REVIEW: BURROUGHS AND SCOTLAND
Burroughs and Scotland
Dethroning the Ancients: the commitment of exile
by Chris Kelso
The subtitle is important because though Kelso revels in some of the delicious details of Burroughs interactions with the country of Scotland and its people, this is not a book about the Beat writer on holiday in Caledonia. Instead, it maps a line from Burroughs to the transgressive literary instinct which informs the output of many contemporary Scottish writers. Kelso is himself included amidst this fine cohort of Scottish writers and he is open about the influence endowed upon him having in the past authored fictionalized reimaginings of Burroughs himself. The creative non-fiction of Burroughs and Scotland is in part a homage to the influence Burroughs had on Kelso’s own life and writing, but also a critique of this influence and a psycho-geographical exploration of the cobbles he left upturned.
Central to the text is Burroughs attendance at the now infamous International Writers Conference which took place in Edinburgh in 1962. For Kelso, it is the moment ‘the Moderns’ liberated literary expression from the clutches of ‘the Ancients’. The author Mary McCarthy described the conference to her friend Hannah Arendt: ‘People jumping up to confess they were homosexuals; a registered heroin addict leading the young Scottish opposition to the literary tyranny of the communist Hugh MacDiarmid…’ The latter condemning both Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi as ‘vermin who should never have been invited to the conference’, it was a riotous affair but also a significant one and Kelso expounds it here to great effect.
Burroughs’ fiction, the experimentation with regards to form seen with the ‘cut-up technique’, was for Kelso a means of resisting the authoritarian principles at work within language. In a very well executed passage, Kelso explores the Burroughs renaissance which came about in the light of Gen-X nihilism. Quoting fellow author Ewan Morrison, he explains that, ‘a lot of us had been raised with a sense of desperation around what the hell was left of the left-wing project and that fed the idea that we had to destroy Western Capitalist Patriarchal Culture’. To this end, ‘we didn’t like Burroughs for his literary style or artistic merit as much as we adored him for breaking all rules of taste’.
Kelso would be the first to concede that Burroughs’ did not have all the answers. What Burroughs did instead was enable multiple generations of readers to equip themselves with new tools of violent expression and resistance. Giles Deleuze once wrote in his essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ that, ‘there’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons’. Burroughs had long since taken on that challenge and is responsible for significantly bolstering the arsenal which we have all inherited.
| Burroughs and Scotland | Dethroning the Ancients: the commitment of exile is available now from Beatdom Books