William Burroughs
Strade Morte (The Place of Dead Roads)

Sometimes it's hard to know where to start. Perhaps because you don't feel up to it or because there are many things that strike directly at the heart. Faced with "Dead Roads" (whose initial title was supposed to be The Johnson Family), back in bookstores thanks to Elliot publishing house 25 years after its first release in Italy in 1983, two sensations overlap that both require anxiolytics. The initial disorientation is followed by a reading frenzy that pumps blood quickly. A hemorrhage of sensations and missed (generational) opportunities.

William Seward Burroughs (1914-1997) who defined himself as a homosexual drug addict black sheep from a good family, inundates you, strikes you, amazes you, slams you, mocks you, makes you laugh, and sometimes suffocates you. You can't expect anything else from someone who asserts that the most dangerous thing you can do is stand still. The architect of the beat generation together with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady (soon joined by Corso, Ferlinghetti, Lamantia, Leary, McClure, Sanders, Kupferberg, Orlowski, Giorno, and many others), requires training. Either you empathize or you miss the good part. And it's not easy to empathize with the chaotic logic of the main character, the shooter, the gun master, Kim Carsons, Jesse James's badder and cooler brother, homosexual, poet who reads Rimbaud, and a doctor with surreal lucidity. Quién es Kim Carsons (i.e., William Seward Hall)? Burroughs's alter ego is a despicable, morbid young man with unhealthy tendencies and an insatiable appetite for the extremes and the sensational is everything taught to be detested by a normal American boy (...) dedicated to the subversive practice of thinking. An occasionally adorable, occasionally detestable son of a bitch, in short.

But let's start from the beginning. From a shootout, in the most classic western style, unfolds a circular story in three parts in which Kim Carsons and his henchmen (the Johnson family, a southern expression for the damned) try to save the galaxy from aliens who want to subdue it. In the wandering from the satellites of the Dog Star to Paris, London, New York, New Mexico, Tangier, and Venus, they pass through the doors of a psychedelic (and psychotropic) perception of time and space that drags us helplessly into the struggle for control. Homosexual copulations, deities, rites, drugs, guns, and characters with bizarre names parade through the mind like fragments of a verbal dream. A male, ruthless world. A cosmic coitus of calendar gunslingers wearing only holsters and boots. Surely neither western nor science fiction. But all together. Good western and good science fiction.

All made possible thanks to the experimentation of cut-up, developed together with Brion Gysin, which, with previous Dadaist influences, articulates narrative collages and de-structures (and often destroys) syntactic and semantic norms. Burroughs fought against language as against any form of conformity or thought repression by the manipulators of words and considered the human being its victim because, with its grammatical and syntactic norms, it acts as a parasitic organism, a virus that finds its habitat in our minds. My basic theory, he stated, is that the written word actually arises from a virus. It isn't recognized as a virus because it has been symbiotically assimilated by its host. The near unreadability of the early works is progressively tamed, and with the trilogy comprising City of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and Western Lands manages to articulate a subtle deconstruction that finds a balance between experimentation, revolution, and readability.

Indeed, thanks to cut-up, on the brink of hallucination, you experience a piercing and fierce lucidity that made Burroughs the guru of no less than three generations of lost souls. Just read the wonderful "list of goals and characteristics of the aliens," as hilarious as it is a real portrayal of the hardest reactionary thinking. Not to mention What fundamentally distinguishes a jerk is that he always has to be right. / People aren't silenced about what they know. They are influenced not to understand. /Life is a tangle of lies that tend to hide its basic mechanisms. The one thing that drives Homo Sapiens to move its leaden ass is the goal of rising by half a meter.

Happiness is a by-product of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war. This is the crack in all utopias. A society, like the individuals that compose it, is a device designed for a purpose. As for what life might be worth when the purpose is no longer there...

I don't know if the beat generation was actually a utopia cracked by the pursuit of victory without war (even if they did see their fair share of wars). The Place of Dead Roads, written in the midst of rough Reaganism, is a vision of the decay of the values at the base of the American myth. And it is indeed difficult to understand how generations with such revelatory visions could have selfishly betrayed the fight against the conformity of minds, becoming strongholds inside, to be generous, a shameful intellectual aristocracy of exclusive clubs. What is certain is that those who came after inherited a desolately orphaned disappointment. According to his words, how much can our lives be worth without a purpose? ...another story, no doubt.

Two things. In any case, not an easy read, to be read after a brief initiation and sincere oblivion. Burroughs, after exploring the abyss, died at 83 years old. Not stopping is good for your health. The ball is in your court.

nina snarvic

Elliot editions, Collana Raggi - Translation by Giulio Saponaro - pp. 410 - Cover Price: 22.00 euros - July 2008 - ISBN 9788861920385