Perversion the Social Relation

Fatal West 35Burroughs's curious preoccupation with the figure of Hassan i Sabbah,Imam of the Assassins, corresponds to his disregard for the significanceof the individual subject: not only do his effective assassins killindividual political figures without remorse, but they willingly accepttheir own deaths. If one's enjoyment is in submission, the persistence ofa personal soul or image might be less important than it would be to onecommitted to individuality. Burroughs quotes Hassan i Sabbah: " 'It isfleeting: if you see something beautiful, don't cling to it; if you see somethinghorrible, don't shrink from it, counsels the Tantric sage. Howeverobtained, the glimpses are rare, so how do we live through the drearyyears of deadwood, lumbering our aging flesh from here to there? Byknowing that you are my agent, not the doorman, gardener, shopkeeper,carpenter, pharmacist, doctor you seem to be.'... So acting out a banalrole becomes an exquisite pleasure" (200). In his identification with thefigure of HIS, as he calls him, Burroughs finds a way of placing himselfoutside of any political or economic order, precisely because the "conceptof salvation through assassination" (202) is ultimately a parody ofthe social forces he detests, made perverse in his case by its deliberateexploitation of the enjoyment one can derive from being the agent ofanother.The idea of the Western Lands reaches back to Egypt and into a versionof America, to the land of the dead and beyond death, to the dreamof Hassan i Sabbah and that of Captain Mission. There is a fatality inBurroughs's vision of history, and consequently his critique never developsa clearly external position, never offers an alternative that doesnot fall into the same history he mocks. This mockery, this con, thisclowning queer vision shows that the American sublime shares its soulwith the perverse. But I would hesitate to call this writing subversive.Burroughs comments on the Arab world's having led civilization to becomewhat it is, in part, by "introducing such essential factors as distillationfor drunkenness, and the zero for business. What would Burroughsand IBM do without it?" (198). Alcohol, pathway to both the sublimeand the abject. The zero that enables us to signify the Nothing, the Realthat defines us, and that made double entry bookkeeping possible; thezero that made the Burroughs Adding Machine Company and IBM, butthat also made W. S. Burroughs. The inseparability of the two aspects oftranscendence—below and beyond—suggests less subversion than contamination.Burroughs with his black suit and his dead, knowing eyes