The American Century: Literature since 1945 635all systems and verbal ones in particular, took several forms. Like Pound, he became
interested in other cultures and vocabularies that resist the abstractions and
oppositions of Western language and thought. In his case, as The Yage Letters (1963)
indicates, this drove him more toward the Mayan codices. He also became convinced,
as The Ticket that Exploded (1967) suggests, that, while human beings are vulnerable
to damaging instructions fed into them as on to a tape recorder, the tape could be
wiped clean; the ticket of entry into contemporary reality could be exploded or
impounded. “Why not take over the ticket?” we are asked. And one, seminal way
of taking over the ticket, a logical development of earlier verbal experiments in
The Naked Lunch, is what Burroughs called the cut-up method. Which is just that.
Words, phrases, are cut up into fragments and rearranged at random so as to create,
not propositions or declarative statements, but suggestive word series. “The Word
Lines keep thee in Slots,” the reader is told in The Exterminator, “Cut the Word Lines
with scissors or switch blade as preferred The Word Lines keep you in time ... Cut
in lines ... Make out line to Space.” How successful Burroughs was in his “blocks of
association,” using language to destroy language, is a matter for debate. What is clear,
however, is that he was responding to a need, felt by the beats and many earlier
American writers, to shuffle off all constraints on the self. “Words, at least the way we
use them, can stand in the way of what I call non-body experience,” Burroughs said
(using words, of course). That answers to an imperative as old, at least, as the dream
of America: to escape from the constraints of society, history, language, or whatever,
to lose even the constrictions of a particular identity in a condition of absolute
space, a fluid territory that lies somewhere ahead.
The freedom, the resistance to orthodoxy embraced by Henry Miller and Charles
Bukowski is simpler. And the nature of that freedom is suggested by the fact that
both men wrote a kind of fictive autobiography. Miller was a traveler, living in
various areas of the United States and for ten years as an expatriate in Europe.
Among his many works, the best known is Tropic of Cancer, which was published in
France in 1934 but not in the United States until 1961. “This is not a book,” Miller
declares at the beginning. “No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of
Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will.”
“I am going to sing for you,” Miller insists, “a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.”
What he sings of here, in a literal sense, is his life as an expatriate in Paris: his
adventures in art, his sexual relations, his quasi-philosophical and aesthetic musings,
all animated by his belief that “more obscene than anything is inertia.” What he
sings of, here and elsewhere, more generally, is his conviction that (as he puts it in
Tropic of Capricorn (France, 1939; US, 1962) “there is only one great adventure and
that is inward towards the self.” “The aim of life is to live,” Miller insisted in
Black Spring (France, 1939; US, 1962), “and to live means to be aware, joyously,
drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” “In this state of godlike awareness one sings,”
he added, “in this realm the world exists as a poem.” Drawing on a realm of influences,
including Eastern religion, Walt Whitman, and D. H. Lawrence, Miller presents
himself in his work as a man alive in just this way: “a pre-Socratic being,” as he
puts it, “a creature part goat, part Titan.” And he presents the world around him,GGray_c05.indd 635ray_c 05 .indd 635 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM