Cities of the Red Night: Inscribing William Burroughs in the Carnivalesque Tradition

The work of William Burroughs shocks and provokes—it cannot leave the reader indifferent. Critical opinion on his novels has ranged from the most scathing condemnation to the highest praise. Those who condemn his work usually do so because they see it as both obscene and worthless, a mad jumble of words, most of them offensive, which rarely seem to make any sense. Even those readers who are not offended by the explicit language and violent scenes are usually left wondering where it all leads to, what it means, and rarely think it worth the time to try and work it out. Burroughs is not an easy writer to read. The average reader is guided by convention—novelistic conventions, which, as we know them, are put to work in a novel in order to give an impression of verisimilitude, of "realism." One expects a novel to create characters with some psychological depth, to develop a story line more or less chronologically, with a beginning, a middle and an end, even if one is prepared to accept that they do not appear in that order in a given novel. The modern reader is also prepared to accept interior monologue and stream of consciousness as being "real" in a psychological sense, and these techniques have already become conventions in the modern novel. When even these conventions are thrown to the wind, however, the reader is disconcerted, and can react in two ways: he or she can either reject the whole work as incomprehensible or can accept what is presented and begin to look at the novel in a new way. The very meaning of "realism," "representation," "signification," "language," and even "logic" are called into question in Burroughs’ work, and his readers are invited not only to look at novels and writing in a new way, but to question such concepts as illusion, reality, time, space, control, and freedom.