Rewriting Gods Script Borges Burroughs A

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Rewriting God’s Script

Burroughs, Borges, and the Syntactical Nature of Reality

Exam no.: 119649Student no.: 119041362012

Comparative Literature MA



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Rewriting God’s Script

Burroughs, Borges, and the Syntactical Nature of RealityExam no.: 119649

Student no.: 11904136 Word count: 12000

2012Comparative Literature MA



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The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret ofmagic, is that the world is made of words. And if you

know the words that the world is made of, you can make of

it whatever you wish. - Terence McKenna



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Contents0. Introduction 4I. Kether 10

II. Mayan Echoes 17III. The Invasion 28IV. Conclusion 37

Works cited and bibliography 40



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Introduction

While discussing the topic of this dissertation with my

supervisor, one intriguing coincidence that emerged was that

both William Burroughs and Jorge Luis Borges have surnames

derived from the Germanic word ‘burg’, meaning fortified town.

It is from this root that we derive words like ‘burgher’ and

‘bourgeois’, carrying connotations of the respectably conformist

urban upper-middle classes. This is both fitting and ironic:

fitting, as both emerged from wealthy backgrounds in St. Louis

and Buenos Aires respectively; ironic, as neither could exactly beaccused of bourgeois conventionality. Both were, to borrow a

phrase from American poet Hakim Bey, ‘ontological anarchists’,

not only attacking the excesses of state interference and

dogmatic tyranny but unsettling the very foundations of what is

conventionally perceived as reality. In dissolving the apparent

boundaries between fact and fiction in their writing, both writers

seem to anticipate some the intellectual developments of post-

modernism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, and many of

the critical writings on Burroughs and Borges have attempted to

fit their work into these paradigmatic frameworks. This

dissertation will argue that academics have been somewhat hasty

in allying these two writers with certain intellectual tendencies,

and that the apparent solidity of this alliance is somewhat more

tenuous than it might appear. First of all, there is the question of

how easily writers as radical and non-conformist as Burroughs

and Borges can be placed within any clearly defined academic

logos ; Borges himself dismissed deconstruction as ‘a mistake, a

really pedantic mistake’ (Cortinez 1986: 83). Secondly, and more

specifically relevant to this thesis, the eagerness on the part of

academics to examine the two writers under the lenses of certain

fashionable discourses often serves to sideline the more esoteric,

spiritual, and mystical aspects of the two authors and theirrespective oeuvres. While there has been some excellent



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scholarship on Borges’ relationship to the Kabbalah, Stephen

Soud points out that this often ends up tying the Kabbalah to

deconstruction and post-structuralism, denying or dismissing its

metaphysical dimension. Likewise, contemporary Burroughs

scholars often sideline the mystical and occult aspects of

Burroughs’ writing and thought, these elements not sitting too

comfortably alongside such discourses as revisionist Marxism

(Murphy 1997) or deconstruction (Lydenberg 1987). This

reticence to delve into the weirder aspects of Burroughs’ and

Borges’ respective cosmologies is perhaps unsurprising;

academia, as William Rowlandson writes, ‘treats the shape-

shifting and ill-defined landscape of mysticism and mystical texts

with reservation’ (forthcoming). I would suggest that this

reservation goes beyond the need for academic distance and into

an unjustified silence that leaves certain fascinating trails

unexplored in the scholarship around these two writers.

This thesis will explore some of these trails, using the

Kabbalah as a launching point from which to navigate the

Burroughsian and Borgesian notions of reality as fiction, or ‘thesyntactical nature of reality’ as McKenna phrases it in the quote

above. Borges once said that what most attracted him to the

K abbalah, apart from his mother’s Jewish ancestry, was the ‘the

idea that the whole world is merely a system of symbols, that the

whole world, including the stars, stood for God’s secret writing’

(Alazraki 1988: 7). While Borges’ interest in the Kabbalah is

well-known and has been the subject of numerous studies (cf

Alazraki; Aizenberg, The Aleph-Weaver ), I have found no direct

evidence to suggest that Burroughs ever took any particular

interest in it. However, Burroughs’ notion of reality as a text or

recording has a strong Kabbalistic flavour, and his familiarity

with both Gnosticism and Aleister Crowley (Roberts 2004: 233)

makes it likely that he was at least acquainted with its principles.

Indeed, Burroughs described himself as a ‘Gnostic, or

Manichean’ in a 1984 interview (Guffey 2006), and his



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preoccupation with alien forces of control keeping humanity in a

prison of ignorance and matter is very much consistent with

Gnosticism. Gnosticism and the Kabbalah have a close

relationship, and it is very likely that Gnostic and Neo-Platonic

influences fed into the development of the Kabbalah in the

Middle Ages (Borges 1988: 58). Borges, however, was (as always)

more equivocal in applying the term ‘gnostic’ to himself; after

initially mishearing Willis Barnstone’s question as being about

agnosticism, Borges humorously deflects the question ‘are you a

gnostic?’ with ‘Ah yes, I may be. Why not be Gnostics today and

agnostics tomorrow? It’s all the same thing’ (Rowlandson,

forthcoming: 5).

Gnosticism shares with the Kabbalah an idealist

scepticism towards perceived reality, and this thesis will explore

these mystical tendencies in relation to Borges and Burroughs

and the notion of reality as text or fictional construct. As

mentioned above, this aspect of their writing has often been

used by academics to illustrate or support certain post-modern,

post-structuralist, or deconstructionist theories; I will put forththe argument that approaching Burroughs and Borges from this

angle is at best a limited perspective, and overlooks key elements

that are ‘generally ignored in deconstructive haste to erase the

logos in the name of its own brand of indeterminacy and

deferral’ (Soud 1995). For instance, Borges is often invoked

alongside Roland Barthes’ declaration of the ‘Death of the

Author’ and Michel Foucault’s subsequent deconstruction of the

concept in ‘What is an Author?’; Borges then becomes a post -

structuralist ally of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida in this oft-

repeated academic narrative. However, if we look a little closer

at Borges’ fiction, we find a number of different explorations of

the concept of the author, many of them entirely contradictory to

Barthes and Foucault’s approach; e.g, in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis

Tertius’, we find out that on the mythical planet of Tlön, ‘it has

been established that all works are the creation of one author,



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who is atemporal and anonymous’ (Borges 1970: 37). This is in

complete opposition to Barthes’ post-Nietzschean erasure of the

authorial logos . As Soud has beautifully illustrated, ‘The Circular

Ruins’ can be persuasively read as a ‘means of sacralizing the

text, of establishing authorial presence in his work’ (1995).

Likewise, in light of Burroughs’ Gnostic leanings, his denial in

Nova Express of any ‘true or real “reality”’ in favour of ‘a more or

less constant scanning pattern’ (2010: 53) is considerably more

complex than a post-modern reading would allow, having more

in common with William James’ radical empiricism, or the

Buddhist scepticism towards any phenomenal experience, than

the diffuse, florid nihilism of the post-modernist.

One important difference between Burroughs and Borges

that deserves to be pointed out is that Borges maintained a

critical distance, a certain level of scepticism towards all systems

of philosophy and spirituality, where Burroughs was always a

magical thinker. ‘In the magical universe,’ Burroughs says, ‘there

are no coincidences and there are no accidents[…] The dogma

of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces,and I think that’s ridiculous[…]’ (Morgan 1992: 235). Psychic

possession, sympathetic magic, and hostile entities were as much

a part of Burroughs’ experience of the world as of his fiction. In

his spare time at college, he studied books on Tibetan occultism

and the work of French master magus Eliphas Levi ( ibid ). The

cut-up technique, introduced to him by artist and fellow occultist

Brion Gysin, was more than an avant-garde literary experiment;

it was a practice of cutting through the text of reality. Burroughs

wrote a cut-up text called ‘Afternoon Ticker Tape’ which

produced the line ‘Come on, Tom, it’s your turn now’; shortly

afterwards, he saw this headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

TOM CREEK OVERFLOWS ITS BANKS (Morgan 1992: 323).

Burroughs felt this was proof of the cut-ups prophetic power: ‘I

tell you, boss, you write it and it happens’ ( ibid ).



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By contrast, Borges remained agnostic throughout his life;

not just towards the existence of God or the supernatural, but

towards all forms of belief or disbelief. He always rejected the

label of mystic, philosopher, or metaphysician, stating his

interest in such ideas was purely for their aesthetic value. As

Rowlandson points out, this divergence between his scepticism

and his artistic and intuitive attraction to mysticism and

esotericism created something of a tension: ‘He would prefer to

call himself a rationalist, a sceptic and a disbeliever – rejecting

the supernatural out of principle – and yet his natural affinities

lie with the non-rational, the mysterious, the poetic and those

fields of experience beyond the confines of materialist

philosophies’ (forthcoming: 27). On Buddhism, he stated

unequivocally, ‘[it] is not a museum piece; it is a path to

salvation’ (Rowlandson, forthcoming: 33). In his later interviews,

he displays a profound sense of wonder at the mysteries of life,

isolating the word ‘maze’ in the English word ‘amazement’ and

relating it to his use of the labyrinth motif in his writing (10).

Initially, this study will compare two condensations of theinfinite (‘El Aleph’ by Borges and ‘The Market’ from Burroughs’

Naked Lunch), gathering the implications of a parodic or satirical

approach to the mystical experience and its depiction in

literature. From there we look at two tales focused on the Mayan

theocracy, ‘The Mayan Caper’ from Burroughs’ Soft Machine , and

‘La escritura del dios’ (‘The God’s Script’) from Borges’ El

Aleph . Burroughs depicts the priesthood as a grotesque

manifestion of the forces of ‘Control’, dismantled through the

manipulation of textual or prerecorded elements that constitute

reality. Borges, by contrast, chooses to use the setting as a

background that loses any relevancy for its first person narrator,

who is granted of a vision of the divinity that leads him to the

‘bliss of understanding’. In the final chapter, I look at the

invasion of reality by fictional or linguistic construct in ‘Tlön,



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Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ from Ficciones and selections from William

Burroughs’ Nova trilogy.

Both Borges and Burroughs, then, displayed an open

interest in and respect for the mystical and esoteric traditions

they encountered, and with this dissertation I intend to explore

these aspects of their writing. I shall attempt to trace a path

through the labyrinth of syntactical universes they constructed,

and in doing so thread a trail that I hope complements those

who have done so before, and those who will do so in future.



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KetherTo see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour. – William Blake, ‘Auguries of

Innocence’

‘THE Aleph’ seems a natural starting point for this thesis,

Borges using the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet to signify

the microcosmic sphere that forms the tale’s centrepiece. I have

named this chapter ‘Kether’, after the first Sefirot of the Tree of

Life from which all the subsequent Sefirah emanate; often

associated with the letter aleph as ‘the source of all articulate

sound’ and ‘the spiritual root of all other letters’ (Alazraki 1988:

50), in its written form, the shape of the letter is said to contain

the letters yod , vau , and daleth , reading as IVD, or yod , the first

letter of the Tetragrammaton (Mathers 1991: 11). Borges

associates aleph with En Soph, ‘the pure and unlimited godhead’

(2000: 132). The Aleph is described as ‘a small iridescent sphere

of almost unbearable brightness[…] probably two or three

centimetres in diameter, but universal space was contained inside

it, with no diminution in size’ (129); likewise, MacGregor

Mathers is quoted as saying of Kether: ‘The limitless ocean of

negative light does not proceed from a centre, for it is centreless,

but it concentrates a centre, which is the number One of themanifested Sephiroth, Kether, the Crown, the First Sephirah’

(Fortune 1998: 37). The ‘limitless ocean of negative light’ is a

Kabbalistic metaphor for the godhead, which concentrates itself

at the point of Kether; similarly, Alazraki makes mention of a

thirteenth century Midrash that ‘refers to God as ha ving

concentrated His Shekhinah , his divine presence, at the place of

Cherubim, as though his whole power were concentrated and

contracted in a single point’ (50). Of aleph , Borges writes that ‘it



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has also been said that its shape is that of a man pointing to the

sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map and

mirror of the higher’ (2000: 132); similarly, Mathers states that

the lowest Sefirot Malkuth, signifying base material reality, ‘is

Kether after another manner’ (1991: 96), recalling too the

Hermetic maxim ‘as above, so below’.

In true Borgesian fashion, this dense, enticing, but rather

maddening jungle of Kabbalistic associations that takes root

from Borges’ simple use of a single Hebrew letter is neatly

disregarded by his narrator in the postscript. The protagonist is

aware of the Kabbalah and its symbolism, but appears

unconcerned with any mystical ambitions of ascending the Tree

of Life in order to achieve union with the divine; instead, he

dismisses the Aleph as a fake, based on the testimony of one

Captain Burton, a 19th century British consul in Brazil, and

concludes by lamenting the fading memory of his unrequited

love Beatriz. As Rowlandson points out, the tale can be read as a

parody of mystical texts (forthcoming: 6). The protagonist (also

called Borges) has a panoptical vision of the same literary type asthe vision of Krishna’s true form shown to Arjuna in the

Bhagavad Gita ; however, the vision leaves ‘Borges’ with nothing

but the revelation of Beatriz’s incestuous relationship with

Daneri and the mystery of the ‘true’ Aleph. But even bearing in

mind the bathos that frames the narrative, the vision of the

Aleph is the only moment when the narrator drops his dry,

ironic mode of discourse; at least in the moment described,

‘Borges’ seems absolutely sincere in his ‘sense of infinite

veneration, infinite pity’ (2000: 131). Here we face a conundrum

that Borges often touched on, the issue of the arbitrariness of

categorization; even if we were to classify ‘The Aleph’ as a

parody of mystical texts, the very nebulous nature of the term

‘mystical’ means it could easily be stretched to accommodate

this. As Alan Watts once said of Zen, ‘once you attain satori,

there’s nothing left to do but have a good laugh’ (Watts 2012);



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given this jovial response reported in some accounts of the

mystical experience, is it necessarily a contradiction for a text to

be sincere as well as parodic in its treatment of mysticism?

We shall leave that particular labyrinth aside for the time

being, and return to the question of the Kabbalah and the

‘syntactical nature of reality’. ‘Borges’, Alazraki writes, ‘seems to

be repeating Moses Cordovero’s pantheistic formula: Where you

stand, there stand all the worlds’ (1988: 50). Borges’ practical

application of this formula is, at least from where we stand,

purely literary. ‘The Aleph’ can be read as parodying or

pasticheing such literary encapsulations of the cosmos as Joyce’s

Ulysses , Dante’s The Divine Comedy , or Walt Whitman’s Leaves of

Grass in the form of the self-important Daneri and his baroque,

effusive poetic epic, The Earth . ‘Daneri’ is a pun on Dante

Aligheri, and the connotations of Beatriz are self-evident

(Núñez-Faraco 1997: 613). A dialectic is constructed within the

story, pitting Daneri’s florid verse against the terse prose of

Borges-‘Borges’; in condensing a glimpse of infinity into a

couple of pages, Borges is constructing a literary work analogousto the Aleph itself, consistent with the Kabbalistic sense of the

symmetry between microcosm and macrocosm. Many critics

have noted Borges is also satirizing his own early literary output

in his sardonic treatment of Daneri (ibid : 626); Alazraki quotes

Borges as stating that he

began writing in a very self-conscious, baroque style. It wasprobably due to youthful timidity. The young often suspect

that their plots and poems aren’t very interesting, so they tryto conceal them or elaborate on them by other means. (1988:78-79)

In his engagement with the Kabbalah, Borges found a practical

metaphysics that was perfectly symmetrical with his own literary

technique of depicting inconceivable cosmic visions in

condensed, laconic prose. In ‘The Aleph’ and ‘The God’s Script’,

part of this technique involves what Alazraki calls ‘chaotic

enumeration’ (1988: 49). ‘What I saw was simultaneous ,’ the

narrator stresses to remind us, ‘what I shall write is successive ,



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because language is successive. Something of it, though, I will

capture’ (Borges 2000: 129). The enumeration that follows is

therefore suggestive of the infinite in the same way that the letter

aleph is suggestive of all other letters and sounds. Borges uses

rapid, disconcerting juxtaposition of images to depict the Aleph:

‘a silvery spider- web at the centre of a black pyramid’ (130) uses

the sharp contrast of colour (‘silvery’ against ‘black’) and

proportions (the spider-web against the immensity of the

pyramid); ‘a broken labyrinth (it was London)’ ( ibid ) immediately

sets up a strong image in the reader’s mind which has to be

compromised and adjusted with the revelation that the ‘broken

labyrinth’ is London; the grandiosity of ‘tigers, pistons, bisons,

tides, and armies’ and ‘all the ants on earth’ leads up to the

disconcertingly personal and intimate vision of obscene love

notes sent by Beatriz to Daneri.

Burroughs uses a similar technique in Naked Lunch , in the

description of Interzone at the beginning of ‘The Market’. Much

of this section’s material comes from The Yage Letters , a record of

Burroughs experiments with South American psychoactive brewyage or ayahuasca; Burroughs was one of the first whites to

explore such practices. Interzone is, as its name implies, a liminal

point of connection; it simultaneously cements and transcends

such apparent dichotomies as ancient and modern, utopia and

dystopia, nature and civilisation. The city is polyglot, infinitely

multi-racial, and geographically impossible; ‘The Composite City

where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market’

(1993: 91). Here we have

Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling inEtruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers ofsouped-up Harmaline, junk reduced to pure habit offeringprecarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah,

Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World WarIII, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit,investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoidchess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down inhebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations ofthe spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials ofunconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has



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perfected operation Bangutot, the lung erection that stranglesa sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxingmachines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories testedon the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for rawmaterials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of

diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowlyto the surface and the human host, maladies of the oceanfloor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory andatomic war... A place where the unknown past and theemergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larvalentities waiting for a Live One... (1993: 93)

Much like Borges in ‘The Aleph’, Burroughs uses a jarringly

discordant barrage of sensory information to depict the

hallucinogenic, attractively corrupt world of Interzone. The

mention of Etruscan is immediately followed by ‘addicts of

drugs not yet synthesized’, a collision of the ‘unknown past and

the emergent future’. Like in ‘The Aleph’, Burroughs is depicting

a mystical experience with a sordid and satirical dimension,

drawing on his own yage hallucinations to weave a psychedelic

tapestry with an air of Swiftian lunacy. For Timothy S Murphy,

Interzone represents ‘a biologically and ontologically anarchistic

vision of society’ that ‘anticipates some of the insights into therevolutionary possibilities of the body without organs that

Deleuze and Guattari will draw from the world-historical visions

of schizophrenics in Anti-Oedipus’ (99). However, Murphy

concludes that ‘Burroughs is unable to offer any real solutions to

the problem of radical organization’ ( ibid ); by the same logic, one

could criticize a dream for failing to offer any real solutions to

the problem of how to fix household appliances. ‘The Market’,

written at least in part under the influence of yage, is a piece of

visionary art, not a political manifesto; Murphy’s critique serves

to demonstrate how trying to fit mercurial and nonconformist

writers like Burroughs or Borges into conventional academic

discourses such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, or

post-structuralism can produce limited results. Applying a

similarly instrumentalist attitude towards Buddhism and other

practices of Eastern spirituality, at least as practiced in the



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Western world, Murphy suggests that the lack of attention

Burroughs paid in his writing to the Tibetan Bardo Thodol as

compared to other ‘Books of the Dead’ can be attributed to ‘its

popularity among those members of the Anglo-European

subculture who adopted versions of Zen Buddhist philosophy

and therefore tended to refrain from active dissent’ (1997: 154).

However, this speculation is not supported by the evidence; as

shown by Katherine Streip, Burroughs studied Tibetan

Buddhism and, finding it ‘extremely interesting’, advised Jack

Kerouac to ‘Dig it if you have not done so’, but warned that

‘Yoga is no solution for a Westerner, and I disappro ve of all

practice of neo-Buddhism’ (Streip 2010: 2). Burroughs

concluded, albeit tentatively and with humility, that Buddhism

is not, for the West, An Answer, not A Solution. We mustlearn by acting, experiencing, and living; that is, above all, byLove and by Suffering. […]Buddhism frequently amounts toa form of psychic junk. ( ibid )

The line Burroughs took, if we were accept Murphy’s conjecture,

would be very similar to the one taken by Marxist-Lacanian

philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who frequently attacks Buddhism

because it distracts attention from the Marxist cause ( Žižek

2001); in actuality, however, his view was closer to that of Carl

Gustav Jung, who warned against Westerners adopting practices

from Asia for fear of psycho-spiritual peril, rather than partisan

politics (see Schlamm 1998; 2009).

Both the Aleph and Interzone are literary depictions of

mystical experience, Burroughs drawing on his actual yage

experiments for his depiction of the infinite city ‘ where all

human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market’. Both

utilise a similar literary technique of enumeration to bombard

the reader with a rapid-fire juxtaposition of images. Perhaps

most interestingly, both display an irreverent and ironic attitude

to the mystical experience, Borges drawing on his own

experiences of the ‘timeless’ and fascination with the infinite,

and Burroughs directly reproducing material from his accounts

of yage and drawing on his experience of Tangiers. Borges uses



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this to finish with a note of scepticism, dismissing the Aleph as

false, while Burroughs depicts a swirling, labyrinthine dissonance

of a city that will serve only to mislead those who are seeking a

purely political depiction of utopia.



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II

Mayan Echoes

I T was while living in Mexico that Burroughs started researching

the Mayan culture. ‘In contrast to Olson and Ginsberg, writes

David Ayers, ‘Burroughs[…] thought that he had found in

Mayan society one of the earliest models of control in human

history’ (Control 226). Burroughs’ portrayal of Mayan society

was coloured by his mythology of ‘Control’, and in the chapter

of The Soft Machine entitled ‘The Mayan Caper’, he offers a

grotesque and fantastic vision of the Mayan ‘control system’. By

contrast, Borges offers a more restrained vision, but the two

texts display a number of illuminating connections and contrasts

that shed light on Burroughs’ and Borges’ differing approaches

to the syntactical nature of reality.

‘The Mayan Caper’ begins in the style of a newspaper report. The protagonist, who has just returned from an expedition

through time, begins by explaining the methods used. The cut-

up and fold-in techniques are described as technologies of actual

time-travel: ‘Now when I fold in today’s paper with yesterday’s

paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I

am literally moving back to the time when I read yesterday’s

paper, that is traveling back in time to yesterday’ (1995: 50). The

experimentation continues with film material, with the

protagonist learning to ‘talk and think backward on all levels’

(50) by reversing sound and image tracks of routine activities,

including orgasm: ‘It was explained to me that I must put aside

all sexual prudery and reticence, that sex was perhaps the

heaviest anchor holding one in present time’ (50). The

protagonist goes on to elaborate on the Mayan calendar, ‘some

observations’ of which are ‘essential to understanding this



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report’. The Mayan calendar is a technology of control: ‘The

absolute power of the priests, who formed about two percent of

the population, depended on their control of this calendar’ (51).

The priests are horrific, shapeshifting entities consisting of

nothing but prerecorded film, conducting brutal and sadistic

rites of control over the Mayan populace. Their punishments

include ‘Death In The Ovens’, echoing Nazi atrocities, and

‘Death In Centipede’, the victims of which are eaten alive by

giant centipedes which emerge from the ashes of the oven

victims. This motif first appears in Queer , and carries through to

Naked Lunch in the form of the Senders.1

Rather than focusing on speculations around the concluding

date of this calendar, as did fellow writer and yage psychonaut

Terence McKenna, whose theories have become increasingly

conspicuous in popular culture in the years leading up to this

hypothesised eschaton, Burroughs treats the calendar as simply

an arbitrary control system that needs to eliminated; it is a fiction

imposed upon daily life in the same way the game is imposed in

Borges’ ‘The Lottery in Babylon’. However, what Burroughs andMcKenna share is an enthusiasm for the liberatory potential of

apocalyptic upheaval. McKenna’s ‘Timewave Zero’ theory, a

complex and highly controversial teleological analysis of history

that developed out of McKenna and his brother’s experiments

with psychedelics, the I Ching, and mathematics, posits a

dialectical struggle between ‘Habit’ and ‘Novelty’; the former

‘entropic, repetitious, conservative’, the latter ‘creative,

disjunctive, progressive’ (Horgan 2012: no page numbers given).

McKenna, as presumably would Burroughs, favours Novelty:

‘Anything which destroyed novelty would be bad, and anything

which helped build it up and advance it would be good’ (2012).

McKenna’s calculations appear to show a drastic spike in

Novelty occurring on December 21, 2012, the date on which the

1

For a detailed look at this and Burroughs’ engagement with Mayan archaeology in general , see Paul H. Wild, ‘William S. Burroughs and the Mayan gods of death: the uses of archaeology’. 2008, College Literature ,35:1: West Chester University.



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Mayan long-count calendar stops. When asked what he believed

would happen on this date, McKenna replied:

“If you really understand what I’m saying,” he replied, “you would understand it can’t be said. It’s a prediction of an

unpredictable event.” The event will be “some enormouslyreality-rearranging thing.” Scientists will invent a trulyintelligent computer, or a time-travel machine. Perhaps we

will be visited by an alien spaceship, or an asteroid. “I don’tknow if it’s built into the laws of spacetime, or it’s generatedout of human inventiveness, or whether it’s a mile and a half

wide and arrives unexpectedly in the center of North America.” (2012 )

‘Novelty’, in McKenna’s philosophy, is roughly equated with

‘good’; nonetheless, this predicted spike in novelty could be a

cataclysmic event with the power to destroy life as we know it.Like Burroughs, McKenna is willing to endure the apocalypse in

order to combat the forces of sterility and regression2. Compare

McKenna's speculations with Burroughs' catastrophic

denouement of 'The Mayan Caper':

'Cut word lines-Cut music lines-Smash the control images-Smash the control machines-Burn the books-Kill the priests-Kill!-Kill!-Kill!'Inexorably as the machine had controlled thought feeling andsensory impressions of the workers, the machine now gavethe order to dismantle itself and kill the priests – I had thesatisfaction of seeing the overseer pegged out in the field, hisintestines perforated with hot planting sticks and crammed

with corn – I broke out my camera gun and rushed thetemple – This weapon takes and vibrates image to radio static

– You see the priests were nothing but word and image, an oldfilm rolling on and on with dead actors – Priests and templeguards went up in silver smoke as I blasted my way into thecontrol room and burned the codices – Earthquake tremorsunder my feet I got out of there fact, blocks of limestoneraining all around me – A great weight fell from the sky,

2 McKenna invokes Borges later in the same interview. When discussing the synchronicity between the

calculations of his Timewave Zero software, the Mayan long-count calendar, and certain astronomicaltheories relating to the precession of the equinox, he asks rhetorically: ‘“ What does all this mean?”McKenna leaned toward me, his eyes slitted and his teeth bared. “It means we are trapped in software

written by the ghost of Jorge Luis Borges!” He threw his head back and cackled’ (Horgan 2012). McKenna was a keen reader of Borges, likening the secret of ‘The Sect of the Phoenix’ to ‘The Aleph: ‘Borges neverexplicitly says what the Secret is, but if one knows his other story, The Aleph, one can put these two

together and realize that the Aleph is the experience of the Secret of the Cult of the Phoenix’ (Rowlandson2012: 46).



21

winds of the earth whipping palm trees to the ground – Tidal waves rolled over the Mayan control calendar. (1995: 57)

What Burroughs also shares with McKenna is a sense of the

‘syntactical nature of reality’, that ‘if you know the words the

world is made of, you can make of it what you wish’ (McKenna2010). The protagonist, armed with the syntactical technologies

available to him, is able to deconstruct and subvert the

paradigms of control, the machine itself engineering its own

destruction, and revealing the agents of repression to be fictions,

literally ‘an old film rolling on and on’ that dissolves in ‘silver

smoke’, in Burroughs’ familiar cinematic terminology. Once the

protagonist, who is clearly relishing the scenes of chaos

unfolding around him, burns the codices, the revolution

becomes ontological: nature itself assures the destruction of the

Mayan hierarchy, as the earth shakes, a ‘great weight’ falls from

the sky, and hurricanes and tidal waves ‘roll over the Mayan

control calendar’. Marxist, post-structuralist, and

deconstructionist critics of Burroughs often face difficulty in

grasping the fact that he is an ontological revolutionary, a Gnostic,

a Manichaean; therefore, his programs for revolutionary

transformation involve the radical alteration of consciousness

leading to a transformation of reality at a basic ontological level,

going indefinitely further than materialist revolutionaries and

their programs and strategies for ‘the practice of social

transformation ’ (Murphy 1997: 154). Burroughs elaborates on

these revolutionary technologies:

It’s more of a cultural takeover, a way of altering theconsciousness of people rather than a way of directlyobtaining political control… simply by the use of taperecorders. As soon as you start recording situations andplaying them back on the street you are creating a new reality.

When you play back a street recording, people think they’rehearing real sounds and they’re not. You’re tampering withtheir actual reality. (Miles 1992: 156)

Burroughs real-world experimentation in tampering with the

prerecording included an attack on the Scientology Centre in

1972 (156). After a brief period of following Scientology,Burroughs decided that it was ‘just another one of those control-



22

addict trips’ (155) and embarked on a campaign of taping and

photography outside the Centre at 37 Fitzroy Street in central

London. After a couple of months, the Centre moved to

Tottenham Court Road. Key to understanding Burroughs

revolutionary program on its own terms is the sense of the

syntactical or fictional nature of reality. This means that the

agents of control are themselves fictions, and this realization

nullifies their power: ‘when you erase your involuntary

subservience to authority,’ Burroughs is quoted as saying, ‘the

extreme manifestations lose their power to affect you’ (154).

A rather different treatment of the Mayan priesthood is to be

found in ‘The God’s Script’. The story’s beginning is visceral and

oppressive: ‘The cell is deep and made of stone’, an ‘almost

perfect hemisphere’, the floor ‘something less than a great circle,

and this somehow deepens the sense of oppression and vastness’

(2000: 89). The juxtaposition of ‘oppression and vastness’ is

interesting; despite being a prison cell, its oppressiveness seems

to invoke a kenophobic, rather than claustrophobic, response.

Words like ‘deep’ and ‘vastness’ conjure abyssal images hintingat an abstract horror of the infinite that is a recurring feature of

Borges’ work, making the ecstatic liberation at the tale’s climax

all the more potent by contrast. Alazraki makes a connection

between the prison cell and the body, claiming that ‘it goes

without saying that for the mystic the body is a dark prison that

he strives to transcend’ (1988: 45); Alazraki’s rather presumptive

attitude towards the nebulous term ‘mystic’ aside, the correlation

of the body and the cell is important, intersecting with the

Gnostic theme that runs through both Borges’ and Burroughs’

oeuvre. Borges’ depiction of his Mayan priest is considerably

more sympathetic than the inhuman, sadistic polymorphs of

Burroughs’ tale; the priest, although tough and brutal as shown

by his reminiscing over having ‘opened the breast of victims’

with ‘the deep flint blade’ (ibid), is possessed of an equally strong

sense of integrity and honour, refusing to disclose to his captors



23

the site of a sacred treasure. The priest, like many of Borges’

knife-fighters, gauchos, nomads, and soldiers, is rugged and

accustomed to violence and hardship, but depicted with a strong

sense of moral value. The use of the word ‘deep’ to describe

both the blade and the prison implies an equivalency; the prison

cell, cleaved neatly in half, can be seen as tearing open the

priest’s receptivity to his god, just as his knife cleaved through

his victim’s hearts.

In order to occupy himself during his captivity, the priest

engages in a very Borgesian pastime: he attempts to recall

everything he knows.

I squandered entire nights in remembering the order and thenumber of certain stone serpents, or the shape of a medicinaltree. Thus did I conquer the years, thus did I gradually cometo possess those things I no longer possessed. (90)

This struggle to ‘possess those things I no longer possessed’ is a

kind of prelude, a necessary first step in the priest’s journey

towards the infinite. This striving to recall memories in precise

detail bears fruit: ‘One night I sensed that a precise recollection

was upon me; before the traveller sees the ocean, he feels a

stirring in his blood’ (ibid). The recollection is that of a legend:

On the first day of creation, foreseeing that at the end of timemany disasters and calamities would befall, the god had

written a magical phrase, capable of warding off those evils.He wrote it in such a way that it would pass down to thefarthest generations, and remain untouched by fate. No oneknows where he wrote it, or with what letters, but we doknow that it endures, a secret text, and that one of the electshall read it. I reflected that we were, as always, at the end of time ,and that it would be my fate, as the last priest of the god, tobe afforded the privilege of intuiting those words. ( ibid ;emphasis added)

His reflection is all the more astonishing for the casual manner

in which it is thrown at the reader; even before his epiphanic

revelation of the infinite, the priest intuits a sense of the non-

linearity of time that allows him see the ‘end of time’ as being

ever-present. The priest lives, in the words of Spinoza, sub specie

aeternitatis , under the aspect of eternity.



24

The priest speculates on the textual nature of reality as

he ponders where Qaholom’s inscription could be:

A mountain might be the word of the god, or a river or theempire or the arrangement of the stars. And yet, in the course

of centuries mountains are levelled and the path of a river ismany times diverted, and empires know mutability and ruin,and the design of the stars is altered[…] Perhaps the spell was

written upon my very face, perhaps I myself was the object ofmy search. (90-91)

The priest then recalls that one of the names of his god is

‘jaguar’ or ‘tigre’ . He intuits that the god’s script is written in the

markings of the jaguar in the other part of the prison, and

devotes himself to memorizing the patterns in the portions of

the day when the animal is visible from his cell. The process ofdeciphering is arduous, and he begins to ponder over the notion

of what phrase could form in an absolute mind:

No word uttered by a god could be less than the universe, orbriefer than the sum of all time. The ambitions and povertyof human words – all, world, universe – are but shadows orsimulacra of that Word which is the equivalent of a languageand all that can be comprehended within a language. (92)

For the Kabbalists, the whole of manifestation is constructed

from multiple permutations of the 22 letters of the Hebrewalphabet. Alazraki quotes the Sefer Yetsirah (Book of Creation) as

stating: ‘Twenty -two letter elements: He outlined them, hewed

them out, weighed them, combined them, and exchanged them,

and through them created the soul of all creation and everything

else that was ever created’ (1988: 45). The power of these

building blocks is concentrated in the Torah; for some

Kabbalists, the letters of the Torah could be arranged into divine

names of power that would allow one to manipulate the laws of

nature. ‘It is well known,’ writes Scholem, ‘that in the Hellenistic

period and later the Torah was put to magical use both by Jews

and non-Jews: divine names gleaned from the Torah were used

for the purposes of incantation’ (1965: 37-38). Even more

relevant to our story is a pre-Kabbalistic midrash which offers

the following commentary on Job 28:13:

No man knoweth its order. The various sections of the Torah were not given in their correct order. For if they had been



25

given in their correct order, anyone who read them be able to wake the dead and perform miracles. For this reason thecorrect order and arrangement of the Torah were hidden andare known only to the Holy One, blessed be He, of whom itis said (Isa. 44:7): “And who, as I, shall call, and shall declare

it, and set it in order for me”. (37) Both Burroughs and Borges share this Kabbalistic theme of the

textual nature of reality, and the rearranging and deciphering of

the text in order to effect changes in reality in accordance with

will. Unlike Burroughs, however, who conducted real-life occult

experiments in re-ordering the textual elements of reality, Borges

(as far as we know) never attempted to apply this principle

outside of his stories - if, indeed, such a delineation between

‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ is permissible in relation to these two

writers. This contrast is reflected in a comparison between ‘The

God’s Script’ and ‘The Mayan Caper’; as mentioned previously,

the narrator of ‘The Mayan Caper’ engineers the destruction of

the Mayan control system, while Tzinacan, who has the power to

reverse a similar apocalypse, refrains from doing so.

Tzinacan dreams of waking from one dream to another as

his cell is filling up with sand, and a feeling of despairoverwhelms him:

Someone said to me: You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity,which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to takeis endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened. (2000: 92)

When he wakes from this nightmare, he finally surrenders; as he

accepts his fate as a prisoner, the cell no longer seems like a

prison. ‘I blessed its dampness, I blessed its tiger, I blessed its

high opening and the light, I blessed my old and aching body, I

blessed the darkness and the stone’ ( ibid ). At the point of his

surrender, the writing of Qaholom is revealed to him, and he

experiences ‘union with the deity, union with the universe’ ( ibid ).

Alazraki connects the priest’s vision of ‘a Wheel of enormous

height, which was not before my eyes, or behind them, but

everywhere at once’ (Borges 2000: 93) with the Hindu symbol of

the Bhavacakra (Wheel of Life), ‘which represents the differentspheres of existence where the infinite concatenation of causes



26

and effects operates’ (Alazraki 1988: 46). In III:16 of the

Bhagavad-Gita , we read: ‘He who does not cause to turn here on

earth/The wheel thus set in motion,/Lives, Son of Prthā

(Arjuna),/malicious, sense-delighted, and in vain’ (Sargeant 1984:

173). In other words, he who is attached to the material world

and its pleasures does not assist the turning of the infinite wheel

of existence; it is only after Tzinacan experiences a momentary

horror of the infinite, in his dream of the grains of sand, that he

surrenders completely to his fate, that the words’ true meaning is

revealed to him. He abandons every attachment to the material

world, including any desire to free himself from his prison or to

decipher the script of the deity, and it is only at this moment of

total surrender that the epiphanic vision of the wheel is granted

to him. As Alazraki points out, this motif of the wheel is

elaborated in Svetasvatara Upanishad:

Those who have followed the method of meditationHave seen the god’s own power, hidden by his own strands – One, who rules over those causesFrom ‘time’ to ‘self’.

As a wheel with one rim, three tyres, and sixteen ends,Half a hundred spokes, twenty counter-spokes,Six eights […] (I:3-I:4)

As we can see, after following his own ‘method of meditation’,

Tzinacan has been given a revelation of the divine Wheel. His

meditations involve the intense study and concentration on the

jaguar’s markings, calling into question Alazraki’s comment that

‘Tzinacan’s vision is not the result of mystical meditations and

ecstasy’ (48); this feeds into the perennial debate in the study of

mysticism on the difference between a ‘passive’ and ‘active’

mystical experience. This debate is far outside the scope of this

dissertation, but it does serve to highlight the question of

whether such a clear delineation can be made between a mystical

experience obtained through ‘mystical meditations and ecstasy’

and one received as ‘a kind of miraculous apparition’ ( ibid ),

especially when such meditations are clearly present in the text.

As in the vision of the Aleph, Tzinacan is able to see the



27

universe in this wheel, and it is here that the influence of Hindu

scriptures on Borges becomes most apparent:

Interlinked, all things that were, are, and shall be formed it,and I was one of the fibres of that total fabric and Pedro de

Alvarado who tortured me was another. There lay revealedthe causes and the effects and it sufficed to me to see that

Wheel in order to understand it all, without end. O bliss ofunderstanding, greater than the bliss of imagining or feeling. Isaw the universe and I saw the infinite designs of theuniverse. I saw the origins narrated in the Book of theCommon. I saw the mountains that rose out of the water, Isaw the first men of wood, the cisterns that turned against themen, the dogs that ravaged their face. I saw infinite processesthat formed one single felicity and, understanding it all, I wasable also to under the script of the tiger. (1970: 206-207)

Unlike the Aleph, which for all its wonder does not leave its viewers much the wiser for seeing it, the infinite vision

bequeathed to Tzinacan has a profound effect on his

consciousness; he achieves enlightenment, the ‘bliss of

understanding, greater than the bliss of imagining or feeling’.

Borges’ technique of ‘chaotic enumeration’ is reminiscent of the

vision of Krishna seen by Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita :

I see the gods, O God, in Thy body, And all kinds of beings assembled;Lord Brahma on his lotus seat

And all the seers and divine serpents; (XI: 15)

With infinite power, without beginning, middle or end, With innumerable arms, moon and sun eyed,I see Thee, with Thy blazing, oblation-eating mouth,Burning all this universe with Thine own radiance. (XI: 19)

Like Arjuna, Tzinacan achieves blissful liberation after his vision.

Even though he has learnt the god’s script, ‘a formula of

fourteen random words’ (Borges 1970: 207) that offer him total

control over the manifested universe, he chooses to remain

inactive in his prison cell; ‘I know I shall never say those words,

because I no longer remember Tzinacan’ (207). Tzinacan’s tale

ends with the transcendence of desire and the extinguishing of

individuality, a process very similar to Hindu and Buddhist

descriptions of the experience of enlightenment. Given Borges’

sympathies with Buddhism, and Burroughs’ wariness of Westerners adopting the practice (discussed above), this is an



28

interesting point of contrast between the two writers; in this

instance, Burroughs evidently favours the path of action, Borges

the path of renunciation.

Both texts deal with the Mayan priesthood and a divine,magical text that offers absolute control over reality. Like

Burroughs’ protagonist, Tzinacan must undergo a period of

torment and captivity in order to obtain access to this text. Both

texts are eschatological, and both deal with the downfall of the

Mayan priesthood; for Burroughs, this downfall provides the

climax of his tale, for Borges, the analepsis. In Bu rroughs’ text,

the Mayan priesthood forms the mindless, prerecorded nexus of

Control; in Borges’, they are the subjugated recipients, theircivilisation already devastated by the Spanish. Once Burroughs’

protagonist obtains the means of control, an revolution takes

place, and nature itself assures the destruction of the civilisation

and its hierarchical order; however, when Borges’ protagonist

discovers the script of the god in the stripes of the jaguar, he

abstains from any attempt to reformulate reality, such desires

having dissolved along with his identity, his entire being purified

in the blazing streams of the infinite.



29

III The Invasion

In ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Borges depicts an unsettling

invasion of the real world by a masterfully constructed fiction;

the invasion does not involve any armies, but language, culture,

and metaphysics. Likewise, throughout his work Burroughs

explores the invasive and parasitic power of the word,

particularly in Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy. As we have

seen, to tamper with these symbolic constructs is, in a syntactical

reality, to tamper with reality itself. The notion of conspiracy is

important, as for both writers it is the means by which the

fiction that is reality is controlled and rearranged. The esoteric

society of Orbis Tertius breaks down the boundaries between

our world and the world of Tlön so thoroughly that even the

laws of nature seem to shift in accordance; meanwhile, in the

fictions of Burroughs, the Manichaean struggle between the

Nova Police and the Nova Mob goes on behind the scenes of

the reality studio.

‘Tlön, Uqbar’ is, in part, a parody of esoteric societies;

direct mention is made of Hermeticism and the Kabbalah, and

one of the tlönistas is named as Johannes Valentinus Andreä.

Andreä was the author of The Chemical Wedding of Christiani

Rozenkreutz in 1616, a tale of a knight who visits a castle and

experiences a number of wondrous events and chivalric

initiations, heavily allegorical and laden with alchemical and

Hermetic symbolism (Yates 2002: 82-96). This, along with two

manifestos, promulgated the legend of the Rosicrucians, a

fraternal order of esoteric philanthropists formed in the Middle

Ages but only revealing themselves in the comparatively tolerant

era of the 17th century. This story is nearly universally accepted



30

to be fictitious, but the legend that Andreä helped to create

generated enough excitement in Europe to lead to the founding

of various actual Rosicrucian orders. Thus, a fictional secret

society became real, and, having captivated the imagination of

Borges, folds back into fiction in ‘Tlön, Uqbar’.

The tale begins with ‘the conjunction of a mirror and an

encyclopedia’ (Borges 1970: 27). The encyclopedia is

representative of categorisation and taxonomy, pursuits which

are essentially arbitrary, as Borges comically illustrates in ‘The

Analytical Language of John Wilkins’ using a fictitious Chinese

encyclopedia (1999: 231). It is explained later in the story that

the nations of Tlön are ‘congenitally idealist’ (1970: 32), and as

such would agree with Borges when he says, ‘there is no

classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative.

The reason is quite simple: we do not know what the universe is’

(1999: 231). The mirror is suggestive of the alternate universe of

Tlön, where all metaphysics, and as we later find out, even

physics is dominated by idealism. The narrator explains that he

was engaged in a conversation with Bioy Casares, about a novel‘whose narrator would omit or disfigure facts and indulge in

various contradictions which would permit a few readers – very

few readers – to perceive an atrocious or banal reality’ (1970:

27). Previously unseen dimensions emerge in this detail when

read alongside the conclusion to ‘Avatars of the Tortoise’:

Art – always – requires visible unrealities. […] Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world.

Let us do what no idealist had done: seek unrealities whichconfirm that nature. […] We (the undivided divinityoperating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamtit as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durablein time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous andeternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false. (1999:242).

The conversation between Casares and the narrator takes on a

Gnostic quality in light of the above passage. First of all, we

have the explicit equation of art and reality; life as fiction, or

artifice. The unreliable narrator of the discussed novel can be



31

interpreted as a kind of demiurge, concealing ‘an atrocious or

banal reality’ from the witnesses of his projection. Tlön is one of

those ‘crevices of unreason which tell us it is false’; originally

dreamed by Hermetic idealists in its ur form of Uqbar, it

insidiously glides into the real world in order to demonstrate the

falsity of this world. Ironically, the reaction of the world is the

opposite; society accepts the reality of Tlön, in the same way that

it accepted the equally fantastic narratives of Nazism,

Communism, and anti-Semitism.

Didier T Jaèn observes that the tale’s three sections (I, II,

and Postscript) correspond to Uqbar, Tlön, and Orbis Tertius

respectively (1984: 28). Uqbar functions as the gateway through

which Tlön can enter the world: Casares and the narrator

discover in Volume XLVI of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia that

‘the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and

legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary

regions of Mlejnas and Tlön’ (Borges 1970: 29). Tlön is

therefore a fiction within a fiction within the fiction that is

Borges’ tale; this vertiginous telescoping of the narrative servesto prepare the reader for the invasion that takes place in the

postscript. Not only is the heresiarch of Uqbar who condemns

mirrors and copulation explicitly described as Gnostic, as Jaèn

points out, the location of Uqbar is implied to be in the vicinity

of Persia, the region from which the Manichaen heresy

emanated (1984: 29). It is in section II that we are introduced,

through ‘some limited and waning memory’, to Herbert Ashe.

Ashe is an Englishman described in ironic terms that serve to

both emulate and parody the stereotypical manners of his class.

‘In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many

Englishmen’ (30); perhaps this unreality is what made him join

the project of the tlönistas . The nature of this unreality seems to

be rather banal, and the narrator’s irony is a transparent screen

behind which the heaviness of his boredom is almost tangible.

He explains that ‘He [Ashe] and my father entered into one of



32

those close (the adjective is excessive) English friendships that

begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with

dialogue’ (30); the ironic note of understatement exactly parallels

the emotional coolness that the narrator describes. The narrator

discovers a package sent to Ashe containing A First Encyclopaedia

of Tlön. Vol XI. Hlaer to Jangr , and it is from this tome that we

learn something of the planet’s languages and metaphysics, the

narrator hinting at ‘transparent tigers and towers of blood’ (32)

but choosing not to focus on such details. As pure idealists, the

inhabitants of Tlön have no nouns in their languages, as for

them the world ‘is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a

heterogenous series of independent acts’ (32). Materialism

therefore constitutes a logical paradox for the Tlönian mind. As

such, many of the religious and philosophical doctrines have a

Gnostic flavour to them; however, a peculiar side-effect of this

ubiquitous idealism is that metaphysics is judged a branch of

fantastic literature. Peculiarly, no mention is made of any

spiritual techniques or meditations, so their theological and

philosophical debates seem to be primarily intellectual andconjectural, rather than arising from any personal experience or

gnosis . Even the individual who first proposes non-dualism is

described as a ‘thinker’ (36), rather than a holy man or saint. The

crux of his message, however conjectural, is fundamentally the

same as that communicated by mystics of both East and West:

‘This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject,

that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that

these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity’ (36).

Compare this with Scholem’s description of Kabbalistic

doctrine: ‘Creation mirrors the inner movement of the divine

life… It is nothing but an external development of those forces

which are active and alive in God Himself… The life of the

Creator pulsates in that of his creatures’ (Alazraki 1988: 18).

Whether affirmed through ‘happy conjecture’ or confirmed

through meditation and practice, the unnamed Tlönian thinker



33

expresses his findings in terms very close to those of the

Kabbalists, Buddhists, and Hindu monists. One school of Tlön

believes that ‘the history of the universe – and in it our lives and

the most tenuous detail of our lives – is the scripture produced

by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon’

(1970: 35). Another, ‘that the universe is comparable to those

cryptographs where not all the symbols are valid and that only

what happens every three hundred night is true’ ( ibid ); a mixture

of Kabbalistic and Gnostic themes is present in both.

It is when discussing the hrönir that the already

traumatized foundations of reality as we know it begin to slide.

‘Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence

reality,’ the narrator casually mentions as he begins to explain the

phenomenon of the hrön, an ideal object manifested through

thought. It seems that intentional creation of hrön dates back

only a century from Tlön’s ‘present’, and that ‘expectation and

anxiety can be inhibitory’ (38). When Tlönian artefacts begin to

appear in the narrator’s world, as described in the Postscript, it is

implied that they, too, are hrönir : as it is explained in a footnote,‘There remains, of course, the problem of the material of some

objects’ (42). In masterfully subtle terms, the invasion of the

earth by Tlön is obliquely suggested to be more than merely the

work of an international conspiracy of pranksters, but the

process of Tlön emerging from fiction into reality, bringing with

it languages, history, and laws of nature radically different from

our own; ‘already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the

place of another, a past of which we know nothing with

certainty – not even that it is false ’ (42-43; emphasis added). Borges’

narrator is unconcerned: ‘The world will be Tlön. I pay no

attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the

Adrogué hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do

not intend to publish) of Browne’s Urn Burial ’ (43).

This Schopenhauerian renunciation of the will stands in

marked contrast to Burroughs’ revolutionary imperative. In the



34

chapter of The Ticket That Exploded entitled ‘Operation Rewrite’,

the Burroughsian concept of word as virus is related to

‘Operation Other Half’, a conspiracy led by Venusian sex addict

Johnny Yen to enslave the human race in binary, ‘either/or’

conflicts by infecting them with the parasitic word:

The ‘Other Half’ is the word. The ‘Other Half’ is anorganism. Word is an organism. The presence of the ‘OtherHalf’ a separate organism attached to your nervous system onan air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally[…] The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once havebeen a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism thatinvades and damages the lungs. The word may once havebeen a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism thatinvades and damages the central nervous system. Modernman has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocalspeech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You

will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. (1987: 49)

The misogynist subtext to the ‘Other Halfs’ has been explored

by Barry Miles in El Hombre Invisible . Although ‘the specific

definition of ‘the Other Halfs’ as women had not yet been made’

(1992: 123), Burroughs proposed sexual segregation in The Soft

Machine and explained his views on love in The Job : ‘I think love

is a virus. I think love is a con put down by the female sex. I

don’t think it’s a solution to anything… I think they [women]

were a basic mistake, and the whole dualistic universe evolved

f rom this error’ ( ibid ). Burroughs later softened his views,

expressing support for the women’s movement in a 1977

interview, but during the process of writing the Nova trilogy,

‘they were seen very much as the enemy, possibly even as agents

from another galaxy’ ( ibid ). The ‘Other Half’, then, is something

of an abstract enemy applied to a number of Burroughs’

preoccupations; most relevant for this thesis is the ‘Other Half’

as the Word. The Word ‘is a parasitic entity that lives in the

human body but which could not survive space’ ( ibid ), keeping

humanity from exploring space and escaping the Nova operation

on this planet. Not only does the Word imprison the human on

Earth, it imprisons the consciousness in a human body. In TheThird Mind , it is explained in a ‘Technical Deposition of Virus



35

Power’ that ‘It was important all this time that the possibility of

a human ever conceiving of being without a body should not

arise’ (275). The way to separate oneself from the word, from

the ‘Other Half’, was through the cut-up technique:

The word is spliced in with the sound of your intestines andbreathing with the beating of your heart. The first step is torecord the sounds of your body and start splicing them inyourself. Splice in your body sounds with the body sounds ofyour best friends and see how familiar he gets. Blast jolt

vibrate the “Other Half” right out into the street[…]Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it. (1987: 50-51)

The Burroughsian trope of total symbiotic union between two

beings (presumably male) is enacted through the process of

cutting and splicing recordings in order to reformulate the

psyche, and consequently reality. In Burroughs’ Gnostic

cosmology, the word equates to imprisonment on Earth, in the

body, in sex, death, and shit; as the world is text or recording,

cutting up the text is a method of freeing oneself. In the chapter

of Nova Express entitled ‘Uranian Willy’, the eponymous

‘Uranian born of Nova conditions’ utilises the ‘Silence Virus’:

As he walked past the Sargasso Café black insect flak ofMinraud stabbed at his vitality centers. Two Lesbian Agents

with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sipping spinal fluidthrough alabaster straws. He threw up a Silence Screen andgrey fog drifted through the café. The deadly Silence Virus.Coating word patterns. Stopping abdominal breathing holesof The Insect People Of Minraud.

The grey smoke drifted the grey that stopsshift cut tangle they breathe medium

the word cut shift patterns wordscut the insect tangle cut shift

that coats word cut breath silenceshift abdominal cut tangle stop word

holes. (2010: 60-61) As the narrative switches to a cut-up made of words from the

preceding paragraph, it is clear that the Silence Virus is a

manifestation of the cut-up technique. The spaces between the

words represent the fog of silence that envelopes the scene as

the words ‘cut’ and ‘shift’ disrupt and reformulate the text.

Unlike Tlön’s narrator and his calm, fatalistic approach to the



36

textual invasion of reality, Burroughs’ characters take a more

proactive stance:

So he sounded the words that end “Word”-Eye take back color from “word”-

Word dust everywhere now like soiled stucco on thebuildings. Word dust without colour drifting smoke streets.Explosive bio advance out of space to neon. (61)

Burroughs’ experimentation with consciousness (e.g., thinking in

images rather than words) is manifested in this scene as ‘Eye’

(resonant with ‘I’ as well as the visual portion of the brain) ‘take

back color from word’. Colour is an important motif in Nova

Express , symbolic of what has been stolen by the Nova Mob:

“Boards Syndicates Governments of the earth Pay – Pay backthe Color you stole –

“Pay Red – Pay back the red you stole for your lying flagsand your Coca-Cola signs – Pay that red back to penis andblood and sun –

“Pay Blue – Pay back the blue you stole and bottled anddoled out in eye droppers of junk – Pay back the blue youstole for your police uniforms – Pay that blue back to sea andsky and eyes of the earth –

“Pay Green – Pay back the green you stole for your money – And you, Dead Hand Stretching The Vegetable People, payback the green you stole for your Green Deal to sell outpeoples of the earth and board the first life boat in drag – Paythat green back to flowers and jungle river and sky –

“Boards Syndicates Governments of the earth pay backyour stolen colours – Pay Color back to Hassan i Sabbah –”(150)

Burroughs prefigures the rise of the ecology movement by

around a decade or so in this condemnation of corporate and

state control. Hassan i Sabbah is a recurring figure in Burroughs’

cut-up period, a mythologized version of the founder of the

medieval sect of the assassins. In the Nova trilogy, he is

frequently invoked along with his famously attributed but highly

apocryphal utterance ‘Nothing is True – Everything is

Permitted’. Colour here represents freedom, nature, life, vision,

in opposition to the sterility and death represented by ‘Word’.

The urgency with which Burroughs addresses the reader in the

Nova trilogy is part of the attempt to make of his fiction one of

those ‘crevices of unreason’ that alert the reader to the textualnature of reality, and the forces of control working in it. This is



37

amplified by a number of self-referential moments in the Nova

trilogy: ‘I am reading a science-fiction book called The Ticket that

Exploded . The story is close enough to what is going on here so

now and again I make myself believe this ward room is just a

scene in an old book…’ (1987: 5-6); ‘The purpose of my writing

is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch , Soft

Machine , and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are

and what they will do if they are not arrested’ (2010: 7). These

function as jolting reminders of how serious the Nova project is;

in ‘When Fiction Lives in Fiction’, Borges proposes that the

essential aim of any fiction contained within a fiction is ‘to make

reality appear unreal to us’, to ‘help us sense that oneness’ (1999:

161-162).

While Borges appears to take more a renunciatory,

contemplative stance in comparison to Burroughs’ frenzied call

to arms, both here can be seen to deliberately upset the

boundaries between reality and fiction with these texts. Although

less overtly revolutionary, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ is no less

radical than anything Burroughs has written; its approach ismore insidious than incendiary, but its effect is essentially the

same; to upset the boundaries between text and reality, and in

doing so awaken the reader to the morass of fictions that

surround him. Borges’ reference to the doctrines of Nazism,

racism, and Marxism are damning indictments of how easily the

masses are swept away by pleasingly symmetrical fictions, just as

Burroughs’ denunciations of the forces of control still resonate

in the 21st century. It should not be too surprising, then, if

artefacts of Tlön begin to emerge in our world in the years to

come.



38

Conclusion

Perhaps one of the sharpest contrasts between Borges and

Burroughs is the latter’s chaotic, libertine existence and the

former’s frugal, moderate way of life. That Borges was

considerably more stable than Burroughs is evident from simply

reading the texts in question; in no sense should this be taken a

value judgement on either author, but simply acts as a point of

comparison. Both writers drew on their respective experiences

and proclivities to leave the world with some of the most

remarkable literary achievements of their era. They shared a

fascination with Gnosticism and other esoteric currents, blurring

the line between reality and fiction with a certain devilish

mischief that should not detract from the seriousness of their

political and philosophical commentary. Borges never abjured

from his denunciation of political tyranny, even in the repressive

climate of Peron’s regime; likewise for Burroughs, whose

writings are filled with condemnations of the death penalty and

exaltations of personal liberty and anarcho-individualist morality,

and who along with Leroi Jones, was the only ‘Beat’ writer to

seriously address the racial strife he witnessed in 20th century

America. Where Burroughs adopted a violent, revolutionary

approach in his writing, Borges was more subtle, more serene;

both complement each other beautifully. The constraining

powers of space have forced the reluctant exclusion of a wealth

of relevant material in this study; from Borges, ‘The Library of

Babel’, ‘The Circular Ruins’, ‘The Book of Sand’, and ‘Death and

the Compass’ form just a few examples; from Burroughs,

numerous extracts from Naked Lunch , Exterminator! , his

collaborations with Brion Gysin in The Third Mind , and the ‘Red

Night’ trilogy.



39

Following this thread out from Burroughs and Borges

leads to a wider complex of labyrinths stretching into the 21st

century. Gnosticism, anarchism, conspiracy theory, psychedelic

culture, occultism, and paranormal investigation overlap and

intersect in the currents that emerge. Eccentric polymath Robert

Anton Wilson, co-author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy , uses

Burroughsian cut-ups in his writing, and utilises Borgesian satire

to explore the intricate narratives of conspiracy theorists. A

universal agnostic like Borges, Wilson sends up such narratives

by trying to envision a world in which all such theories are true,

leading to an infinitely regressing ‘pull-back-and-reveal’ as each

grand conspiracy is progressively exposed as a cover-up for

something even larger and more complex. Philip K Dick, a

Gnostic like Burroughs, explores the illusory nature of memory,

identity, and phenomenal reality, the war on drugs and personal

freedom, and the intrusion of narrative into reality, ‘reality’ for

Dick merely a cybernetic information system in the Gnostic

mythos detailed in his autobiographical novel VALIS . Dick

commented on Burroughs’ ‘word virus’ theory, expressingsupport for its essential tenets but disagreeing that this ‘virus’ is

malign (Selected Letters 1980-1982, 146). From Dick, we can

connect with Richard Linklater, director of Waking Life and A

Scanner Darkly (an adaptation of Dick’s novel), who references

Gnosticism explicitly in the former and casts American

conspiracy radio host Alex Jones in both. David Cronenberg,

director of Videodrome and Naked Lunch (as much a fictionalised

biopic of Burroughs as an adaptation of the novel), is another

important cinematic reference, as are the Wachowski’s Matrix

trilogy and Chris Nolan’s Inception . Scottish-born comic book

writer Grant Morrison introduces Borgesian metafiction and

Burroughsian cut-ups to the graphic-novel genre, dealing with

sentient cities, extra-dimensional races, anarchic-occultist bands

of revolutionaries, and McKenna’s 2012 eschatology. Doom Patrol

depicted the fictional world of Orqwith slowly infiltrating the



40

real world like a virus; The Invisibles , intended as an extended

piece of ritual magic to bring about radical changes in the real

world, featured a character based on Morrison himself who was

shot in the lung shortly before Morrison’s own lung collapsed,

and offered its readers a page that functioned as a focus or ‘sigil’

for sexual magic intended to revive the comic’s flagging run

(Roberts 2004: 226). Morrison is a notable practitioner of ‘chaos

magick’, a ‘post-modern’ approach to occultism emerging in the

late 20th century taking influence from Burroughs, Wilson,

Crowley, and British artist Austin Osman Spare, and most clearly

expounded by Peter Carroll in books like Liber Null &

Psychonaut . Chaos magicians, taking an attitude of Borgesian

agnosticism towards their occult practice, regard belief as merely

a tool that can be used to achieve certain effects in reality. Then

we have the American poet Hakim Bey (born Peter Lamborn

Wilson), another exponent of chaos magick, who incorporates

anarchism and Sufi mysticism in his works of ‘ontological

anarchy’ and ‘poetic terrorism’, which at best are ecstatic pieces

of visionary art and at worst, sub-Burroughsian exhortations ofpederasty and drug-induced stupor. Lastly, we have J.G. Ballard,

the only contemporary British writer Burroughs had anything

good to say about, and who experimented with cut-ups in The

Atrocity Exhibition .

Sitting somewhere near the centre of this chaotic

labyrinth, we might find Burroughs and Borges themselves, clad

as they habitually were in neat three-piece suits, Borges trying to

decipher the God’s script, Burroughs trying to rearrange it.



41

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Documents

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