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William Burroughs
and John Cage hardly seem real. The lives of both men are a public patchwork
of stories that have been told and retold so many times (Cage quitting his
studies with Schoenberg because his teacher insisted he must have a sense of
harmony, Burroughs being interviewed for the OSS) that the incidents are less
biographical facts and more stages on a mythological hero's journey. It's
almost as if we need to put both men's names in inverted commas because they
seemed to construct themselves and have then been constructed by others as
repertoires as anecdotes. Cage and Burroughs seem destined to go on being
'Cage' and 'Burroughs'.
On the face of it, there seem to be a number of similarities between John
Cage and William Burroughs, between, say, chance procedure and cut-ups. Both
men had large, albeit very different, visions of humanity; and both men's
visions were informed by thinkers from outside the mainstream of western
culture or from outside western culture altogether. Both men drew on American
cultural icons: Burroughs on the Wild West, Cage on Thoreau. And the work of
both seems to involve asking questions about what we pay attention to.
But these sorts of comparisons will only get us so far and the question of
how we should go on paying attention to Cage and Burroughs is at the heart of
the two books under review here. It is perhaps worth noting that Kyle Gann's
book is part of series called 'Icons of America' which includes volumes on
Fred Astaire, Gone With the Wind, the Liberty Bell, and the hamburger; and that Phil
Baker's book is part of a series called 'Critical Lives' which includes
volumes on Bataille, Foucault and Genet. This has the curious effect of
suggesting that Cage is populist, firmly in the mainstream, and that the work
is more important than the man; and that Burroughs's work can be allied with
a kind of philosophical avant garde and remains secondary to the man. There
may be some truth in the latter suggestion. Timothy Murphy's excellent but
little-known study Wising Up The Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (1997) notes that critics have
often been and still are repelled by Burroughs's subject matter. One feels
bound to add that repulsion is an excellent excuse for not paying attention
to a body of work and its implications. And, of course, Burroughs's work can
be seen as an extended riff on various types of genre fiction. This might
explain, in turn, why he seems to attract fans as opposed to serious
commentary.
Phil Baker's book portrays Burroughs as largely isolated and practically
invisible for most of his career until his return to America in the early
1970s. He did seem to be everywhere during the following decade: a Reader, Letters 1945-59, and other volumes from Picador;
a memorable cameo in the film Drugstore Cowboy; allegedly supplying the title
for Blade Runner;
and an appearance on Laurie Anderson's second LP Mister Heartbreak. And the short-lived Radio 1
programme Walter's Weekly regularly played recordings of his readings from a number
of LPs that came out in that decade. This meant that he was often back to
back on the airwaves with Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk and Eric Bogosian.
You don't get much sense of this from Baker but it does suggest that
Burroughs was an awkward, almost-crossover figure, not quite mainstream, not
quite avant garde. In fact, Baker paints him as an essentially conservative
person. Now Burroughs seems less visible again or perhaps his relevance is
getting harder to understand. When Burroughs first started writing his
paranoid visions in which access to alternative realities revealed not
alternative ways of living and being but the reality of control, few writers
were doing this and not many readers were ready to receive it. But after the
collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War made the world free for
total war, knowledge of the violence committed in the name of or complacently
caused by neo-liberal capitalism is everywhere from a documentary about the
realities of farmed prawns in South-East Asia, through Alphonso Lingis's
essay 'Anger' (in which the world in divided into 'a technocratic-commercial
archipelago of urban technopoles' and a vast outer zone of cheap labour and
cheap production), to the film Babel.
The context of Reaktion's series teasingly suggests that Burroughs might be a
kind of philosopher. Baker doesn't really follow this up except to suggest
that Burroughs was a precursor of both Situationism and the postmodernism
espoused by Lyotard and to argue that 'his ideas on viruses and parasites
[...] make a certain sense'. But calling someone a precursor risks condemning
them to a past relevance. Baker is very good on the day-to-day detail of Burroughs's life
and on the years before, one might say, Burroughs was 'Burroughs'; and also
draws a good 'story arc' of the life plotting all the main points and events.
Baker gives you a clear sense of important figures in Burroughs's life such
as Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville, Kells Elvins and Anthony Balch as people.
The illustrations of people and book covers are well-chosen. He is also very
good in tracing the influence of, for example, Wilhelm Reich and Scientology.
Maybe it's these sorts of things that have made people sceptical about how to
take Burroughs. At any rate, they seem not to fit with either the impact of
the work or the kind of associations we expect such as Ginsberg, the Beats,
etc.
So if you are new to William Burroughs then Baker's book is an excellent
introduction. For a small paperback, it's very heavy: 350 grms. But you'll
need to go to other sources to flesh out Baker's narrative: Iain Finlayson's Tangier for the years in North Africa;
Victor Bockris's With William Burroughs for 1974-80 in New York; Timothy Murphy's book for
Burroughs's collaborations in other media; and Last Words: The Final
Journals of William Burroughs for the final years in KansasÑalthough that book now
seems unpleasantly voyeuristic and probably shouldn't have been published.
Barry Miles's William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible is still the best 'life and work'
account. And that's the most frustrating aspect of Baker's book: there's no
real attempt to argue for the importance of Burroughs as a writer which is a
real oversight for a 'critical life'. Here's what Timothy Murphy has to say
on 'the final implication' of Burroughs's work:
an explosive
intermediation or scrambling of all the codes
faster than capital,
subjectivity, or language can resuscitate
them [...]
'Burroughs' is no longer just the name of an author,
a celebrity,
or an artist; it is the name, rather, of a set of
potentials,
an effect that propagates itself from medium to
medium by the
force of its difference, bringing into contact
incompatible
functions, incommensurable concepts, and
unrelated
materials. Even when Burroughs is no longer able
to function
as the focus for this force, it will continue to
reverberate,
indefatigably sounding its critical imperative:
listen to my
last words everywhere. (232)
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The reverberation of
a critical imperative is one way to describe John Cage's 4'33", the subject of Kyle Gann's
enthralling study. The book is a small format hardback and weighs 420 grms.
And who, apart from Cage himself, ever thought there would be so much to say
about silence? In six chapters, Gann takes us through the piece's first
performance in 1952; Cage's life and work up to that point; Cage's influences
(Satie, Russolo, Duchamp, Coomaraswamy, among others); how the piece came to
be written; the piece and its notations; and, finally, its legacy and
available recordings. Gann is a composer and performer so his musical
knowledge and expertise are an important part of the book but all this is
handled lightly and accessibly so that one feels freshly informed. Gann's
simple but accurate descriptions of what Cage's early music sounds like
enables us to see both how Cage developed as a composer and where 4'33'' came from. The book is full of
fascinating illustrations: of the Maverick Concert Hall where the piece was
first performed; of scores and programmes; and of a 1932 cartoon from the
piano enthusiasts' magazine The Etude which shows a boy getting out of practice by
composing a piece entirely of rests. It seems scarcely credible that the
cartoonist was called Hy Cage.
Equally fascinating are all the other things Gann tells us about a piece
which everyone who knows it thinks they know inside out. The notation of the
piece changed twice; there were three published versions of it; and, like a
sonata, it has three movements. There was even a 4'33'' (No.2) which Cage dedicated to his
student Toshi Ichiyanagi and his wife Yoko Ono. But Gann's real achievement
is to situate the piece culturally and historically. So we not only get a
clear sense of how 4'33'' fits into Cage's life and work but also of the larger
musical and social worlds in which Cage worked and in which the work was
received. Like Phil Baker on Burroughs, Gann is a lively and engaging writer
and the chapter on Cage's life 1912-1949 is in many ways a better read than,
say, David Revill's The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (1992) which, while
comprehensive, can sometimes seem rather laborious. Gann also offers a
balanced and convincing account of the afterlife and influence of both Cage
and 4'33''. No
Such Thing As Silence is an excellent introduction to Cage, his music, and his ideas; and,
unlike Baker's book, you won't need to supplement it with very much apart
from Cage's own writings collected in books like Silence and A Year From Monday. The book I'd recommend to go
with them is John Cage: Composed in America, edited by Marjorie Perloff and
Charles Junkerman (University of Chicago Press, 1994). This has essays on
everything from Cage's early life to the relation of his music to chaos
theory. As for the music, CDs of Cage are often hugely expensive but there
are two excellent budget-price CDs of the early piano music on Naxos; and a
mid-price version of Roaratorio: A Circus on 'Finnegan's Wake' on Wergo. Litany for the Whale (Harmonia Mundi), a selection of
Cage's compositions for voice, performed by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of
Voices with a bit of help from Terry Riley, is also recommended.
David Revill argues that 'One can gauge Cage's importance from the company he
has kept' and one is reminded that it has always seemed easier to place
Burroughs in a pop/rock/underground context than a literary one. Nonetheless,
as I suggested at the beginning of this review, engaging with the work of
Burroughs and Cage has the effect of making one pay attention in new ways.
And, do you know, I just realised that 'gravitational pull' is a phrase that
appears in both Roaratorio and De La Soul's Ego Trippin' (Part Two).
© David
Kennedy 2010
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