William S. Burroughs’s Concept of Language as a Virus in the Context of American Beat and Postmodern Literature

In this essay, we shall attempt to highlight W. S. Burroughs’s concept of language being a virus from outer space as remarkably different from the pertinent views of any other Beat writer. If Kerouac saw language as an efficient medium of expressing the immediacy and unpredictability of experience, while Ginsberg used it as just as efficient instrument of voicing sociopolitical protest or Buddhist truths (following in the footsteps of Romantic transcendentalists or Whitman), Burroughs saw it rather as an enigmatic, alien force. The latter could effectively disturb human understanding and communication, or even be used as a means of mental/social political oppression and manipulation on the global scale. Consequently, this, arguably, most atypical Beat writer appears to be a forerunner of a relevant trend in American postmodern fiction, represented e. g. by Ronald Sukenick or Raymond Federman, with their implied disbelief in language as a cognitively reliable means of handling human experience or reality as such: for example, by the lavishly applied typographical experimentation.