Inside Burroughs’ workshop, amidst obsessions, reading material, voices and clippings

When, on 22 April 1954, William S. Burroughs wrote to Jack Kerouac from Tangier, he opened the letter with one of his most provocative images: ‘My lad has just left and now I can write with the philosophical serenity of an emptied scrotum’. The sentence aptly captures the American writer’s disenchanted, ironic and radically non-conformist tone. The same spirit runs through the writings collected in La Calcolatrice meccanica (Adelphi, introduction by James Grauerholz, translation by Andrew Tanzi), a volume of articles and essays that offers a close-up view of the intellectual workshop of the author of Naked Lunch.

Whilst Burroughs’ novels represent one of the most unsettling reading experiences of the twentieth century, these texts offer a better understanding of the reasons behind them: his literary influences, philosophical interests, obsessions and, above all, the genesis of the cut-up technique, developed in collaboration with the artist Brion Gysin. The process is well known: cutting out words, phrases or passages from different texts and reassembling them into new sequences, producing unexpected combinations and meanings that the original text did not appear to contain. The pages also reveal a portrait of an author deeply marked by post-war America and its conformism. From a young age, Burroughs felt the need to break free from rules he perceived as oppressive. He recalls, for example, his experience in the Scouts, where even the time spent in the toilet was strictly monitored. Behind such episodes looms the shadow of puritanical morality, which continued to weigh heavily on his upbringing: during a trip to Santa Fe, he even felt guilty for having masturbated twice a day. A seemingly minor detail, yet one that reveals the conflict between individual desire and social discipline which would characterise much of his work.

No less interesting are the pages devoted to the writers who influenced his development. Burroughs surprises, as is often the case, with the unconventional nature of his judgements. Regarding Hemingway, he considers The Snows of Kilimanjaro to be his only true masterpiece, one of the most powerful accounts of death – or, to use his own words, of the ‘stench of death’ – in English-language literature. He compares it to the endings of Joyce’s The Dead and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a novel in which he particularly admires the narrative structure and symbolic complexity, whilst at times finding the dialogue somewhat stilted.

The theoretical core of the collection, however, remains the cut-up. For Burroughs, this is not merely an avant-garde game, but a tool for altering the relationship between language and reality. The technique is extended to tape recorders: voices and sounds are cut, overlaid and recombined. Writing thus takes on an almost magical function. Just as a ritual claims to exert an influence on the world, so too can language – when manipulated and freed from the ordinary sequence of words – bring to light something that would otherwise remain hidden. For Burroughs, in fact, the cut-up is not merely a matter of pure chance. Behind the apparent disorder of the combinations, profound connections, latent meanings and, at times, even mysterious ‘voices’ are said to emerge. Hence his interest in the psychophony research of Konstantins Raudive and Friedrich Jürgenson. Among the explanations proposed for those voices recorded on magnetic tapes – interventions by the deceased, extraterrestrial intelligences or the psychical energy of the experimenters – Burroughs significantly favours the latter: it is the unconscious memory that resurfaces through technology. Telepathy, auditory hallucinations and the unconscious thus become different ways of questioning the limits of consciousness. Burroughs recalls that even Freud, albeit with great caution, had taken the possibility of telepathic phenomena seriously; and he looks with interest at the theories of Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. According to Jaynes, consciousness as we know it today is a relatively recent development: people in the most ancient civilisations would have perceived the ‘voices’ generated by their own minds as divine commands.

Burroughs is less concerned with establishing whether such a theory is true than with using it to shake our certainties. This, ultimately, is the thread that links linguistic experiments, tape recorders, telepathy, psychoanalysis and literature: the attempt to understand where reality ends and where the mind’s construction of it begins.

The crucial question then becomes: what is consciousness really? Burroughs prudently avoids any definitive answer and resorts to an image far more effective than any theory: consciousness is like a ruler trying to measure itself. An insoluble paradox that perhaps explains why, beyond the provocations and Beat mythology that have accompanied his name, Burroughs continues to unsettle and fascinate to this day.