Alternative Intratextual Spatialities in William S. Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night

Abstract

Given the amount of criticism that has been devoted to William S. Burroughs’s earlier works, in particular Naked Lunch, as well as the volume of writing that both explores and places stock in information pertaining to Burroughs’s life, relatively little has been written about Burroughs’s Cities of the Red Night. In addition, given Burroughs’s status as a postmodernist writer, very little investigative work has been allotted to exploring issues of spatiality in Burroughs’s works. As such, this thesis aims to address the relative paucity of research on Burroughs in these twin areas, combining the two by looking into issues of spatiality in Cities of the Red Night. This work focuses on the ways in which Burroughs’s narrative strategies compel the reader to generate what the present work terms ‘alternative intratextual spatialities’. Chapters two and three delineate the theoretical underpinnings of this terminology, intended to encapsulate Burrough’s narrative methods.Chapter two draws upon theoretical works by Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre to construct a working definition of ‘alternative spatialities’. The third chapter engages with issues of undecidability and intratextuality in literature, considering diegetic levels in fiction and their transgression via metalepsis, also exploring Wolfgang Iser’s approach to reader-response criticism. Having taken these various strands of re-search, and having used them to establish a definition of ‘alternative intratextual spatialities’, the present work then explores the ways in which Cities of the Red Night compels the reader to generate such spatialities.This thesis proposes that Burroughs deploys a range of narrative strategies in Cities of the Red Night that have the shared aim of destabilising the reader’s ability to establish a clear, finalisable understanding of the text; the manner in which textual elements interact amounts to producing a level of in-built undecidability in the text that demands a suitable response from the reader, a response informed by the primacy of attaining a macro-level understanding of the text’s diegetic levels. The present work argues that the text’s destabilising narrative techniques require the reader to construct multiple ‘plot keys’, each housing potential blueprints of the diegetic levels of the text; having taken all the textual evidence into account, the reader is forced to concede that none of the potential plot keys may be privileged over the others, meaning that mutually exclusive textual elements are required to be considered as mutually inclusive. The main conclusions of this thesis are that Burroughs’s Cities of the Red Night engages in textual strategies that ensure that key macro-level elements of storyworld levels remain in a state of undecidability, thus compelling the reader to generate plot keys that propose hierarchical orderings of the various diegetic levels. The text compels the reader to adopt a mutually inclusive approach to plot keys that, in a logical sense, must be regarded as mutually exclusive. This thesis demonstrates that, in the reader’s mind, these plot keys coalesce, cross-contaminating one another and creating palimpsest-like zones, similar to the areas of crossover within a Venn diagram within which mutually incompatible narrative possibilities become hybrid and simultaneously feasible. The present work concludes that Burroughs’s principal spatial project is to employ transgressive narrative strategies that require the reader to generate ‘alternative intratextual spatialities’.