EXTERMINATOR!

On William S. Burroughs’ collection as a prophetic and transformative work of art

Graffiti in Padua, Italy. The messages read: Imagine, Organize, Transform. Give Money to Education, not to Weapons.

Made up of different stories published between 1966 and 1978 but ultimately composing a novel of some sort with recurring characters and themes, Exterminator! feels like a prophetic book. In its contemplating the rotting flesh of American society in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, teeming with multiple forms of racism, oppression and surveillance of both the body and the mind, the book speaks such a powerful truth it still rings true today, moving beyond the context it originated from.

While taking in its hallucinatory language, I often felt like it might well have been something coming straight out of the 2020s, like a phlegm ejected from this disjointed, suffocating panopticon of a world that we live in. War, savagery, non-stop dehumanization (and suppression) of the Other are something we have all become far too familiar with – or have we? –up to the point that seeing people (“enemies”, far-right politicians insist on calling them) exterminated like rats and roaches is no longer an issue, but just part of the desolate landscape we chose to inhabit absent-mindedly. Meanwhile, mass media, corporations and governments use all the power they hold in their hands to make sure these “rats and roaches” are written off collective history, as if never existed. Wiped out, obliterated by the Newspeak of our times, where the word “fascist” is replaced by “anti-antifascist” and the expression “Free Gaza” is equated with “Heil Hitler” (should you dare express your sympathies for the Palestinians in public, you might even end up losing your job, as it recently happened to a woman screaming these words outloud at Theatre La Scala in the presence of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni).

As the protagonist comes back home in Astronauts Return, it’s hard not to see the “sad dead empty” room he steps in as something more than a local space in a local town, but rather as a metaphor for white capitalism in the decaying West. “According to ancient legend the white race results from a nuclear explosion in what is now the Gobi desert some 30,000 years ago. The civilization and techniques which made the explosion possible were wiped out. The only survivors were slaves marginal to the area who had no knowledge of its science or techniques. They became albinos as a result of radiation and scattered in different directions. Some of them […] moved westward and settled in the caves of Europe. The descendants of the cave-dwelling albinos are the present inhabitants of America and Europe. In these caves the white settlers contracted a virus passed down along their cursed generation that was to make them what they are today a hideous threat to life on this planet.” He may enjoy making mincemeat of your typical straightforward sentence, but Burroughs certainly minces no words in saying what he wants to say: white people are parasitical, living off the need to “kill torture conquer enslave degrade as a mad dog has to bite”. Think about all the dictators acting with impunity today in the supposedly civilized white West, and you’ll see how his truth moves beyond the narrow shackles of his time, turning it back on ourselves: “The boy’s room is quite empty now. Do you begin to see there is no face there in the tarnished mirror?” Corroded by slaughter, we albinos can no longer see ourselves in the mirror, because there’s nothing left to see – no humanity, no meaning whatsoever, only rot. And if this vile top dog remains in charge, will the planet even have a future?

A faceless power ruling over a dying planet, that’s the tale Burroughs’ “novel” foretold. As for the others – the renegade, the rejects, the repulsive – those who are persecuted and chained down by the controlling agents of police, CIA, mental health institutions and the judicial system, there’s nothing more to hope for but to survive in the stained interstices of space, time, and language, like “convulsed corpses to the sky”. What makes Burroughs’ prose so unique and so far beyond the apocalyptic to turn into a political statement is this virulent embracing the hallucinatory litany of the eccentrics, the peripheral, the misfits, as a form of reaction to the ongoing rot of their surroundings, which in turn is the primary goal to achieve if they really want to make it alive.

In this respect, “I can’t wait for this city to rot” is no doubt one of the most telling sentences in the entire book; non-coincidentally, it appears in the most interesting story too, The coming of the purple better one, which is about youth revolution, but also about Power rearing up its ugly head and showing its faceless skull, electing “a purple-assed baboon to the Presidency”. The newly elected candidate starts ranting about the sanctity of the Vietnam war as “a holy crusade against the godless forces of international Communism” and about all the “darkies”, “queers” and “dope freaks” contaminating the fabric of American society. Just like any other coming before and after him, he blabbers about the fact that “there is an infection in this great land” very much similar to the one plaguing the rest of the world. If neither is contained, he swears, “they will engulf us all.” Any measure can thus be deployed in the name of containment – including mass rape and murder, as we see in From here to eternity, or torture turned into theatrical performance, as shown in Reddies, where people pay to see the rejects of society “undergo biological change during intercourse” and contemplate the “soft mucilage” of death and deformity exploding in their own skulls…

And if this seems far too much or removed from reality, remember all the atrocities we humans have been perpetrating for centuries in the name of domination or mere survival, then you’ll understand how true and revolutionary Burroughs’ words are, not simply aimed at electrocuting readers out of their indifference but rather at turning reality inside out, and hopefully transforming it – which is what all great literature does.