The Aesthetic, the Postmodern and the Ugly: The Rustle of Language in William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded

The Aesthetic, the Postmodern and the Ugly: The Rustle of Language in William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded

Ugliness is everywhere. It is on the sidewalks—the black tar phlegm of old flattened bubblegum—squashed beneath the scraped soles of suited foot soldiers on salary. It is in the straddled stares of stubborn strangers. It is in the cancer-coated clouds that gloss the sweet-tooth sky of the Los Angeles Basin with bathtub scum sunsets rosier than any Homer finger-painted dawn. Like the treble yell of helpless children, ugliness is piercing, unavoidable, everywhere. Yet, some powerful pieces of literature, with the assistance of paroxysmal words juxtaposed against brutal vistas and bitter emotions, have transformed the ugly into the beautiful. Here are some obvious examples: the monomania of Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick ; Rhoda’s descent towards suicide in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves ; Walt Whitman’s telling of the shipwreck of the San Francisco in “Song of Myself”—in these works, the lilting power of language, with its ability to moisten raw and tender flesh, exposes the friction between unsightly sores and the soaring majesty of the greatest art—the ability to transform the ugly into the beautiful.

What I describe in the previous paragraph pertains to the literary realm of the aesthetic. George Levine frames the aesthetic scene as being composed mostly of moments when readers “have felt overwhelmed, perhaps on the verge of tears, the whole body thrillingly interested” (4). Geoffrey Galt Harpham describes it in the following terms: “[Precisely] as ‘theoretical confusion,’ as the undecidablitity between object and subject, freedom and the repressive law, critical and uncritical passages, grievous and necessary misreadings, even art and ideology” (135).

Yet, in certain theoretical writings about postmodernism, there seems to be no confusion at all. Instead, what has been described appears as an-aesthetic: a style, or a poetics, that deadens and numbs a tendency towards the aesthetic in postmodern literature. Jean-François Lyotard describes postmodern writing as putting “forward the unpresentable in presenatation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms” (81). Linda Hutcheon even suggests that postmodern poetics might, instead, be referred to as “a ‘problematics’” (224). In her book The Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon focuses on an-aesthetic forms in the critical and literary writings on and within postmodernism without any consideration of the aesthetic.