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Volume Two is a very different kettle of fish, a collection of heroic legends very few of which come from the living traditions of real people. The Grimms say these stories could be called Legends of Teutonic Tribes and Royal Families and, here, they are as much concerned with myth-making as with folklore. They embrace the historic with disturbing enthusiasm: ‘ . . . it is . . . a noble attribute of people . . . any people . . . when both the dawn and the dusk of their day in history consists of legends.' The relation between the rise of folklore studies and that of modern nationalism is an interesting one; there are things here that uncomfortably tease the mind.

To quote King Dagobert who, while he lay on his deathbed, said to his dogs: ‘No company is so good, that one cannot take leave of it.'

(1981)

There's a photograph – among the surrealist souvenirs – of the poet, Benjamin Peret, insulting a priest. One lesson of Georges Bataille's erotic novella,
Story of the Eye
, is that French intellectuals are made of sterner stuff than we are.

We think blasphemy is silly. They are exhilarated by it. Bataille's hero and heroine end up doing a lot more to a priest than just insulting him. The fine European tradition of anti-clericalism is central to the preoccupations of this grand old surrealist fellow-traveller and sexual
philosophe
. It underpins Bataille's theory of active sexuality as the assertion of human freedom against the laws of church and state. There can be few texts that illustrate so precisely the cultural differences between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant sensibility.

Bataille puts pornography squarely in the service of blasphemy. Transgression, outrage, sacrilege, liberation of the senses through erotic frenzy, and the symbolic murder of God. This is a scenario alien to the secular heritage of Protestant humanism. It confirms the free-thinker's darkest fears about the nauseating madness inherent in Judaeo-Christianity itself. One can understand why Susan Sontag – whose worthy but dull essay, ‘The Pornographic Imagination', is appended – refrains from commenting on the climax of
Story of the Eye
, where a priest is enticed into lapping up his own urine from a sacramental chalice. Sontag is concerned to define what kind of literature pornography might be; she doesn't notice that
Story of the Eye
is didactically lewd.

After the hapless cleric has drained the cup to its dregs of marinated Host, the polymorphously perverse heroine, Simone,
orgiastically strangles him, gouges out his eye and pops it into her vagina, which she has already used as a repository for eggs, both raw and cooked, and the testicles of a bull. Roland Barthes, in
his
essay in the buxom appendix to the brief tale, points out the complex circularity of the dominant imagery of eye, egg, testicle. No content man, he; his whimsical formalism is too disingenuous by half.
Story of the Eye
was first published in France in 1928; two years later, French fascists smashed up the cinema in which Buñuel and Dali's
L'Age d'Or
was celebrating erotic blasphemy. Bataille was dicing with death and
Story of the Eye
is about fucking as existential affirmation against death, who is also God. (Unless Bataille's own blind, paralysed father – syphilis, naturally – is God; he materialises horribly in an afterword.)

Now Simone, her lover, and an onanistic English milord set sail to America. They won't be able to raise Susan Sontag's eyebrows, whatever they get up to there; but since they crew their boat with black sailors, no doubt these guerrillas of the libido will think up a few stunts that will get up everybody else's noses.

That English milord, the non-participatory entrepreneur of obscene spectacles, is an unkind cut. The French have always thought we are sexually weirder than we have ever thought them, which is saying something. This has to do with the relativity of the notion of the sense of sin; and to do, too, with the way the metaphysics of
Story of the Eye
evaporate in the translation (by Joachim Neurgroschel), just as the crystalline rhetoric of Bataille's incomparable prose muddies in English. Nevertheless, this marvellous, scatological fairytale about the omnipotence of desire, as Barthes says, ‘between the banal and the absurd' still enlightens.

(1979)

Since William S. Burroughs relocated from New York City to Lawrence, Kansas, the town blasted by IBMs in the antinuke TV spectacular, ‘The Day After', he has evidently perfected a final loathing for the instruments of mass death and – ‘no job too dirty for a fucking scientist' – their perpetrators.

Pointless to head for the hills, these days: ‘What hills? Geiger counters click to countdown. Decaying lead spells out the last syllable of recorded time. Orgone balked at the post. Christ bled. Time ran out. Radiation has won at a half-life.'

The densely impacted mass of cultural references here – Macbeth, the Western, Reich, Dr Faustus, pulp science fiction – isn't an isolated example of
The Western Lands
' intense awareness of literature and of itself as literature, suggesting that perhaps one of the things going on, here, is an elegaic farewell to all that. The peremptory demand on which the novel ends, ‘Hurry up, please. It's time', is a straight quote from ‘The Wasteland', reminiscent also of Cyril Connolly's remark about closing time in the gardens of the West.

Unless Burroughs is practising some complicated double irony (and I wouldn't put it past him), the West of Connolly's usage has nothing to do with the Old West of Burrough's obsession, site of his last novel,
The Place of Dead Roads
, which was second in the trilogy of which
Cities of the Red Night
was first and this the last. The ‘Western Lands' of Burroughs' title are, mythologically speaking, where the dead live. That is, the place beyond death.

Essentially we are talking about immortality, the immortality promised by the poet to Mr W. H., which is no longer compatible
with the weapons that cause ‘Total Death. Soul Death'. ‘Well, that's what art is all about, isn't it? All creative thought, actually. A bid for immortality.' Who is talking about immortality? William Seward Hall, for one, old man and blocked writer, who decides to ‘write his way out of death' just as old novelists, like Scott, wrote themselves out of debt.

But, both in and out of this transparent disguise, Burroughs is talking about immortality, too.
The Western Lands
is structured according to an internal logic derived from an idiosyncratic reading of Egyptian myth; immortality, in its most concrete form, greatly concerned Egyptians.

In spite of a series of discontinuous story lines featuring a variety of heroes, the book often resembles a nineteenth-century commonplace book. The most urgent personal reflections are juxtaposed with jokes, satires, quotations, essays in fake anthropology, parody, pastiche, and passages of Burroughs' unique infective delirium – piss, shit, offal, disembowellings. This is slapstick reinterpreted by Sade.

Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic
all
the time.

The method is eclectic and discrete and it is important, and essential, because Burroughs is doing something peculiar with the reader's time. He's stopping it. Or, rather, stop-starting it. Taking it out of the reader's hands, anyway, which is where we tend to assume it ought to be.

He'll give you a paragraph, a page, even three or four pages at a time, of narrative like a railway down which the reader, as if having boarded a train, travels from somewhere to somewhere else according to an already existing timetable. Then – the track vanishes. The train vanishes. And you find you don't have any clothes on, either. While all that's left of the engine driver is a .disappearing grin.

This constant derailment of the reader happens again and again, shattering the sense of cause and effect, whilst all the time one is reassured in the most affectingly disingenuous manner: ‘How can any danger come from an old man cuddling his cats?'

You cannot hurry Burroughs, or skim, or read him for the story. He likes to take his time and to disrupt
your
time in such
a way that you cannot be carried along by this narrative. Each time it tips you out, you have to stand and think about it; you yourself are being rendered as discontinuous as the text.

In fact, Burroughs' project is to make time stand still for a while, one which is more frequently that of religion than of literature and there are ways in which Burroughs' work indeed resembles that of another William, the Blake of the self-crafted mythology of the Prophetic Books, although it must be said that Burroughs is much funnier.

He is also the only living American writer of whom one can say with confidence he will be read with the same shock of terror and pleasure in a hundred years' time, or read at all, in fact, should there be anybody left to read.

(1988)

Ah Pook is Here
is an apocalypse. Ah Pook is the Mayan death deity. John Stanley Hart, a young American student of immorality, searches the jungle for the lost Mayan codices that contain Ah Pook's secrets of fear and death. But, when he finds them, he reads them ‘as one who reads Moby Dick to find out about whaling and to hell with Ahab'. For Hart is addicted to a personal immortality predicated on the mortality of others, ‘gooks, niggers, human dogs, stinking
humans
'.

The arcane secrets of fear and death are utilised to make a world safe for John Stanley Hart to live (forever) in. ‘Is this terrible knowledge now computerised and vested in the hands of far-sighted Americans in the State Department and the CIA?' Burroughs is often so outrageously upfront about his moral indignation it is possible, I think wrongly, to dismiss it as a cheap effect.

But a fugue of deathless mutant boys precipitate a bizarrely ecstatic finale that looks like it's been choreographed by Hieronymous Bosch. ‘A boy whipped with a transparent fish sprouts wings . . . Flying fox boy soars above a burning tree.' Wild boys lyrically ejaculate robins and blue birds. Nobody, it turns out, can Hire Death as a company cop. Or not for long.

This is by no means an adequate summary of the only hitherto unpublished text in this little garden of Burroughs.
Ah Pook is Here
is infinitely more thematically complex, more uncomfortable and replete with far more deadpan black humour than I have begun to suggest. But you can't easily fillet the meaning out of Burroughs' work because he is against succinct verbal exposition,
which he sees as a sinister form of thought control. What he likes to do is hit you with an image and let the image act for itself.

No wonder, then, all these pieces reflect his interest in scripts composed of signs and hieroglyphs.
Ah Pook is Here
was originally intended as a picture-book based on the Mayan codices. The second piece, ‘The Book of Breething', actually turns into pictures. In the third piece, ‘The Electronic Revolution', Burroughs talks approvingly about Chinese, ‘a script derived from hieroglyphs . . . [and therefore] more closely related to the objects and areas described'.

Elsewhere, he defines words as ‘moving pictures'. The dialectic between the concrete and the discrete in Burroughs, between the solidity of the image and the arbitrariness of sequence, is what makes his own prose
move
, makes it kinetic, gives it, in spite of its obsession with death, mind-death, soul-death, death-in-life, its superabundant life.

(1979)

J. G. Ballard says he's an optimist, which, given his penchant for apocalypses, initially seems unlikely but is nevertheless reassuring. He convinces me Reagan won't start World War III because he's too gaga to locate the whereabouts of the red button. Since, back in the Sixties, Ballard was the only sane person in the entire Western world who predicted the ex-movie actor would one day rise to the dizzying heights of the Presidency, maybe Ballard-the-prophet will hit target on this one too. Cross fingers.

It was in a story titled ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan', written, Ballard thinks, in 1966, that he foretold Reagan would run for the White House and that ‘the profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the US in the coming years'.

Not that he presented it as a prophecy exactly, or that ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan' is a short story on the terms of V. S. Pritchett or William Trevor. It is a piece of fiction, a set of ferocious images, a fragment of Swiftian satire, and it subsequently formed part of a book called
The Atrocity Exhibition
, published in 1970, which is one of the important works of British fiction produced in those exploding years.

I read ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan' to a class of English Literature majors at a liberal East Coast college in one of the four states in the Union that stayed with Jimmy Carter that November day in 1980 when a British science-fiction writer's mad notion came true. They laughed until they cried, except those who vice versa'd, and then they demanded: ‘Who is this
man? He is one of your great writers! Why haven't we heard of him before?'

Perhaps it was just because they
were
Eng. Lit. majors that they hadn't heard of him before. He was certainly big stuff in the semiotics department already. Besides, Ballard doesn't like to think of himself as a ‘literary man'. He bridles and huffs at the very thought. He is an imagery and ideas man, surreal, troubling – ‘sensitive and enigmatic',
The Times Literary Supplement
once characterised his work, making him sound like Denton Welch, for God's sake. He is
not
a fine-writing man: