The Apocalypse of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch Essay -- Apocalyps

The Apocalypse of William S. Burroughs Naked LunchThe roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the gaga of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, be portions of eternity too great for the nerve center of man. (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 7)In 1980, William S. Burroughs delivered a speech at the orbiter Earth Conference at the Institute of Ecotechnics in Aix-en-Provence titled The tetrad Horsemen of the Apocalypse.1 In this speech, Burroughs, following religious tradition, says that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are Famine, Plague, fight, and Death and moves on to prophesise a more contemporaneous apocalypse. In Burroughs apocalypse, War and Plague, for example, have become allies this alliance, Burroughs announces, was cemented with the first germ experiments (Burroughs, 1984, p. 12). The danger of these experiments lies in their ability to not provided create new viruses but to in any case turn them into biological weapons. But for Burroughs there is a significant law of similarity between a twentieth-century-specific apocalypse, with its radiation and contaminants, and the religious apocalypse of the four horsemen. For Burroughs, both types of apocalypse have no meaning outside of human context, they are in fact human inventions (p. 17). More specifically, they are the essential flaws in what Burroughs calls the human artefact (p. 17) and in our evolution as a species. For Burroughs, the only way out is to first understand that our biological destiny is in Space, and that our failure to achieve this is the basic flaw in the human artifact (p. 24). This speech constitutes Burroughs first appearance in the scene as an apocalyptist. anterior to this, he was best known as one of the fundamental members of... ... and McCain, Gillian, occupy Kill Me The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (London Little embrown and Company, 1996)Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (London Pimlico, 1991)Mo ttram, Eric, The Algebra of Need (Canada Beau Fleuve Series, 1971)Murphy, timothy S., Wising Up the Marks The Amodern William Burroughs (London University of California Press, 1997)Pounds, Wayne, The Postmodern Anus Parody and Utopia in deuce Recent unfermenteds by William Burroughs in Poetics Today, 83-4, 1987, pp.611-629Seltzer, Alvin, Chaos in the Novel, the Novel in Chaos (New York Schocken Books, 1974)Ziegesar, Peter von, After Armageddon Apocalyptic Art Since the mid-seventies Tactics of Survival in a Postnuclear Planet in Strozier, Charles B. and Flynn, Michael, eds., The course 2000 Essays on the End (London New York UP, 1997)