Evil Art: William Burroughs’ Occult Legacy Named

Burroughs saw literature as a virus that infected a reader with the writer’s pent up bad juju regardless of authorial intent. For Burroughs, a text on first pass was always a kind of unconscious confession, riddled with the contagious pathogens of genealogically inherited, self-propagating moral maladies. To excise his own guilty conscience from his work, Burroughs’ solution was to cut up chapters, paragraphs, and sentences, then splash it all back on the page — a literary equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s drunken oil paint lacerations. Cut-up was useful to Burroughs because it reduced all traces of personal voice — anything too intimate that still might make it past his internal filter.

There’s something to be said for purposefully jumbling passages around in the editing process to find a better arrangement of ideas, but Burroughs took his verbal expressionism to an extreme, concocting non-chronological narratives with no clear beginning, middle, or end. The result is less a work of literature than a collage or jigsaw puzzle that teases the reader with the impossibility of a single solution or straightforward message. The only thing to do is watch it rev around and draw your own conclusions after it peters out.

The title of Burroughs’ most famous novel, Naked Lunch, presides as chief mystery. Like Rumpelstiltskin’s taunt against a Miller’s daughter in the famous Grimm’s Fairytale, that her firstborn child would be his to claim unless she guessed his true name, deciphering the “real name” behind Burroughs’ title has the power to release a child-like reading public still enamored with his magically impish prose. Rumpelstiltskin could spin straw into gold; Burroughs accomplished something more amazing yet — the transmutation of scraps of typescript into lasting literary monuments to the public and now institutionalized worship of Evil Art.

Burroughs stated in his introduction that Jack Kerouac suggested the title Naked Lunch. “The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” But rather than clarify, this statement dissimulates, since it is unclear where the line between social critique ends and full-blown misanthropy begins. If society itself is a kind of cannibalistic feast, then the sourly obscene edge of Burroughs’ remark implies that forks, not spoons or knives, feature like devils’ pitchforks, collectively held skewering implements that impale a nude and squeaming human morsel, frozen in air mid-bite. Whether this image refers to people devouring their fellow men or gods and demigods tucking into an unholy banquet — probably both — is left suggestively vague.

Thickening the plot, Burroughs scholars have suggested the credit Burroughs gave Kerouac for the title Naked Lunch was a calculated lie which Kerouac happily played along with, and that Manet’s controversial painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Lunch on the Grass), in which a nude woman lunches with two fully clad suitors in a rural setting, provided the authentic genesis of the title Naked Lunch. The fact that authoritative “Burroughs Scholars” are needed in the first place to initiate an archaeological dig into Burroughs’ corpus should itself raise the question of why such literature deserves to be so scrupulously analyzed. In 1863, Manet’s nude was withdrawn from consideration by the Paris Salon Jury, and Burroughs likely saw a parallel between the stodgy 19th century art world and the puritan strictures of the Hayes Code that had inspired Ginsberg’s mid-20th century screed, Howl, to indulge its censor-defying lyrical exultation on the dominating power of drugs, race, and sex to shape a used-up generation.

The apex of Howl’s discontented cry — the tritone gong-smash of “Moloch, Moloch, Moloch” — likens America to the vicious Babylonian deity whose lust for child victims to be burnt alive and devoured as sacrificial offerings stands in Ginsberg’s apocalyptic vision for the American public education system and its abused victims — no measly complaint. Again, a kind of Naked Lunch. But originally, vis-à-vis Manet, Burroughs’ original title — The Naked Lunch in Paris — pinpointed the old vanguard of the European art establishment, not America, as prime villain for the prophet criminal artist to vanquish.

The wider, international scope of Burroughs’ discontent played out in both Mexico City and North Africa, where exile from Uncle Sam was portrayed as its own flavor of Hell rather than any kind of shangri lah. The angst of Ginsberg or Kerouac feels naively parochial by contrast, since Burroughs’ heat-seeking target wasn’t just America but the whole shebang: European arrogance, the pathetic disarray of third world scrambling, and ultimately human civilization itself.

Heroin needles and the junkie life that Burroughs learned about from first-hand experience is the pharmaceutical equivalent of the cut-up, justified as a personhood-dampening anesthetic in a world demanding conformity and participation in de-personing norms. Like the cuck Rumpelstiltskin — literally “little man” as a play on height and suggestive of impotence — Burroughs’ inability to foster a long-term relationship with a significant other features as a central theme, where going it alone, via alchemical self-neutering of all social attachments and emotional lures, is the only effective route to freedom, even if overdose fatality looms, and pedophilic preying is required to soothe the pangs of loneliness. Having exchanged his humanity for the roll of a godless perturbator, his fatherly side (Burroughs’ unassuming look resembles a gentle scoutmaster) is perverted into Molochian boy-lust—the more the merrier around the old Babylonian bonfire.

Burroughs arouses such intense interest because, roughly a decade the elder of both Kerouac and Ginsberg, he exerted a big brotherly influence on the young Beats, and he continues to mystifies his close readers today by guarding such a scantily defined intellectual and artistic lineage of his own. Dada pranksters initiated the cut-up, but Burroughs ran with it. Like Rumpelstiltskin, Burroughs seems to come from nowhere and return back again. By contrast, the Beats have a reputation for evoking an impressionable young adulthood. Their bleak call to buck the system concealed an underlying idealism that eventually went mainstream.

Ginsberg and Kerouac are household names, whose titles float atop bookstore bargain bins because multiple editions of their work proliferate long after the Beat movement fizzled. For Burroughs, this distorted legacy is a viral, disease-laden consequence of ego-driven misappropriation. His own reputation, on the other hand, remains solidly hipster cool even now because works like Naked Lunch are too abrasive to be widely co-opted, and the film adaptation by David Cronenberg lumped Burroughs’ alter ego in with other much beloved pop horror stars in spectacles of vintage special effects wizardry.

In Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum’s frenetic performance updates the 1958 original by portraying in gooey realism a mad scientist’s rapid devolution into a monstrous arthropod. In Cronenberg’s version, The Fly doesn’t just swap bodies but minds as well, a slow boiling process intended to caricature science as de facto diabolic. Under the Hayes Code, The Fly (1958) was originally a parable for the perils of scientific intrepitude. When a matter-transporting device mixes fly and human DNA, the scientist’s sad fate is held up as a tragic yet honorable consequence of pursuing a courageous path forward to discovery, ending: “He was searching for the truth. He almost found a great truth but for one instant, he was careless. The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world and the most dangerous.”

As in The Fly, Burroughs represents his anti-hero as a kind of man-insect hybrid, who works stints as an obsessive cockroach exterminator unable to complete his fumigation between dope binges. This combination is made explicit in Cronenberg’s creative rendition — yet another cut-up of a cut-up — where Burroughs’ typewriter transforms into a squishy talking beetle who spits out powerfully strong ink resembling opium black tar while Burroughs is zonked in a Heroin haze. This is a clever depiction of Burroughs’ real literary results, where happenstance juxtapositions produce uncanny resemblances along the cynical theme of self-obliteration and insect take over. When this works, it’s genuinely weird, but it owes more to the Ouija board than anything truly literary. The meaning communicated by Burroughs remains something tentative and fragmentary, as if such a work is not really the novel it purports to be, but instead addressed the reader the way an book of spells does, speaking to the seductive desire for power that cracking open such volumes implies, somewhere deep beneath the level of the reader’s own lucid awareness.

Despite mining an unconscious reservoir, Burroughs had more Pollock in him than Dali, because even someone like Salvador Dali showed greater restraint, and his madcap concoctions wove a parodic image in keeping with the comparatively straightforward Freudian dictate to make the unconscious conscious and the conscious unconscious. Dali’s surrealism may have made him prone to bizarre personal rituals and grandiosely mystifying gestures, but he paid fealty to Franco’s Spain and knelt at the crucifix, even if it was just to masturbate.

Dali’s painting, Enigma of William Tell, shows his father’s hat brim and right buttock extending on either end phallus-like, supported by crutches for lopping. A red rag lies suggestively on his father’s buttock, suggesting a castration cut wound, a reference, according to Dali, to the Red Revolution of October 1917, which unmanned Europe. The Enigma of William Tell is a parody of the old Swiss legend. In the original, a brutal Hapsburg bailiff named Albrecht Gessler places his hat on a pole and made everyone bow to it. William Tell’s father refused, and was arrested along with his son. At the tyrannical whim of Albrecht, the father shot an apple off his son’s head to save both of their lives. Dali inverts this fable to depict a tyrannical father’s demand that his son live up to his own legacy in a winner-take-all battle of phallus versus phallus. His own father wears the hat in this depiction, and demands filial worship.

Dali’s distortion of myth indulges an auto-biographical fantasy and does not pretend to anything else. But Burroughs’ use of the same legend was enacted in real life before it made it into Naked Lunch.

Black-out drunk, Burroughs asked his wife Joan Vollmer to prepare for their “William Tell routine” by placing a glass on her head and stepping back while he cocked his revolver. They had never performed an actual party trick by that name, but his wife complied in a trance and Burroughs shot a bullet through her forehead. This far more direct inversion of myth is more disturbing than Dali’s bizarre distortion, especially given Burroughs killed Volmer in Mexico City and was eventually fully exonerated on U.S. soil. Rather than nurse phallic insecurities, Burroughs took aim against his wife, a surrogate for womankind as a whole, and claimed the role of executing Bailiff himself after fictively reducing her to the status of his own son. He then successfully vied for pardon by pleading his own bad memory of the event and exploiting his artistic success and influence. But rather than be a kind of wall-flower, Joan is remembered by the Beat movement as its well-read, intellectually fierce founding matron, and Burroughs’ act of murder suggests a level of envy directed against her status in the group. She was also the primary witness to whatever artistic influences guided his writing at its outset. Killing Vollmer cemented Burroughs’ own enigmatic origin story into a legend in its own right.

The comparison between Burroughs and Dali is useful because whereas Dali’s perversity was a kind of circus act he played on stage— something mainly affected for shock — Burroughs’ perversity remained something deliberately hidden, much like the personal voice obliterated from his prose works. Whether visiting boy prostitutes, scoring dope, or murdering his wife, the goal of his literary self-exposition was primarily to exonerate himself from public censure or guilt and promote his own reputation as a true original. Not by argument or pleading, but obfuscation and a quasi-mystical insanity defense. In the words of Bart Simpson or Steve Urkel: “I didn’t do it.” Whereas Dali once remarked, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad” — which is a quip rather than a confession — since he had no direct need of one—as well as an admission of how fully aware he was of his own public reveling in private vice.

Burroughs’ great achievement—dissembling through chopped up artistic rendering of personal crimes, even murder one — has made him retroactively incognito in the public mind, and he miraculously evaded arrest and appeared on TV talk shows late into his life. It was as if Burroughs managed to superimpose the jury of artistic and literary review above the jury of his peers, and as though his own court case was just another cut-up. Taking aim at the original Paris Académie des Beaux-Arts, “These crimes,” Burroughs seemed to say, “O people of Earth, do not fall within your jurisdiction.” Naked Lunch was not written to stand alongside Dante and Dickens, or even Beckett and late Joyce, but to be use as an occult instrument toward Burroughs’ own personal ends.

As a benchmark for occultic manifestation, it’s worth noting that self-mystification is largely a matter of self-censure before it turns into something that can be effectively employed in the outside world as an insanity defense, which, after all, must appear genuine to rattle the jury and insinuate a grain of reasonable doubt. Burroughs may have been genuinely mad, not faking it, but that doesn’t excuse his courtship with insanity. Burroughs’ dodge is the evil inverse of the Christian call to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, where “All other things will be given unto you.” For Burroughs, this is negated, “All will be allowed you, if you abandon the Kingdom of Heaven. Flee the light of hope from the Christian lamp of revelation. Logos only brings order out of chaos, but if you pursue the darkness, you will be able to multiply chaos out of order.”

Pursuing the logic of this dictate, Burroughs brought his literary cut-up technique into the real world, and recounted the home-brewed occult practice of recording the sounds of a hated coffee shop, revenging himself by returning next-day to play back his recording back at a subliminal volume to flood the place with nasty vibes. This activity is more akin to driving pins through a voodoo doll than anything even pseudo-scientific. Dali’s ego-overflow antics, like bathing in piles of dollar bills or pouncing in Louis C.K-style jack off attacks upon unsuspecting female models, feel tame by comparison, and were often paired with absurdly elaborate scientific justifications. Dali had the vices of a gonzo comedian, and mainly abused himself, but Burroughs worked the devices of a criminal creep, and caused lasting harm to others.

The unnerving thing about Burroughs’ techniques are their apparent effectiveness and the copycat-ism they inspire. The cut-up elevated Burroughs’s prose into a Bible of avante garde stylings, and according to Burroughs’ own account his use of the playback technique effectively forced the closure of several establishments he had vendettas against. Why? Does bad service call for black magic? The cut-up is more explicable — modern art has long nourished an unhealthy sympathy with weird for weird’s sake, even if Burroughs didn’t exactly luck into that arrangement but actually helped to engineer it in the first place. But the playback technique strikes a more macabre note, and seems like pure metaphysics.

Burroughs described weaving alarm bells, explosions, and other disturbing noises into his recordings. It’s not beyond belief that such a recording, if the ear registered it, could produce a state of unease. But that veneer of pop-psychological justification is stretched thin, especially since Burroughs also described printing photographs of the block where his targeted cafe lay and scissoring it out in an act of symbolic warfare. Whether it was an audio or a visual attack, Burroughs seemed happy with his results; the businesses closed. Like C.S. Lewis’s apology for Jesus in Mere Christianity, Burroughs was either a Lunatic, Liar, or (dark) Lord. Perhaps all three.

What Burroughs’ procedures evoke in the modern day is the phenomenon of meme-warfare and the Cult of Kek — a.k.a. Pepe the Frog — who 4Chan true believers credit as an Egyptian God who brought about Clinton’s demise and the rise of Trump in the 2016 presidential race. At its surface, this claim seems too ridiculous to even bother with as fantasy until it’s remembered that Clinton declared Pepe an official threat, elevating him from cartoon curiosity to public enemy worthy of censure.

Was Hillary just acting from a knee-jerk reaction, or do the “spirit cooking” rituals revealed four years ago by the Wikileaks Podesta email drop mean she fought fire with fire? Clintonite dems engaged at top dollar in dinner-party rituals where menstrual blood, breast milk, urine, and sperm were used to create a “painting” of violent curses scrawled in Manson-murder bloody graffiti on the wall, part of a mock cannibal feast. Moloch would be proud.

If Clintonites believed in even one iota of the pretend power on display, they might have at least expected a return volley from their psychic rivals. Phrases like one used in 2016, “With a sharp knife cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand and eat the pain” paint an oddly specific target, and not even a particularly gruesome one. It’s the obscurely specific phrasing, rather than the violence itself, which so unsettles, since it seems to be precision-directed at a particular target.

The commonality between spirit cooking and Burroughs’ cut-up technique is hard to ignore, since both feature a jumbled assembly of words depicting highly evocative and gruesome scenes, and both aim at “painting” rather than “literature,” being born from Burroughs’ initial revolt against the old Parisian Fine Arts Academy. But Manet’s desire to launch a more expressive style of painting was focused on the beauty of the human form, and the current stuck barnacles and scurrying crustaceans that now afflict museums worldwide are anti-Human spectacles, where works by Manet and other old masters hang in the back rooms like hostage victims.

Dismissive accounts of the dem’s spirit cookery in outlets like NYMag soothe conspiratorial alarm by locating the origin of Marina Abramovic’s work in the 1990s NYC art world. But that only means Abramovic rubbed shoulders with the likes of Burroughs and his ilk. At this point, association with the contemporary art world is less of an alibi than a red herring, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Nowadays, contemporary art is praised for being “fucked up,” “insane,” or otherwise mastering some ungodly-ugly arrangement of elements valued more for the narcotic pungency they exude than anything aromatically enticing or even passingly innocent. The overlap between contemporary art and occult practice is as fat as can be; it stinks, and the stench has us all by the nose.

America is gradually coming to its senses, growing ever more aware that the occult is alive and well, whether or not its methods actually work the way they’re supposed to. Despite its dark side, the popularity of Pepe, or now QAnon, and the disturbing visions they promote, indicates a new political battleground where people grapple with an opponent who is not just wrong, but evil, and on both sides. Admitting this new state of affairs doesn’t excuse the worst excesses of conspiracy thinking, but owns up to the situation as it stands. Pretending we live in a pre-Podesta, pre-Pepe world is a regression to a now hypernormal fantasy. The prevalence of “Evil Art” took over long ago, at a roughly 50-year delay with its political counterpart, which only lately followed suit. If the current state of contemporary art is any indication, the political world we’re heading toward is about to get even uglier, more fucked up, and insane. Maybe. Politics is not quite the same as art, and there’s always the chance we can reason with it.

Pepe is a nickname for Jose, or Joseph. In Latin, Saint Joseph’s name is always followed by the letters “P.P.” for Pater Putativus (translated: supposed father) of Jesus Christ. In Spanish, the letter “P” is pronounced “peh” giving rise to the nickname “Pepe” for Jose. The similar sounding “peepee” for penis is a convenient but false cognate. The amphibian is primarily a symbol for adolescence, since it traverses the membrane between the surface world of human, adult expectations and the childhood realm of undersea dreams and monsters of the deep. A number of other handy dyads can be roped into the analysis of one’s choosing: Pre- vs. post- lapsarian; ante- vs. post-diluvian; yin vs. yang; Apollonian vs. Dionysian. It probably doesn’t matter too much. It’s all just occultic musings on a cartoon frog.

Jordan Peterson’s donning of a native American frog head-dress, however, and his Kermit the frog vocal twang, was a genuinely uncanny media moment when it occurred. His penchant for giving advice to struggling young men is perfectly in keeping with theme. But JBP, despite his heroic efforts, represents a troubling scientism that has reduced religious thought to a syncretistic element in a broader world-faith. There’s a risk that Peterson’s methods may be later weaponized by self-justifying global authorities who will use his blend of homespun fatherly wisdom and Biblical correspondence-finding to promote a science-based low sugar and low salt Christianity-substitute. Fake wine for fake wine skins.

In the original comic, Pepe is depicted peeing into a toilet with his pants around his ankles, green buttocks exposed. A young humanoid labrador opens the bathroom door while Pepe, not one for “locked doors,” if he’s really the manifestation of cross-realm travel, is mid-stream. Word gets around to what looks to be a teen Wolf, another personification of adolescent border-crossing. Over a friendly video game match, the teen Wolf asks Pepe about his toddler-ish urination style. A dreamy expression crosses Pepe’s face. “Feels good man,” is his mock-solemn reply. This is surprising. One might think that Pepe would respond with embarrassment when confronted with his immature stance. Doubling down on what “feels good,” constitutes the comic’s main punchline as well as Pepe’s new catchphrase — a trollish quotable for anyone who engages online turf battles in bad faith. Unless political discourse reclaims its integrity and rises above meme-warfare team sports, the teams will splinter beyond repair.

Of course, Pepe went on to become the darling of the alt-right, and is now mostly extinct. What gives? Specifically, why should a green skinned character in a racially diverse universe of frogs, dogs, and werewolves come to symbolize white supremacy, and then go into hiding? The answer has less to do with racist motives than it does with a sense of tortured and half-formed masculinity. In a world increasingly affected by gender-mixing at work and changing gender roles at home, many men feel their birthright has been denied them. Rather than grow up and start families, they hover like humanoid frogs in perpetual adolescence. Racial connotations are tacked on as an after-thought, since many conflate the loss of traditionally masculine roles with the influx of cheap and easy to exploit labor both at home and abroad. Pointing out these resonances eventually made Pepe passé, irrelevant, because he was named for what he was in Rumpelstiltskin fashion. Once his adolescent qualities became mainstream connotations, his power as a weapon of meme-warfare was neutralized. Now anyone posting Pepe memes signals his own strained relationship to masculinity.

William Burroughs, as the 20th century’s very own Rumpelstiltskin man-kin, should be named as well. The magic he wove into his work should be regarded for the offense against taste and ethics it was, and his warlock’s brew should be demystified and dispelled of its charm. Burroughs was the chief progenitor — in the American literary world at least — of the narcissistic prophet criminal artist. Such widespread posturing robs literature and painting of their beauty by perpetrating officially-approved vandalism within the museum and library walls themselves. It’s just so much scrawling of bodily fluid. Burroughs’ talent for obscurity and self-abnegation concealed a deep unwillingness to grow into mature manhood and seriously engage with literature or art as something more meaningful than an accessory to murder. Rather than struggle frog-like on land for breath, Burroughs chose a fully aquatic deep dive into the abyss, mill-stone-around-the-neck style, and he’s not likely to emerge anytime soon unless it’s on the back of something worse, and even more unnamable.