“Prisoners of the Earth, come out”: Links and Parallels between William Burroughs’s Writing and Gnostic Thought

• Authors: Anna Białkowska
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

William Burroughs’s works are rarely read in relation to any religious context. I would like to present a correspondence between the vision that emerges from his Nova Trilogy and some of the most popular Gnostic ideas. In the cut-up trilogy, mankind is left alone, trapped in a hostile cosmos ruled by antihuman forces. Through the manipulation of words and images, Demiurge-like agents spread their control over an illusory reality. Like Gnostics, Burroughs envisions the physical world, and also the body, as a prison to the transcendent spirit. To him, one way of escape is through cut-ups. The writer shows that by breaking away from arbitrary notions and a routine mode of thinking, one can attain gnosis — saving knowledge. Burroughs creates his own mythology which, like Gnostic teachings, promotes the ideas of self-knowledge, internal transformation and transcendence.

Keywords

EN

William S. Burroughs; Gnosticism; Nova Trilogy; cut-ups; gnosis

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego
• Journal: Anglica Wratislaviensia
• Year: 2018
• Issue: 56
• Pages: 23 - 34

Contributors

author

Anna Białkowska

• Jagiellonian University, Kraków