A note about brain-chemistry here may help to clear up a popular error. Addiction to opiates provided Burroughs with a frequent subject and a pet analogy, but it was marijuana not heroin which coloured his imagination when he was writing, as he described in The Place of Dead Roads (1984): “the cannabis made everything so much sharper . . . . it also made him silly in an eerie, ghostly sort of way”. Though Walter Benjamin long ago called for a “physiology of style”, literary studies have not moved far in that direction, let alone attempted a neurophysiology of style. And perhaps the explanatory prospects are not bright: the Marquis de Sade, for instance, was a chocaholic, but it might not be easy to correlate massive intake of theobromine with the character of his oeuvre. Yet in Burroughs’s case, he was himself so avid a self-diagnoser it seems apt to calibrate input against output. His writing often lies along the dangerous edge between prurience and indignation.

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