Perversion the Social Relation

Fatal West 27is associated with America: "Everything is true and everything is permitted"(158). The genius of America is to pretend that despite the absenceof limits, the structure of symbolic meaning remains intact, ableto guarantee truth: enjoyment is not only possible and good, it is obligatory.The pretense is what enables large parts of American culture tochannel enjoyment so effectively—through advertising, entrepreneurialbusiness (as in pentecostal meetings of Mary Kay Cosmetics distributors),patriotism, and ecstatic religions—without the disillusionmentthat characterizes most other, older cultures. Everything is true!Such is the interpretation the most American of the Cities of the RedNight gave the "last words of Hassan i Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain":"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted" (158). The words areobscure, at best. It would take a culture such as that which introducedthe zero into Western mathematics to recognize both that nothing is true(more true than something), and that everything is permitted ("whateveris, is," as Parmenides put it). 10 Each of the Cities gives its own interpretationof the sentences, 11 inserting its own fantasy into the tautologicalemptiness of the juxtaposed claims. In the statement "Everythingis true," Burroughs suggests that in a contemplation of Nothing, theAmerican fantasy is to see a hint of the sublime, of a totality beyondexpression.Many of the sequences in Cities parody conventional attempts to reachbeyond the linguistic medium. In sexuality, for example, we imagine wemove through ecstasy toward freedom: in sex, we seem to transgress thehuman realm of law, convention, and restraint and to approach a realitythat is fully physical, bodily. For Burroughs, however, no activity is moreclearly bound to the stage. We see this staging in the passages involvingPort Roger, the pirate's home base. The port is itself a set that Burroughscompares to Prospero's enchanted island, and the pirate's main weaponfor establishing an alternative society is magic, i.e., staged illusion: "Itis our policy to encourage the practice of magic and to introduce alternativereligious beliefs to break the Christian monopoly" (105). Christianity,in this vision, works by the same rules as other magical productions,so one has only to perform the part of a devout believer toundermine Christianity's status as truth: a ceremony is above all a performance,transcendence an effect.Recognizing the family to be one of the fundamental institutions of