Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture by Guy Stevenson

Author:Guy Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030477608
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Human Specimen

As Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has shown—tirelessly—his work is in many ways more interestingly understood outside of the Beat narrative (2003, 2009, 2016). A singular figure in twentieth-century literary history, he left a legacy of avant-garde artistic innovation that was more radical than Kerouac’s or Ginsberg’s. Like the Beats’ better-respected postmodernist contemporaries, Burroughs’ antipathy to Romanticism led him to use literature to interrogate its purposes—and to produce more formally sophisticated writing than his younger friends. This chapter considers the roots of those formal innovations in the modernist milieu Burroughs shared with Miller and reconnects that to the Beat project he begrudgingly, perhaps unwittingly helped shape. Consulting commentary on Burroughs as postmodernist (Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 1987), as a-modernist or late modernist (Timothy Murphy 1998) and as an early literary experimenter with post-humanist re-imaginings (N. Katherine Hayles 1999), it gives a theoretical grounding to the political contradictions we have seen so far in that Beat quest for a fairer world. Of course, by extension it asks what this dry satirist of Cold War America can tell us about the wider counterculture they, and he, came to represent.

Burroughs explains in the preface to his breakthrough and still most famous work Naked Lunch that his satirical approach had its precursor in the eighteenth-century style of Jonathan Swift (1993, p. 12). A series of stitched-together vignettes he either experienced or hallucinated high on heroin, Naked Lunch meant to shock by its obscenity just as Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ had in 1729 and with an equivalent express social purpose. Where Swift’s mock-pamphlet used an obscene suggestion—that the starving Irish poor should feed themselves on their own children—to expose the obscenity of British policy during the Famine, Burroughs claimed that certain ‘pornographic’ sections of his own work were designed to illuminate the ‘the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism’ of Capital Punishment (p. 12). The connection has been made frequently—by Mary McCarthy and Jack Kerouac in Burroughs’ day, and since by Beat critics including Murphy, Oliver Harris and Barry Miles—and it would no doubt have been discovered without Burroughs’ pre-signalling.3 There are obvious similarities between the tone, the language and form of Naked Lunch and Swift’s work that we’ll come onto shortly. But what is most interesting here—and worth establishing first, not least because it has only really received passing scholarly notice—is an anthropological and sociological affinity between the two writers that informs but runs deeper than their common methods or conceptions of social justice.

The Swiftian aspect to Burroughs’ literary worldview—based on distrust of what both writers called the human ‘animal’—put him at odds with the general thrust of the zeitgeist that claimed him. The scepticism it entailed provides both a useful reminder of the problems with Ginsberg’s Romantic faith in a new movement to sweep the Western world, and—most importantly—of an equivalent scepticism Ginsberg intuited but concealed. Swift had used essays like ‘A Modest Proposal’ and the fictional, mock travelogue Gulliver’s Travels to affirm his Anglican belief in human beings as base and

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