The American Century: Literature since 1945 633deserves). And the experience that interests author and narrator here, above all,
is the love, loneliness, and longing they feel, in equal measure, as they contemplate
the apparently boundless territories they travel over, in fact or imagination. What
the book charts, finally, is what is called at one point “all the wilderness of America,”
at once liberating and terrifying: a world that stretches out as far as the eye can see
and, within, far beyond what the mind can know.
Just as Sal Paradise is Kerouac in fictional disguise, so Dean Moriarty is Kerouac’s
friend, Neal Cassady. Another character in On the Road, Carlo Marx, is Allen
Ginsberg. And another, Bull Lee, is William Burroughs. Bull Lee is described as a
teacher who “had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning.”
“The things he learned were what he considered to be and called ‘the facts of life’ ”;
and he learned them, Paradise explains, by dragging “his long, thin body around the
entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa.” He learned them by
studying Shakespeare (“the ‘Immortal Bard’ he called him”) and the Mayan codices.
He learned them by “experimenting with narcoanalysis.” “Now his final study,”
we are told, “was the drug habit.” Kerouac captures here some of the obsessive themes
and pursuits of Burroughs’s life – the voracious curiosity and experimentation, for
instance – but by no means all – which is hardly surprising, given that Kerouac died
young while Burroughs, after being involved with the beats, lived most of a long life
as an expatriate in Paris, Tangiers, and elsewhere. What Kerouac misses, in particular,
is the formative influence on Burroughs of two circumstances in particular: his
experiences as a drug addict (although, admittedly, Kerouac begins to touch on this)
and as a homosexual in the claustrophobic moral climate of Cold War America.
Among the first books Burroughs wrote, in fact, were two dealing precisely with
these two circumstances: Junkie, published under the pseudonym of William Lee in
1953, and Queer, which was written in 1953 but not published until 32 years later.
Starting from his own experiences with drug addiction – in which the body is “fixed”
by an alien power that enters and takes it over – Burroughs began to develop a whole
mythology of need and control. “The algebra of need,” as Burroughs calls it, means
that need creates subservience, allowing malign forces of all kinds to enter and
exploit the individual consciousness. “The face of ‘evil,’ ” the reader is told at the
beginning of The Naked Lunch (Paris, 1959; New York, 1962), “is always the face of
total need.” And his experience as a homosexual, in a homophobic postwar culture
that identified gay people with other, repressed enemies of the state like communists,
allowed him to recognize how forms of control could be exercised in the body politic
and the American body politic in particular. For Burroughs, the malign forces bent
on absorbing or exploiting the unique identity of the individual are omnipresent,
waiting to do their parasitic work: “I can feel the heat closing in,” the narrative of
The Naked Lunch begins, “feel them out there making their moves.” “The US drag
closes around us like no other drag in the world ... there is no other drag like the US
drag,” the reader is told later on in the same book. “You can’t see it, you don’t know
where it comes from.”
Undoubtedly, Burroughs’s most powerful fictional exploration of the algebra of
need, the virus of control that enters bodies and bodies politic, and the dreamGGray_c05.indd 633ray_c 05 .indd 633 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM