"Language is a virus" is a virus - at least on the Web.
Net denizens received the news of the death of novelist William Burroughs - the last surviving member of the original beat trinity that also included Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg - as a loss of one of their own, though the 83-year-old author of Naked Lunch only saw the Web a handful of times, and didn't have an email address.
In an explosion of tributes on sites like Christopher Ritter's The Last Words of Doctor Benway, new-media professionals and casual readers reflected on the uncanny correspondence between Burroughs' 1950s vision of the "Interzone" - a polyglot, polysexual, transnational free-trade zone - and the Internet.
"Burroughs liked to quote Hassan-I-Sabbah, the patriarch of the hashishin, who said 'Nothing is true, everything is permitted.' That could be the motto of the Web," says Christian Crumlish, the creator of Enterzone and editor of Coffeehouse: Writings from the Web.
"The Internet is an Interzone - a zone where no one's in control," declared Levi Asher, the architect of Literary Kicks, a pioneering online beat outpost, and co-editor of Coffeehouse. Asher cited the homosexual, heroin-addicted novelist's move to Tangier in 1954 - where he penned Naked Lunch, his second novel - as an attempt to live "'outside of society,' like Patti Smith says."
A 1965 obscenity trial made Naked Lunch a cause célèbre, but in Asher's view, "Burroughs never got political about censorship. He understood the game and just wanted to get away from it.... Burroughs didn't fight censorship, he subverted it. That's similar to the way we deal with it on the Net." (The novel was first judged obscene by Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Eugene Hudson, who asked expert witness Norman Mailer if any of Mailer's own novels involved "sex in the naked sense." Hudson's decision was reversed by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1966.)
Many aficionados drew parallels between Burroughs' method of "cut-up" - a strategy for revealing buried significances in texts, developed with painter Brion Gysin - and hypertext.
"Cut-ups," Crumlish says, "evoke the confusion brought about when forging an unguided path through dense hypertext works." On Luke Kelly's in-depth Burroughs Explorer site, there's a Web-based "Cut-Up Machine."
Writer Sean Young agrees, observing that the author's "careening juxtapositions and collisions of ancient references and contemporary references ... seem to have prophesied a lot of what has happened with language."
Malcolm Humes, who got the first site dedicated to Burroughs' work, The InterWeb Zone, up and running on the Web in 1994, sees approaches similar to cut-up operating throughout contemporary culture, especially in the oblique strategies and appropriations employed by musicians such as David Bowie and Brian Eno. "It's a metaphor for creative applications that work in multiple modes of media - visual collage, film montage, audio sampling," Humes explains.
Tim Franklin, who is building the first officially sanctioned Burroughs outpost for launch later this year, says one reason the novelist's writings have stayed relevant to new generations of readers is that "the model Burroughs followed in his work wasn't one of linear progression, it was one of expansion. He didn't throw out old ideas, he continually absorbed new ones, so there was a continuity between his thought in the '50s and his thought in the '90s." The official site, says Franklin, will feature essays on topics like chaos magic, the significance of the number 23, and Jack Black's proto-noir potboiler, You Can't Win.
Crumlish hails Burroughs' oeuvre as "an atlas of freedom of the imagination," calling the novelist "a great liberator" as well as "a great and terrible libertine." An influential online bohemian think-tank called Antiweb, Crumlish says, was forged out of dialogs among webmasters influenced by Burroughsian thought.
"Burroughs was no stranger to techno-fetishism.... His grandfather invented the adding machine," Crumlish observes. Part of what inspires his peers, says Crumlish, is that Burroughs didn't hesitate to utilize taboo subject matter, and illegal means, to access his vision.
"Use everything, but be suspicious of it all," Crumlish says.
