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Description
The role of the Maya in William S. Burroughs's writing, though often noted, has not been extensively explored. Burroughs's readers may know that he studied Maya culture and language at Mexico City College in 1950-1951, but those unversed in Maya archaeology of the last half-century cannot evaluate the extent or accuracy of his knowledge or its relevance to his life-long resistance to control. For instance, Burroughs radically reworked the role of Maya priests to meet his own thematic needs, making them gods of death in command of a telepathic control system, while, with the exception of the death god Ah Puch, completely ignoring Xibalba (1) and the nine lords of the underworld in the Maya creation myth, the Popol Vuh. Burroughs's thematization of Maya priests as gods of death is not consistent with either the archaeological views of the 1950s or of the present, but for different reasons. In the 1950s when Burroughs studied the Maya at Mexico City College, they were believed to have been a benevolent theocracy, but in the mid 1980s some leading Mayanists came to believe that there were no Maya priests at all. It requires a fine balancing act to keep straight the state of knowledge about the Maya in 1950 along with Burroughs's literary appropriation of that knowledge while at the same time distinguishing what he may have known in the 1950s from the radical changes in knowledge established in the mid-1980s. Since Burroughs's studies in Mexico City, archaeology has undergone a dramatic transformation in its interpretations of the Maya, showing Burroughs's appropriation of the Maya to be not only idiosyncratic but also curiously prescient. He anticipated a dramatic change in archaeological interpretation that began in the 1960s but crystallized only in 1986, recognition of the violence in ancient Maya culture--human sacrifice and exquisite tortures inflicted on victims before death. And within his idiosyncratic theories on language he anticipated Derrida's radical argument that writing preceded speech.
Because students of Burroughs are not typically grounded in Maya archaeology or in Burroughs's knowledge of the Maya, the literature on Burroughs includes occasional naive, credulous, even absurd comments on his Maya motif. Some are tempted to read Burroughs literally, resulting in conclusions like the following from an anthropologist: "From Burroughs we can also glean perspectives on the uses of hallucinogenic drugs grown in Mexico, the power structure of Mayan society and the futuristic nightmares of Mexican megalopolises" (Campbell 2003, 225). It is self-evident that the Maya priests' telepathic control "machine" (which can be reprogrammed to self-destruct) is pure fantasy. The extent to which Burroughs fabricated his priestly gods of death out of his own imagination and thematic needs urges close examination of his related Maya motifs--hieroglyphs as "transparent language," priestly manipulation of the "secret" codices, or the sacrifice of the hanged man. For instance, he was romantically naive in believing that hieroglyphic "picture" writing could communicate ideas directly without the intervention of language, bypassing the Word Virus. These critiques conclude this essay.
Readers without some knowledge of Maya archaeology can easily be led astray while attempting to elucidate Burroughs, including the writers of two book-length critical studies, Eric Mottram, The Algebra of Need (1977), and Timothy Murphy, Wising Up the Marks (1997). Mottram's misconstrual of Maya archaeology is far more damaging than Murphy's. Mottram sets out to "ascertain Burroughs's bases" in Paul Westheim's The Art of Ancient Mexico (1965), a peculiar choice for a variety of reasons. Mottram first cites Westheim's Spanish language Mexico City edition published in 1950, the time when Westheim was active in the intellectual life of Mexico City and when Burroughs studied there. Westheim could conceivably have influenced Burroughs, but there is no evidence to suggest that he did. But when Mottram quotes from Westheim, he cites page numbers in the second, revised, 1963 English language edition where Westheim notes that entire chapters have been rewritten. Furthermore, Westheim's book is an aesthetic study of the art of ancient Mexico, not archaeological research. As he generalizes his thesis about Mexican art, Westheim treats the Maya as just one of many Mesoamerican cultures along with Olmec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, and Aztec, with Aztec receiving the most attention. In other words, Westheim conflates Aztec with Maya much as Burroughs does, and this despite an early archaeological tradition of distinguishing the pacific, philosophical "Greek" Maya from the militaristic, bureaucratic "Roman" Aztec. When books by leading archaeologists like Sylvanus Morley and Eric Thompson were so widely available and influential, why did Mottram choose Westheim?
Mottram compounds his error by citing Westheim selectively, the researcher's mistake of finding what he set out to look for. Mottram offers a page-long pastiche of quotations from Westheim selected from eight different pages but presented as one continuous passage (1977, 67-68). This pastiche presents the same view of priestly control over a submissive peasantry accomplished by manipulation of the ritual calendar as do the selections from Morley and Thompson that follow later in this essay. Mottram uses his selection of quotations to launch this flight of absolute fancy:
The focus of the theogony is, of course, human sacrifice, ritual rape of a virgin, killing of the child as the young maize god which climaxes with a young captive tied to a board, arms and legs extended, and shot to death with arrows--and as Westheim observes "this ceremony has the same symbolic significance: copulation, fecundation," whether female or, as in this case, male virgin. (Mottram 1977, 68)
In Westheim, a young female virgin is sacrificed at midnight to the Mexican goddess Tlazolteotl. It is the goddess who is impregnated and gives birth to a male child, the young god of maize. At the finale of the feast, a captive is sacrificed by being shot to death with arrows. But no rape of a "male virgin," no killing of a child as the young maize god, and the ceremony is not Mayan.
Murphy, more circumspect than Mottram, notes discrepancies between Burroughs's claims about the Maya and the findings of Maya archaeologists. Murphy notes that books of the dead have "received little attention from literary scholars" and cites "the Tibetan Bardo Thodol, the Egyptian Books of the Dead and the Maya codices" as examples. However, he partially corrects himself about the codices with the following disclaimer: "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" (1997, 148). Scholars do indeed disagree that the codices are books of the dead, but Murphy does not carry his investigation far enough to report that a genuine Maya book of the dead exists in the Popol Vuh. But Murphy is more concerned with what Burroughs did write than with what he didn't, and nowhere does Burroughs acknowledge the Popol Vuh, its journey to the underworld, Xibalba, its defeat of the nine lords of death, or its account of the birth of the Young Corn God, symbol of resurrection from death.
Burroughs's interest in anthropology surfaced much earlier than his enrollment in Mexico City College. After graduating from Harvard College with a degree in American literature in 1936, he returned to Harvard in 1938 to take courses in anthropology, and in 1939 he was studying anthropology at Columbia University, where he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Burroughs also reports that in 1938 he visited the Egyptology Department at the University of Chicago because of his interest in Egyptian hieroglyphics (1987, xix-xx). Whether or not any of these early anthropological investigations included the Maya appears to be unknown at present. But James Grauerholz reports that Burroughs was reading Maya anthropology at his farm in Texas in 1946-1947 (Burroughs 1998, 38). It is most likely that the Gods of Death originated with Burroughs's Maya studies in 1950 since he had not done any sustained writing before then; he had not envisioned himself a writer until his success with his first novel, Junky, in 1953.
Burroughs enrolled in Mexico City College in 1950... |
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