ballard on burroughs/97/from Salon/

william Burroughs' raw-boned figure haunted us long before his death. For
nearly half a century, he infected our literature, seeding it with his
obsessions, suspicions and passions. In his brutal honesty, we began to
learn something new about truth and humor and maybe even love. Of the many
authors who have acknowledged his influence, few have been as unflinching
or provocative as J.G. Ballard. From the chromey auto-eroticism of "Crash"
to the surrendered innocence of "Empire of the Sun," Ballard has refined a
style that cuts through the moralism and sentimentality that blunt so much
contemporary writing. After Burroughs' death, Ballard spoke to us by phone
from his home in Shepperton, England. William Burroughs was someone who
was suspicious of language and words, but his whole life was defined by
them. Do you see a contradiction here? Perhaps the essential writer's
contradiction? I think Burroughs was very much aware of the way in which
language could be manipulated to mean absolutely the opposite of what it
seems to mean. But that's something he shared with George Orwell. He was
always trying to go through the screen of language to find some sort of
truth that lay on the other side. I think his whole cut-up approach was an
attempt to cut through the apparent manifest content of language to what
he hoped might be some sort of more truthful world. A world of meaning
that lay beyond. In books like "The Ticket that Exploded" and "The Soft
Machine," you see this attempt to go through language to something beyond.
If there is a paradox, I think it lies somewhere here. How did you first
encounter Burroughs' work? I think it was in something like 1960. A friend
of mine had come back from Paris where "Naked Lunch" had been published by
the Olympia Press, which was a press that specialized in sort of low-grade
porn, but also published what were then banned European and American
classics. Henry Miller, for example, was first published in the Olympia
Press. And Nabokov's "Lolita" was first published by the Olympia Press.
Anyway, it was a rather low time for me. I had just started out as a
writer. I hadn't written my first novel. And this was the heyday of the
naturalistic novel, dominated by people like C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell
and so on, and I felt that maybe the novel had shot its bolt, that it was
stagnating right across the board. The bourgeois novels, the so-called
"Hampstead novels" seemed to dominate everything. Then I read this little
book with a green cover, and I remember I read about four or five
paragraphs and I quite involuntarily leapt from my chair and cheered out
loud because I knew a great writer had appeared amidst us. And I, of
course, devoured the book and every Burroughs novel. I think there were
about three or four then in print from Olympia Press. I knew that this man
was the most important writer in the English language to have appeared
since the Second World War, and that's an opinion I haven't changed since.
It was an encouraging moment. I mean, although my writing has never been
along the lines that Burroughs set out, his example was a huge
encouragement to me. I first met him in the early '60s in London. I
visited him in his flat in Picadilly Circus. I'm not sure that he got up
to a great deal of writing there. He didn't seem that happy. This was in a
street called Duke Street, literally about 100 yards from Picadilly
Circus. And, of course, this was of interest to him because that's where
all the boys used to congregate, in the lavatory of the big Picadilly
Circus Underground station. They had completely taken it over. It was
quite a shock for a heterosexual like myself to accidentally stray into
this lavatory and to find oneself in what seemed to be a kind of oriental
male brothel. He obviously found that absolutely fascinating. I think
these big cities aren't all that different, really. Burroughs roamed
around the world throughout his youth and middle age without ever really
stopping anywhere for very long. I think the closest he probably felt to
home was Tangiers. He certainly did his most important writing there. I
mean, he wrote "Naked Lunch" there, and I think he found a very
sympathetic community of homosexuals and drug users and, of course, an
unlimited availability of boys and young men. This was Interzone [a
parallel universe in "Naked Lunch"] of course. Interzone was based on
Tangiers, so I think he was happy there. Happier than he seems to have
been in New York. Or, for that matter, during his days as a would-be
farmer. I think he must be one of the strangest men ever to set out to
raise a cash crop. I remember reading his collected letters a few years
ago and he's describing how many carrots and lettuce he's planted and you
can tell that this isn't going to work out. N E X T+P A G E | "The
bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth ever invented."
ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH TRENHOLM







When critics look at both your work and Burroughs', they often point to
the severity and even a sense of dissociation. Sometimes they even call
your works antisocial. Do you see any truth in that? Severity, yes.
Honesty is what I prefer to call it. That has a much more satisfying ring
to it. Burroughs called his greatest novel "Naked Lunch," by which he
meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very
difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing
fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close
to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine. The bourgeois
novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.
It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at
every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and
recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy
and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to
carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no
business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man
or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did
and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth. So I don't object
to the charge of severity at all. So you think the writer is more
interesting as a reporter than as an artist? I mean he's reporting not
just on the external world, but on his own interior world because he's
telling the truth about himself. It's extremely difficult to do. Most
writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves.
So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern. When the modern
movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the
poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement
was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed
about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions. It's
difficult to tell the truth about one's own fantasies and obsessions and
equally difficult in a different way to reflect honestly on the external
world. And mankind can't bear too much of that sort of honesty. Certainly
Burroughs revealed, with absolute honesty, his own obsessions. I mean,
teenage boys ejaculating as they die on the scaffold. Pretty grim stuff,
you know, socially objectionable, I dare say. But at least he was honest
about his own obsessions. And he made it a little more palatable, and I
see this in your own work, by the use of black humor. Absolutely. I mean
he's one of the greatest humorists who ever lived. His books, particularly
"Naked Lunch," are hilarious from the word go. They never let up. "Naked
Lunch" was written largely in the form of a long series of letters to
Allen Ginsberg, in which Burroughs practiced these routines which were
sort of skits or cabaret items in which he introduced characters like Dr.
Benway. They were these extraordinary comic routines. You're both often
misunderstood, however. You're both read as darker, more somber writers
and not often given the credit for the humor in your work. Is this because
of the subject matter? My humor is rather different. It's much more
deadpan. I suppose there's an element of tease in my writing. I mean, I've
never been too keen to show which side of the fence I'm on. And all the
controversy that's grown up over David Cronenberg's film of "Crash" has
tended to center on, "Do you or do you not actually believe that people
should find car crashes sexually exciting?" People think I'm being evasive
sometimes, but it's that ambiguity that's at the heart of everything. I
try to maintain a fairly ambiguous pose, while trying to unsettle and
provoke the reader to keep the unconscious elements exerting their baleful
force. But you're right, I don't think I've been given enough credit for
the humor I have. Both you and Burroughs have been dogged by censors your
entire careers. What is it about both of your works that inspires this
venom on the part of the censors? Well, it's such a huge question. In
Britain, it relates back to insecurity of a desperate kind. "Crash," the
film, is still banned from central London, the West End. Westminster
Castle controls, I don't know what the equivalent would be in New York or
San Francisco, the central entertainment district where most of the major
movie theaters are. This is generally subsumed under the term West End,
which also includes, of course, the Houses of Parliament and the main
government district in Whitehall. And they banned the film from the West
End of London. So it's only being shown in peripheral areas and sometimes
in a ludicrous way. There's the council that's directly adjacent to
Westminster on the northeast side called Camden, and it passed the film.
So there's this very peculiar sensation that there's a sort of invisible
frontier much like the one that existed between East and West Berlin. One
could cross this set of traffic lights, literally about 30 yards from the
Camden theater, and you enter the forbidden zone of Westminster. It was
like going through Checkpoint Charlie in the old Berlin. But it all
reflects the same thing. Not unlike the trouble Burroughs had with "Naked
Lunch" when it was first banned from publication in the States. Just like
Henry Miller's novels, which were banned from publication in America for
decades. It's a deep insecurity, a fear that once you allow the populace
at large to enter any kind of forbidden rooms, God knows what they may get
up to next. So one's got to keep the lids severely jammed on these
nefarious books and films. Meanwhile, allowing people to go and see the
latest "Die Hard" film, or piece of designer sex and violence from
Hollywood. Very, very curious. Both you and Burroughs write very visual
narratives and you've both painted. Do you find a resonance between
writing and creating something visual? Burroughs did take up painting in
his later years. I took up painting in my youth and found I hadn't any
talent for it, but I always really regretted that I didn't, because I
think I would've been far happier as a painter. I don't think that's true
of Burroughs. I think he was a writer from the word go. In conversation he
chose his words very, very carefully. He thought quickly, but spoke rather
slowly. Obviously words were immensely important to him and the framing of
ideas, thoughts, wasn't something to be just done at the drop of a hat. In
a way, he adopted a kind of adversarial relationship with the word, with
the printed word, seeing how easily it could be manipulated for sinister
reasons. My approach has been quite different. I would love to have been a
painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.
Sometimes I think all my writing is really the substitute work of an
unfulfilled painter. But, you know, there we are. Both you and Burroughs
studied medicine. This seems to have had a profound effect on the work you
both produced. I studied medicine for a couple of years before giving it
up, as a great number of writers have done, curiously. I think Faulkner
even spent a small amount of time as a medical student. But Burroughs was
intensely interested in the mechanisms involved in any kind of process.
Right across the board. And he was intensely interested in psychology and
psychiatry. He was interested in all kinds of obscure things. I remember
the very first time I met him, this was the early '60s, his boyfriend had
"love" and "hate" tattooed on his knuckles, which was quite startling
then. Once, while the boyfriend carved a roast chicken, Burroughs began to
describe the right way to stab a man to death and he was graphically
illustrating it with this large carving knife. His head was filled with
all sorts of bizarre bits and pieces culled from "Believe It or Not"
features and police magazines and all kinds of obscure sources. But he was
very interested in scientific or technological underpinnings. I think, in
a way, I share that with him. I've always felt that science in general is
a way of ordering one's imaginative response to the world. It's also a
separate language, too, isn't it? Books such as "Naked Lunch" and your
"Atrocity Exhibition" use scientific language to break down the novel into
something that people hadn't seen before. I think that's true. I've always
used a kind of scientific vocabulary and a scientific approach to show the
subject matter in a fresh light. I mean, if you're describing what happens
when, say, a car crash occurs and a human body impacts against a steering
wheel and then goes through the windscreen, one can describe it in a kind
of Mickey Spillane language with powerful adverbs and adjectives. But
another approach is to be cool and clinical and describe it in the way
that a forensic scientist would describe what happens, or people working,
say, at a road research laboratory describing what happens to crash test
dummies. Now, you get an unnerving window onto a new kind of reality. I
did this a lot in "The Atrocity Exhibition." The same applies to, say,
describing a man and woman making love. Instead of using all the clichs
that are marshaled wearily once again in most novels, approach it as if it
were some sort of forensic experiment that you were describing. An event
that is being watched with the calm eye of the anatomist or the
physiologist. It often prompts completely new insights into what has
actually happened. So yes, I've done that and Burroughs did that in a
different way. His novels, particularly "Naked Lunch," are full of almost
footnote material explaining the exact route to the central nervous system
taken by some obscure Amazonian poison on the end of a dart as it pierces
its victim. He was very interested in that sort of thing, the exact
mechanisms by which consciousness was altered by drugs of various kinds. I
think I share that with him too. If there is one thing that you think we
should, as readers, take away from Burroughs' work, what would that one
thing be? Or that you would hope we would take away, perhaps? It's
difficult to say, because I think he's a writer of enormous richness, but
he had a kind of paranoid imagination. He saw the world as a dangerous
conspiracy by huge media conglomerates, by the great political
establishments of the day, by a corrupt medical science which he saw as
very much a conspiracy. He saw most of the professions, law in particular
but also law enforcement, as all part of a huge conspiracy to keep us
under control, to keep us down. And his books are a kind of attempt to
blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what's on the end of the
fork. Sept. 2, 1997 Richard Kadrey is a columnist for the Site and the
author of several books, including the "Covert Culture Sourcebooks" and
the novel "Kamikaze L'Amour." Suzanne Stefanac is online executive
producer for the Site and owes more than a little of her will to write to
William Burroughs.