SOURCE: Oxenhandler, Neal. “Listening to Burroughs's Voice.” In William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989, edited by Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg, pp. 133-47. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981.

In the following essay, Oxenhandler examines Burroughs's poetic voice.

The artist's privilege is to liberate himself from his personal obsessions by incorporating them into the fabric of life, by blending them so thoroughly with other objects that we too are forced to become aware of them, so that he is no longer alone, shut up with his anguish in a horrible tête-à-tête.

—Claude-Edmonde Magny

The “grumus merdae” (heap of feces) left behind by criminals upon the scene of their misdeeds seems to have both these meanings: contumely, and a regressive expression of making amends.

—Sigmund Freud

William Burroughs's five major novels¹ overwhelm us with a chaos of metamorphosing shapes and forms which constantly destroy...