The Apocalypse of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch Essay -- Apocalyps

The Apocalypse of William S. Burroughs unclothed LunchThe roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, atomic number 18 portions of eternity too great for the eye of man. (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 7)In 1980, William S. Burroughs delivered a speech at the Planet Earth Conference at the Institute of Ecotechnics in Aix-en-Provence titled The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.1 In this speech, Burroughs, pursuance religious tradition, says that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are Famine, Plague, War, and Death and moves on to prophesise a more contemporaneous apocalypse. In Burroughs apocalypse, War and Plague, for example, have become consort this alliance, Burroughs announces, was cemented with the low germ experiments (Burroughs, 1984, p. 12). The danger of these experiments lies in their ability to not besides create new viruses but to also turn them into biological weapons. only if for Burroughs there is a significant similarity between a twentieth-century-specific apocalypse, with its ray of light and contaminants, and the religious apocalypse of the four horsemen. For Burroughs, both types of apocalypse have no meaning outside of kind context, they are in fact human inventions (p. 17). More specifically, they are the essential flaws in what Burroughs calls the human artifact (p. 17) and in our evolution as a species. For Burroughs, the only way out is to first understand that our biological destiny is in Space, and that our failure to achieve this is the canonic flaw in the human artifact (p. 24). This speech constitutes Burroughs first demeanor in the scene as an apocalyptist. Previous to this, he was best know as one of the fundamental members of... ... and McCain, Gillian, Please Kill Me The Uncensored oral exam History of Punk (London Little Brown and Company, 1996)Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw The bearing and Times of William S. Burroughs (London Pimlico, 1991) Mottram, Eric, The Algebra of Need (Canada Beau Fleuve Series, 1971)Murphy, Timothy S., Wising Up the Marks The Amodern William Burroughs (London University of atomic number 20 Press, 1997)Pounds, Wayne, The Postmodern Anus Parody and Utopia in Two Recent Novels by William Burroughs in Poetics Today, 83-4, 1987, pp.611-629Seltzer, Alvin, Chaos in the Novel, the Novel in Chaos ( new-made York Schocken Books, 1974)Ziegesar, ray of light von, After Armageddon Apocalyptic Art Since the Seventies Tactics of Survival in a Postnuclear Planet in Strozier, Charles B. and Flynn, Michael, eds., The Year 2000 Essays on the End (London New York UP, 1997)