Chapter Five—
The Wild Boys :
Desire, Fantasy, and the Book of the Dead

In Bright Book of Life, his survey of postwar American fiction, Alfred Kazin sums up Burroughs's work from Naked Lunch through The Wild Boys by presenting him as an obsessive auto-eroticist, engaged in "transcribing open sexual fantasy into literary energy"^[1] and producing in the process an almost hermetic set of personal myths. Burroughs's texts have no real referent in, or even connection to, reality in Kazin's view: "Burroughs's fiction happenings are a wholly self-pleasing version of what D. H. Lawrence called the 'pure present.' Lawrence meant that the act of creation could renew the world. What Burroughs means by it is reverie, a world forever being reshuffled in the mind, a world that belongs to oneself like the contents of a dream" (Kazin 263). This reading is fundamentally the same as the postmodernization carried out by Cronenberg and Lydenberg, despite its distinct critical framework. What is striking about Kazin's reading of Burroughs is its explicit assumption that Burroughs's production of fantasy is in some way solipsistic or at least narcissistic, rather than world-historical and political; this appears especially difficult to understand in light of the overt political content we have found in Burroughs's major texts from Junky forward. Lydenberg at least attributed a political intention, textualist though it was, to Burroughs's formal experimentation. Moreover, many recent theories of ideological fantasy have demonstrated the very practical effect of fantasy in resolving, at the level of imaginary representations, contradictions inherent in the material relations of production.^[2]

The Marxist critique of ideology is, of course, an example of the seriousness that critics other than Kazin have granted to the social problem of fantasy, particularly in its group form: ideology is the medium by which historically and socially determined relations of power are mystified, masked by the appearance of inevitability; it is the fantasmatic medium through which culture appears as nature. This is not to suggest that all fantasy necessarily serves as cover for already constituted systems of power; such a position would be tenable only if we could avoid the force of the various critiques of metalanguage that have been articulated in the last several decades. The assumption that fantasy is necessarily more complicit than a critical realism in masking the relations of power depends upon an image of unmasking or demystification as science, in the old Marxist sense of an objective account of the material relations of production. But the later works of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and others have demonstrated the impossibility of finding a definable position outside of those relations in which to ground a straightforward dialectical critique.^[3] Burroughs recognizes this difficulty as well, as the extrahistorical perspective of the narrator at the conclusion of Naked Lunch shows. From another perspective, Jacques Derrida has demonstrated, with respect to Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, that metalinguistic translation of myth simply produces another myth that cannot claim any greater "adequacy" to the supposed facts than the myth it purports to explain.^[4] The dialectical critique of ideology itself produces ideology, and the structural study of myth itself produces myth.

The various critiques of demystification leave us, then, without access to a privileged level of reality that would allow us to determine the adequacy of any representation of the world to that world; truth can no longer be conceived as this adequacy, and therefore no traditional hermeneutic approach will be able to provide the grounds for the transformation of existing practices of exploitation and domination by simply unmasking the status quo.^[5] This is most emphatically not to say that all ideologies are equivalent to one another, nor that all myths are the same. In fact, the burden of this chapter is to follow out Kazin's most interesting insight: the possibility that desire, in the form of fantasy, represents not a retreat from the world, nor an imaginary justification of its failings, but the creation and transformation of it. Deleuze describes this power of fantasy as its ability to produce "the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary" through the abandonment of normative standards. of truth as representational adequacy (Deleuze, Cinema -2 132). Kazin

himself is willing to attribute this power of fantasy to Lawrence but not to Burroughs, insisting that for Burroughs, "Self and world become utterly opposed places," and therefore "the world becomes a nut place simply because it is the opposite of the private movie theater," not because the fantasy identifies real problems or material contradictions in the world (Kazin 267).

Kazin's narcissistic model of fantasy, however, is not adequate to Burroughs's literary practice; Burroughs's longtime friend and former lover Allen Ginsberg offers a better one. In the introduction to a collection of Burroughs's letters to him, Ginsberg points out that Burroughs composed many of the routines that would go into Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy in letters he sent to Ginsberg in the mid-fifties, after their love affair had ended; these routines, some of them quite disturbing and scatological (like the famous "Talking Asshole" sequence, in the letter dated 7 February 1954), were apparently intended as means of seduction. Ginsberg describes Burroughs's textual courtship as "an exquisite black-humorous fantasy . . . and a parody of his feelings, lest his desire be considered offensive. . . . The reader will thus recognize many of the 'routines,' that later became Naked Lunch, as conscious projections of Burroughs's love fantasies—further explanations and parodies and models of our ideal love schlupp together."^[6] Through these routines, Burroughs hoped to win the errant Ginsberg back. Burroughs's writing, then, has never been autoerotically hermetic, as Kazin implies, or hermeneutic; rather, it is performative. It does not attempt to describe something that exists outside of itself, but to intervene in a particular conjunction of necessarily libidinal (and political) circumstances. Clearly Burroughs's writing is not singular in this respect, since it is difficult to imagine any literary work that is not intelligible as such an intervention; what is important for my argument is not this abstract, generalized performativity, however, but the affirmative valence of seduction it takes on in Burroughs's apparently negative and even repulsive works. The issue here is not the fact that Burroughs's writing is effective, but how exactly it is effective—which is to say, how it can be politically transformative or affirmative despite (or even because of) its reliance on violence, alienation, and disgust. The fact that Burroughs's attempts both to win Ginsberg back and to change contemporary society have apparently not succeeded should not blind us to the profound seriousness and inventiveness with which he pursued those goals. Marshall McLuhan recognized this effective side of Burroughs's work early on: "It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed

science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home."^[7] The means Burroughs finds to get us out of the house may have no simple referential relation to the danger, but those means must be judged on the basis of their effects rather than their truth.

This perspective not only refutes Kazin's reductive assessment of Burroughs's writing as a "private movie theatre" in which "Self and world become utterly opposed places," but also argues for the political efficacy of Burroughs's texts, both virtual and actual. Given the contexts in which he wrote, from the now-lost early texts of the twenties through the "queer" perspectives on McCarthy-era hysteria and the violent activism of the late sixties to his recent revisionary history of the Enlightenment, it is possible to claim (or denounce) Burroughs's fantasmatic writing for pure narcissistic aestheticism only by ignoring the context of political engagement into which he sent his literary interventions, a context that he discovered among his peers and later reconstructed, not only for his own literary purposes, but also for the use of others with similar convictions. Such a context could be called an audience, a community of addressees, to anticipate the argument a little. This audience, itself a fantasy to the extent that it is the product of the investment of desire and simultaneously its object, will be as much a focus of our investigation as Burroughs's text will be.

Why is it necessary to bring up the issue of fantasy and its status at this point in the study of Burroughs's work? As we have seen, Burroughs's infamous early fiction, Naked Lunch (1956) and the Nova trilogy (1961–67), provides what we might provisionally call a negative, or high modernist, fantasy from the point of view of social transformation: that is, a fantasmatic allegorization of the contemporary social order that Burroughs himself admits functions as a "new mythology for the space age" (Burroughs and Mottram 4). This "negativity" of the early fiction—its refusal to offer viable alternatives to the problems it addresses—is largely consistent with Adorno's powerful account of modernism's critique of capitalism: "By cathecting the repressed, art internalizes the repressing principle, i.e. the unredeemed condition of the world, instead of merely airing futile protests against it. Art identifies and expresses that condition, thus anticipating its overcoming" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 27–28). All modernist works can do is negate, through their own hypertrophic form, the parallel organization of the social order, as Burroughs's early works attempt to do. The Nova Mob and its deeply

covered agents, Mr Bradly Mr Martin, and the whole range of political parties in Naked Lunch are horrific figures that can be recognized as hyperbolically depraved versions of segments of the political infrastructure of the postwar United States, while even the Factualists and the Nova Police who oppose the Mob are implicated in their opponents' work. Robin Lydenberg has explicated the theoretical labor of these novels, though she has not fully appreciated their social implications.

What interests us here, however, is Burroughs's invention of a new's et of fantasies during the period of cultural unrest in the late sixties. The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1969–71) inaugurates this period, which continues through The Job (1969–70), Exterminator! (1966–73), The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970; revised 1975), and Port of Saints (1973; revised 1980). These middle-period texts, self-consciously written in the shadow of the Paris student riots of May 1968, the occupation of Columbia University (the alma mater of Burroughs's friends Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), and what Norman Mailer called "the siege of Chicago,"^[8] still present excessive fantasies of Control—as Burroughs calls the centralized authority that rules his paranoid system. But they also introduce completely new kinds of fantasmatic figures: revolutionary (instead of capitalist) double agents, such as the narrators of the novels, and the Wild Boys themselves, bands of young homosexuals who reproduce by a kind of fantasmatic parthenogenesis and whose purpose is to destroy the bourgeois world order. In Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy, figures of resistance tended to be marginalized drug users and "queers," as if Burroughs could only find spaces of resistance in the confined interstices of a successful dominant (American/capitalist) order. These spaces of resistance were highly unstable and likely at any time to reverse into their opposites according to the dialectic of treason: "all Agents defect and all Resisters sell out." In these middle texts, however, resistance is almost ubiquitous—as it seemed to be in the new cultural order of the sixties—and springs not from the traditional subject of revolutionary activity, the working class, but from a new vanguard: boys and young men similar to the leaders and members of student movements like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the 22 March Movement, and the Yippies. According to Burroughs, speaking in 1969, "Authority in the West has never been more threatened than it is right now" (Burroughs and Odier 128), precisely because this new body of radicals supplanted the accommodated and quiescent working class. A positive or affirmative alternative to capitalist society, and not just a negative critique of it, seemed conceivable: a utopian fantasy not bounded by the

mythological terms of modernism or foreclosed by the linguistic terms of postmodernism. The Wild Boys are Burroughs's intensified fantasy version of countercultural revolt, both the object and the audience of his writing: "The wild boys have no sense of time and date the beginning from 1969 when the first wild boy groups were formed" (Burroughs, Port of Saints 73).^[9] These figures, for all their hyperbolic cruelty and willful ignorance, are Burroughs's phantom doubles or surrogate selves, even down to their initials, "W. B."

The gender specificity of Burroughs's fantasmatic revolutionaries should surprise no one familiar with his work prior to this point, or with his writings of the following decade. It may be useful for us to recall, however, that Burroughs's infamous misogyny, unlike that of heterosexual chauvinists like Norman Mailer or Ishmael Reed, is premised on a conception of the fundamental irreducibility of sexual difference as radical as that of a feminist like Luce Irigaray. Burroughs has never demanded the subordination of the feminine to the masculine, as many heterosexual male chauvinists have; he has argued, rather, for the total separation of the masculine from the feminine, as befits his theory that men and women are actually separate species that cannot be united under the rubric of an expanded, and therefore abstracted, definition of "humanity." In light of this, it seems more fruitful to view the project of The Wild Boys not simply as "the occlusion of women"^[10] but as an attempt to take sexual difference as a point of departure for political transformation, rather than seeing it as a problem to be overcome. Though his own viewpoint is unrepentantly androcentric, Burroughs said at that time that "I certainly have no objections if lesbians would like to do the same" from a gynocentric point of view (Burroughs, "Rolling Stone Interview" 52.). On the basis of this reading, Burroughs's novel might be seen as the anticipatory counterpart of feminist political fantasies like Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères and Joanna Russ's The Female Man, both of which share Burroughs's disregard for narrative continuity and his fascination with explicit, politicized violence. In addition to the formal experiments in which they engage, these books also offer new kinds of characters for their audiences' libidinal investment: Wittig's women warriors and the surgically altered female assassins of Jael's world in Russ's novel resemble Burroughs's Wild Boys in many (though by no means all) ways.

In addition to new character types, these texts also introduce new forms of composition, of which the most significant is the "book of the dead." The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, as its subtitle indicates, must be read as an example of a genre that has no equivalent in Western

culture, and that therefore has received little attention from literary scholars. The most famous examples of this genre—the Tibetan Bardo Thödol, the Egyptian Books of the Dead, and the Maya codices—come out of non-Christian traditions. (Scholars disagree, but Burroughs insists that the Maya codices, which he studied in Mexico in the late forties and early fifties, "are undoubtedly books of the dead; that is to say, directions for time travel"; Burroughs, Ah Pook 15).^[11] Burroughs had made reference to and use of these texts earlier, for example in "The Mayan Caper" section of The Soft Machine (85–97) but this use was always subordinated to the controlling metaphors of the Nova trilogy, criminal metaphors that Burroughs came to distrust because of their reliance on exclusionary Law: organized crime provided the image of control, and the police provided the image of objective resistance. In the middle-period texts we will consider, the "book of the dead" takes over as controlling structure. The function of these books of the dead is practical as well as spiritual; they provide guidance, in narrative and ritual form, to souls seeking paths through the dangerous and uncertain lands of the dead to the promised land.

Of course, the very idea of a book intended to guide the dead through the afterlife is either absurd or blasphemous to Christians, for whom the status and eternal fate of the individual dead soul has been determined at the moment of death, if not well before. The idea of purgatory in Roman Catholicism is no more than a baroque variation on the theme of salvation and damnation, by which souls can atone in predetermined ways for their transgressions; no real uncertainty exists. Because of this, no narrative can exist in the afterlife, at least not for the individual soul; the only narrative movement in the Judeo-Christian afterlife is the mass Hegelianism of the Apocalypse. The nearest correlative in European literature would perhaps be Dante's Divine Comedy, but it cannot be considered a "guide" to the afterlife except perhaps in topographical or political terms: none of its characters find themselves in the position of seeking a passage through the perils of the land of the dead, so the Divine Comedy can only be an allegorical map of virtue. Dante experiences narrative movement as an observer, but he himself is not subject to any of the punishments or rewards he sees bestowed around him in his journey, and the souls he meets are in no uncertainty concerning their fates; for a book of the dead to have any meaning as such, its readers, like its characters, must (be prepared to) fall into both categories, observer and observed.

Books of the dead suggest, again contrary to Judeo-Christian belief, that the afterlife resembles mortal existence, and therefore that the soul

needs guidance there as much as it does here. This situation is clearest in Egyptian culture, which developed elaborate rituals and preservative practices to maintain the bodies of the dead, both by embalming (mummification) and by filling tombs with supplies for the use of the dead. The Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge (to whom Burroughs occasionally refers) reports that many early texts "seem to imply that the Egyptians believed in a corporeal existence, or at least in the capacity for corporeal enjoyment, in the future state. This belief may have rested upon the view that the life in the next world was but a continuation of life upon earth, which it resembled closely" (Budge, Egyptian Book lxxviii).^[12] Consider, for example, this prayer from chapter 110 of the Book: "May I become a khu therein, may I eat therein, may I drink therein, may I plough therein, may I reap therein, may I fight therein, may I make love therein . . ." (Budge, Book 327).^[13] They believed not only in the possibility of corporeal enjoyment, but also in the threat of corporeal danger, which is why the Egyptian Book is filled with prayers for the intercession of the gods in the progress of the soul through the lands of the dead.

That a book of the dead must be fantasmatic is clear: it is the desire-invested projection of a cultural group's identity into a world beyond, or at least other than, our own. But what specific kind of fantasy does it represent? To put the question bluntly and somewhat reductively, is it ideological in a bad sense, utopian in a good sense, or something else entirely? And how will Burroughs be able to put this fantasmatic genre to radical use? To determine the answers, we must articulate a method for distinguishing forms of fantasmatic desire that does not operate as a simple textual hermeneutic—that does not, in other words, fall back into the interminable dialectic of truth and mystification. If the hermeneuti-cal search for meaning can only produce reproductions of the textual modes upon which it works, we should find another model for thought than the text if we wish to understand (and perhaps undertake) the transformation of practice that Burroughs's use of the book of the dead proposes. Deleuze, in his collaborations with Félix Guattari, suggests a radical, nonhierarchical and nonhermeneutic method for distinguishing the political ramifications of forms of mass fantasy like the book of the dead. The radical function of mass fantasy in their model is to allow and even promote investments of desire that are incompatible with the established social and economic order. This nonhierarchical, or rhizomatic, account of fantasy underpins the theory of social groups in Anti-Oedipus, which was itself inspired by the same student movements of the sixties that Burroughs engaged and supported, and which developed out of Deleuze's

and Guattari's readings of Jean-Paul Sartre's last major work of philosophy, the Critique of Dialectical Reason .

As we saw in chapter 1, Sartre posits a fundamental distinction between two kinds of human social structures, the series and the group (or fused group ). Most common of these types is the series, which is, roughly speaking, passive and dependent upon an outside force for the determination of its internal structure; relevant examples of series would be the sets of people lined up in a grocery store check-out line or at a polling booth, their seriality (in these cases their identities as consumers or citizens) "produced in advance as the structure of some unknown group" (Sartre 265) by the cash register or the voting machine. This means that an individual person forms part of a series when s/he participates in "a reality shared by several people . . . which already exists, and awaits him, by means of an inert practice, denoted by instrumentality, whose meaning is that it integrates him into an ordered multiplicity by assigning him a place in a prefabricated seriality" (Sartre 265). In other words, he or she belatedly joins an already existing social complex embodied in mechanical sorting, counting, and management devices (aspects of what Marx called "dead labor" and Sartre calls " inert practice " or " instrumentality"). These machines give him or her "a place in a prefabricated seriality" by reducing the subject's choices to the array of preestablished alternatives they offer. The place of such a complex in the overall social organization, or "socius," is stable and wholly determined by the constraints of that organization's formal structure and requirements. This passive and preordained seriality is obviously "the basic type of sociality" (Sartre 348) under capitalism and state socialism, and many more examples could no doubt be found. Deleuze and Guattari theorize a form of ensemble explicitly modeled on the series: the subjugated group, which is also entirely determined by the preexistent categories, choices, and structures that the social order provides. This kind of group invests "all of an existing social field, including the latter's most repressive forms," with desire (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 30). Because of this, a subjugated group remains subjugated even when seizing political/social power if

this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production . . .: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom; the effusion of anti-production and death-carrying elements within the system, which feels and pretends to be all the more im-

mortal; the phenomenon of group "superegoization," narcissism, and hierarchy—the mechanisms for the repression of desire. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 348)

These "investments" or "mechanisms" constitute constructions or articulations of simple desires into complex networks of libidinal connection and feedback that ultimately form one type of mass fantasy. Ideology is certainly one of the most powerful forms of fantasy produced by the social system for the purposes of its own reproduction, as is modernist myth, inasmuch as each is presented in its respective context as being simultaneously the permanent ("immortal") base of value and the legislating superego of the subjugated group.

Sartre's radical alternative to seriality is the group in fusion, or fused group . A fused group is a novel and unstable social structure, "constituted by the liquidation of an inert seriality under the pressure of definite material circumstances, in so far as particular practico-inert structures of the environment were synthetically united to designate it, that is to say, in so far as its practice was inscribed in things as an inert idea" (Sartre 361). The fused group negates the series by the force of its collision with material circumstances (including, in some cases, machines, legal penalties, sanctioned violence, and other forces) that are the products of other series of individuals who treat the proto-fused group as their object and thus threaten it. We might say that the threat wakes the subjugated group up to its dilemma, at which point it becomes a fused group. Like the existential subject in Being and Nothingness, the group is produced through the look of the Other, but as Fredric Jameson demonstrates, the Other in this case is no longer simply the abstract category of objective exteriority, but is in fact embodied in the other individual members of the group: "the group no longer has to depend on the look of the outsider or enemy" because "a structure has been evolved such that the group carries its source of being within itself" (Jameson, Marxism and Form 253). The stable and external determination of the series—its dependence upon an inert and instrumental element of the socius—is displaced into the group and simultaneously projected outward toward a material locus that is taken to measure both the threat to the group and its opportunity to protect and preserve itself. For example, the Parisians' storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution enacted the process of becoming-fused that allowed them to transform the existing social structure (Sartre 351–63).

The radical position of the fused group is extended in Anti-Oedipus by the subject-group, which is distinct from the subjugated group. When confronted by the repressive fantasies provided by the socius or by

subjugated groups, the subject-group responds by "launch[ing] a coun-terinvestment whereby revolutionary desire is plugged into the existing social field as a source of energy" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 30).^[14] This does not mean that the subject-group invests the existing forms of sociality or fantasy; rather, it is driven by the libidinal poverty of existing forms to find alternatives to them.

[It] is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without hierarchy or a group superego. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 348–49)

In defiance of the stable subjugated order, the subject-group produces or invests "formations," or new group fantasies, that are actively hostile to the structures of the socius; but unlike myths, subject-group fantasies are in constant flux and are incapable of instituting a permanent and restrictive Law. Among these fantasies Deleuze and Guattari number certain popular utopian schemes (such as Charles Fourier's utopia of "passionate attraction" and "attractive work": Fourier 216–19, 274–83), to which I would add the apparently more "nihilistic" or "disgusting" images of revolutionary change that fill Burroughs's novels. Such effective fantasies, which draw out desires that have no established place within the existing society, embody what Deleuze will later call "the powers' of the false" (Deleuze, Cinema -2 131).

The key element of this analysis, which is largely only implicit in Sartre's account but is foregrounded in Deleuze and Guattari's, is the fact that the process of displacement and projection that grants the subject-group its power is not conscious and rational but fantasmatic. As discussed earlier, the Bastille served the terrified people of revolutionary Paris as a focus for innovative social reorganization, but as an imaginary mirror for desire rather than as a fixed, rational object of calculation. This process of imaginary mirroring is fantasy itself, which serves as the catalyst for subject-group fusion. The voters and shoppers also see themselves in an imaginary mirror, but the relations and identities they see there are planned and preestablished, not by their novel desires, but by the structure of the institutions in which they seek satisfaction. Their seriality, in relation to the market or the polls, is permanent and indifferent. They willingly insert themselves into the given categories, willingly

accept the desires that are offered to them along with the means of fulfilling them (for a short time). This is the method that Deleuze and Guattari practice in Anti-Oedipus and their other works, the method whereby they distinguish radical from reactionary desire: the investment of desire in and through fantasy can remain enmeshed in institutionalized, serialized ideology, but it can also itself produce group formations that are hostile (though not necessarily opposed, in the strict dialectical sense)^[15] to the given relations of production, class, and subjectivity, without necessarily presenting themselves as permanent replacements for those relations. This method offers us a way to distinguish between forms of fantasy, and it is fantasy that attracts serialized or subjugated subjects, in order either to keep them subjugated or on the contrary to dissolve, or "deterritorialize," the subjects' conformity. The construction of viable subject-group fantasies, and the consequent fantasmatic production of revolutionary groups, is the burden of Burroughs's writing in The Wild Boys and later works.

From the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of mass fantasy, the book of the dead is clearly an ambiguous genre: it generally serves its culture as a (direct or indirect) religious legitimation of social power structures, and thus serves conservative ideology, but it also treats the afterlife much like mortal life, as a fundamentally open process of contestation for which the book serves as a guide. The historical books of the dead, particularly the Egyptian and Maya texts on which Burroughs has focused, fall into the category of subjugated-group fantasy because of their positions within the institutionalized belief systems that characterized those cultures. Budge points out that all surviving copies of the Egyptian Book were owned by members of the dominant class, including "priestly officials [who] were still relatives of the royal family"; and "the tombs of feudal lords, scribes, and others, record a number of their official titles" (Egyptian Book xviii), which are also written into their books of the dead. Even during the most socially egalitarian periods, only a very small number of citizens could afford the expense of following the Book's rituals and suggestions. Of the Maya, Burroughs himself claims that "The workers could not read the books and undoubtedly they were prevented from learning" by "the absolute power of the priests, who formed about two percent of the population" (Burroughs, Ah Pook 16 and SM 87). They controlled the workers, Burroughs claims, by controlling the elaborate system of calendars that make up the Maya "book of the dead."^[16] These claims suggest that the historical books of the dead served as markers of social status, and thus abetted the status quo as

subjugated-group fantasies. The actual terms of the Egyptian burial ceremonies lend credence to this interpretation. The dead patrician is offered to the gods as an equal, who takes his (or her) place in an already constituted system: "Thou art purified with natron [soda], and Horus is purified with natron; thou art purified with natron, and Set is purified with natron; thou art purified with natron, and Thoth is purified with natron . . .; Thou art stablished among the gods thy brethren, thy head is purified for thee with natron, thy bones are washed clean with water, and thou thyself art made perfect with all that belongeth unto thee" (Budge, Egyptian Book cxl). Note as well that property follows the deceased into the afterlife, in contrast to Christian doctrine.

Once the books of the dead move into contexts that do not correspond to their "proper" cultures, however, their status as subjugated-group fantasy changes, though not necessarily into subject-group fantasy; they no longer represent the imaginary of the existing socius, but this does not mean that they are hostile to it. Their difference from the established social order gives them the potential for revolutionary influence, as many members of the Anglo-European counterculture have realized, but the specific form and content of that difference may fail to realize that potential; this is the case with many varieties of so-called Eastern mysticism, including Buddhism, whose anticapitalist tenets are subsumed within a larger project of completely antimaterialist spirituality that, at least among many of its Anglo-European adherents, tips over into absolute idealism. Such idealism treats all material manifestations of the spirit as, at best, steps necessary for scaling the ladder of spiritual evolution; in very few cases can this idealism provide a rationale or strategy for the practice of social transformation. This may partly explain Burroughs's selectivity regarding historical books of the dead: his lack of interest in the Tibetan Book may be attributable to its popularity among those members of the Anglo-European counterculture who adopted versions of Zen Buddhist philosophy and therefore tended to refrain from active dissent. We may judge Burroughs's response to passive resistance by recalling the admission he made during the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention: "nonviolence is not exactly my program" (Burroughs, Exterminator! 96).^[17]

Even if the historical books of the dead remain subjugated-group fantasies when recontextualized into the late twentieth-century American social order, the possibility of a book of the dead that would act as a subject-group fantasy remains open. But it can only be realized by means of a careful analysis of the social order. The question must be asked, then:

in what precise way is Burroughs's novel The Wild Boys a book of the dead? A great deal rides on this question, because the radical book of the dead remains Burroughs's ultimate goal throughout his subsequent writing—his latest novel, The Western Lands, takes its terms directly from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Jennie Skerl suggests that The Wild Boys is a book of the dead because all of its characters are in fact dead, apparently in several different ways: "The characters who die and who retain consciousness after death—the wild boys, the dead child, Audrey Carsons, and his friend John Hamlin—are part of the immortality theme. Other characters are 'dead' because they have never lived; that is, they are fictions . . . [like] the Mexican characters . . . created by Burroughs from cultural stereotypes. Still others are dead because they exist only in the past and are controlled by the writer's consciousness" (Skerl 84). Leaving aside the difficult task of making the subtle distinctions Skerl claims to find, I would agree that she is correct in reading the entire book as a posthumous narration, a book of the dead, not simply because its characters are "dead" (what is the difference between a dead character and a "dead" character, or even between a dead character and a living character?), but because it projects a world whose realization would entail the death of our world. In fact, Burroughs's book enacts the death of the old world in the fictional birth of the new. This new world, after death, is his subject-group fantasy, offered for investment to an audience that seemed, in the late sixties, already on the verge of such an imaginary fusion.

Burroughs recognizes the tension inherent in the historical book of the dead: if the Egyptians and the Maya, as he claims, offset the threat of social contestation contained in their books of the dead by limiting literacy (and therefore the means to salvation) to the dominant classes, he attempts to shift the balance in the other direction, by constructing a series of guidebooks that give lessons in intensifying rather than resolving or avoiding social antagonisms. If the historical books of the dead are "how-to" books for the reproduction of the socius, his books of the dead intend to show how to undo the socius and produce a different one. Of course, all utopian fantasies aspire to be such how-to books, directly or indirectly: they try to make good on the promise articulated by the narrator of Ellison's Invisible Man, of a "plan of living . . . [which gives] pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties" (Ellison 567). Most utopias do this by offering idealistic visions that offer no purchase for direct investments of desire, no suggestions for strategies or tactics of change. What makes Bur-

roughs's effort singular is its insistence on "death," on the violent undoing of the status quo as it is incarnated both in the materiality of institutional practices and in the structure of the subjugated subject. Burroughs's fulfillment of Ellison's promise takes the form of a plan of dying, or better, a plan of afterliving.

Burroughs's overriding task is to make his book of the dead accessible. The historical books succeeded as subjugated-group fantasies because they were kept from the masses; their form of control was secret manipulation, for example through the Maya calendar of rituals managed by the priestly caste. In contemporary society, "The mass media of newspapers, radio, television, magazines form a ceremonial calendar to which all citizens are subjected" (Burroughs and Odier 44) and which serves the interests of the state. Exposure of its methods and instruction in how to evade its dictates are necessary, as is mass organization that must avoid the ossified forms of the nation and the party:

He who opposes force with counterforce alone forms that which he opposes and is formed by it. History shows that when a system of government is overthrown by force a system in many respects similar will take place. On the other hand he who does not resist force that enslaves and exterminates will be enslaved and exterminated. For revolution to effect basic changes in existing conditions three tactics are required: 1. Disrupt. 2. Attack. 3. Disappear. Look away. Ignore. Forget. These three tactics to be employed alternatively . (Burroughs and Odier 101)

This almost Nietzschean imperative to forget power, rather than to overcome and reinscribe it dialectically, accounts for the anarchic structure of the revolution represented in the novel, which is to serve as a reference manual (though not strictly as a "blueprint," as Burroughs sometimes claimed) for revolution outside the novel. The Wild Boys are "utopian as a force, not as literal images of the ideal community" (Skerl 83). Revolution, like fantasy, is fundamentally polymorphous and impermanent. Resistance must be coordinated, relayed along a rhizome, but not controlled; the path through danger to the promised lands of the afterlife can be negotiated in many mutually irreducible ways. Burroughs must thus shift the status of his book of the dead (with respect to its historical forebears) by making it self-reflexive, as is evidenced both by the reference to the novel itself within the novel (WB 149) and by his choice of the indefinite article in "A Book of the Dead"; one embodiment of a genre, it cannot claim the privilege of being the only guide to the contemporary lands of the dead.^[18] Its value will be determined solely by its utility.

In structure The Wild Boys is self-consciously kaleidoscopic, as are all of Burroughs's extended works, narrative or expository. The cut-up method is generally (though not exclusively, as we will see) applied to narration, as it was in Naked Lunch, rather than to syntax, as it was in the Nova trilogy. This approach might appear to be inappropriate in a book of the dead, but Budge insists that even the Egyptians were in fact rather "writerly" (to use Roland Barthes's term) in their textuality: "The Book of the Dead was, even in those early times, so extensive that even a king was fain to make from it a selection only of the passages which suited his individual taste or were considered sufficient to secure his welfare in the next world. . . . The 'Pyramid Texts' prove that each section of the religious books of the Egyptians was originally a separate and independent composition, that it was written with a definite object, and that it might be arranged in any order in a series of similar texts" (Budge, Egyptian Book xxiv). Thus in The Wild Boys, a series of routines (Burroughs's preferred compositional units) are organized around an apparently aleatory device called "The Penny Arcade Peep Show," which controls the arrangement and interpenetration of the routines. The standard peep show itself is a fantasmatic device, presenting a set of prefabricated images for erotic investment, but Burroughs's machine is far less predictable even as it maintains the erotic intent of the standard peep show. The character Audrey Carsons, who comes upon the device at a carnival and whose experience of its shows fills the bulk of the novel, describes its formal structure thus:

1. Objects and scenes move away and come in with a slow hydraulic movement always at the same speed. The screens are three-dimensional visual sections punctuated by flashing lights[. . . .] Sequences are linked by the presence of some arbitrary object [. . .]

2. Scenes that have the same enigmatic structure presented on one screen where the perspective remains constant[. . . .]

3. Fragmentary glimpses linked by immediate visual impact[. . . .]

4. Narrative sections in which the screens disappear. I experience a series of quite understandable and coherent events as one of the actors. The narrative sequences are preceded by the title on screen then I am in the film[. . . .] The structuralized peep show may intersperse the narrative and then I am back in front of the screen and moving in and out of it.(WB 40–42)

The novel as a whole thus presents itself as a film, or rather an anthology of films, unrolling from the peep show before the eyes of Audrey, an author-surrogate who is labeled, significantly, a "walking corpse . . .

[who] didn't know whose corpse he was" (WB 32, 40). Filmic structure and point-of-view identification abets this confusion of subjectivity, as the fourth point above makes clear.

Film has long been a powerful metaphor for Burroughs, going back at least as far as "Doctor Berger's Mental Health Hour" from Naked Lunch, and reaching its full development in the Nova trilogy: "Postulate a biologic film running from the beginning of time to the end, from zero to zero as all biologic film run in any time universe—Call this film X1 and postulate further that there can only be one film with the quality X1 in any given time universe. X1 is the film and performers—X2 is the audience who are all trying to get into the film" (NE 15n). The linear predetermination of film and its apparently objective referentiality make it the perfect figure for the ideology and false consciousness of hierarchical control situations. This is not a question of simple audience manipulation, to be complicated by reception or consumption theory. As an experimental filmmaker himself, Burroughs understands perfectly well the differences between the manipulative ideology of classical Hollywood narrative cinema and the defamiliarizing effects of avant-garde film, as well as the different uses to which viewers can put both kinds of film. When he uses film as a structural metaphor in his books, however, he insists on the physical identity of the two forms: each is, ultimately, a single physical strip of film stock, the material contents of which do not change from one viewing to the next. In the Nova trilogy, the primary task of the revolutionary partisans is to "storm the reality studio" in order to destroy the "reality film." This is not a film that is shown to audiences to control them; the film is reality itself, and there is no audience outside it. We do not watch the reality film; we are part of it. The same holds true for The Wild Boys, from its opening direction: "The camera is the eye of a cruising vulture flying over an area of scrub, rubble and unfinished buildings on the outskirts of Mexico City" (WB 3). Thus, although the Penny Arcade Peep Show fractures and multiplies the representational space of classical cinema, it shares with that cinema its identically repetitive, mechanically reproduced form. This is confirmed in the final image of the film "exploding in moon craters and boiling silver spots" (WB 184)—burning up, that is, under the heat of the projection lamp, an image that recurs throughout The Wild Boys and signals the escape from inert seriality into group activity, from atomized subjugation into the fusion of group subjectivity, and from the repetitive structure of representation into the anarchism of desire. After the burnout, "the wild boys smile " (WB 184).

The Penny Arcade Peep Show shows films of several sorts: nostalgic reveries presented in elegiac style ("The Silver Smile," "The Dead Child"); frenetic parodies of popular fictional genres ("The Frisco Kid"); pointed political satires ("Le Gran Luxe"); flights of science-fictional fancy ("The Miracle of the Rose," "The Wild Boys Smile"); and hommages to other writers (for example, to Jean Genet in "The Miracle of the Rose"). Almost all of these films contain explicit scenes of impersonal homosexual intercourse, which should alert us to the fact that, for Burroughs, homosexuality is not an inherently revolutionary form of desire but an ambiguous one that can fit into both radical and reactionary political groups. (For Burroughs, homosexuality is only revolutionary when it escapes the model of normative heterosexual love, which constructs the self as a subject by reducing the loved Other to an object.) There are at least four conflicting rationales for these explicit scenes. In the first place, for Burroughs's more ambiguous control figures, in the "space age . . . sex movies must express the longing to escape from flesh through sex. The way out is the way through" (WB 82). In the second place, for the radical figures in the novel, they demonstrate Burroughs's fundamental agreement with Wilhelm Reich's insistence that "Psychic health depends upon orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sex act" (Reich 6). Burroughs refers to Reich approvingly in many places, most often to Reich's work on the orgone; in a letter from 1949, he asserts that "My own experiments with [Reich's orgone] accumulator have convinced me that many of his conclusions are correct" (Burroughs, Letters 1945–1959 58). The radical power of orgasm is marked throughout the novel by the abrupt break in syntax that follows every climax; orgasm "cuts up" dogmatic verbal systems. Third, the explicit scenes emphasize "the erect phallus which means in wild-boy script as it does in Egyptian to stand before or in the presence of, to confront to regard attentively " (WB 151).^[19] This interest in the actual glyphs of the books of the dead would later lead Burroughs to compose texts incorporating narrative illustrations of glyphs from the Maya (in Ah Pook is Here, 1979) and Egyptian books (in The Book of Breeething, 1974).^[20] Lastly, and most importantly, "the point of sexual relations between men is nothing that we could call love, but rather what we might call recognition " (Burroughs and Odier 118). It is this recognition, this look of the Other displaced into the group, that marks the Wild Boys as a subject-group.

A schematic passage from "The Miracle of the Rose" demonstrates this multiplicity of significance. It begins in a fantasy North African

setting (like those in some of Genet's works) where the narrator and his two guides, a Berber named Ali and an Arab named Farja, stop to make camp. The two guides engage in intercourse, an event which the narrator transforms into an "old book with gilt edges. THE MIRACLE OF THE ROSE written in gilt letters" (WB 73). The book consists of pictures, or glyphs, illustrating the stages of intercourse: "The Proposition " ("Ali points to the bed. Farja stands there sullen eyes downcast long lashes," WB 74), "The Agreement " ("Farja looks at the bed blushing to his bare feet"), and "The Consummation " ("Roses and thorns through translucent flesh squirming a slow scream of roses," WB 75). This set of images is interrupted by glyphs of Mayan priests harvesting human flesh and creating slave-boys who repeat the actions of Ali and Farja: "The Recognition . The other has dropped the sheet from his naked body. . . . The Proposition . Two boys in the room. 'That's kid stuff. I wanta.' One boy with eyes downcast sullen" (WB 76). The juxtaposition of homosexual intercourse produced by Mayan tyranny to the intercourse of the first scene implies that such intercourse is not necessarily an attribute of the Wild Boys and their revolutionary allies, but can also be used as material for control. Indeed, immediately after the conclusion of "The Miracle of the Rose," we are offered the "Great Slastobitch's" theories on the aesthetics and metaphysics of pornography, which I have already cited (WB 82).

The films contained in the novel can be divided, for the purposes of this political analysis of fantasy, into two categories whose boundaries are fluid and which can and do turn abruptly into one another: Control films, which correspond to subjugated-group fantasies, and Wild Boy films (including antlauthoritarian films that don't actually contain Wild Boys), which correspond to subject-group fantasies. The Control films, which embody the Great Slastobitch's aesthetics, take up a smaller total proportion of the book than the Wild Boy films do, but they predominate in its opening sections and contain some of its most memorable routines. Let us consider a few of them in some detail.

The Wild Boys of the title do not make a formally announced entrance until well into the text, but they are present in spirit from the very beginning, when Tío Mate, the masterless pistolero, kills González the Agente. This is the first in a long string of routines concerning the destruction of the hypocritical and monstrous representatives of the law, the state, and the family by characters who offer us none of the typical traits of the humane/humanist hero. In the same routine, the mother, Tía Dolores is described as a "war machine" whose "evil eyes rotate in a

complex calendar, and these calculations occupy her for many hours each night" (WB 5). This description alludes to the interlocking wheels of the elaborate Maya calendar, the interpretation of which, Burroughs claims, forms the Mayan book of the dead. On the Egyptian side, Tío Mate has an apprentice, El Mono, who is described as his "Ka"; in Egyptian, Ka refers to the spiritual "double" of the dead soul, and in fact El Mono is a mimic. Tío Mate, the Chief, and Old Sarge—the antiauthoritarian figures of the first three routines—share with the Wild Boys a peculiarly beatific way of smiling; indeed, the chapter's titles and closing lines draw attention to it. Skerl sees in these smiles "that invite comparison with the smile of Dante's Beatrice and of the Mona Lisa—two hallowed female icons that embody traditional Western values" evidence that the Wild Boys and their allies "exist in a state of ecstasy" (Skerl 83). Perhaps, like Beatrice, the Wild Boys are to be our guides to/through the lands of the dead; perhaps as well, like Dante, we will not be subject to any of the perils and delights to be found there—but perhaps we will. At any rate, the smiles of the Wild Boys and of the characters who anticipate them do not bode well for those "traditional Western values."

Among the most important Control films is "A. J.'s Annual Party," narrated in the chapter "Le Gran Luxe." This routine, a sequel to one of the same title in Naked Lunch, resembles in structure and ambition Burroughs's earlier piece "Roosevelt after Inauguration" (1961), an elaborate send-up of the imperial presidency in which Franklin D. Roosevelt appoints criminals and degenerates to the highest offices of the land in order to run the state into the ground:

Roosevelt was convulsed with such hate for the [human] species as it is, that he wished to degrade it beyond recognition. He could endure only the extremes of human behavior. The average, the middle-aged (he viewed middle age as a condition with no relation to chronological age), the middle-class, the bureaucrat filled him with loathing. . . .

"I'll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate," he would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity. (Burroughs, Roosevelt 21)

Like Roosevelt, A. J. represents the most extreme form of concentrated power: "His annual party collapses currencies and bankrupts nations," and he thinks nothing of suspending a section of Missouri countryside between two zeppelins in order to get a perfect meal of hog's liver (WB 53–54). The gratuitous waste of his annual party—attended only by his close patrician friends while the poor huddle in absolute scarcity outside, shredding each other for a chance to eat the refuse that A. J. sends

them through a "huge phallus" and a "rubber asshole" (WB 59)—takes its model from Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," and eventually A. J., like Prince Prospero, finds the outside he tried so hard to keep out has gotten inside.

Like "Roosevelt after Inauguration," "A. J.'s Annual Party" serves as a demonic vision of the capitalist world order run amok, but in both routines the status of the leader is ironic: even in exercising power over people, Roosevelt is convulsed with hatred for them and in fact exercises his power to force them to mutate into some new and more extreme form, while the very extremity of A. J.'s conspicuous consumption is meant to be emblematic of capitalism at the same time as it provides the materials for its own destruction. The way out is the way through. A dead soul, according to the Egyptian Book, "eats with his mouth, and exercises other natural functions of the body, and gratifies his passions" (Budge, Egyptian Book lxxviii). As a good host to such dead souls, A. J. provides his guests with every conceivable amenity, from five-star restaurant service and a fully stocked arsenal to tailor-made "blue movies," one of which leads the routine away from A. J.'s excesses and toward the Wild Boys. This movie begins abruptly as one of Burroughs's elegiac evocations of young men engaging in sex, but it is intercut with dialogue suggesting that A. J. is directing and editing even this tableau of desire (WB 63–67). After another rapid spin through the Penny Arcade Peep Show, we are presented with the final product of this effort, "The Miracle of the Rose," which as we saw continues the elegiac daydream of casual sex with Genet-style props and language and without A. J.'s interruption, until the "silver light" (WB 81) of the projector reveals to us that it has all been just a flat representation without real "presence," despite the ejaculations that shatter syntactic continuity. Several other "blue movies" follow, each less stable than the last, until the film is stretched to the breaking point and, with a final Controlled scene of orgasm, snaps.

The break throws us back to the Penny Arcade Peep Show, which now introduces the relation between violence and order more explicitly in its shattered narration of the deaths of Jesse James, Dutch Schultz, and most importantly, Billy the Kid (himself a proto-Wild Boy whose last words, "Quién es ?" ask the central question of Burroughs's late trilogy), alongside science-fiction evocations of decaying future cities, arbitrary schemes of order (the standard calendar, New Year's Eve, a referee's whistles), and the interchangeability of "Tissue, minerals, wood seen through electron microscope" and "Stars and space seen through telescope" (WB 100–101). The effect is surprisingly similar to the famous moment in In-

gmar Bergman's Persona when Liv Ullman's petty violence precipitates a break in the film itself, revealing the psychic horrors held in check by the linear narration. Bergman's film reconstitutes itself slowly and incompletely after its break, but Burroughs's "Peep Show" empties out directly into "The Dead Child," which begins as another nostalgic tale of adolescent intercourse—a Control film—but mutates in the middle into a Wild Boy film, a narrative of revolution, in this case of enslaved planters against their Maya masters. Two boys escape into the Central American jungles and live there until one boy, unable to escape the masters' control, turns into a jaguar and dies (WB 114–15).^[21] The other boy's soul, unable to escape the material world, haunts the locale until visiting tourists provide him with a new, young male body. This split fantasy, this hybrid of "blue movie" and revolution, serves as an introduction to the Wild Boys themselves, who are similarly hybrids of ourselves and a world beyond the death of our own.s

From this point in the novel to the end, revolutionary Wild Boy films follow each other without a break. The term "Wild Boys" appears for the first time in the thirteenth chapter, "Just Call Me Joe," which narrates the raising of an American army to combat the Wild Boys and its subsequent defeat at their hands. This chapter is set up as a parody of a Hollywood propaganda film of the fifties, complete with soundtrack music and opening credits; most of its characters are played by named actors, except for the General in charge of the army, "played by himself," and the Wild Boys themselves, who are "played by native boys on locations" (WB 121). The plot of the film is the exposure of a conspiracy, which the General blames on Moscow, to undermine America's purity by drawing American boys into anarchist packs of Wild Boys; in the middle of the General's denunciation, the camera cuts to a suburban home where a couple reads the following note: "Dear Mom and Dad: I am going to join the wild boys. When you read this I will be far away. Johnny."^[22] Once overseas, the Americans are greeted by the natives of the area that has been overrun by packs of Wild Boys; the natives appear glad to be rescued, but in fact they simply welcome whatever force passes through their country as an opportunity for profit (hence the chapter title). A few Wild Boys surrender and promise to lead the Americans to their "Chinese advisers," but this is a ploy to divide the army, which is cut down by linguistic and viral weapons as well as by standard guns. The surviving officer even settles down at the native location to set up a restaurant at which the "Wild Boys [are] welcome" (WB 137).

The diverse disruptive elements in the novel, whether transitional figures like Tío Mate or full-fledged Wild Boys, are united by the goal of total revolution:

Despite disparate aims and personnel of its constituent members the underground is agreed on basic objectives. We intend to march on the police machine everywhere. We intend to destroy the police machine and all its records. We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems. The family unit and its cancerous expansion into tribes, countries, nations we will eradicate at its vegetable roots. We don't want to hear any more family talk, mother talk, father talk, cop talk, priest talk, country talk or party talk. To put it country simple we have heard enough bullshit. (WB 139–40)

What unifies their agenda is the refusal of talk, of representation in the form of religious belief ("priest talk") and social or political ideology ("mother talk, father talk, . . . country talk or party talk"). In fact, it is this emphasis on "talk," on representation, that underlies Burroughs's explicit criticisms of the historical books of the dead as well: "Death is . . . a protean organism that never repeats itself word for word. . . . For this reason I consider the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead, with their emphasis on ritual and knowing the right words, totally inadequate. There are no right words" (Burroughs, Ah Pook 15).

This kind of statement, for all its value in articulating the explicit theme of the various revolutionary routines, never seems to come directly from the Wild Boys themselves, but comes instead from their recruits among the older generation, like the Chief, Old Sarge, and Colonel Bradly—a version of Burroughs's friend Brion Gysin who "was with one of the first expeditionary forces sent out against the wild boys" and who "Later . . . joined them" (WB 145). This seems to be Burroughs's own unambiguous desire, inasmuch as the Wild Boys are versions of his own "Ka," or spirit double, based in his identification with the student movements (whom he urged to use "more riots and more violence": Burroughs and Odier 81). The Wild Boys themselves do not speak much, and when they do, they speak in performatives, like the lies they tell to lead the American forces sent against them into a trap in the desert and the pleas they make to one another for sexual gratification (like Burroughs's original fantasy letters to Ginsberg). The Wild Boys do not demonstrate or denounce; they simply seduce and destroy, leaving others to explain their work. This is consistent with the imperative to forget rather than to consolidate power. Even their methods are parodies of representation, based as they are on Burroughs's viral theories of language: they kill by spreading "trained killer viruses" (WB 133), literally contagious forms of laughter, sneezing, hiccuping, and coughing

that render their victims helpless and defenseless before the Wild Boys' killer legions. They use the representational structure of the socius against itself by sending out false calls for help to police units and by impersonating the police themselves to undermine their authority; moreover, "fifty boys with portable tape recorders record riots from TV . . . and hit the rush hour in a flying wedge riot recordings on full blast" to produce more riots through playback (WB 139).

The Wild Boys manifest what Deleuze and Guattari would call "becomings-animal" in their escape from the constituted social order. They do not become animals, as if "boys" and "animals" were two states that could be occupied essentially; rather, they deterritorialize, or dismantle their bodies' social representations, by adopting or "reterritorializing" on effective, nonrepresentational animal functions.^[23] They do not imitate animals, but rather they adopt the animals' defense mechanisms. "Each group developed special skills and knowledge until it evolved into humanoid subspecies" (WB 147), like the Warrior Ants, handless boys who screw steel implements into their stumps; cat boys who wear poison-clawed gloves; Snake boys, who handle (and even become) venomous reptiles; and lycanthropic wolf boys. Other boys deterritorialize themselves through technology, attaching themselves to gliders, roller-skates, and other weapons systems in order to battle the state apparatus (WB 147–48, 150–54). In this way, the Wild Boys actively assume the hybrid forms of the gods of the Egyptian book of the dead—hawk-headed Horus, jackal-headed Anubis—and of the glyph-creatures of Maya writing, like Ah Pook the Destroyer, the subject of later Burroughs texts. Burroughs calls these Wild Boys "biologic adaptives" (Burroughs, Port of Saints 101).^[24]

Perhaps the most significant scene in The Wild Boys, from the point of view of subject-group fantasy, comes near the end of the novel, in the "Wild Boys" chapter. This is the description of their reproductive technique, by means of which they increase their numbers and also reincarnate any members who have been killed or maimed in combat with counterrevolutionary forces (prefigured in the spirit-film at the end of the "Dead Child" chapter). These offspring are known as Zimbus, and they are created through masturbatory fantasy. This method allows the Wild Boys to escape both the binarism of gendered reproduction (which had previously trapped them in specular opposition to the women they artificially inseminated: WB 154) and the ideology of the nuclear family that constantly reinscribes it. One of these descriptions is worth quoting in its entirety:

A boy with Mongoloid features steps onto the rug playing a flute to the four directions. As he plays phantom figures swirl around him taking shape out of moonlight, campfires and shadows. He kneels in the center of the rug playing his flute faster and faster. The shape of a boy on hands and knees is forming in front of him. He puts down his flute. His hands mold and knead the body in front of him pulling it against him with stroking movements that penetrate the pearly grey shape caressing it inside. The body shudders and quivers against him as he forms the buttocks around his penis stroking silver genitals out of the moonlight grey then pink and finally red the mouth parted in a gasp shuddering genitals out of the moon's haze a pale blond boy spurting thighs and buttocks and young skin. The flute player kneels there arms wrapped tightly around the Zimbu's chest breathing deeply until the Zimbu breathes with his own breathing quivering to the blue tattoo. The attendants step forward and carry the pale blond Zimbu to the blue tent. (WB 160)

This boy's masturbatory fantasy actually creates its own object: another Wild Boy. The Wild Boys as a group, then, are merely revolutionary (that is to say, subject-group) desire made flesh; they appear and exist because they desire and are desired in an affirmative manner that has nothing to do with lack, and the flow of this desire is self-generating (though assembled out of the materials at hand: other Zimbus are constructed by drawing blue mist from the rug" and pulling "blue down from the sky," WB 158).^[25]

The novel concludes with a chapter entitled "The Wild Boys Smile," which is also the last line of the text. In it, an unidentified narrator (perhaps Audrey, who is pronounced dead in the penultimate Penny Arcade Peep Show, or Rogers from "The Chief Smiles") joins the Wild Boys in their struggle for the streets and in their frequent copulations, which serve them also as means of teleportation. The sexual contact between the narrator and the Wild Boy called the Dib forges a link between the radical coalition, which still uses referential language, and the Wild Boys who do not. The Wild Boys'couplings, which also transmit information, are spontaneous and multivalent, carried out with the same level of interest and intensity as their battles. At the conclusion of the chapter, the narrator and his companion, confronted by policemen and photographers at the "time barrier" (WB 181) that separates the Wild Boys' "dead" world from our "live" historical world, escape by throwing a film grenade at them; this grenade, like the novel itself, is meant to blow a hole in the ideological "reality film" that controls social reproduction (as well as the producers) under the existent socius. After it goes off, we are left with the final fading images in the Penny Arcade Peep Show—naked boys fucking, laughing, and gaming—as the Peep Show (and the novel itself) burns out:

The silver screen is exploding in moon craters and boiling silver spots.
"Wild boys very close now."
Darkness falls on the ruined suburbs. A dog barks in the distance.
Dim jerky stars are blowing away across a gleaming empty sky, the wild boys smile . (WB 184)^[26]

Since they must forget power if they are to avoid duplicating it, the Wild Boys cannot smile in triumph over their enemies. Instead they smile in invitation to the reader; such an invitation is precisely what the book of the dead must offer if it is to be a viable subject-group fantasy.

The Wild Boys' threat to capitalist society is immanent within that society in the form of desire that exceeds the available forms of fantasy and so constructs its own forms, its own enabling objects of investment. These forms may resemble myth, but they are, at most, joke myths that mock the very structure of myth, or throwaway myths to be used like condoms as protection against the infection of power, binarism, and hierarchy (apotropaic prophylaxis, if you like):

According to the legend an evil old doctor, who called himself God and us dogs, created the first boy in his adolescent image. The boy peopled the garden with male phantoms that rose from his ejaculations. This angered God, who was getting on in years. He decided it endangered his position as CREATOR . So he crept upon the boy and anesthetized him and made Eve from his rib. Henceforth all creation of beings would process through female channels. But some of Adam's phantoms refused to let God near them under any pretext. After millenia [sic ] these cool remote spirits breathe in the wild boys. (Burroughs, Port of Saints 97)

It is desire that must be policed, controlled, limited to the sterile pornographic simulacra of A. J. and the ruling classes, for when it erupts in fertile ground, as it appears to have done among the young and the dispossessed of the late sixties, it threatens to amplify the antagonisms that already fissure the socius into irreparable cracks. In 1969, Burroughs wrote, "Young people pose the only effective challenge to established authority. . . . The student rebellion is now a worldwide movement. Never before in recorded history has established authority been so basically challenged on a worldwide scale" (Burroughs and Odier 81). The Wild Boys are one form, Burroughs's form, of this desire, and it is either reactionary or foolish to claim, as Kazin does, that "The 'wild boys' who come into the book of that name are not important except as a culmination of the continual fantasy of boys in rainbow-colored jockstraps coldly doffing them and turning their totally impersonal couplings into a piece of American science fiction" (Kazin 268). They are not

important if fantasy itself is unimportant, and if "American science fiction" is incapable of being something other than escapism; but if, as I have argued, fantasy is the catalyst in the constitution of subject-groups, and if science fiction is capable of providing such a fantasy, then the Wild Boys are an important incarnation of Burroughs's Lawrencean "pure present." They are an act of creation through which Burroughs intends to "renew the world," as Kazin would have it. In an interview given shortly after this period, Burroughs said, "Would I consider events similar to the Wild Boys scenario desirable? Yes, desirable to me" (Burroughs, "Rolling Stone Interview" 52).

The Wild Boys, then, is what it claims to be: a book of the dead and hence a powerful fantasy. But because of its relation to the late capitalist socius and the subjectivities in its charge, The Wild Boys was for a moment more than that: it was a subject-group fantasy, a revolutionary fantasy, a "plan for afterliving." As such it employed the "powers of the false" to become, in Ginsberg's words, "an exemplification of the world."^[27] But for Burroughs, as for the radical student movements of the sixties, this "exemplification" was not sufficient; the fantasy he provided did not fuse people into subject-groups that could defeat the groups subjugated to capital. Burroughs's "detailed illustrated blueprints for operations against enemy personnel" (Burroughs, Ah Pook 115) were not carried out. The seventies saw not the total dismantling of worldwide state capitalism, but rather the retreat of the revolutionary forces of the sixties. Burroughs had to spend much of the seventies amplifying his futile Wild-Boy fantasies, expanding his "powers of the false," before he could create more precisely detailed, more profusely illustrated manuals in the form of a subtler, more complete book of the dead: the trilogy composed of Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands, in which the moments of destruction that fill The Wild Boys are balanced by affirmative suggestions for the reorganization of society. The starting point of these books of the dead is the theoretical endpoint of The Wild Boys: "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted" (WB 170). But The Wild Boys remains unique in the purity of its desstructive force.