Perversion the Social Relation

20 Dennis Fosterwhich humankind has fallen. The distant past of the Cities of the RedNight was as corrupt as any modern time in its greed, racism, and violence.Nor, on the level of individual history, is childhood a place ofinnocence: at the conclusion of Cities, the narrator recalls a dream: "I remembera dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I reachout to touch the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare feelingof foreboding and desolation comes over me as a great mushroomshapedcloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time.Like Spain, I am bound to the past" (332). An ambiguity in the first lineleaves us uncertain whether he dreamed about his childhood or duringhis childhood, diminishing the difference between ordinary time and thetimeless space of dreams. Within this dream he dreams a second dream,a nightmare of the future. Something happened, we feel, to cast us fromthe garden into the realm of time and death, into reality. Dreams "[blow]a hole in time" (332), leading us to imagine when we awaken that atimeless, deathless realm must once have existed, before or beyond thetrauma, the fall from infant bliss, that marks all historical life. But at notime, even in the dream of a garden, can we touch the flower.Sublime America, the edenic garden, was from the beginning a denialof every constraint of European history. This founding fantasy imaginedAmerica as a land without difference, "a fresh, green breast of the newworld," as the final page of The Great Gatsby describes it, where everychild is whole and not riven by fantasies of race, religion, wealth, andclass. False from the start, the fantasy has nevertheless found embodimentin numerous icons of American life. The astonishing thing aboutthe people of this land is how readily an image of ourselves as uncorruptedcan be evoked in us. Despite the venal motives behind almost allof America's founding adventures that led to the decimation of nativepopulations and the importation of African slaves, we repeatedly affirmour commitment to the propositions of non-difference: that Americansaspire to a color-blind, classless, pluralistic society with many religions,but one god.Burroughs opens Cities with a version of the American story, whereinpiracy is neither the nascent form of early capitalism nor, in a perversionof big business, the eventual outcome of wild capital's pillaging everyweak spot in the financial field. Rather, it is an originating impulse ofliberty. Piracy, rejecting the cover of a national flag, declares the absence