Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs (1914––97) is an iconic figure of the Beat generation. In William S. Burroughs, Phil Baker investigates this cult writer’s life and work—from small-town Kansas to New York in the ’40s, Mexico and the South American jungle, to Tangier and the writing of Naked Lunch, to Paris and the Beat Hotel, and ’60s London—alongside Burrough’s self-portrayal as an explorer of inner space, reporting back from the frontiers of experience. After accidentally shooting his wife in 1951, Burroughs felt his destiny as a writer was bound up with a struggle to come to terms with the “Ugly Spirit” that had possessed him. In this fascinating biography, Baker explores how Burroughs’s early absorption in psychoanalysis shifted through Scientology, demonology, and Native American mysticism, eventually leading Burroughs to believe that he lived in an increasingly magical universe, where he sent curses and operated a “wishing machine.” His lifelong preoccupation with freedom and its opposites—forms of control or addiction—coupled with the globally paranoid vision of his work can be seen to evolve into a larger ecological concern, exemplified in his idea of a divide between decent people or “Johnsons” and those who impose themselves upon others, wrecking the planet in the process. Drawing on newly available material, and rooted in Burroughs’s vulnerable emotional life and seminal friendships, this insightful and revealing study provides a powerful and lucid account of his career and significance.

フィル・ベイカーは、バロウズを単なるビート文学の象徴ではなく、魂の深淵に潜む「醜悪な霊」と闘い続けた魔術的探求者として定義しました。妻の死という悲劇を契機に、中毒や支配の檻から逃れようとする彼の生涯は、オカルトや科学を横断しながら内宇宙の最前線を報告する、壮絶な魂のドキュメントへと昇華されています。 本書の白眉は、彼のパラノイア的ヴィジョンが現代の環境破壊への危惧へと繋がる、驚くべき思想の進化を紐解いた点にあります。他者を踏みにじらない高潔な精神性は、狂気と隣り合わせの言葉の中に、真の自由への渇望を刻み込んでいます。既存の像を根底から覆し、バロウズ文学の真髄に触れさせる決定的な一冊です。