodern abandonment of critique in the face of the procession of simulacra” (29).

Murphy, through the course of his book, traces Burroughs’s progression towards amodernism that he believes is

finally achieved in the Red Night trilogy.

19

Burroughsesque—voice and creating a new group of characters with a radically different

theory of revolution, Burroughs was able to create his last great trilogy of novels.

CHAPTER 3:

Women, the “Other Half,”

and Burroughs’s Infamous Misogyny

In the words of a great misogynist’s plain Mr. Jones, in Conrad’s

Victory: “Women are a perfect curse.” I think they were a basic mistake, and

the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error. Women are no longer

essential to reproduction…”

-William S. Burroughs, from The Job, 116

In order to understand the necessity of “passing” for the gay male characters of the

Red Night trilogy, one must first understand Burroughs’s attitude towards women.

Burroughs’s blatant misogyny remains one of the more troubling and notorious aspects of his

writing and philosophy. Burroughs sees sexual division and its linkage with linguistic

dualism as the principal controlling factors in our world: “Like the Gnostic Blake, he sees

history as determined by a primordial fall from an androgynous unity into a strife-ridden

duality whose chief expressions are language and sexual difference” (Pounds 224).8

Burroughs, thus, sees the division into two sexes as a major cause of the strife that

humankind has experienced throughout history, which leads to his numerous novels, one of

which is Cities of the Red Night, including depictions of a war between the sexes.

Burroughs’s accidental shooting of his common law wife, Joan Vollmer, has only

fueled the image of him as a blatant misogynist. This incident, which occurred in 1951 in

Mexico, would haunt Burroughs throughout the remainder of his life. Joan’s death has

8 Gregory Stephenson, in his essay on The Soft Machine, correctly argues that Burroughs’s philosophy

parallels the beliefs of the Gnostics: “Both view the material world as illusory, the body as the primary

impediment to true being and identity, and escape from the body and the world of the senses as humankind’s

paramount concern” (59-60).

21

always been shrouded in mystery; it has remained a controversial issue due to the differing

accounts of the shooting that were given by Burroughs, Gene Allerton, and Eddie Woods,

who were all witnesses of Joan’s demise (Morgan 194-6). Burroughs had arranged to sell a

gun in order to raise money, and he and Joan had been drinking throughout the afternoon

(Hombre 57). Including Burroughs’s own description of the event, Barry Miles provides one

account:

Bill opened his travel bag and pulled out the gun. ‘I suddenly said,

“It’s about time for our William Tell act. Put a glass on your head.”’ They

had never performed a William Tell act but Joan, who was also very drunk,

laughed and balanced a six-ounce water glass on her head. Bill fired. Joan

slumped in her chair and the glass fell to the floor, undamaged. The bullet

had entered Joan’s brain through her forehead. She was pronounced dead on

arrival at Red Cross Hospital. (Hombre 57).

Burroughs suffered little legal recrimination for the killing, but the event would haunt him

throughout his life. Joan’s death caused Burroughs to rewrite an early version of Junky

(originally entitled “Junk” in manuscript) and set the trajectory for the rest of his career’s

battle with control (Hombre 57-8). Cutting Joan out of the novel completely was one of the

changes Burroughs made to Junky before its publication. Despite Ace Books’s pressure to

include the character of Joan in the novel, Burroughs persisted in keeping her and her death

out of his first novel (Harris, Introduction xv). It would not be until 1985, when his second

novel, Queer, was finally published that Burroughs would discuss the event at length in his

preface:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have

become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the event to which

this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with a constant

need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought

me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a

lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

(Queer xxii)

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Burroughs believed himself to be possessed at times by what he terms “the Ugly Spirit,”

which he saw as controlling him during the shooting of Joan (Queer xix-xxii). Therefore, he

sought escape from this control through his writing in order to avoid a dangerous recurrence.

Coupled with the killing of his wife, Burroughs’s slanderous comments against women over

the years led to a general view of him as a misogynist.

Burroughs attempted to deny the charge of misogyny by casting himself instead in the

role of a misanthrope; in his essay entitled “Women: A Biological Mistake?,” he states,

“Women may well be a biological mistake; I said so in The Job. But so is almost everything

else I see around me” (125). Burroughs, therefore, despised not just women but the entire

human condition, which he perceived—much like Kim Carsons in The Place of Dead

Roads—to be in a state of “Arrested Evolution” (Roads 40). In 1983, shortly after the

publication of The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs spoke about his viewpoint on humanity’s

inability to progress beyond its present stage of development: “A lot of people have the

mistaken impression that I hate women. Not true. Homo sapiens, as an entire species, are a

pathetic lot, both sexes. Homo sapiens are a bunch of stupid shmucks who, every time they

come up to bat, they strike out….The white-skinned homo sap has always been a fuck up”

(Burroughs and Ohle 34). Burroughs often spoke in this way about the human species,

emphasizing the division between the sexes as being one of the primary hindrances to

humankind’s advancement. The question, then, becomes how did Burroughs intend that this

binary sexual division be eradicated and what did he envision as a system to replace it.

In Queer Burroughs, Jamie Russell, analyzes how Burroughs, while purporting to

break down the binaries of male/female and homosexual/heterosexual, actually upholds a

misogynistic masculine homosexual paradigm from which all deviants are shunned, a thesis

23

which explains why Burroughs has often been excluded from the pantheon of gay authors.

Russell writes, “Burroughs’ gay politics attempt to ape the dynamics of a masculine,

heterosexual dominant that ultimately can never accept them” (7). However, for some

critics, Burroughs’s depiction of gay characters is also positive. Kendra Langeteig, in her

essay on the Red Night trilogy, explains how Burroughs inverts the normally negative social

construction of homosexuality and posits it as a site of empowerment instead:

His strategy of affirming society’s negative construction of

homosexuality as disorder, rather than being victimized or overpowered by it,

turns the cultural bias against the “outlaw” on its head—a fatal strategy that

transforms the homosexual’s mythic toxicity and problematic exile into a

paradoxical means of empowerment and resistance. (159)

Burroughs works within the framework of the heterosexual/homosexual binary while finding

the means for subverting it within this very system. The configuration of heterosexual as

order and homosexual as disorder becomes for a Burroughs a site of ambivalence (as Butler

might call it) that allows his characters to work against the very binary system that labels

them as disordered. However, while Burroughs may provide his gay characters with

empowering new subversive principles, his attitudes towards women still prove troublesome

and offensive to modern readers.

When referring to women, people often use the cliché “man’s better half,” a term

Burroughs would roundly reject. By contrast, he preferred to talk about the “Other Half,”

which refers to more than just women but with which women are inextricably linked. The

concept of the “Other Half” provides one of the controlling metaphors for the Cut-up novels,

but it also remains a persistent trope throughout the bulk of his work. Ted Morgan

summarizes the project of the Cut-ups when he states, “Burroughs postulates ‘Operation

Other Half,’ which imprisons human life in conflict and duality, and counters it with

24

‘Operation Rewrite,’ in which binary thinking is dismantled” (424). The “Other Half,” thus,

embodies all of Burroughs’s distrust for—and desire to break down—the Aristotelian system

of binary thought and categorization, one of the primary aspects of which is the division

between male and female; “Operation Rewrite” symbolizes his revolutionary goal of

eliminating humankind’s dependence on binary thinking.

In her book William S. Burroughs, Jennie Skerl explains how “the other half” ties in

with the film metaphor of the Cut-up trilogy in her discussion of The Ticket that Exploded:

“The double metaphor of virus and film provides the controlling imagery for the Nova plot in

Ticket. Operation Other Half is defined as a double virus invasion” (60). The virus invasion

is double because it works upon two different aspects of the human mind—“one sexual the

other cerebral working together the way parasites will” (Ticket 166). This virus, as Skerl

explains, operates upon both the sexual area of the human mind and the section of the brain

that perceives reality, which, in Burroughs’s novels, is dictated to humans from “the reality

studio”:

The replication of a virus is equated with the linear repitition of the

same image. Thus the Other Half is a “disease of the image track” in which

human victims are forced to participate in “the reality film,” a linear repetition

of the same scripts, images, and sounds with no alternative allowed—indeed

no alternative is conceivable. The Word virus controls our concept of reality

and imposes a dualism that makes it impossible to change reality. Burroughs

attacks all either-or thinking, especially the separation and opposition of mind

and body, word and world, birth and death, pleasure and pain, male and

female. It is these concepts, according to Burroughs, that trap us into bodies

that can be manipulated by power elites. (William 60)

Burroughs, speaking like a true skeptic, denies the existence of any one “true reality” because

what humankind takes for reality has been imposed upon it: “There is no true or real

‘reality’—‘Reality’ is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern—The scanning pattern

25

we accept as ‘reality’ has been imposed by the controlling power on this plant, a power

primarily oriented towards total control” (Nova 53).

Burroughs’s Cut-ups derive from his desire to break the primary controlling element

of human life: language. Throughout the cut-ups, he consistently illustrates how

humankind’s views on sex and reality stem from language, for he reveals language itself to

be a viral mechanism:

The “Other Half” is the word. The “Other Half” is an organism.

Word is an organism…The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It

is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous

system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-

vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will

encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the

word. In the beginning was the word. (Ticket 49-50)

Oliver Harris, in his recent book on Burroughs and fascination, traces the origin of

Burroughs’s interest in the “other half” back to Queer, his second novel. Once Allerton, the

man whom Lee repeatedly tries to woo into a homosexual relationship, quits listening to

Lee’s routines, Lee continues to perform in the absence of an audience, and, thus,

Allerton stands revealed as no more than a prop, a pretext for what

appears essentially as a sadomasochistic encounter between Lee and an

intrapsychic other: not the social other but the Symbolic Other. This

Burroughs would name the “Other Half”…What Queer demonstrates is the

point of exposure of an embodied parasitology: the Other Half as an organism.

(Harris, Fascination 126)

The viral organism that is the “word” drives the animosity between the two sexes and

perpetuates a state of eternal warfare. Cary Nelson explains how “the word became flesh”—

an obvious parody of the word of God becoming incarnated in the form of Christ—in

Burroughs’s novels and how it drives this state of conflict between the sexes:

Like all human interaction, sex is a form of warfare—a series of

outrageous violations which occur over and over again. History consequently

proceeds in time through the sexual warfare of mutually dependent

26

antagonisms. The word became flesh, permutating in hemispherical, double,

warring dialectical forms. Conversing and intersecting, these forms now

create history, which is the history of one word and its doubled fleshly

variations. (Nelson 123)

Sex, therefore, proves to be the most insoluble of the “insoluble conflicts” that the nova mob,

the non-three dimensional enemies of the Nova trilogy, attempts to create and foster (Nova

53). Such a view of sex gives rise to Burroughs’s repeated depictions of wars between the

sexes and of groups of gay men that split themselves off from a society based on the duality

of sex.

While Burroughs persisted throughout his career in creating texts that include such

misogynistic scenes and attitudes, he did manage to investigate and criticize the traditional

binaries of male/female and homosexual/heterosexual. Like Judith Butler, Burroughs found

sites for disruption and subversion in the niches between these binaries. Particularly in the

Red Night trilogy, Burroughs provides instances in which the reader glimpses an agreement

with Butler’s statement that “gender proves to be performative” (Gender 33). In fact, for

queer “passing” to function properly, one must recognize the inherent perfomativity of

gender, a performativity that enables men to act in more traditionally masculine ways or,

alternately, “to pass as a fag”—in other words, to act out the role expected by society of

Foucault’s homosexual “species.” Like the doctrine of visible difference determining race,

“both masculine and feminine positions are…instituted through prohibitive laws that produce

culturally intelligible genders” (Gender 37). Gender, however, cannot be dualistically

determined in the way that the law—and much of society—believes it can. Indeed, as Butler

argues, “if gender is not tied to sex, either casually or expressively, then gender is a kind of

action that can potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits imposed by the apparent

binary of sex” (Gender 143).

27

Like race, therefore, the visible difference of sex often determines modern society’s

conception of gender as well; indeed, even gays and lesbians are often demarcated as such

based solely upon their appearance. However, as both Butler and Burroughs would argue,

within the interstitial spaces of such a system, there remains room for movement and the

potential for subversion:

Consider not only that the ambiguities and incoherences within and

among heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual practices are suppressed and

redescribed within the reified framework of the disjunctive and asymmetrical

binary of masculine/feminine, but that these cultural configurations of gender

confusion operate as sites for intervention, exposure, and displacement of

these reifications. (Trouble 42)

It is precisely such “ambiguities and incoherences” with which Burroughs’s characters

engage in the Red Night novels in order to deconstruct the dualistic system of control while

continuing to operate within its sphere of influence. The characters in the trilogy play with

this “reified framework” of masculine and feminine roles in order to break this system down.

While Burroughs’s writings contain numerous misogynistic scenes and attitudes that can

prove troubling to even the most ardent of Burroughs fans, the deconstruction of the binary

thought system, particularly with respect to sex, is undoubtedly meant to work towards the

amelioration of humankind as a whole. Thus, although Burroughs did possess an irrefutable

distrust and even hatred for women, he did seek to demolish the control system that so neatly

categorizes sex and gender along binary lines.

CHAPTER 4:

Under the Shadows of the Red Night:

New Revolutionary Praxis in the Late Trilogy

“Illusion is a revolutionary weapon.”

-William S. Burroughs,

from The Electronic Revolution, 125

The revolutionary characters of the Red Night novels effect Murphy’s

“reorganization of society” and attempt to subvert Butler’s “reified framework” in one

significantly different way from the characters in Burroughs’s earlier works: they attempt to

create fully functional—and seemingly normal—societies that try to overthrow the

framework of control by working from within it. To do this, the characters often must “pass”

as the very type of people they are attempting to destroy. Beginning with his earliest novels,

Burroughs wrote about characters who must “pass” in order to achieve their goals, the most

famous of which comes from the first section of Naked Lunch, (“I Can Feel the Heat Closing

In”), in which the novel’s protagonist, William Lee, is being trailed by a “narcotics dick in a

white trench coat,” whom he believes to be “trying to pass as a fag” (Lunch 3). Thus,

“passing” acts as a means of infiltration for the detective in Naked Lunch, one which William

Lee quickly perceives for the ruse it is, enabling him to escape from his pursuer.

In Port of Saints, the third novel to feature the Wild Boys, Burroughs depicts another

act of “passing” and demonstrates, through parallel scenes, how engaging in such subterfuge

provides the “passers” with distinct advantages not normally available to them. The scene

features Willy the Actor, Audrey Carsons, and Jerry disguising themselves variously as both

hyper-masculine (“macho”) men and as cooing, subservient women:

29

Willy the Actor gets himself up like a macho in the days of Président

Alemán—glen plaid suit, false mustache, pearl-handled .45. He careens

through the streets in a black Cadillac screaming “CHINGOA” as he blasts at

cats and chickens with his .45. Now the Cadillac screams to a stop in front of

a neon-lit cocktail bar. He gets out with Audrey and Jerry in drag as

Chapultepec movie starlets, one on each arm, and staggers into the bar. (Port

28)

Willy functions in the hyper-masculine role that Jamie Russell argues was Burroughs’s ideal

of homosexual behavior: strong, completely devoid of femininity, constantly cursing, and—

like Burroughs himself—always toting a gun.9 While Willy acts out various testosterone-

induced displays of manhood—“goos[ing]” one of the “women” with his .45, pointing the

gun at another American tourist, and blasting the glass out of a telephone booth—Audrey and

Jerry, in their guise as clinging groupies, chant the phrase “Never repeats himself,” as if they

are attesting to the masculine brilliance and originality of the “macho” Willy (Port 29). The

scene becomes particularly comical when another—presumably non-“passing”—“macho

gets out of his Cadillac and staggers in with two blondes and a troop of mariachi singers”

(29). After “the two machos” have “rush[ed] into each other’s arms” and, to masculinize this

feminine display of emotion “pound[ed] each other on the back,” they proceed to order “Old

Pharr Scotch for the house” as blatant proof of their status as good guys (29). The two have

now become identical, and, after placing the order for Scotch, one of them exclaims,

“Practically everybody in Mexico drinks Scotch” (29). In hilarious fashion, the female

“passers” become indistinguishable from the real “blondes” as they repeat the “litany” of

“Never repeats himself” (29). Thus, as Butler would say, “the artifice works, the

approximation of realness appears to be achieved, the body performing and the ideal

9 This scene, which features a gay character “passing” as a “macho” Mexican stereotype, is reminiscent

of Butler’s discussion of the “bangie” in Paris is Burning. While the “bangie” is a form of drag that apes

“straight black masculine street culture,” Willy the Actor, on the other hand, mimics the physical and behavioral

aspects of hypermasculine Mexican “street culture,” and, as evidenced later in the scene, flawlessly succeeds in

his act of “passing” (Bodies 128-9).

30

performed appear indistinguishable” (Bodies 129). This scene provides evidence that a

subject is capable of “passing” without being detected and that “passing” can allow a subject

to blend seamlessly with whatever group he or she is attempting to enter.

Although still retaining much of its comic impact from his earlier writings, “passing”

becomes an important “strategy” of revolution in the Red Night trilogy. Michel de Certeau’s

concept of “tactics” and “strategies” helps in further illuminating the revolutionary function

of “passing” in the novels. In the Practice of Everyday Life, he defines two types of possible

action in the postmodern world: “tactics” and “strategies.” De Certeau uses the term

“strategy” to refer to “the calculus of force relationships which becomes possible when a

subject of will and power…can be isolated from an environment. A strategy assumes a place

that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating

relations with an exterior distinct from it” (De Certeau xix). A “tactic,” on the other hand, is

defined as “a calculus which cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional

localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality” (De

Certeau xix). The tactic

has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages,

prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to

circumstances. The “proper” is a victory of space over time. On the contrary,

because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the

watch for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing.” Whatever it wins,

it does not keep. (De Certeau xix)

The revolutionaries of the Red Night trilogy seek more than just “opportunities that must be

seized ‘on the wing’”; instead, they seek to create their own utopias that act as “propers”

from which they can carry out their subversive activities. These operational bases allow

them to have a distinct space of their own—an interior—from which they can battle the

exterior world that remains ordered by the control apparatus. In order to effect this creation

31

of a “proper” and to infiltrate their foes, Burroughs’s characters in the Red Night trilogy learn

the value of “passing” as a “strategy” of revolution.

The first novel of the Red Night trilogy, Cities of the Red Night, heralds a return to

narrative clarity that had been absent from Burroughs’s writing since his first two novels—

Junkie and Queer—and, as already stated, it displays a further evolution in Burroughs’s

revolutionary theory. The novel opens with a historical account of a liberal utopian pirate

commune that the pirate Captain Mission founded in the eighteenth century. “One of the

forbears of the French Revolution,” Captain Mission founded the colony of Libertatia, which

was governed by a set of Articles that “state[d], among other things: all decisions with regard

to the colony [are] to be submitted to vote by the colonists; the abolition of slavery for any

reason including debt; the abolition of the death penalty; and freedom to follow any religious

beliefs or practices without sanction or molestation” (Cities xii). The historical account of

Captain Mission parallels almost exactly the story of Captain Strobe’s pirate commune, Port

Roger, in the novel, and it displays Burroughs’s new utopian ideals of revolution. No doubt,

some of Burroughs’s interest in utopias stemmed from his constant interest in Hassan i

Sabbah, master of assassins, and his mountain fortress called Alamout. Burroughs explains

that Hassan i Sabbah was a member of “the dissident Ishmaelian sect” of Islam, who created

a base of operations “in the mountain fortress of Alamout in what is now northern Iran

(Breething 102). Alamout became an “all male community of several hundred apprentice

assassins,” a community in which Burroughs believes that “undoubtedly homosexual

practices formed a part of the training” (Breething 102). Whether this ancient Islamic

assassin organization engaged in homosexual practices, or whether it is merely a phatasmatic

32

projection on Burroughs’s part, it is important to understanding the utopian contexts for the

Red Night novels.

Burroughs divides the structure of Cities of the Red Night into alternating chapters

dealing with three major stories: the story of Virus B-23 that orginiated in the six ancient

Cities of the Red Night and was rediscovered in 1923, the story of Noah Blake’s adventures

with the pirate revolutionary named Captain Strobe, and the first person narrative of private

detective Clem Snide, who turns out to be the grand writer of all three distinct stories as they

become interrelated at the novel’s end. Burroughs opens the novel in 1923 with the outbreak

of Virus B-23 in the city of Waghdas, one of the ancient Cities of the Red Night, but he

promptly whisks the reader back in time through a picture entitled “The Hanging of Captain

Strobe the Gentleman Pirate. Panama City, May 13, 1702” (Cities 27).10 Burroughs

characteristically narrates the chapter like a film, a technique that he used as far back as

Naked Lunch and that became the dominant narrative form in The Wild Boys: “A Sepia

Etching onscreen…the etching comes alive, giving off a damp heat, a smell of weeds and

mud flats and sewage” (Cities 27).11 Soon, the reader becomes a part of the

10 The number 23, as evidenced in both the date 1923 and the virus’s name, became a running theme in

Burroughs’s works starting with The Last Words of Dutch Schultz and continuing through the Wild Boys novels

and into Cities of the Red Night. An excellent example comes from the shot in Dutch Shultz that is described as

“Close up of front page shows the sign at 23rd and 10th…‘Vincent Coll, Age 23, of 228 West 23rd Street’” (61).

The number 23 continues to crop up throughout the Wild Boys books as well, in which Virus B-23 makes it

first appearance.

11This passage provides further evidence of the connection between The Wild Boys and the Red Night

trilogy. The Wild Boys, which Burroughs wrote almost entirely with the use of film metaphor, features a very

similar passage: “Sepia picture in an old book with gilt pages. THE MIRACLE OF THE ROSE written in

golden letters” (73). Douglas G. Baldwin traces what he calls “Burroughs’s bipolar response” to film

throughout all of the Burroughs oeuvre, and he argues that Burroughs feels “on the one hand, a fascination with

narrative methodologies developed along with the growth of the various technologies of the moving image as

they suggest potential ‘cinematic storytelling’ that he could imitate in language, and, on the other hand, an

increasing suspicion of the potential social ‘control’ technologies of the moving image may have over the

individual” (Baldwin 64). Going beyond simple metaphor, Burroughs would actually write The Last Words of

Dutch Schultz: A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script (1969) in the form of a film script. Although not written

as an actual film script, Blade Runner, a Movie (1979) is narrated entirely as if it was a film. Blade Runner

even goes so far as to question how certain scenes, actions, and effects could best be translated to the audience

33

“silent…waiting” crowd that watches the hanging in this painting, and then Burroughs begins

to relate the tale of Noah Blake (Cities 27).

Noah Blake and his five friends enlist to sail out of their home in Harbor Point on a

ship called The Great-White, which is captained by a man named Opium Jones.12 The novel,

then, shifts to a first person account, and Burroughs allows Noah to narrate his own story.

Through the journal entries of Noah Blake, the reader learns of his struggles with repression

and discrimination in his hometown:

I am asking myself where I come from, how I got here, and who I am.

From earliest memory I have felt myself a stranger in the village of Harbor

Point where I was born. Who was I? I remember mourning doves calling

from the woods in summer dawn, and the long cold shut-in winters. Who was

I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.

And who are the others—Brady, Hansen, Paco, Todd? Strangers like

myself. I think that we came from another world and have been stranded here

like mariners on some barren and hostile shore. I never felt that what we did

together was wrong, but I fully understood the necessity and wisdom of

concealing it from the villagers. Now that there is no need for concealment, I

feel as if this ship is the home I had left and thought never to find again. But

the voyage will end of course, and what then? (Cities 60-1)

Noah’s feelings of liberation aboard The Great-White presage the life he will discover in the

utopian commune of Port Roger, which, like Captain Mission’s Libertatia, seeks to free

people from the shackles of racial, religious, and (in Burroughs’s version) sexual

discrimination.

Burroughs himself dealt with concealing his own homosexuality during his early

adolescent years. In 1925, during his tenure at the John Burroughs School in Ladue, a suburb

of St. Louis, he first “met Kells Elvins, who was to become a lifelong friend” (Hombre 25).

through the medium of film, such as when Burroughs states of one scene that it “poses [the] problem of how

background material is to be presented on screen” (8).

12 Opium Jones provides yet another importation from the Wild Boys novels. He is already familiar to

readers of Port of Saints, in which John provides the following description: “He’s known as Opium Jones in the

trade sir…opium, white slaving, nothing is too dirty for Opium Jones…. And he’s a right savage buzzard as

well…Telling you all this could cost me my life sir…” (128).

34

Burroughs, who “already knew he was a homosexual,” quickly developed a strong crush on

Elvins, “but it was a taboo subject in the circles within which the two families moved”

(Hombre 25). Later, in 1929, Burroughs began attending the Los Alamos Ranch School in

New Mexico, where he had his first experience with drugs (“an encounter with some store-

bought chloral hydrate”) and from which he left “under a cloud of hushed-up insolence and

homosexual rumour” (Caveney 40).

Like Burroughs, Noah Blake feels trapped within the confines of Harbor Point and

never completely free to indulge his homosexual impulses for fear of the town’s censure.13

Noah’s fear, like Burroughs’s own, of “coming out” caused him to never feel at liberty to

openly pursue homosexual relationships. Though Noah did not feel that his homosexual

impulses and encounters were wrong, he could not indulge them in any sort of public

fashion, and so he remained in the “closet.” Noah and his friends’ homosexuality had to

remain hidden in order to preserve his family’s dignity and to keep him safe from the

possibly violent hands of the intolerant community of Harbor Point. Comparing the

homosexual’s secret to a virus, which no doubt would have pleased Burroughs very much,

Sedgwick explains the discrimination that the parents of a professed homosexual endure, a

discrimination that Noah spares his parents by remaining within “the closet.” Noah,

however, finds escape from the hegemony of heterosexual society by joining the crew of The

Great-White and by later becoming a part of the homosexual utopia of Port Roger.

13As Eve Sedgwick discusses, Noah’s “coming out” would have caused repercussions for both himself

and his parents: “When gay people in a homophobic society come out, on the other hand, perhaps especially to

parents or spouses, it is with the consciousness of a potential for serious injury that is likely to go both

directions. The pathogenic secret itself, even, can circulate contagiously as a secret: a mother says that her

adult child’s coming out of the closet with her has plunged her, in turn, into the closet in her conservative

community” (80). Thus, “coming out” can cause the parents of a homosexual to experience a similar degree of

prejudice to what their child is already encountering.

35

The capturing of The Great-White’s crew by Captain Strobe’s pirates leads to Noah’s

arrival at Port Roger and provides the first instance of “passing” in the novel. On February

28, 1702, Noah writes that he and the crew “were captured by pirates,” who board The

Great-White via a “boat…rowed by what appeared to be a crew of women, singing as they

rowed and turning towards us to leer and wink with their painted faces” (Cities 67). Noah

quickly notices, however, that these “‘women’…were, in fact, handsome youths in women’s

garb, their costumes being oriental, of colored silks and brocades” (Cities 67). After these

“handsome youths” in “oriental” drag have secured the ship, Captain Strobe boards The

Great-White and reveals himself to be the captain of The Siren, a meaningful name in both

this scene and throughout the rest of the novel. The “passing” in this scene proves to be far

from subversive or liberating, but it does reveal the potential of such a tactic. Indeed, the

young men show that they can easily act as “sirens,” as the name of their ship implies, by

“passing” as women, thus enabling themselves to infiltrate enemy strongholds that might

prove less accessible if they wore normal masculine garb. Since Noah remains “convinced

that the ‘capture’ had been prearranged between” Captain Strobe and Opium Jones, The

Siren’s crew did not find it necessary to use their “passing” skills to their full subversive

potential (Cities 68).

The arrival at Port Roger a few chapters later causes Noah to imagine the landing

scene as a painting, obviously reminiscent of the painting that introduced the story of Strobe:

I had the curious impression of looking at a painting in a gold frame:

the two ships riding at anchor in the still blue harbor, a cool morning breeze,

and written on the bottom of the frame: “Port Roger—April 1, 1702”

The trees part, and Indians in loincloths carry boats to the water. The

boats are fashioned by securing a raft between two dugout canoes which serve

as pontoons. These boats ride high in the water and are propelled by two

oarsmen facing forward, after the manner of Venetian gondoliers. This day

presents itself to my memory as a series of paintings…. (Cities 93)

36

Noah narrates the remainder of the chapter as series of paintings entitled “The Oarsmen,”

“Unloading the Cargo,” “Radiant Boys,” and “Captain Nordenholz Disembarks at Port

Roger” (Cities 93-6).14 Port Roger itself proves to be little more than a painting “passing” as

just another section of the jungle, for, after their trek through the jungle, their trail “ends in a

screen of bamboo”; however, Noah notices that “the bamboo trees are painted on a green

door that swings open like the magic door in a book” (Cities 97). Thus, Port Roger lies

concealed from outside gazes by appearing to be part of the surrounding jungle. Strobe’s

pirates have also painted the interior of the town in order to make it blend with the jungle,

which Noah describes when he says, “I can see buildings along the sides of the square, all

painted to blend with the surroundings so that the buildings seem but reflections of the trees

and vines and flowers stirring in a slight breeze that seems to shake the walls, the whole

scene insubstantial as a mirage” (Cities 97). Having demarcated Port Roger as their “proper”

and concealed it from the exterior gaze of the control apparatus through “passing,” Strobe’s

revolutionaries are capable of mobilizing themselves and moving from the level of “tactics”

to “strategies,” which greatly increases their potential for success in combating their enemies.

Port Roger also anticipates Johnsonville, the utopia in The Place of Dead Roads, which not

only camouflages its exterior through “passing” but also attempts to make itself “pass” even

when outsiders enter the town. Thus, Port Roger is a less sophisticated utopia than the one

that will have evolved in Burroughs’s mind by the time of the next novel in the trilogy: The

Place of Dead Roads (1983).

The following chapter heralds the return of Burroughs’s most famous character, the

inimitable Dr. Benway, and it reveals the revolutionary aims of the Port Roger community to

14 Again, this section of Cities of the Red Night is reminiscent of a scene from The Wild Boys, which

also depicts the action of the scene through describing a series of paintings (Wild Boys 74-5).

37

both the newcomers from The Great-White and the readers as well. Skipper Nordenholz

explains that the group’s major enemy is Spain and that their main weapon “is the freedom

hope of captive peoples now enslaved and peonized under the Spanish” (Cities 103). The

pirates of Port Roger seek allies in all the alienated and oppressed peoples of the world, a

mission similar in many respects to Captain Mission’s Libertatia, which found its “allies in

all those who are enslaved and oppressed throughout the world” (Cities xiii). While their

main interest is the Spanish, who are the primary source of control in South American area

near Port Roger, the revolutionaries are actually concerned with breaking the control lines

that enslave all the various peoples of the world. The utopia created by Strobe and his pirates

proves itself to be a reworking of the utopian vision from The Wild Boys tetraology, in

which, as Steven Shaviro states,

power is carried to its logical extreme of fragmentation, chaos, and

anarchic destruction. Freedom is not the restriction or abolition of power, but

its unchecked dissemination beyond all limits. Revolution does not dispense

with control, but appropriates the technology of power for its own ends. The

youth gangs running rampant in The Wild Boys have their parallel in the

eighteenth-century pirates of Cities of the Red Night, who promulgate Captain

Mission’s Articles while perfecting techniques of biological, economic, and

guerilla warfare. (200)

Shaviro is correct, since Cities of the Red Night does not feature the well-nigh feral Wild

Boys dispatching their enemies in bloody, anarchic fashion; the pirate revolutionaries of Port

Roger never “dart like vicious little cats slashing with razor blades and pieces of glass,” yet

their organizational methods prove to be just as dangerous to the agents of control because of

the base of operations—or “proper”—that they have created in Port Roger (Wild 57). By

circumscribing of Port Roger as their “proper,” the pirate commune effectively

“appropriate[s] the technology of power for its own ends” (Shaviro 200).

38

While the Port Roger pirates do not operate through such beastly means as the Wild

Boys, they have even more dangerous weapons, weapons reminiscent of those that the forces

of control would employ. These weapons range from Dr. Benway’s plans for using illness as

a weapon to the Iguana Girl’s plans to use magical weaponry against the “Christian

monopoly” (Cities 105). The Iguana Girl, or the female de Fuentes twin, explains how this

“Christian monopoly” has effectively created a series of marginalized groups that can easily

be united and brought over to the side of the Port Roger pirates:

All religions are magical systems competing with other systems. The

Church has driven magic into covens where practitioners are bound to each

other by a common fear. We can unite the Americas into a vast coven of

those who live under the Articles, united against the Christian Church.

Catholic and Protestant. It is our policy to encourage the practice of magic

and to introduce alternative religious beliefs to break the Christian monopoly.

(Cities 105)

Religion, like the binary system of sexual categorization, creates potential revolutionary

groups through its restrictive laws. These laws themselves attempt to govern sexuality, and

they further create subaltern groups just waiting for a leader to organize them into a

revolutionary army; Strobe and his followers hope to be such leaders.

The Iguana Girl proves herself to be one of those surprisingly positive female

characters that are extremely rare—but that do sporadically appear—in Burroughs’s writings

from time to time, particularly in the Red Night trilogy. Another such female character

appears at the end of the chapter, and astoundingly the reader actually glimpses Burroughs,

for just a few seconds, narrating through the voice of a woman named Hirondelle de Mer.

Together these two female characters help to illuminate the role of women in the Port Roger

society; after all, if a community is to function, then it must have the capacity for

39

reproduction, and if a society desires to “pass” as normal, then women prove to be a

necessity.15

After the briefing has concluded, Burroughs reveals how procreation was dealt with

in the almost exclusively male homosexual society of Port Roger.16 In order for the

revolution to be successful, settlements such as Port Roger must be created across the globe,

and, as Skipper Nordenholz explains, in order for this to be successful, the revolutionaries

need families to bolster their cause:

We have already established fortified settlements…as you see,

practically unlimited. We Need artisans, soldiers, sailors, and farmers to man

the settlements already founded and to establish new centers from the Bering

Strait to the Cape. Breeding is encouraged…is in fact a duty, I hope not too

unpleasant. We expect that some of you will raise families. In any case,

mothers and children…well cared for, you understand. We need families to

operate as intelligence agents in areas controlled by the enemy. (Cities 106)

Traditional, heterosexual family units are essential if Port Roger is to “pass” as an ordinary

town, and, as Nordenholz points out, such families can also be used to infiltrate enemy areas

as spies. Skipper Nordernholz then proceeds to introduce the “young ladies” with whom the

men of Port Roger are expected to breed. After the women have lined up along one wall, the

men line up along the opposite wall facing them, at which point Juanito, “the joker and

15 Cities of the Red Night complicates the view of Burroughs as positively misogynistic, since, for the

first time, Burroughs provides a section narrated by a woman. This feminine narration occurs at the end of the

chapter detailing the conference with Dr. Benway and the Iguana girl.

16 The characters in Port of Saints also attempt to learn to reproduce without the aid of women. They

experiment with cloning, which will become the homosexual male characters’ means of dismissing women

entirely from their society in The Place of Dead Roads: “our laboratories were working round the clock on the

clone project, but we were still dependent on the border cities for male babies, where a semen and baby black

market flourished despite periodic crackdowns. You could take your boy friend’s semen to town, line up fifty

Arab girls and take the male crop back to your village” (Port 91). Later, through the use of sex magic—another

typical trope of Burroughs, as seen in all the Wild Boys novels and in the Clem Snide story of Cities of the Red

Night—the Wild Boys attain a level of complete independence from the female: “Here are the boys cooking

over campfires quiet valley by a mountain stream. They have stepped back into the dawn before creation. No

female was ever made from the flesh that turns to yellow light in the rising sun. The phallic gods of Greece, the

assassins of Alamout and the Old Man himself, dispossessed by generations of female conquest….We will

show you the sex magic that turns flesh to light. We will free you forever from the womb” (Port 93-4).

40

Master of Cermonies,” says, “And now we will separate los maridos, the husbands, from los

hombres conejos, the rabbit men, who fuck…and run” (Cities 106). Thus, the men of Port

Roger are split into two groups: the heterosexual men, who desire to take a wife and have a

family; and the homosexual men, who will impregnate the women solely because of their

sense of duty to Port Roger and who, as such, “fuck and run.” What follows is a hilarious

scene in which “the rabbit men,” who apparently far outnumber “the husbands,” group

themselves together. Once the division has taken place, “the wives and husbands pair off and

retire to private rooms,” never to be mentioned again, since it is obvious that “the rabbit

men” are not only the focus of the novel, but also the primary driving force behind the Port

Roger revolutionaries (Cities 107).

“The rabbit men,” who view women with feelings of utter disgust, enact a series of

tableaux-like performances, which enable them to have intercourse with other men while

impregnating the women. Then, astoundingly, Burroughs allows one of these women to

speak for her self. While she does take part in the demeaning breeding rituals of Port Roger,

Hirondelle de Mer seems to be an object of sympathy, for she laments the fact that she is

forced to take part in such degrading sex acts:

I am a sorceress and a warrior. I do not relish being treated as a

breeding animal. Would this occur to Skipper Nordenholz? No force, he

says, has been applied—but I am forced to by circumstances, cast up here

without a peso, and by my Indian blood which compels me to side with all

enemies of Spain. The child will be brought up a sorcerer or a sorceress.

(Cities 111)

Hirondelle de Mer even dreams of taking part in the revolution that Strobe, Nordenholz, and

the others are fomenting: “They can only plan to hold the area by sorcery. This is a

sorcerers’ revolution. I must find my part as a sorceress” (Cities 112). Timothy S. Murphy

claims that the breeding with the women at Port Roger is “describing, for the first time in

41

affirmative terms, heterosexual intercourse” (Cities 183). Coupled with the account of

Hirondelle de Mer, this “demonstrate[s], for the first time in Burroughs’s writing, that the

sexes are not destined to be at war with each other, but can form alliances against a common

enemy” (Cities 184). While these are definitely the first positive portrayals of heterosexual

intercourse and of women in general, they seem to be severely undercut by the villainous

roles that women play in the rest of Cities of the Red Night.

The final section of the novel presents a more negative attitude towards women, as

the action shifts back in time to present the wars between the ancient Cities of the Red Night.

Yass-Waddah, the city which is ruled by women, becomes the major enemy in this section of

the novel. Aside from Hirondelle de Mer, the novel persistently casts women in villainous

roles. For example, early in the novel, during the discovery of Virus B-23 in modern times,

Doctor Pierson reveals that the virus itself stems from the division between male and female.

As usual, Burroughs reveals women to be the bane of humankind’s existence. Doctor

Pierson equates the symptoms of Virus B-23—“fever, rash, a characteristic odor, sexual

frenzies, obsession with sex and death”—with the effects of being in love:

Are not the symptoms of Virus B-23 simply the symptoms of what we

are so pleased to call ‘love’? Eve, we are told, was made from Adam’s

rib…so a hepatitis virus was once a healthy liver cell. If you will excuse me,

ladies, nothing personal…we are all tainted with viral origins. The whole

quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically

a viral mechanism. I suggest that this virus, known as ‘the other half,’ turned

malignant as a result of the radiation to which the Cities of the Red Night

were exposed. (Cities 25)

Thus, the “Other Half” virus from the Cut-up trilogy reappears in Cities of the Red Night,

and, characteristically, Burroughs reveals women to be one of the primary sources of

humankind’s woes. Cities of the Red Night does feature some less misogynistic traits than

Burroughs’s other writings, but comparing women to hepatitis is hardly a flattering

42

statement. Therefore, typically for Burroughs, women become one of the primary factors in

the virus’s origin and subsequent dissemination.

The Red Night, “when the whole northern sky lit up red at night,” caused a variety of

mutations, including, as Dr. Pierson points out, the mutation that spawns Virus B-23 (Cities

155).17 Soon, as Burroughs describes, “the mutants began to outnumber the original

inhabitants, who were as all human beings were at the time: black” (Cities 155).18

Immediately following this catastrophic event, the women of Yass-Waddah revolted, and

“led by an albino mutant known as the White Tigress, seized Yass-Waddah, reducing all the

male inhabitants to slaves, consorts, and courtiers all under sentence of death that could be

carried out at any time at the caprice of the White Tigress” (Cities 155-6). Later, the reader

discovers that “Yass-Wadah, a spaceport in rivalry with Ba’dan, is a matriarchy ruled by a

hereditary empress” where men are mere “second-class citizens” (283). This rivalry

culminates in a full-scale war between the cities/sexes that includes the use of “passing” yet

17 Virus B-23 provides another parallel to The Wild Boys novels, since the virus makes its first

appearance in Exterminator!, the second novel to include stories of the Wild Boys. The number 23 appears

throughout the novel as a running motif, but the virus makes its appearance over halfway through the novel in

the section entitled “What Washington? What Orders?” Even in this early incarnation, Virus B-23 proves to be

a violent mutation of the “word,” and the “word” becomes the primary evolutionary advancement of mankind,

an advancement that is as detrimental as it is stupendous: “The word that made a man out of an ape and killed

the ape in the process keeps man an animal the way we like to see him. And the Queen is just another prop to

hold up the word. You all know what we can do with the word. Talk about the power in an atom. All hate all

fear all pain all death all sex is in the word. The word was a killer virus once. It could become a killer again.

The word is too hot to handle so we sit on our ass waiting for the pension. But somebody is going to pick up

that virus and use it…Virus B-23…” (Exterminator! 114). This passage hearkens back to the last chapter of The

Soft Machine, in which Burroughs depicts the evolutionary step of humans crawling out of the mud. In this

section of the first Cut-up novel, entitled “Cross the Wounded Galaxies,” the apes contract “the muttering

sickness,” which kills many of them as their “throats [were] torn with the talk sickness” (173). However, the

apes that survive undergo a typical Burroughs metamorphosis, as “hair and ape flesh off in screaming strips.

stood naked human bodies covered with phosphorescent green jelly” (174). Finally, the fittest emerge, and the

narrator explains, “When we came out of the mud we had names” (174).

18 The description of Virus B-23 in Cities of Red Night parallels its description in Ah Pook is Here, the

fourth of the Wild Boys books, in which “A top government scientist bluntly warns…‘Virus B-23, now loose in

our overcrowded cities, is an agent that occasions biologic alterations in those affected, fatal in many cases,

permanent and hereditary in those who survive and become carriers of that strain, which as a measure of

survival, they will spread as far and fast as possible to destroy enemies and quite literally make friends…’” (53-

4).

43

again as one of the strategies of infiltration. In order to prevent the destruction of Tamaghis

and the blockading of Waghdas, the university city from which all knowledge is derived, the

men of the other cities “foment” riots as “a prelude to an all out assault on Yass-Wadah”

(Cities 284). Their final objective is nothing less than the total eradication of Yass-Waddah:

“There can be no compromise. Even the memory of Yass-Waddah must be destroyed as if

Yass-Waddah had never existed” (Cities 284). Hence, the male characters of the novel must

not only destroy the city but also erase any memories that could prove that a matriarchal

society could have ever wielded so much power. Therefore, Burroughs seems to still be on

the same misogynistic train of thought, even though his more mature novels do at times cast

women in a slightly more positive light.

Audrey, presumably the same character from The Wild Boys, bears witness to the

female infiltration of the “walled city” of Tamaghis under cover of the Red Night: “Red

Night in Tamaghis: Dog Catchers, Spermers, Sirens, and the Secret Police from the Council

of the Selected who are infiltrating Tamaghis from Yass-Waddah” (Cities 177). The various

agents of Yass-Waddah attempt to capture young boys “for the transplant operation rooms of

Yass-Waddah” that turn the boys into females (Cities 177). Thus, Yass-Waddah poses the

ultimate threat to both Burroughs and his characters: the complete feminization of the male

subject. The operation rooms of Yass-Waddah transform boys into women to fight against

the other cities as part of “the Countess of Gulpa, the Countess de Vile, and the Council of

the Selected[’s] plot” to bring about the “final subjugation of the other cities” (Cities 158).

The Sirens, who are one of the principal groups of Yass-Waddah’s agents and whose name

recalls the ship of Captain Strobe, entice the men of Yass-Waddah to their deaths through the

use of “passing”:

44

A flower float of Sirens passes. In conch shells of roses they trill:

“I’m going to pop you naked darling and milk you while you’re being

hanged….”

Idiot males are rushing up, jumping on the hanging float to be hanged

by the Sirens, many of whom are transvestites from Yass-Waddah. (Cities

177)

The Sirens act in two distinct ways: first, they are a typical cross-dressing Burroughs comic

routine; second, they represent a method by which “passing” can enable the subject to

infiltrate and deceive enemies. In this grotesque Homeric parody, Burroughs satirizes male

heterosexual lust and displays how the masculine desire for the feminine can lead to

complete annihilation. Later, the reader learns that Tamaghis was captured by the agents of

Yass-Waddah and “was in the hands of the women with their dogcatchers and Sirens,

supported by a weak and acquiescent City Council” (Cities 230). The story of Yass-

Waddah’s revolution allows the reader of Burroughs to glimpse a different sort of revolution,

one that the novel does not cast in a very positive light, but one that depicts women engaging

in the same revolutionary strategies as the men in order to create their own base of operations

and to subvert the surrounding centers of patriarchal control.

Like the pirates of Port Roger, the women of Yass-Waddah create their own “proper”

by seizing control of the city and relegating the men to subservient positions. Thus, the

women have appropriated power and its mechanisms of control. However, while they have

circumscribed their own interior in Yass-Waddah, they still feel threatened by and desire the

land of the other five Cities of the Red Night. In order to penetrate enemy territory, the

women of Yass-Waddah utilize a “passing” strategy that plays upon the absence of women in

the city of Tamaghis. Thus, the women of Yass-Waddah present the most successful

instance of “passing” in the novel because they achieve their revolutionary ends through the

strategy. Burroughs’s use of “passing” and the creation of utopian “propers” would evolve

45

significantly in the second novel of the trilogy, The Place of Dead Roads. Whereas Port

Roger’s disguise extended only to the most exterior and superficial level, Johnsonville, the

“proper” of Kim Carsons and the Johnsons in the second novel broadens their disguise to

include both the exterior and interior of the town, thus creating a town that “passes” even

when entered by outsiders.

CHAPTER 5:

Welcome to Johnsonville:

The “Passing Proper” in The Place of Dead Roads

Increased government control leads to a totalitarian State. Bureaucracy is the

worst possible way of doing anything, because it is the most inflexible and therefore

the deadliest of all political instruments. As I see it the only possible system is the

cooperative system. Any movement in the direction of cooperative is blocked by the

manufacturers and the Unions. The present day Union is simply a branch of

governmental bureaucracy, as is the manufacturer.

-William S. Burroughs,

from a letter to Allen Ginsberg, May 1, 1950

The second novel of the Red Night trilogy features a different band of utopian

revolutionaries—a group of homosexual cowboys who seek liberation from the Puritanical

forces surrounding them. The Johnsons, as they are called, like the Port Roger pirates, also

seek to create a “proper” in Johnsonville from which they can lash out against the control

machinery surrounding them. Early in his lifetime, Burroughs came across the idea of the

Johnson Family in Jack Black’s novel You Can’t Win.19 The Johnsons from Black’s novel

provide the basis for Burroughs’s utopian visions in The Place of Dead Roads. Burroughs’s

foreword to Black’s You Can’t Win provides a brief description of what it means to be a

19 Burroughs first discovered the novel when he was thirteen, and “You Can’t Win opened his eyes to

another world: an underworld of seedy rooming houses, pool halls, whorehouses and opium dens, of cat

burglars and hobo jungles, boxcars and the feared railroad cops” (Hombre 26). The novel “inspired” Burroughs

to begin writing “crime and gangster stories while he was at the John Burroughs School,”; his stories

“frequently featured hangings, the method of capital punishment in use in Missouri at that time” (Hombre 27).

His fascination with You Can’t Win, no doubt, presaged what was to come for Burroughs himself and for the

characters in his own novels. As Miles points out, “When he came to write Naked Lunch it was the hanging

scenes in it which caused the obscenity trials: Burroughs used this ingrained imagery from his childhood as a

potent symbol of barbarism” (Hombre 27). Burroughs himself recounts his first reading of You Can’t Win—at

the age of fourteen instead of thirteen according to his recollection— in his essay called “The Name is

Burroughs”: “At the age of fourteen I read a book called You Can’t Win, being the life story of a second-story

man. And I met the Johnson Family. A world of hobo jungles, usually by the river, where the bums and hobos

and rod-riding pete men gathered to cook meals, drink canned heat, and shoot the snow” (3).

47

Johnson: “A Johnson pays his debts and keeps his word. He minds his own business, but

will give help when help is needed and asked for. He does not hold out on his confederates

or cheat his landlady. He is what they call in show business ‘good people’” (11).20 The

Johnsons represent a new form of revolutionary community, an almost communistic social

order, an order that Wayne Pounds calls “a worker’s utopia” (223). In commenting upon The

Place of Dead Roads, Pounds argues that whereas Cities of the Red Night attempted “to

institute utopia through the imagination of disaster,” the release of the deadly virus B-23,

“The Place of Dead Roads seeks to imagine it through miracle, the turning back of time to a

point in capitalist development when the possibility of building utopia had not been lost”

(223). Thus, the revolutionary aim of the Johnsons becomes the dismantling of the

capitalistic ideology that was still in its developmental stage during the era in which the

novel is set.

Kim Carsons, the central character of the novel, explains the communistic aspects of

the Johnson Family when he states, “The Johnson Family is a cooperative structure. There

isn’t any boss man. People know what they are supposed to do and they do it. We’re all

actors and we change roles. Today’s millionaire may be tomorrow’s busboy. There’s none

of that ruling class old school tie” (Roads 114-5). Kim’s comments are almost directly in

line with the dream of annihilating class-based hierarchies that Marx and Engels express in

the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

The history of all past society has consisted in the development of

class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different

epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all

past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No

wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the

20 A similar statement can be found in Burroughs’s essay entitled “The Johnson Family”: “A Johnson

minds his own business. But he will help when help is needed. He doesn’t stand by while someone is

drowning or trapped in a wrecked car” (74).

48

multiplicity and variety of displays, moves within certain common forms, or

general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total

disappearance of class antagonisms. (489)

By doing away with class demarcations, the Johnsons create Pounds’s “worker’s utopia,” a

communistic reordering of society of which Marx and Engels would be proud. The Johnsons,

thus, “represent a society of decentered, nonhierarchical socialist democracies with a

communal economic base in agriculture and useful industry” (Pounds 223). Through this

creation of a cooperative social structure, the Johnsons hope to escape from these “common

forms” and “general ideas” that have repeatedly oppressed them and forced them into

conforming to the hegemonic, Aristotelian categories of Western civilization.

Kim Carsons, like Burroughs and Noah Blake, endured prejudice and discrimination

as a young adolescent. Kim’s interests as a young male radically differ from what would be

considered appropriate in the nineteenth century American west:

Kim is a slimy, morbid youth of unwholesome proclivities with an

insatiable appetite for the extreme and the sensational…Kim adores

ectoplasms, crystal balls, spirit guides, and auras. He wallows in

abominations, unspeakable rites, diseased demon lovers, loathsome secrets

imparted in thick slimy whisper, ancient ruined cities under a purple sky, the

smell of unknown excrements, the musky sweet rotten reek of the terrible Red

Fever. (Roads 16)

Kim’s studies thus tie the novel back into Cities of the Red Night, but they are hardly the

interests that nineteenth century Americans tried to inculcate in their children; as the narrator

states, “Kim is everything a normal American boy is taught to detest” (Roads 16). Not only

does Kim indulge in hideous pastimes, but “he was also given to the subversive practice of

thinking,” and he is “in fact incurably intelligent” (Roads 16). Kim, unlike Burroughs and

Noah, experienced prejudice due to his cognitive capacity and non-traditional ideas instead

of his homosexuality: “Now American boys are told they should think. But just wait until

49

your thinking is basically different from the thinking of a boss or a teacher….You will find

out that you aren’t supposed to think” (Roads 16). Finding himself hated by traditional

society, Kim begins to be fascinated by the legends of Hassan i Sabbah and his army of

assassins: “How he longed to be a dedicated assassin in an all-male society” (Roads 20).

Kim, of course, achieves his dream later in the novel when he founds Johnsonville, a society

that does not discriminate based upon independent and creative thought and which seeks to

escape from capitalist control by creating a cooperative structure.

However, there are those within the capitalist order that want to see the Johnson

movement squashed at all costs. “The evil old men who run America,” Mr. Bickford and Mr.

Hart—familiar by now from Ah Pook is Here—hated “to see wealth and power in the hands

of those who basically despised the usages of wealth and power” (Roads 104). Thus, as the

Johnsons grow in power, they inevitably incite the anger of Mr. Hart and Bickford, who

consequently send Colonel Greenfield to kill the Wild Fruits gang, Kim’s own posse of

Johnsons, which has been wreaking havoc upon the capitalist social order in the Old West.21

However, when Greenfield finally catches up with the Wild Fruits, they are already dead

from a mass suicide. With the help of cloning, Kim and his gang are reborn and populate the

rest of the book in clone incarnations. Kim knows that in order to survive he must be subtler

this time around; thus, he decides to create communities that “pass” as normal towns to the

Harts and Bickfords of the world but that are, in fact, revolutionary bases of the Johnson

operation.

Kim Carsons, then, sets himself the task of “organiz[ing] the Johnson Family into an

all-out worldwide space program” (Roads 102). Only in space can the Johnsons transcend

21 Colonel Greenfield provides yet another parallel between The Wild Boys and the Red Night trilogy.

In The Wild Boys, Mr. Hart and Mr. Bickford hire Colonel Greenfield to crush the insurgent army of wild boys.

50

the oppressive control systems of the hetero-capitalist world. According to Kim, Earth has

reached an evolutionary dead end, and humanity has arrived at a state of “Arrested

Evolution” (Roads 40). Only in space can they escape the oppressive influence of the Harts

and Bickfords, who represent the hetero-capitalist machinery, and be able to further the

evolutionary process of the human race. As Burroughs writes, “The Johnson family

formulates a Manichean position where good and evil are in conflict and the outcome is at

this point uncertain. It is not an eternal conflict, since one or the other must win a final

victory” (“Johnson Family” 74). Barry Miles summarizes this “Manichean” conflict when he

argues that “the theme of the book” is “the Johnson Family versus the shits” (Hombre 228).

Burroughs, in typical fashion, describes the nature of the “shits” in terms of a virus that

causes the “shits” to believe themselves infallible: “Now your virus is an obligate parasite,

and my contention is that what we call evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a

certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of your basic shit is that

he has to be right” (Roads 155). The “shits,” therefore, believe that their values are always

right, and they attempt to force this “rightness” upon those they designate as “other.” As

Burroughs makes clear, the struggle between the Johnsons and the “shits” will not be an

eternal struggle, so one side must inevitably obliterate the other; the Johnsons, however, are

grossly outnumbered by the “shits.” Burroughs describes the vast gulf between the numbers

of Johnsons and “shits” in his introduction to Queer, when he tells a story about searching for

a pharmacy to take his “narcotics script”: “Yes, you found a Johnson, but you waded through

Shitville to find him. You always do. Just when you think the earth is exclusively populated

by Shits, you meet a Johnson” (x). Thus, in order to combat these overwhelming odds, the

51

Johnsons must create their own “proper” that is populated exclusively by Johnsons and that

excludes the “shits” of the world.

In order to win this “Manichean” conflict between the Johnsons and the “shits” and

achieve an escape from earth into space, the Johnsons “seek a Total Solution to the Shit

Problem: Slaughter the shits of the world like cows with the aftosa” (Roads 155). Jamie

Russell points out the disturbingly fascist overtones of Kim Carsons’s proposed “Total

Solution to the Shit Problem” using his “Shit Slaughter brigades”: “In The Place of Dead

Roads, allusions to fascism are taken even further; Kim Carsons’ hatred of ‘civilization’—

that is, the religious, prohibitive, feminine ‘law’ of the frontier towns he inhabits—leads him

to fantasize a program of ‘Shit Slaughter,’ a mass purgation of all who oppose his brand of

queer self-reliance” (Russell 129). While these fascist ideas are disturbing, destroying the

“shits” is essential to bringing about Marx and Engels’s “total disappearance of class

antagonisms” and allowing the Johnsons to achieve the “queer self-reliance” necessary to

escape into space. The victory of space over time, as de Certeau makes clear, requires the

creation of a space designated as “proper,” from which a revolutionary group’s “strategies”

can be enacted. Therefore, in order to see their revolutionary schemes come to fruition, the

Johnsons must first create a base of operations, de Certeau’s “proper,” from which they can

operate on equal terms with the “shits” using passing as a strategy to conceal their

maneuvers.

Kim explains the importance of “passing” in his revolutionary plan when he says, “If

you wish to conceal something it is necessary to create disinterest in the area where it is

hidden”; thus, Kim “planned towns, areas, communities, owned and operated by the

Johnsons, that would appear to outsiders as boringly ordinary or disagreeable, that would

52

leave no questions unanswered” (Roads 130). One problem, however, that the Johnsons have

with “passing” for an ordinary town is that the Johnson Family, except for Salt Chunk Mary,

is a purely male homosexual group. As we have already seen in Port Roger, in order for a

town to pass as normal it obviously needs a female population as well. As Russell expounds

at length, Burroughs’s homosexual male characters always seek to escape from “the

effeminacy of the ‘sissy’ or ‘fag,’” and are “concerned with articulating a masculine gay

identity” (2, 6). Russell argues that Burroughs’s texts can never be considered “gay writing”

because the novels themselves enact “strategies of passing” by “ap[ing] the dynamics of a

masculine, heterosexual dominant” (6). Thus, the Johnsons, while they are inherently

homosexual, still act in ways that the ultra-masculine gunfighters from any normal western

novel would behave. As Russell further points out, “The appropriation of masculinity by

Burroughs’ heroes always centers on two factors: (revolutionary) violence and the exclusion

of all those who are considered feminine” (124). Thus, Burroughs’s homosexual

revolutionaries are still part of the masculine paradigm, although they have queered it to their

own ends and have cast out all traces of femininity.

Like the Iguana Girl and Hirondelle de Mer in Cities of the Red Night, the character

of Salt Chunk Mary poses something of a conundrum to the ultra-masculine, anti-feminine

order of the Johnsons; she is, however, the most positive female character in Burroughs’s

entire body of work. But, as Barry Miles points out, her major scene in The Place of Dead

Roads is “a complete re-run of her role in Jack Black’s You Can’t Win” (Hombre 226).

Furthermore, her demeanor and her role as a fence coincide with the Johnson ideals, for as

Burroughs describes, “She names a price. She doesn’t name another. Mary could say ‘no’

quicker than any woman Kim ever knew and none of her no’s ever meant yes” (Roads

53

122).22 Mary, thus, represents a tough, masculinized version of women, yet it still seems that

Burroughs drew her mostly as a homage to a favorite book from his childhood than as any

kind of tribute to the potential of the female sex.

Timothy Murphy claims that “women occupy an ambivalent position in The Place of

Dead Roads, as both allies…and enemies” (187). However, other than the apparently

nostalgic inclusion of Salt Chunk Mary, the place of women does not seem to be at all

“ambivalent” in the novel because, as Burroughs states, “Women must be regarded as the

principal reservoir of the virus parasite. Women and religious sons of bitches. Above all,

religious women” (Roads 97). The virus spoken of here is an alien virus from the planet

Venus that Kim believes to be the source of all the control mechanisms against which the

Johnsons are battling. By using this virus, the aliens are able to breed the control apparatuses

that Kim so adamantly opposes, for the aliens support “any dogmatic religious system that

tends to stupefy and degrade the worshippers,” all forms of “dogmatic authority,” the

“inver[sion]” of “human values,” “the arch-conservatives,” and, according to Burroughs, they

are solely responsible for the Industrial Revolution (Roads 97). Since women are the main

virus carriers, they represent everything against which the Johnsons are struggling, and they

cannot be allowed to infiltrate Johnsonville or the other Johnson communes. However, as

already stated, this absence of women presents a serious problem for Johnsonville’s ability to

“pass” as a typical town.

The fear of being absorbed by the feminine is a constant trope throughout the book,

especially in such places as the description of the Lophiform Angler fish, which has

intercourse in a manner similar to a praying mantis: “during intercourse the male gets

22 Burroughs’s interest in writing about Salt Chunk Mary can be traced back to his essay entitled “The

Name is Burroughs,” in which he includes a similar line about Mary’s bargaining: “Mary had all the no’s and

none of them ever meant yes” (4).

54

attached to the body of the female and is slowly absorbed” (Roads 252). The male

Lophiform Angler fish, unlike a praying mantis, does not merely die at the hands of its mate,

but instead he becomes absorbed by the feminine, a fate that Burroughs and his characters are

likely to see as worse than death. Later in the novel, Burroughs describes “the dreaded

Lophy Women” who drag men under water where “the abducted male depends on his mate

for oxygen as he is slowly absorbed into her body” (Roads 273).23

The characters throughout the Red Night texts thus seek ways of creating their all-

male homosexual utopias without the need of women to reproduce. Robin Lydenberg

summarizes Burroughs’s viewpoint on the male/female dichotomy as being the source of

virtually all social evils: “Burroughs attributes the polarization of reproductive energy to

structures of binary opposition which set two incompatible sexes in perpetual conflict,

channeling the flow of creative energy into a parasitic economy based on power and

property” (Word Cultures 156). Therefore, the entire capitalistic system maintains itself

based on this binary opposition of the sexes, and, as Jamie Russell points out, “the texts

argue for the total separation of the masculine and feminine spheres, even going so far as to

characterize American society as matriarchal” (Russell 92).

To escape from this matriarchal society, Burroughs’s characters do attempt to

separate these “spheres” by creating utopian societies that are composed solely of men, and

the characters attempt to come up with ways of perpetuating their communities without the

need of women to reproduce. The women of Port Roger, as seen earlier, are used purely for

reproductive purposes, which the gay heroes of the novel engage in rather unwillingly.

23This fear of being effeminized and losing autonomy leads the characters to “fantasize” what Russell

calls “a violent re-establishment of queer autonomy” (84). In order to create this “queer autonomy,”

Burroughs’s characters must effect a complete “rejection of effeminacy in favor of a radical masculinity,”

which “results in misogyny, the logical extension of Burroughs’s effeminophobia” (Russell 92).

55

Burroughs’s misogyny, as in all of his fiction, is readily apparent in The Place of Dead

Roads. Taking this misogyny a step further than the pirates of Port Roger, Kim Carsons and

the Johnsons seek the total exclusion of women—even as purely reproductive vessels—from

their utopias. The Johnsons attempt to enact this idea that women are not necessary for

reproduction when Kim states that “We will give all our attention to experiments designed to

produce asexual offspring, to cloning, use of artificial wombs, and transfer operations”

(Roads 98). Indeed, the Johnsons do manage to clone themselves successfully, as we have

already seen.

Although the Johnsons are able to eradicate the need for women in their society, the

lack of women poses serious problems for Johnsonville’s ability to “pass” as a normal town,

and this eventually causes it to be unable to completely “pass” as an ordinary Western town.

When Colonel Sutton Smith, a “highly placed operative of British intelligence,” comes to

town to conduct archaeological research, he notices troubling aspects of the town (Roads

147). While Kim’s idea of a community “that looks like any other town to the outsider” holds

up from afar, the façade quickly breaks down under close scrutiny. Smith, as he relates in his

diary, first recognizes Johnsonville as nothing other than “archetypical for middle American

towns of this size”; however, he soon begins to notice strange aspects of the locals: “Am I

imagining things or is there something just a bit too typical about Johnsonville? And why do

the women all have big feet?” (Roads 148). The answer, of course, to Smith’s questions

regarding the women of Johnsonville is that they are men “passing” as women. Apparently,

despite Kim’s assertion that “we can hardly get away with stocking a whole town with

female impersonators,” the town is indeed populated exclusively by men, who play the roles

of heterosexual men and women. Smith also begins to notice that the inhabitants of

56

Johnsonville play out the same tired scenes over and over again, but, before he can act

against the Johnsons, the Sheriff determines his true identity as a British agent and coerces

him into cooperating with the Johnsons. Thus, while the Johnsons probably “pass” as normal

middle-Americans to any casual passers-by, astute observers like Smith are able to notice the

idiosyncrasies in the behavior of the townspeople.

Although the Johnsons seek to rid themselves of effeminacy, they also use it to their

advantage in other instances of “passing” in the novel. Kim and his gang employ many

different forms of disguise throughout the book. They dress in what Kim calls “banker drag”

at one point in order to “pass” as bankers when picking up money in Denver (Roads 90).24

Aside from the normal disguises, the Johnsons also use what Russell calls the “dominant

stereotype of the ‘fag,’” as a sort of “Trojan Horse tactic” when The Wild Fruits become

involved in a gunfight (Russell 92). While staying at the “hacienda of the Fuentes family,”

Kim and the Wild Fruits “find trunks full of female clothes” (Roads 98). Therefore, the Wild

Fruits dress up in drag and travel to the local village: “Kim calls himself the Green Nun, and

Tom does Pious Senora, and Boy is the blushing Senorita” (Roads 99).25 The sheriff and the

other inhabitants of the village, particularly the Jefe, “know something is going on up at the

hacienda” and already have a strong hatred for Kim and the other Wild Fruits (Roads 99).

“Passing” as women provides Kim and the other Wild Fruits with a momentary advantage,

and they subsequently cast off their female garb and kill everyone in sight, losing only one of

their own: “a sad quiet kid named Joe [who] had got himself up as a whore in a purple dress

24 “Banker’s drag,” as Robin Lydenberg points out, is a reference to Burroughs’s own “conservative

dress” that he wore in Tangier in the 1950s as part of his “shadowy presence” that earned him the moniker of

“‘el hombre invisible,’ the invisible man” (“El Hombre Invisible” 233).

25 Kim’s taking on the role of the Green Nun draws yet another parallel to The Wild Boys, in which she

is one of the major villains.

57

with slits down the sides” (Roads 100). As Russell suggests, Joe’s inability to even draw his

gun, which had gotten “caught in his strap-on tits,” represents “his total emasculation”

(Roads 100; Russell 93.) Indeed, being appropriated by the object for which one is

attempting to “pass” presents itself as a danger inherent in such a “strategy.”

In this scene, the reader can see why Murphy terms the Johnsons’s “passing”

strategies a “dangerous course” (Murphy 187). Joe provides evidence of these dangers by

showing what happens when one becomes absorbed by the space that he was attempting to

appropriate for revolutionary practice. The danger of absorption by the feminine remains a

constant fear of the characters in the novel, as evidenced by the Lophiform Angler fish and

the Lophy Women. Thus, in order for their “passing” to be successful, the Johnsons must not

allow themselves to be taken over by the objects of their emulation.

Other members of the Johnsons also make use of homosexual stereotypes in order to

carry out missions for the Johnson Family in secret. Greg and Brad, “two American queens,”

play into the stereotype of the effeminate and style-conscious homosexual by “run[ning] an

antique store and do[ing] decorating jobs” (Roads 223). By pretending to be “style queens,”

as Burroughs calls them, they are able to “pass” as the heterosexual stereotype of

homosexuals—Foucault’s homosexual “species”—whereas their masculine form of

homosexuality might arouse suspicion (Roads 223). However, Burroughs makes clear that

they are inherently masculine when he describes them as “Johnson Agents, better trained

than any secret service in the world, with the exception of the Japanese ninja” (Roads 223).

Unlike Joe, Greg and Brad maintain their masculinity while still “passing.” Their cover is

never blown, yet they never become trapped within the effeminate paradigm upon which they

58

are playing. However, while the novel contains such successful examples of “passing,” it

also undercuts these by showing how the Johnson revolution ultimately fails.

CHAPTER 6:

And Onward to the Western Lands:

Breaking the Bonds of the Body

We trail no wires. Our policy is space.

Anything that favors or enhances space programs, space exploration,

simulation of space conditions, exploration of inner space, expanding

awareness, we will support. Anything going in the other direction we will

extirpate. The espionage world now has a new frontier.

-William S. Burroughs

from The Western Lands, 25

After viewing the examples of “passing” and revolutionary practice in the first two

Red Night novels, the reader must question whether or not Burroughs’s new subversive

strategies work for the Red Night characters. Ultimately, the revolutionary praxis of the first

two Red Night novels does not prove as radical as Burroughs probably hoped it would.

Jamie Russell states that

the overriding problem with which Burroughs’ masculine queer

fantasy presents the reader is its unfaltering reliance on a definition of the

masculine based upon heterosexual models…Many of the desires voiced in

Burroughs’ texts replicate the exclusion, denial, or rejection of the feminine

that some male American literature has repeatedly put forward, although the

presentation of this in Burroughs is always queer. (135)

Burroughs’s attempts to subvert heterosexual hegemony always prove faulty due to the

reification of the masculine paradigm that a true subversive would also seek to break down.

Indeed, in this passage, Russell places Burroughs in the long line of American novelists who

simply could see no point in giving a voice to the feminine side of society or of their selves.

However, more than just failing to effect a complete revolution from a queer-feminist

60

perspective, Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads also prove incapable of

bringing about a satisfactory revolution on their own terms.

The endings of the first two novels of the trilogy mirror each other, as do their

beginnings. Both novels begin with a supposedly historical account that has immediate

importance to the plotlines of the novels: Cities of the Red Night begins with the retelling of

the story of Captain Mission’s eighteenth century pirate commune, and The Place of Dead

Roads starts with a nineteenth century newspaper account of a gunfight involving Kim

Carsons. Both novels also feature the lead characters blowing rents in the fabric of time

itself, albeit at different points in the novels. Audrey, in the last words of Cities of the Red

Night, states,

I have a blown a hole in time with a firecracker. Let others step

through. Into what bigger and bigger firecrackers? Better weapons lead to

better and better weapons until the earth is a grenade with the fuse burning.

I remember a dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I

reach out to touch the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare

feeling of foreboding and desolations comes over me as a great mushroom-

shaped cloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time. Like

Spain, I am bound to the past. (Cities 332)

Audrey manages to free himself and any who can “get through the gate in time” from the

constraints of time, thereby providing the potential for moving into space; however,

movement through space, as Burroughs makes clear throughout the trilogy, requires freeing

one’s self from the physical confines of the body.

Different critics have offered slightly different viewpoints on the effectiveness of the

Johnson utopia. David Glover sees the “utopian vision” of The Place of Dead Roads as

“rather more strained than was formerly the case,” and he points to the text’s own criticism

of utopian theories as examples of this fact (Glover 213). Glover is correct to some degree,

since the novel itself undercuts the value of utopias—for instance, when Burroughs explains

61

that “Planet Earth is by its nature and function a battlefield. Happiness is a by-product of

function in a battlefield context: hence the fatal errors of utopians” (Roads 117). Later in the

novel, he writes, “Happiness is a by-product of function. Those who seek happiness for itself

seek victory without war. This is the flaw in all utopias” (Roads 237). Burroughs’s

characters, of course, do not shy away from all-out war; they are not pacifist utopians, and

they do not seek to avoid war at all costs like More’s Utopians, thus rendering them exempt

from this common utopian flaw. Burroughs quotes Nietzsche as he points out this need for

struggle within society:

Utopian concepts stem from a basic misconception as to our mission

here. So many snares and dead ends. Nietzsche said, ‘Men need play and

danger.’ Civilization gives them work and safety. Some cultures cultivated

danger for itself, not realizing that danger derives from conflicting purposes.

Happiness is a by-product of function. Those who seek happiness for itself

seek victory without war. This is the flaw in all utopias. (Roads 237)

Burroughs invoking Nietzsche seems especially apt since Nietzsche was a vehement

misogynist himself, as can be seen in his comments from Beyond Good and Evil that

“Woman has so much cause for shame” and that “nothing is more foreign, more repugnant,

or more hostile to woman than truth—her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is

appearance and beauty” (100-101).

Indeed, Burroughs not only aligns himself with Nietzsche’s misogynistic outlook but

also with much of his philosophy. Kim, Audrey, the Johnsons, and all of Burroughs’s

revolutionary characters seem to embody the anti-herd mentality and the attempt to escape

beyond the binary of good/evil that Nietzsche discusses in Beyond Good and Evil:

Throughout Europe the herding animal alone attains to honours, when

“equality of right” can too readily be transformed into equality of wrong; I

mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged,

against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher

responsibility, the creative plenipotence and lordliness—at present it belongs

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to the conception of “greatness” to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable

of being different, to stand alone. (84)

The Johnsons and the pirates of Port Roger no doubt attain the Nietzschean status of

“greatness,” yet this positioning does not necessarily make them effective as communistic

revolutionaries. The Red Night characters, however, are obviously not concerned with the

ideal of “happiness” nor do they fear the battlefield or seek “victory without war.” Their

only failure as revolutionaries stems from a much more metaphysical dilemma.

In the final analysis, Burroughs’s utopian vision in Cities of the Red Night and The

Place of Dead Roads does not prevail because the hegemonic machinery is never completely

destroyed. Barbara Rose, in her article on conspiracy and paranoia in Cities of the Red Night,

concludes that “Burroughs’s last paranoid narratives…arrive at the greatest conspiratorial

fear: that there is no center, no source to the conspiracy, and thus no possibility of resolution

or closure” (93). For example, the ending of The Place of Dead Roads, which is a reworking

of the novel’s opening in which Kim Carsons takes part in a shootout with Mike Chase, does

not provide the hopes of escape that the beginning sequence offers.26 After Kim has gunned

down Mike Chase, he “shoots a hole in the moon, a black hole with fuzz around it like

powder burns,” similar to Audrey’s hole in reality at the end of Cities of the Red Night

(Roads 8). After taking another shot, “all the spurious old father figures rush on stage” with

screams of “YOU’RE DESTROYING THE UNIVERSE” to which Kim responds,

“What universe?”

26 Daniel Punday argues that the Red Night trilogy operates in a “scenic,” rather than a linguistic,

method and that Burroughs concerns himself with writing “individual episodes” instead of reveling in the

experimental nature of Cut-ups. However, as Punday states, “These scenes differ from the often individual

comic and stylized pieces of Naked Lunch (1959) in that Burroughs’s recent scenes recast the same characters

and situations in a variety of combinations, drawing attention to how characters and their goals are structured by

their situation and its narrative presentation.” Thus, as Punday makes clear, Burroughs’s characters in the Red

Night trilogy are often recast in similar scenes in order for them to find “a way of transcending the traditional

conceptualization of the human situation” (36-7).

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Kim shoots a hole in the sky. Blackness pours out and darkens the

earth. In the last rays of a painted sun, a Johnson holds up a barbed-wire

fence for others to slip through. The fence has snagged the skyline…a great

black rent. Screaming crowds point to the torn sky.

“OFF THE TRACK! OFF THE TRACK!”

“FIX IT!” the director bellows….

“What with, a Band-Aid and chewing gum? Rip in the Master Film….

Fix it Yourself, Boss MAN.”

“ABANDON SHIP, GOD DAMN IT….EVERY MAN FOR

HIMSELF!” (Roads 9)

The novel’s opening hearkens back to one of Burroughs’s controlling metaphors in his earlier

fiction, particularly in the Cut-ups: the idea of the master reality film. In his 1965 Paris

Review interview, Burroughs explains his conception of reality as a biologic film in Nova

Express when he is discussing the meaning of the “Grey Room”:

I see it very much like the photographic darkroom where the reality

photographs are actually produced. Implicit in Nova Express is a theory that

what we call reality is actually a movie. It’s a film, what I call a biologic film.

What has happened is that the underground and also the nova police have

made a breakthrough past the guards and gotten into the darkroom where the

films are processed, where they’re in a position to expose negatives and

prevent events from occurring. (16)

Indeed, when Kim shoots a hole in the sky and knocks the film off its track, the reader

familiar with the Cut-up trilogy almost expects to hear the constant refrain from Nova

Express, as well as from the other two Cut-up novels, that Burroughs constantly presents in

slightly different permutations: “Photo falling—word falling—Break Through in Grey

Room—Use Partisans of all nations—Towers, open fire—” (Nova 59). Thus, at the

beginning of the novel, Kim seems to have the power to break through the reality film, to

rewrite history, to stop the increasing industrialization and capitalization at the end of the

nineteenth century, and to escape from the prison of time like Audrey Carsons; however, the

beginning and the ending of the novel tell different stories.

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The beginning of the novel, which Burroughs draws from two 1899 newspaper

clippings about a shootout between author Kim Carson and Mike Chase and an 1894

newspaper article about Carsons’s gang, describes how Kim wins the shootout by making

Mike draw his gun too fast: “Suddenly Kim flicks his hand up without drawing as he points

at Mike with his index finger. ‘BANG! YOU’RE DEAD.’ He throws the last word like a

stone. He knows that Mike will see a gun in the empty hand and this will crowd his draw…”

(Roads 7). Indeed, Kim’s finger, which—one might say—“passes” as a gun, causes Mike to

draw “much too fast,” and Mike’s bullet “whistles past his left shoulder” (Roads 7). Thus,

Kim gives himself ample time to draw and aim properly, and “Kim’s bullet hits Mike just

above the heart with a liquid SPLAT as the mercury explodes inside, blowing the aorta to

shreds” (Roads 7-8). Kim then proceeds to blow holes in the sky and send the reality film

screeching off its tracks, breaking the destiny of future human events preordained by the

control machine.

The novel’s end features the same shootout between Kim and Mike and the same

“passing” technique on the part of Kim, yet events work out differently in this second

version. The second shootout takes up much less space in the text, but begins similarly:

“Kim’s hand flicks down to his holster and up, hand empty, pointing his index finger at

Mike. ‘BANG! YOU’RE DEAD’ Mike clutches his chest and crumples forward in a child’s

game” (Roads 306). In this version, Kim never actually shoots Mike; he pretends to shoot,

just as Mike pretends to be shot. However, the disturbing part comes in the next lines, the

last ones of the novel: “‘WHAT THE FU—’ Someone slaps Kim very hard on the back,

knocking the word out. Kim hates being slapped on the back. He turns in angry

protest…blood in his mouth…can’t turn…the sky darkens and goes out” (Roads 306).

65

Without having read The Western Lands as well, the first time reader probably is unsure of

what exactly has transpired at the end of The Place of Dead Roads. Only the blood in Kim’s

mouth and the fact that he “can’t turn” point to the fact that he has been shot from behind by

an unknown assailant.

Kim’s “strategy” of “passing” at the novel’s opening, which promises the

revolutionary potential that the rest of the novel expounds upon, does not retain its

effectiveness at the novel’s closing. Instead, Mike falls down and “passes” for dead, a move

that leaves Kim unable to shoot, while an unseen sniper shoots Kim from behind. The

novel’s end portrays the “evil old men” winning by having learned to use Kim’s own

“strategies” against him and by buying out one of his compatriots, Joe the Dead, who

Burroughs reveals in The Western Lands to be Kim’s assassin. Early in The Western Lands,

Burroughs replays The Place of Dead Roads’s ending, but he focuses on the sniper this time

instead: “Joe the Dead lowered the rifle….Behind him, Kim Carsons and Mike Chase lay

dead in the dust of the Boulder Cemetery. The date was September 17, 1899” (Western 26).

The death of Kim Carsons at the close The Place of Dead Roads reveals the only true path of

escape from control: death. Only through breaking the bonds of the body can the subject be

freed from all constraints that society places upon him or her. However, even the afterlife, as

the final volume of the trilogy reveals, contains control mechanisms that attempt to govern

who is allowed to enter the Western Lands.

Miles further points out that “the story of The Western Lands concerns his [William

Seward Hall, the writer of the Kim Carsons story, aka William Seward Burroughs] attempt to

transcend this unfortunate condition,” namely, death (Hombre 231). Therefore, William

Seward Hall, the real name of Kim Carsons, seeks a solution to the ending that ordains his

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own destruction by “set[ting] out to write his way out of death” (Western 231). The Place of

Dead Roads, therefore, ends with Kim Carsons being unable to break out of the control

machinery because of his connection to his body. As Jennie Skerl points out, Burroughs

believes that dualistic thinking “trap[s] us into bodies that can be manipulated by power

elites” (Skerl, William S. Burroughs 60). Because he remains trapped in his body, then, Kim

is still subject to the control mechanisms that he has tried in vain to escape. By appropriating

the “strategies” used by the Johnsons, the “shits” have rearticulated their position as owners

of the “proper,” and thus Kim must seek a new means of escaping control. Only escape from

the body will finally enable Kim, William Seward Hall, and possibly even William S.

Burroughs, to break the bonds of control and achieve absolute freedom in The Western

Lands.

Murphy calls The Western Lands, “the tale that Burroughs had tried to tell, in various

forms, for his entire career” (200). The Western Lands, the final novel of the Red Night

trilogy, reveals that if one is to escape from control, then one must first escape from the body.

Only escape from fear and the body guarantees a person’s entrance into the Western Lands

and an immortality free from control. The Western Lands, however, are also subject to the

forces of control because they have been monopolized by the vampiric mummies—the

pharaohs of Ancient Egypt and the capitalists of the modern world—thus, Kim Carsons,

Neferti, Hassan i Sabbah, William Seward Hall, and, consequently, William S. Burroughs

must seek to expose the ways of gaining access to the Western Lands and of breaking the

monopoly on immortality:

The road to the Western Lands is the most dangerous of all roads and,

in consequence, the most rewarding. To know the road exists violates the

human covenant: you are not allowed to confront fear, pain and death, or to

find out that sacred human covenant was signed under pressure of fear, pain

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and death. They can keep their covenant in case of being short with a million

years of bullshit. To enter the Western Lands means leaving the covenant

behind in the human outhouse with the Monkey Ward catalogues. (Western

180)

The characters in The Western Lands—and Burroughs himself—seek to illuminate the way

to the Western Lands for the general populace and to smash the “exclusive country club” of

immortality (Western 196). To do this, they must train people to exist without “fear, pain

and death” and also without the body. Only then is space travel possible, and only then can

people truly become free from control. Although the revolutionary strategy of Cities of the

Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads does not entirely succeed, Burroughs apparently

believed that The Western Lands achieved the revolutionary strategy he had been developing

since he began writing novels, because the novel ends with the statement: “The old writer

couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be

done with words” (Western 258).

In The Western Lands, the reader glimpses one last group of revolutionaries creating

their own “proper” in order to counteract the repressive control forces of the rich and elite.

Again, the characters in The Western Lands employ “passing” as a revolutionary strategy.

The Pharaoh, who holds a monopoly on immortality in the afterlife, is capable of detecting “a

dagger in your mind”; thus, Neferti uses a sort of telepathic “passing” in order to cloak his

revolutionary agenda from the Pharaoh: “Neferti knows the arts of telepathic blocking and

misdirection. You can’t make your mind a blank, for that would be detected at once. You

must present a cover mind which the Pharaoh can tune into, and which is completely

harmless: ‘For me the Pharaoh is God.’ You can’t lay it on too thick” (Western 104).

Typical of his comedy, Burroughs mocks the desire of rulers to be the objects of flattery;

however, simultaneously, he again reveals the importance of camouflaging one’s motives

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from the higher authorities. Instead of a sexual “passing” or the physical “passing” of a hand

as a gun, Neferti displays how mental “passing” can work as well, thus carrying Burroughs’s

portrayal of this subversive “strategy” over into his final great novel.

The pharaohs and their immortal forms, mummies—which Burroughs always stressed

possess a vampiric nature—represent the source of control in the novel and, thus, are cast in

the role of the primary enemies with which Neferti and the others on the path to the Western

Lands must struggle. Engaging in the subversive act called “Secret Painting,” Neferti’s tribe

must, like Kim Carsons, “create disinterest in the area where it is hidden”—that is, they must

create a “proper” that “passes” as nondescript to any chance outsiders:

their haunts are not secret in the sense of being hidden. To the

outsider they would appear as a perfectly ordinary house or inn. Should an

unwanted stranger happen in, he will see nothing noteworthy, but rather an

emptiness, a lack of anything that can engage his interest or pleasure. The

food isn’t exactly bad, but it is exactly the kind of food he doesn’t like. If he

ventures on a sexual encounter, it will end in a grating climax, at once painful

and disgusting. The sheets are not dirty, but they feel dirty and smell

dirty….They don’t come back. And usually they can’t get out quick enough.

(Western 105)

The revolutionaries—like the Port Roger pirates and the Johnsons—conceal their base of

operations from outside interference through the strategy of “passing.” In response to the

increased vampiric visitations of the mummies, the revolution begins to spread quickly.

Providing another bleakly comical image of absolute control, Burroughs describes these

visitations of the vampires upon the fellaheen—the lower class citizens subjected to the

absolute rule of the pharaoh—in scenes reminiscent of the succubi and incubi of ancient

Christian mythology:

A certain species of vampire which can take male or female form

sneaks into the rooms of youths. The pleasures they offer are irresistible, and

the victim is hopelessly captivated by these nightly visits which no lock or

charm can forestall. The victim loses all interest in human contact. He lives

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only for the visits of the vampire, which leave him always weaker and more

wasted. In the end he is little more than a living mummy. (Western 106)

These vampires, who are revealed to be “the ghosts of mummies who immortalize

themselves this way and convert the energy required to maintain the Western Lands,”

succeed in further inciting the citizens to revolution. Mementot, one of the leaders of the

revolution, utters the battle cry of the partisans, when he utters the threat: “I am going to

destroy every fucking mummy I get my hands on. The Western Lands of the rich are

watered by fellaheen blood, built of fellaheen flesh and bones, lighted by fellaheen spirit”

(Western 106). Thus, the age old battle between the classes continues into the afterlife,

where the immortal pharaohs still exert control over both the land of the dead and the land of

the living.

Eventually, the absolute control of the Western Lands by the pharaohs and their

priests begins to unloosen when the afterlife “open[s] to the middle class of merchants and

artisans, speculators and adventurers, pimps, grave robbers and courtesans” (Western 160).

The introduction of cheaper mummies, “Cut-rate embalmers” who “offer pay-as-you-go

plans,” and “Embalming Conclaves” that produce mummies through an assembly line

method leads to complete commodification of immortality in The Western Lands (Western

160-1). The pharaoh, of course, still wields control over this commodifying of eternal life,

but he is willing to let it proceed in order to continue to exercise his control over the lower

and middle classes. The priests, on the other hand, are initially alarmed at the prospect “of a

hideous soul glut”; however, the pharaoh, recognizing the need for the middle class as a

potential army due to threats of “invasion from without and rebellion from within,” decides

“to throw the biggest sop he’s got to the middle classes, to ensure their loyalty” (Western

161). Thus, he gives the middle classes the gift of Immortality, but he retains the ability to

70

oust them from eternal life at a later date if necessary: “If things get rough, we can always

liquidate the excess mummies” (Western 161). The lower class—the fellaheen—also

manages to find passage into the Western Lands by performing “embalmings in their fish-

drying sheds and smokehouses” (Western 161). Thus, through thriftiness, the non-elite

classes manage to disrupt the mummy monopoly that had previously been maintained by the

pharaohs and their simpering priests, even though, as the pharaoh makes clear, he still retains

control over who is permitted entrance into the Western Lands.

The pharaohs cannot grant access to all who would seek entrance to the Western

Lands because, as Burroughs reiterates, “The Western Lands are fashioned from mud, from

fellaheen death, from the energy released at the time of Death” (Western 196). Thus,

fellaheen must continue to die in order for the “exclusive country club” that is the Western

Lands to be maintained (Western 196). On his journey through the Land of the Dead and

towards the Western Lands, Kim Carsons learns how this system of control can be

bypassed—through the eradication of the reliance on the “parasitic female Other Half that

needs a physical body to exist, being parasitic on other bodies” (Western 74). Kim comes to

understand that this is the reason why the pharaohs rely on the preservation of the physical

form and the consequent vampirism that this entails. However, Kim and the other male

homosexual heroes of the novel learn to subvert this system by reaching the Western Lands

through “the contact of two males”; thus, “the myth of duality is exploded and the initiates

can realize their natural state. The Western Lands is the natural, uncorrupted state of all male

humans. We have been seduced from our biologic and spiritual destiny by the Sex Enemy”

(Western 74-5). The Western Lands, then, represents yet another male homosexual utopia,

from which most people are excluded by their dependence on the feminine. Burroughs’s

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misogyny persists even into his last great novel, as he renders the afterlife as a state that can

be enjoyed only by homosexual males.

In Burroughs’s oeuvre, it becomes necessary for characters to learn methods of

escaping from the confines of their physical forms, to learn ways of breaking the body and

subverting the binary system of biological sexual representation that it entails. By making

themselves “less solid,” the partisan revolutionaries can combat the agents of the vampiric

mummy control and create their own Western Lands, in which elitism has been completely

banished: “Look at their Western Lands. What do they look like? The houses and gardens of

a rich man. Is this all the gods can offer. Well I say it is time for new Gods who do not offer

such paltry bribes….We can make our own Western Lands” (Western 164). The question,

then, arises of how to make this new Western Lands solid and not merely a “Land of

Dreams,” but solidity is the last thing that the revolutionaries want because that was “the

error of the mummies”—“they made spirit solid” (165). Thus, the reader glimpses Kim

Carsons and the other characters moving into Space as beings of light, and it is as beings of

light that they eventually engage their enemies. Burroughs next provides the reader with a

parody of “The Charge of the Light Brigade”; however, unlike Tennyson’s poem, here the

soldiers are not simply fast, but are actually comprised of light. Being made solely of light

allows the partisans to maintain “the element of surprise” because “the virus enemy cannot

comprehend elasticity” (Western 175). They, thus, are capable of operating outside the

“seemingly foolproof broadcasts” of the enemy, rendering them virtually invulnerable to the

agents of control (Western 175).

The partisans, through the loss of their bodies, manage to escape from what Foucault

calls “a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements,

72

its gestures, its behavior” (Discipline 138). For Foucault, the body was one of the primary

sites upon which control acted “not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that

they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one

determines” (Discipline 138). Power, thus, conditions the body to not only be “docile,” in

Foucault’s words, but to perform its designated tasks within society, whether it be factory

work, soldiering, or intellectual labor (Discipline 138). By eradicating this site of repression,

the revolutionaries of The Western Lands are able to wage all-out war upon the agents of

control without any fear of being sucked back into the matrices of power. They are able to

succeed where Burroughs’s previous revolutionaries had failed. No doubt, the success of the

revolution in The Western Lands led Burroughs to feel he had finally accomplished the task

that he had set for himself in the late fifties when he began writing Naked Lunch: he had

finally found a way for his characters to exist completely beyond the reach of power, thus

prompting his already cited concluding passage of the novel in which “The old writer

couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be

done with words” (Western 258).27

27 Of course, Burroughs was not quite finished with writing—he continued to write up until his death

in 1997: The Cat Inside (1986), Ghost of Chance (1991), and My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995). He also

assiduously kept a journal up until the time of his death, and this journal was finally published after his death

under the guidance of James Grauerholz, Burroughs’s long time friend and editor, as Last Words: The Final

Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000). These later works, however, present the reader with a much more

docile Burroughs, one who is more concerned with relating stories and personal experience than with creating

revolutionary schemes. With the Red Night trilogy, Burroughs finally found the end of his quest for a full-proof

revolutionary strategy, a strategy that would enable its practitioners to totally eradicate the control apparatus.

CHAPTER 7:

To Dwell Within Interstitial Spaces:

The Social Import of Burroughs’s Gender Confusion

The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender

configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the

naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central

protagonists: “man” and “woman.” -Judith Butler

from Gender Trouble, 187

Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed

in can hope to escape.

-William S. Burroughs,

from The Western Lands, 116

Although the instances of “passing” in the Red Night trilogy prove to be, at best,

marginally successful, they still direct Burroughs’s audience towards a better understanding

of his project as a whole. Despite being undercut by rampant misogyny, Burroughs’s attitude

towards binary sexuality and his repeated attempts to dismantle this mode of thought still

prove to be entirely valid. Indeed, Burroughs’s project of breaking down social binarism by

engaging in a form of “play” with gender constructs is perhaps the most valid philosophical

project in which one can engage within postmodern society. Feminists critics and Queer

theorists would take up this project themselves in the seventies and eighties, long after

Burroughs’s first conception of it in the early sixties. We, as readers, may still remain

troubled by his incessant misogyny, but this attitude does not negate the social impact of his

revolutionary aims.

74

Constantly fettered by the powers that be, the postmodern human must seek channels

of expression in any form possible. In order to insure our own individuality, it often becomes

paramount for us to try to find aspects of our identity that are free from social construction

and regulation. As Burroughs makes clear, few avenues of genuine identity exist outside the

pale of the control apparatus. Power governs all aspects of our everyday lives: sexuality,

political views, cultural tastes, and even, as de Certeau makes clear, the paths we choose to

walk in cities. In all his writings, from Naked Lunch forward, Burroughs attempts to teach us

methods of twisting our socially determined identities to make them our own, to teach us

how to exist in the interstitial spaces between the coordinate points upon which power

operates, to find ways of subverting the various controlling constructs of identity (race, class,

gender, sex, etc.) into which the agencies of control attempt to force us.

The Western Lands provides the best symbolic structure of explaining the necessity

for such a proliferation of identity structures. In hilarious satire, Burroughs explains the need

to replace the old image of the universe—a “One God Universe” or “OGU”—with a new

vision—a “Magical Universe” or “MU”—that allows for the introduction of multiple gods

into the schema of control. Burroughs’s description of the one omnipotent deity is

particularly comic and completely Burroughsesque:

Consider the One God Universe: OGU. The spirit recoils in horror

from such a deadly impasse. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. Because He

can do everything, He can do nothing, since the act of doing demands

opposition. He knows everything, so there is nothing for him to learn. He

can’t go anywhere, since He is already fucking everywhere, like cowshit in

Calcutta. (Western 113)

Of course, this “One God” represents the control apparatus that—typical of Foucault’s

panoptic theory of control—sees all, knows all, and, consequently, controls all. However, as

Burroughs makes clear, this type of omnipotence leads to a complete stagnation among the

75

general populace: nothing new can ever occur because it is a “pre-recorded universe,”

harkening back to the Cut-up trilogy (Western 113). In opposition to this schema, Burroughs

postulates the “Magical Universe,” which features “many gods, often in conflict”; therefore,

“the paradox of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who permits suffering, evil and death, does

not arise” (Western 113). Burroughs, thus, finds more solace in a pantheon of warring gods,

similar to the Greeks, than the single God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Without

struggle, man stagnates and settles into a state of “Arrested Evolution,” as Kim calls it and as

the “OGU” illuminates for us. The “Magical Universe” symbolizes the possibility of a world

in which identity constructs are allowed to multiply beyond the stringent binary categories of

the Aristotelian, one God mindset. While these constructs may often be at odds with one

another, they allow for the ultimate expression of individuality, and they obliterate the

pigeonholing that occurs as a consequence of dichotomous thought.

Although we are incapable of achieving a non-physical state beyond the confines of

the body, we are, as Burroughs makes clear in the Red Night trilogy, able to find means of

subverting the channels of control by operating within their realm. Through such strategies

as “passing,” subjects are capable of acting within the sphere of binary control while at the

same time dismantling this system through a perversion—in the terms of control—of its

dichotomies. The creation of utopias that exist outside the pale of control may seem like a

pipe-dream, but the creation of “propers” can occur in much more subtle ways than the

overblown, comic instances that Burroughs writes about in his novels. Always the pervasive

satirist Burroughs operates with a method ad absurdum; therefore, he always represents his

philosophy in the most far-out ways imaginable. Thus, we must not take his creation of

actual, physical utopias literally, nor should we think that “passing” should involve

76

outlandish forms of “drag.” Instead, to successfully subvert the binary control apparatus, the

true revolutionaries must learn to function within it—to “create disinterest in the area” where

they are hidden, as Kim states. Burroughs, like de Certeau, Foucault, and Butler, can teach

us to recognize control in every aspect of our lives, and he displays for us that revolution is

possible. If enough covert partisans—as we might term less blatant revolutionaries—were to

combat the binary control apparatus in our daily lives through “passing” and other such

“strategies,” then a “proper” might be created without even constructing a true base that

would be open to enemy attack and infiltration. Burroughs’s novels have always taught the

reader to “question authority,” in the words of Timothy Leary, and to seek new forms of

expressing our identities. In the Red Night trilogy, Burroughs finally shows his audience that

revolution can succeed and that people can be freed from prejudice, discrimination, and

control in general. Ultimately, the Red Night novels offer a view of “strategies,” such as

“passing,” that can be incorporated into the daily lives of subjects in order to fight the powers

that be and find a new, non-exclusive form of existence.

77

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