Memory as Omnipresent History

Page 23 May–June 2008 Williamson continued on next page Schneiderman continued from previous page in space and time that characterize the Burroughsian world.” In the notebook, we find Burroughs working out the Friendly Finance/Skip Tracer routine that will ultimately close Queer (1985), and, deep within this excurses on what might still be possible with Marker (“Dream about / M so many times. Usually we / are on good terms but / some times he is nasty…”), Harris locates an essential passage: When Lee quit junk—unexpurgated / version—First trip to S.Awith /Allerton. Return to Mexico, / Left out—Allerton goes and / returns—Back to S. A. / No word from Allerton, S. A / trip and back to Mexico. / Everything lost— Astoundingly, Burroughs suggests creating “a single text out of six elements” which, without rehearsing the complex publishing histories of his first novels (which Harris has spent the last years tracing), would radically re-present the final part of Junky (1953), substantial sections of Queer and The Yage Letters (1963), and the enticing “Left out” set piece. This last refers to Burroughs’s fatal shooting of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951, among other events involving Marker, aka Eugene Allerton in Queer, referred to in the Notebook by those two names, as well as “M.” Through this semantic triumvirate for his lost love, we might also read Everything Lost’s Allerton sections as deliberately fictionalized set pieces, hasty but calculated moments of authorial process. A routine of significant length begins: Time—Gap between me and M. I / love him like a 4 year old / child, with a childs / unconditional intensity. / Between us/ the years of inner rot / frustration and violence and / misery, I am year younger and / older by the blighting / of horrors he has never known. [sic] The piece continues, as “M” becomes “Allerton” on the next leaf: He has learned as a tourist / learns the customs of an / alien people. But he did not understand or / accept. / He knows that Allerton does / not reciprocate, but he can not / withdraw or alter his / own feeling. A yearning / ache / sullen - sweet muscular / innocence of Allerton. The shift of Burroughs’s persona from “I” to “he” links with the switch from “M” to “Allerton.” Significantly , within this jump from character to external narrator, we can perceive a concomitant shift in focalization: the “I” voice is intensely personal, particularly for Burroughs. The second voice, focalized externally, retains some of the maudlin sentiment of the first, but couches the character’s wounds in the familiar “tourist” persona. This is William Lee with pith helmet, merely a representation of the “authentic ” person we might wish to discover from his notebooks. In short, we get as close to the real man as we might get to a quasar. Of course, this is also a personal manuscript never meant for publication, part of The Ohio State University’s treasure trove of Burroughs papers. Think Michel Foucault here: what constitutes the “work” of a particular author? A shopping list? Asemic scribbles? There’s much more, and less, than both of these at work in Everything Lost. The Burroughs specialist will find the volume useful, but unfortunately, with a list price of $59.95, Everything Lost seems destined more for academic libraries than the average reader of Naked Lunch. This is a shame, for within the many voices of the notebook’s tapestry, we find versions of Burroughs ’s special brand of eschatology (“[D]reamed of a / great atomic cloud / coming up from Chile speading / a purple black shadow over / Lima…A / boy stands… / on a rising and throwing a jujo”), along with recollections of interior disaster (“I see the S. A. / trip as a disaster that lost / me everything I had of value. / Bits of it keep floating back to me / like memories of a day time / nightmare. Slow traps”). Taken together, these voices produce a text that rises at its best moments above the susurrus of familiar Burroughsian conversation. Yes, listen closely to the sounds of this wonderfully reproduced ephemera, but, quick, try to write down what you hear. You’ll find only scribbles on the page, mere intimations of meaning. Davis Schneiderman is co-editor of...