Edgar Rice Burroughs sits cozily next to William Burroughs on the shelves of second hand bookshops. This got me thinking of common ground between the two. Both are about wish-fulfillment, about supermen. Both have similar settings: the Far West, Africa, and the Tropics. After all, what is Edgar’s Mars but just another Far West? Both have lots of violence which isn’t meant to repel the reader. In both we find the American constants of guns and action. Here’s an article by George Laughead who hung around William Burroughs in 1997; there was a lot of gunplay involved.
Both were ultimately successful in what they created. Edgar’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars stories were escapist fantasies that kept many sane on long train journeys or days of loneliness. They took all these modern boys and men into another world full of novelty and adventure.
Yet the works of William Burroughs are also about escape, but one away from conformity. But the author escapes, taking us along into a strange world whose dangers are yet familiar: diseases, random violence, and repressive authorities. The fragmentary narrative gives the sense of dreams, splinters picked from a damaged mind. While Edgar’s stories slide effortlessly through our consciousness, William’s are like streams clogged with flotsam and bodies, the aftermath of floods. His supermen are in direct opposition to the straight world. They often are spies, gangsters, and even pirates, many of them have a certain aspect of addiction about them.
D.H. Lawrence wrote that all of Edgar Allan Poe’s characters are vampires. The vampire combines the elements of addiction, sexual rebellion, and superhuman capacities. The same could be said of the characters in the novels of William Burroughs.
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