Dead Fingers Talk

by William S. Burroughs

Dead Fingers Talk, first published in 1963, combines sections from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded combined together to create a new narrative. Dead Fingers Talk, like many of Burroughs' works, was controversial upon its release. It was the subject of a scathing review in the Times Literary Supplement that resulted in a war of words between supporters and detractors of the novel (and Burroughs in general) that played out in the magazine's letters page for months.
The book itself is considered one of the rarer of Burroughs' novels.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, Science Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

William Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer.
A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".
His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.
He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.
Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".
Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book contains the entries from "The Naked Lunch" rearranges them and includes routines from elsewhere, cuts some of the "Naked..." entries and produces a milder version of "The Naked Lunch". The result focuses upon conspiracy and the hero getting away from the police.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest cut-up book by Burroughs. There are some pages here which actually demonstrate the Burroughs technique before and after. My copy is literally falling apart.

[Adam Beckett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you love drugs, assholes and poetry? Well, this one's for you, you freak!

Dead Fingers Talk is rhythmic, dense; a fever dream deceptively wrapped up as a work of fiction. It is a form of heroin inspired creative genius. Burroughs seemingly was as high as a kite; his delirium and madness, unfiltered, have been spewed onto the pages of this dark, dark series of loosely connected vignettes. It is an absurd yet reliable recounting of addiction and depravity. Its scattered, cut-up style mirrors the chaotic life of a junkie. Like a heroin addiction, this book is repulsive and vulgar and not advisable for weak stomachs. It is deliberately difficult to chow down on, wielding obscene amounts of brutality, grotesque body horror and abuse to teach us a lesson on control in all its forms, while screaming out a desperate plea for liberation.

Burroughs' writing style breaks all of the rules. It's totally unique, I think it's fantastic. It demands to be read slowly so you can appreciate the horrific beauty in his maniacal writing. While I do praise this book highly and thoroughly enjoyed it, it is not without its flaws. You’ll get sentences that appear to be having a fit, barely coherent. Sometimes, the incoherence is taken a little too far, Burroughs is clearly pushing boundaries, and he should probably have been held back just a smidgen. Can’t fault the originality of this style, though.

Surprisingly, while this book contains every trigger warning under the sun, I wouldn’t call it tasteless. It feels like Burroughs was portraying an honest account of life as a depraved homosexual junkie—indeed Burroughs himself was an addict, and even claimed that heroin wasn’t bad for him—so it would be fair to say that Dead Fingers Talk is autobiographical despite the interplanetary settings and hallucinatory style. Maybe this is what autobiographies look like when you’re tripping balls.

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.”
― William S. Burroughs

8/10

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mildly mixed feelings on this one. It really utilized the idea of his previous cut-up novels being small magnifications of his philosophies of control, and this one pieces them together in a completely new way in order to illuminate how things such as capitalism/medicine/police and military forces/media/language don’t just work in isolated scenarios, but can be warped together in any way They desire to do so. Maybe a stretch, but the book really nails how capitalism is a one track path toward fascism, in the sense that Native genocide, pharmaceutical companies, police state propaganda, mass media, etc. are all used initially as profit/property machines until they outgrow themselves and mutate from something at least recognizably human into a mechanical body that can only survive on the literal consumption and oppression of the classes They deem unworthy. All of this can be seen in people like Benway whose initial ideology stems from curiosity and then the need for his clinic to grow and discover more and eventually is a mindless machine that doles out any and every drug you could imagine to, what the reader can infer, are very specific groups of people. Which all brilliantly comes back to the beginning as we see a sole drug addict, addicted by no fault of his own, now being chased down by a police force who is a part of the same system that led to his addiction.

Anyway, my mixed feelings come from the fact that you can gather most of that from the original trilogy + NL, and this one just adds the idea of mixing up the systems to better suit certain needs. Still very fucking good and worthwhile though as long as you’ve read a lot of his other stuff. Burroughs might be the angriest author who has ever lived lol.

Finally done with the cut-up works, so I’m excited to get to mid/late era novels. I need a break first though…

[Kilburn Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's basically Naked Lunch in a different order. With extra bits added in. Some of it cut-ups, some of it not. It's out of print for some reason. My copy is from 1977.

[Rex Hurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is for Burroughs completionists only. Not to say its a bad book or that someone who is unfamiliar with Burroughs shouldn't read it, but I think those who know the author's work closely will appreciate the most. This book was first published in England and was designed to introduce Burroughs to the English public, as such some parts - not many - are softened or even rewritten.

Everything in here has been published elsewhere. It takes parts of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and bits of Exterminator, and rearranges them together, combines them in new ways and gives a different perspective on each story. In a few cases, such as AJs stories, I feel the changes are an improvement. Burroughs work was rather modular in any case, so moving it around is not the detriment that it would be for nearly any other writer.

[Ash Andersson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lapping water—Am writing this at dawn.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where do you start when talking about William S. Burroughs? Is there a good entry point? Is there an effective method for interpreting his writing? The first time I read Naked Lunch and Junky was forty years ago. I’ve been reading him ever since. The answer to the first question is: just dive into his books and read; don’t worry about whether it makes any sense or not. The answers to the latter two questions are: no and no, but I will say the more you read him the more you get out of the experience. Pieces of one book will explain pieces of another. If you’ve got a mind for pattern recognition, a good memory, a long attention span, a knack for decoding hidden messages, and a high tolerance for noise, a lot of it will make sense in the long run. If you prefer authors who spoon feeds you information and explain everything they think you need to know, stick to your Stephen King and Harry Potter novels. Dead Fingers Talk meets all the criteria of a typical Burroughs novel. Since it is a mash-up of three other novels, any Burroughs fan can be forgiven for skipping over it.

When William Burroughs got to the mid-1960s, he was suffering from writer’s block. With a contract obligation to fulfill for his British publishers and no ideas for a new novel, he spliced together passages from three other books, Naked Lunch and the first and third books from The Nova Trilogy, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. With a lot of fat trimming, rearrangement of sequences, and a partially conscious folding in of vignettes excerpted from the three respectful novels, he created something somewhat new, but not really.

Most of these passages come from Naked Lunch. It’s got the descriptions of the slimy, scummy, dirty life suffered by heroin addicts, the insects, the hallucinations, the gay sex, and the amoral medical professionals. One of the better passages from The Soft Machine is folded in near the beginning. The space alien vampires called the Nova Mob are trying, and probably succeeding, towards driving the planet towards Nova, a state where conflict reaches its maximum height causing an atomic explosion that destroys the whole world. Sowing conflict, chaos and disorder is the Nova Mob’s method. Meanwhile the Nova Police are trying to prevent the Nova from happening by sending coded messages to K9, an agent on Earth, but there is interference on their channels and the messages might not be getting through. When things heat up enough, Dr. Benway is called in to take control of the situation.

Here we get a smooth transition into the Dr. Benway sequence from Naked Lunch where the old doctor shows a younger man around the hospital, explaining his mind control experiments and surgical procedures that are done for no particular purpose at all other than for Dr. Benway’s amusement. Then the doctor loses control, the lunatics escape from his asylum, and take to the streets where they go apeshit attacking and terrorizing anyone they can find. It’s hard to tell if the two Dr. Benways are the same man, but the transition from one novel’s passage to the next makes for an interesting contrast. From Dr. Benway, we get the most direct and easy to understand idea in all of Burroughs’ writing: control is just as addicting as heroin and, like heroin, authoritarianism serves no definite purpose other than to sustain the addiction.

In a couple choice passages from The Ticket That Exploded, laboratory doctors breed creatures, half boy and half fish, in the back room of a pharmacy because the males and females of the human race agreed to separate, making sexual reproduction obsolete. The fish-boys have gills and swim in dirty canals and sewers because they have no place else to go, especially when their lives are in danger. It’s an interesting take on reverse evolution from a notoriously misogynistic gay author.

Otherwise there’s lots of filth, disgusting imagery, and a few passages constructed with the cut-up technique in which two texts are cut in half and spliced together for the sake of making random and experimental prose rather than prose with deliberate intention and outcome in mind. At best, the cut-ups read like French Symbolist poetry in which the writers tried to use imagery to convey emotions that were too abstract to be put into words. But Burroughs isn’t concerned with emotion; his program is to reveal hidden meanings and patterns in random noise. But most of the time this doesn’t happen and the cut-ups are usually nonsense. My tolerance for reading them varies widely depending on what kind of mood I’m in.

Overall, this thrown together novel is best for Burroughs connoisseurs and completists, especially those who have already read the books that these materials are drawn from. But in the end, it just feels like a bit of a con and a half-assed one at that, a quick and easy way to make some money so the author could keep his notorious heroin addiction going. Old Bull Lee might even take that criticism as a complement.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

While a lot of this is clearly recognizable from the original novels the material was cut from, a lot of these feels like an entirely new narrative. Definitely in the same vein as Naked Lunch and the trilogy that followed it, dark and drug-fueled. As with all Burroughs, it is an interesting and compelling read.

[Abdullah Hussaini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tringin nak menulis macam ni. huhu.

[mallory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much overlooked in his canon — it’s kind of Junky / Queer like remix of Naked Lunch, so extremely interesting from that perspective

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mostly just an insubstantial parlor trick, but also a reminder of how much better Naked Lunch is than anything else Burroughs ever wrote. Easy to avoid anymore, and that's a damn good thing; the "mashing-three-novels-together-to-create-a-new-narrative" conceit behind this book would be a lot cooler if there was actually, you know, a narrative to speak of here.

[João Álvares · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is as broken as myself, this to say I enjoyed it because of that but at the same hated it, thus would never recommend to someone else.