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

The Aesthetic, the Postmodern and the fearful The Rustle of Language in William S. Burroughs The Soft Machine and The Ticket That explode Ugliness is everywhere. It is on the sidewalksthe black tar phlegm of old planate bubblegumsquashed beneath the scraped soles of suited foot soldiers on salary. It is in the straddled stares of unflinching 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 either Homer finger-painted dawn. Like the treble yell of helpless children, ugliness is piercing, unavoidable, everywhere. Yet, both(prenominal) powerful pieces of literature, with the assistance of paroxysmal words juxtaposed against brutal vistas and acerbity emotions, have transformed the ugly into the beautiful. Here are some unadorned examples the monomania of Ahab in Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick Rhodas descent towards suicide in Virginia Woolfs The Waves Walt Whitmans telling of t he shipwreck of the San Francisco in Song of Myselfin these works, the lilting power of language, with its susceptibility to moisten raw and tender flesh, exposes the clang between unsightly sores and the soaring majesty of the greatest artthe ability to transform the ugly into the beautiful. What I describe in the previous divide pertains to the literary realm of the aesthetic. George Levine frames the aesthetic scene as being serene mostly of moments when readers have felt overwhelmed, perhaps on the verge of tears, the livelong body thrillingly interested (4). Geoffrey Galt Harpham describes it in the following terms Precisely as conjectural muddiness, as the undecidablitity between object and subject, freedom and the repressive law, critical and noncrucial passages, grievous and necessary misreadings, horizontal art and ideology (135). Yet, in trusted 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-Franois 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 whatsoever consideration of the aesthetic.