Burroughs

J'ai face à Jack Kerouac une compréhension instinctive qui va bien au-delà de l'admiration. Ce qu'il a été, ce qu'il a écrit, l'ensemble de sa vie et de son travail, me permettent de voir, de sentir et de comprendre une foule de phénomènes et de réalités, sur son époque, sur le 20ème Siècle, sur l'art, l'écriture, moi-même…

Ginsberg et Burroughs, pour moi, sont donc des figures importantes, mais envers qui je n'ai pas la même connexion, et donc que je connais moins, n'ayant pas de grands enthousiasmes m'incitant à plonger dans leurs œuvres. Ils sont en quelques sortes importants parce qu'extensions de Kerouac.

Mais dernièrement j'ai lu Word Virus, une anthologie des textes de Burroughs, car je n'avais lu qu'un seul livre de lui (Junky) et voulait le connaître davantage.

Au bout du compte, je suis plus intéressé par l'homme que par son œuvre. C'était un grand esprit, cultivé et expérimenté, et il y a dans les textes que j'ai lu des passages d'une grande colère, d'une grande tristesse aussi, avec une très grande virtuosité pour la description, mais en général sa fiction me laisse froid. Je m'explique mal pourquoi, mais c'est comme ça.

Voici certains passages que j'ai retenus de Word Virus.

D'abord, tiré de l'introduction, "punching a hole in the big lie": the achievement of William S. Burroughs, écrite par Ann Douglas:

“How did this happen? How did Western civilization become a conspiracy against its members? In his second trilogy, Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1984), and The Western Lands (1987), which taken as a whole forms his greatest work, Burroughs fantasized the past which produced the present and excavated its aborted alternatives, the last, lost sites of human possibility. The first is the United States that disappeared in his boyhood, the pre- and just post-WWI years when individual identity had not yet been fixed and regulated by passports and income taxes; when there was no CIA or FBI; before bureaucracies and bombs suffocated the American landscape --- “sometimes paths last longer than roads,” Burroughs wrote in Cities of the Red Night. In the heyday of the gunman, or single combat, and of the fraternal alliances of frontier culture, the promises of the American Revolution were not yet synonymous with exclusionary elite self-interest. Now, however, Burroughs wrote, there are “so many factors and so little action”; little room is left for the independent cooperative social units he favored, for the dreams he saw as the magical source of renewal for whole peoples as well as individuals.

Globally, Burroughs located a brief utopian moment a century or two earlier, a time when one’s native “country” had not yet hardened into the “nation-state” and the family did not police its members in the interests of “national security”; before the discovery by Western buccaneers and entrepreneurs of what was later known as the third World had solidified into colonial and neo-colonial empire, effecting a permanent and inequitable redistribution of the world’s wealth; before the industrial revolution had produced an epidemic of overdevelopment and overpopulation and capitalism had become an instrument of global standardization.

Burroughs had no sympathy for the regimented, Marxist-based Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. He saw the Cold War administrations of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. not as enemies but as peers and rivals vying to see who could reach the goal of total control first. Yet both Burroughs and Karl Marx had an acute understanding of just how revolutionary the impact of plain common sense could be in a world contorted by crime and self-justification, and in a number of areas their interests ran along parallel lines. […] He, too, saw the colonizing impulse that rewrote the world map between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century as a tactic to “keep the underdog under,” an indispensable part of capitalism’s quest for new markets and fresh supplies of labor.”

Et puis ici, un extrait de Cities of the Red Night:

“The chance was there. The chance was missed. The principles of the French and American revolutions became windy lies in the mouths of politicians. The liberal revolutions of 1848 created the so-called republics of Central and South America, with a dreary history of dictatorship, oppression, graft, and bureaucracy, thus closing this vast, underpopulated continent to any possibility of communes along the lines set forth by Captain Mission. In any case South America will soon be crisscrossed by highways and motels. In England, Western Europe, and America, the overpopulation made possible by the Industrial Revolution leaves scant room for communes, which are commonly subject to state and federal law and frequently harassed by the local inhabitants. There is simply no room left for “freedom from the tyranny of government” since city dwellers depend on government for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.”