William S. Burroughs

“Gontarski’s book is unique for the way its own research methodology mirrors its critical thesis about Burroughs’ work, which is seen as a ‘Neuromatic network,’ an ongoing archive of primary materials across many media, a rhizome of sources, a recursive structure that defies the flow of narrative frameworks or the stability of fixed forms. Drawing most heavily on Deleuzian theory, but also digressing into a multitude of fields, the book therefore shifts attention away from the oeuvre of familiar canonical texts to the larger creative and critical systems that frame it.  Also striking is how Gontarski gives priority to supposedly minor works (Blade Runner is the only text analysed at length) and marginal figures (François Bucher in particular), while presenting a series of backstories through an array of facsimile documents. With a recurrent focus on Florida State University, the book offers densely detailed engagements with the dubious politics of archival acquisition, access, and taxonomic cataloguing that add up to a timely and forceful critique of the institutions that shape not just the reception of Burroughs’ work but, more crucially, its production.”

– Professor Oliver Harris, President of the European Beat Studies Network

“Part detective tale, part institutional critique, part scholarly manifesto, and wholly compelling, Gontarski’s study digs deep into the archives and emerges with an urgent warning for the academy and a pile of evidence that Burroughs’s work still has plenty to teach us. The archival material included is a true boon for readers and scholars of twentieth-century literature, but the frank exploration of contemporary “regimes of power” is absolutely vital for us all. Gontarski brings to William S. Burroughs’s archive the same rigor, vigor, and attention to detail that has defined his field-altering work on Samuel Beckett, and I expect this study to similarly inspire and shape a new wave of serious scholarly attention to Burroughs as writer, artist, “immoral amoral comedian,” and philosopher. As in Gontarski’s early work, the prose is nearly as thrilling as the scholarship, resulting in the rare academic page-turner. And he brings a breadth of knowledge about Burroughs’s rhizomatic network of projects, remarks, and exploits that invites readers rather than intimidating them. The Burroughsian ‘Neuromatic’ network—represented both in Burroughs’s work and in Gontarski’s own wide-ranging and productively recursive approach—emerges as the antidote to regimes of control and their sometimes arbitrary, shifting, self-interested acts of recklessness and casual destruction. In attending to the afterlives of intentionally Neuromatic creation and institutional destruction, Gontarski recounts and continues a project of re-activation, expansion, and fruitful new intersections. Never-before-published typescripts reveal new dimensions in and connections across Burroughs’s work; never-before-published correspondence sheds new light on Burroughs’s biography, process, and philosophy; and Gontarski’s fluency in the larger biography and bibliography (of letters, lectures, columns, marginalia, revisions, and better- and lesser-known works) of Burroughs ties it all together. There is no better guide through the literary archives than S.E. Gontarski, and that’s a good thing for us, because the journey Gontarski recounts plays like something from the pages of a Burroughs novel: strange intersections of disease and natural disaster, ego and indolence, big personalities, institutional labyrinths…Gontarski’s frustration is justified and on-display. But his perseverance is inspiring; the archival treasures he unpacks are illuminating; and the reader’s journey through Gontarski’s text is an absolute pleasure.”

– Paul Ardoin, Brackenridge Endowed Associate Professor in Literature and the Humanities, University of Texas at San Antonio