Burroughs’s beat

William S. Burroughs is, alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the third part of the Beat generation’s holy trinity. Yet while those two were long ago ushered into the canon, Burroughs’ writing has stubbornly resisted a comparable assimilation into the mainstream. A less conventionally romantic figure than the unruly Kerouac or the hippie seer Ginsberg, the gaunt, irredeemably strange Burroughs is perhaps comparatively unappealing to the adolescent male readers who are so notoriously eager to recreate the lives recounted in On The Road and Howl. But a greater impediment to Burroughs’ incorporation into the reading lists of youthful idealists (if there are any left) is the simple fact that he is considerably more difficult to read. While Ginsberg and Kerouac’s ecstatic compositions suggest that the Beat moniker derives from their visionary, beatific souls, Burroughs beats up language to express a downbeat, deadbeat world of paranoia, psychic entanglement and codified conspiracies.