William S. Burroughs and the ancient historians

Abstract Although not typically known for his close engagement with classical texts, William S. Burroughs (1914–97) incorporates writings by ancient historiographers into several of his later publications, Cities of the Red Night (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981), The Place of Dead Roads (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983), and Apocalypse (New York: George Mulder Fine Arts, 1988). This article analyses the alterations that Burroughs makes in these works to Herodotus (4.72), Tacitus (Hist. 3.33), and Plutarch (de defectu oraculorum 419b–e). It demonstrates how Burroughs deliberately alters ancient prose writings as part of a larger aim to rearrange his own physical reality — what the author terms ‘a magical theory of history’. On the one hand this alteration of ancient texts emphasizes a particular technique in Burroughs’ later writing practice, where working on a larger scale the cut-up technique becomes looser and more akin to re-writing, thus echoing more conventional prose. On the other hand, Burroughs’ subversion of canonical classical authors adds a further example to recent scholarship that has examined the forgery of classical texts as a form of queer reception practice.