1The mutable subject—unstable, fluid, and fragmented—stands at the centre of experimental literary modernity. William S. Burroughs’ works, marked by radical experiments in text, time, and identity, exemplify this condition. The notorious wife-killing, drug-addled, homosexual avant-garde Beat figure and grandfather of punk, has long fascinated critics not only for his colorful life but also for the radically open-ended, oscillating, transmedial productions he created. Frederic Jameson identifies Burroughs as a key figure in the emergence of postmodernism, yet his proximity to modernism, particularly through his affinity for the works of Joseph Conrad, remains comparatively overlooked (1).
2This article traces points of convergence between Burroughs and Conrad centred on the motif of fluidity—of bodies, narratives, identities, and geopolitical spaces—and examines how this fluidity unsettles dominant structures of heteronormativity, imperialism, and linear time. Although separated by era and background—Conrad as a Polish-born Victorian expatriate novelist, Burroughs as a mid-century American outsider—both writers experienced life on the margins of empire and civilization, and both produced experimental, self-reflexive narratives that resist stable identity formations. Both frequently stage their works in expatriate enclaves, on vessels, and at frontier spaces where psychological darkness, disconnection, and unknowability pervade. This discussion will draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the Body Without Organs and smooth and striated space to frame how both writers produce destabilized, anti-hierarchical literary terrains. It will also engage Emilio Amideo’s Queer Tidalectics, Elizabeth Freeman’s Queer Temporalities, Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope” and Paul Ricoeur’s narrative time in situating Burroughs and Conrad’s narrative experiments within a broader challenge to normative rhythms of time, embodiment, and community.
3Fluidity in their works is not merely thematic but formal. Burroughs’ experiments with editing, re-editing, and fragmenting text find a precursor in Conrad's disjunctive narrative structures. Conrad frequently disrupts linear temporality, dramatizing storytelling situations on ships and employing sharp disjunctions between fabula (the chronological sequence of events) and sjužet (the order of their narrative appearance). As Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, and James Phelan note, Conrad’s use of “innovative temporalities and plots” is deeply tied to his presentation of subjectivity, memory, and moral ambiguity. Burroughs, taking such innovations further, produced profoundly self-reflexive works such as his 1959 novel Naked Lunch, where narrative fragmentation becomes both method and message, peppering his tales with meta-commentary on the sinister potentials of storytelling.
4Both writers also construct distinctly homosocial worlds. As Jamie Russell observes, Burroughs’ homosexuality is often understated in critical discussions, with figures like Norman Mailer (who shared Burroughs’ penchant for uxoricide) insisting that Burroughs' queerness was incidental to his masculine identity (cited in Morgan 618). Similarly, Richard J. Ruppel challenges longstanding views of Conrad as a “man’s man,” revealing undercurrents of homosociality and suppressed homoeroticism” (1). As Wayne Koestenbaum describes, Burroughs’ works inhabit a form of “bachelor literature,” a homosocial, homoerotically charged space in which women are often dangerous intruders who disrupt the masculine world (23). Ruppel similarly identifies in Conrad’s fiction an anxiety around women entering male-dominated environments (28).
5Crucially, both authors’ treatment of gender and sexuality intersects with their approaches to time and space. As Cesare Casarino points out, the sea narrative forms a crucial chapter in the representational forms of modernity, staging modernity itself as a site of constant flux or crisis. Casarino adapts Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia—real spaces that contest and disrupt the normal order of society—to frame the ship as a floating, destabilized space where normative cultural sites are suspended or inverted. In these heterotopic spaces, the emerging crisis of same-sex desire and the instability of imperial power structures are laid bare.
6Ultimately, this article argues that Burroughs and Conrad share deep structural and thematic preoccupations: with fluidity, fragmentation, and resistance to normative constructions of identity, sexuality, temporality, and empire. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s model of deterritorialization, Amedeo’s tidelectical crossings, and Freeman’s queer disruptions of chrononormativity, it will show how Burroughs radicalizes tendencies already latent in Conrad’s work, pushing literary modernity into new, profoundly destabilized forms.
7Burroughs’ approach to sex is outlined by Polina Mackay as “an emptying out of an inconsistent, inefficient body” (184), and she rightly points to a passage in Naked Lunch (1959) where the narrator notes, “no organ is constant as regards either function or position … sex organs sprout everywhere … rectums open defecate and close … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments” (9). This passage is the origin of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the “body without organs”—not a literal body devoid of physical parts, but the virtual, pre-organic ground from which organs and organisms emerge through processes of stratification and territorialization (153). Their structure-resistant theories and emphasis on societal fluidity have resonated with critics of Burroughs’ work, particularly Timothy Murphy, whose Wising Up the Marks highlights the binary-resistant and consistently fluid nature of Burroughs’ world-building (35–45). Fluidity is crucial to understanding the body without organs: it is a concept encompassing both time and space, emphasizing the de-territorialized flows of desire and energy that constantly traverse and constitute the body.
8While approaches such as Murphy’s focus on Burroughs’ resistance to organized society, they often relegate discussion of sexuality, because, as Mackay notes, “Burroughs seems to privilege fluidity and inconsistency,” leaving the suggestion that sexuality is largely irrelevant in his work. Even Queer (1985), unique as the one novel in Burroughs’ oeuvre that, as Oliver Harris states, offers “the sustained, realist representation of a sexual relationship,” was initially framed by Burroughs’ introduction not in terms of sexuality, but in terms of the violent death of his wife Joan and his withdrawal from heroin. Harris himself reedited the book in 2010, defiantly placing Burroughs’ introduction at the back as an appendix, thereby reformulating the novel as what Mackay describes as “a response (resistance even) to attempts at regulating the homosexual subject by heterosexual/heteronormative society” (185).
9It should also be noted that the novel’s queerness (in every sense) is compounded by its publication context and chronology: initially rejected in 1952 during the lavender scare and amidst heightened state homophobia, it was eventually published in 1985 at the height of the AIDS pandemic, which, particularly in the U.S., brought renewed homophobia through the false framing of AIDS as a “gay plague” (Erin Ruel and Richard T. Campbell, 2167).
10Yet when one experiences Burroughs’ work, sexual imagery is everywhere. Images of bodily fluids proliferate, as do phantasmagorical scenes of open and often violent sexuality, where homosexuality is recast as normative and opposed to heteronormativity. Notable examples include the infamous “Blue Movie” scene in Naked Lunch and the “Captured by Pirates” scene in Cities of the Red Night (1981), which employ a polyphony of voices and an amorphous queer sensibility (81–82; 279–282).
11Burroughs’ radical homonormative imaginary fits Freeman’s argument that there is a heteronormative “dominant arrangement of time and history … in which historical narrative … organizes various temporal schemas into consequential sequence” (11). Nonsequential forms of time, therefore, as presented in these works, resist forms of ontological fixity and heteronormativity. Ricoeur has emphasized that narrative time is not simply the passage of moments but a configuration of events that gives them meaning through the act of storytelling. For Ricoeur, the experience of narrated time is shaped by mimesis (the process of representation) and emplotment (the way events are structured into a narrative), both of which may disrupt linearity and allow for alternative temporalities to emerge in storytelling (Time and Narrative: Vol. 1. 54.). This non-sequential approach to time is evident in Burroughs’ work, where the fluidity of desire and sexuality unfolds not according to a predetermined order but in a manner that is more reflective of the disruptions and discontinuities in lived experience.
12Recalling the body without organs, Freeman suggests that the body binds social groups, where “naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation … people are bound to one another, engrouped, made to feel coherently collective, through particular orchestrations of time” (3). Such descriptions of temporal and bodily fluidity have much in common with those described by Emilio Amideo in his book Queer Tidalectics, which highlights the malleability and overflowing boundaries of gender, sexuality, and race. For Amideo, linguistic fluidity is demonstrated through the adaptation and queering of language: “Black queer people have learned to resist, live, and thrive in a racist heteronormative system, by constantly reinventing themselves through the language of that very system” (194). Amideo refers to the creativity that Black queer people have employed by reclaiming the racist, heteronormative language of their former colonial masters. This is a point also made by Gregory Coles, who notes that “hotly contested are words like ‘nigger’ and ‘faggot,’ which some members of the derogated groups have used in reclaimed ways, but which are almost universally considered derogatory when used by non-group members” (425).
13Burroughs’ status as a homosexual and Conrad’s as an immigrant situates their shared marginality in this context of reclamation and irony, a status that is explored in their novels and which continues to generate controversy—for example, in the title of Conrad’s N-Word of the Narcissus. The transgressive homosexual / homosocial relations and border-crossing evident in the work of both writers, particularly in the context of the sea, can be seen to denote the “crossing of dualistic or monolithic conceptions of both gender and identity,” where homonormativity is challenged (Amideo, 194). Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night presents a fluid “queer temporality,” where narrative time is presented as non-linear through dizzying switches between a range of time zones and the exploration of various homosocial spaces, most notably an eighteenth-century pirate ship (The Great White) and commune (Port Roger).
14Missing the importance of homosocial spaces such as these, Sean Bolton nevertheless rightly highlights, “One of the most unique features of William S. Burroughs’s experimental novels is the absence of any stable setting, any consistent geographical location or time period” (53). Burroughs’ use of alternate and unstable temporality in Cities of the Red Night allows the text to break standard heteronormative features. In this sense, both Burroughs and his characters conform to the resistant queer subcultures imagined by Jack Halberstam: “Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (2). As the narrator explains in an effective elegy to freedom at the beginning of Cities of the Red Night, the liberal commune of Libertatia did not succeed because, “There is simply no room left for ‘freedom from the tyranny of government’ …. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it” (12).
15With a focus on his use of language, Allen Hibbard regards Burroughs’ texts as “writing designed to remain fluid, resisting fixity, defying stability,” pointing to their textual fluidity ironically by alluding to phrases and characters recurring across Burroughs’ works (106). This analysis can be extended to Burroughs’ wider, transmedial and genre fluidity, along with the more literal symbolism of fluid across Burroughs’ work. If fluid is the substance that allows amorphous, androgyne, and non-binary resolutions, then it is the substance that permeates Burroughs’ work as a symbolic resistance against any kind of fixity—a point made by Sean Bolton in reference to Burroughs’ narratives: “Burroughs’s novels disintegrate all material contexts, constructing temporal and physical (dis)locations as fluid and destabilized spaces” (76). Bolton’s reading presents readers with a quandary: they must develop associative reading strategies to negotiate this overarching fluidity—yet such an approach ignores the material “anchor points” that Burroughs embeds in his text, particularly through his queering of temporalities. One can plot a course if one knows Burroughs’ “intersection points.” Murphy makes a similar point in his essay “Intersection Points: Teaching William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch,” where he sees four points of convergence that allow the reader to plot a reading of Naked Lunch (and by extension perhaps other works by Burroughs): “narrative self-reflexivity, character recurrence, thematic continuity, and the repetition of specific verbal motifs” (86).
16Narrative, time, space, character, text, and context may all be fluid in different ways, but there are more overt representations and symbols of fluidity running through Burroughs’ works. Fluidity is built into the self-reflexivity of Naked Lunch through the narrator’s suggestion that the reader “can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point,” and that the book “spills off the page in all directions” (187, 191). Pursuing this non-linear narrative strategy further, in 1959 Burroughs launched into a decade-long period of collaboration and experimentation using the cut-up method; a part-aleatory technique of cutting up various pieces of writing (his own and others) and rearranging them to produce texts that demonstrate a fluid, compositional flexibility (Burroughs and Gysin). The initial outcome of Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin’s collaborative experiments appeared in the pamphlet Minutes to Go (1960), a title heavy with connotations of time. Burroughs viewed the cut-up technique as a direct intervention in the structure of time, and it’s no coincidence that the method starts with the newspaper—the epitome of temporality in written form. By “cutting into the present,” he asserts, “the future leaks out” (1986). According to Burroughs, the process does not result in random combinations, but rather in meanings that point “to some future event” (2008: 28). Burroughs’ works present a vocabulary of fluid, verbal motifs where “gelatinous substances and jissom float and ejaculate to the surface and drift … serving as metaphors for this fluidity of word mass” (Hibbard 109). Rather than a reductive “word mass,” these word choices ironically demonstrate an ontological fixity, words pregnant with deferred meaning as they “spill” and “leak” into future time: the reader will always exist in the author’s future, along with any revelation they might present.
17F.R. Leavis makes a similar point about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, arguing against its “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery” (177), with Harold Bloom noting that Conrad’s “alert adroitness and ambiguity” anticipated later twentieth-century trends (19). The interrelation between time, the novel, and mystery is not exclusive to Burroughs and Conrad. Mark Currie notes that “the notion of the true secret, or the secret which cannot be revealed, is central to an understanding of the operations of fiction.” As J. Hillis Miller writes:
Literature keeps its secret. A work of literature is all on the surface, all there in the words on the page, imprinted on a surface that cannot be gone behind. This means that there are certain secrets or enigmas in a work of literature that cannot by any means be penetrated, though answers to the questions they pose may be essential to a reading of the work. (2001: 152)
18Highlighting the temporal aspect of deferred meaning, effectively brought about by Conrad’s obsession with mystery, Miller also writes that, “The structure of Heart of Darkness is the structure of the endlessly deferred promise” (112). This temporality of deferral is given a nautical context in the novel, where protagonist Marlowe states: “the furthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience,” was “not very clear,” nevertheless “it seemed to throw a kind of light” (7). This non-linear fluidity seems go some way toward solving the mystery or exposing meaning, but it is a route fraught with danger, particularly in the context of seafaring.
19In his analysis of Conrad’s N-Word of the Narcissus, Maxwell Uphaus argues that the sea serves as an allegorical force that spans multiple temporal dimensions: “The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history’s repressed violence” (173). In this particular novella, often referred to as one of his “storm pieces,” it is a site of disaster, (Conrad 2005 ix). However, the disaster is not merely the storm or the seemingly menacing antagonist; it is time itself. As Ruppel notes, time has overtaken “the sailing world in general since both the values and the technologies of the sailing ship are increasingly obsolete” (27). The novella ends with the narrator reflecting on the loss of the Narcissus crew: “The crew of the Narcissus drifted out of sight. I never saw them again” (Secret Sharer 254). The ship, lost at sea, becomes a metaphor for a bygone era, a eulogy to the age of sail. Ruppel also points out the homoerotic undertones in the camaraderie of the crew, which depicts a freedom now consigned to the past (27). The theme of lost freedom, which intersects with questions of sexuality and power, finds an echo in Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night, where the failure of Captain Mission’s Libertatia commune signals the collapse of an imagined utopia.
20Burroughs’ experimental narrative techniques, particularly the cut-up method, challenge linear constructions of time and language. His methods allow for non-linear thought to flow, evoking Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth space. According to Deleuze and Guattari, smooth space is defined by a lack of territoriality and fixed routes, “one [point] can rise up at any point and move to any other” (387). In contrast, striated space is regulated by the territorial logic of states and institutions, constraining movement to fixed paths. In this light, both Conrad and Burroughs explore the sea as a smooth space where authority is not fixed but mutable, flowing, and resistant. For both writers, the “hegemony of the West was the power of its State apparatuses to striate the sea” (Deleuze and Guattari 387). Conrad’s Narcissus directly critiques imperialism by presenting the sea as both a literal and symbolic boundary, while Burroughs uses the sea metaphorically to resist Western control, positioning fluidity as an alternative to state-sanctioned order.
21In Naked Lunch, Burroughs acknowledges the long and violent history of the U.S., stating, “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting” (11). This “waiting” evil is often linked to the sea as a space of both geographical and moral displacement, where colonial violence lingers beneath the surface. Burroughs’ depiction is drawn from similar representations in Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands (1896): “The old sea; the sea of many years ago, whose servants were devoted slaves and went from youth to age or to a sudden grave without needing to open the book of life, because they could look at eternity reflected on the element that gave the life and dealt the death” (14). Here, Conrad ties the sea to colonial exploitation, portraying seafarers as both physical laborers and symbolic slaves to imperial forces. This connection underscores the centrality of the sea in both writers’ exploration of colonialism and authority.
22In Lord Jim, Conrad further explores the fragility of authority, particularly in the absence of solid foundations. Jim’s trust in external authority figures is described as temporal and contingent upon immediate sensory perception, which can shift at any moment. As the narrator of Lord Jim observes, “[In] our own hearts we trust for our salvation in the men that surround us, in the sights that fill our eyes in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the air that fills our lungs” (17–18). This fleeting trust is exposed during the disaster on the SS Patna, when Jim, faced with the breakdown of authority and his own failure, is forced to confront the instability of the world around him. The sea, in this instance, becomes a site of total disorientation, a space where time loses its grounding: “No time! No time! No time! … Before he could shout three words, or make three steps, he would be floundering in a sea whitened awfully by the desperate struggles of human beings, clamorous with the distress of cries for help” (55). In this moment, the sea serves as a metaphor for the collapse of Jim’s identity and the disintegration of the order that he once trusted. The repeated refrain “No time!” emphasizes the temporality of Jim's understanding of authority and his inability to orient himself within a world where the familiar markers of time and space have vanished. This chaotic, fluid temporality mirrors the sea itself, an unstable space where life and death are always in flux. Jim’s failure to act during the Patna disaster reveals his incapacity to cope with a world that, like the sea, resists any fixed meaning or stable structure. The instability of the sea reflects his internal collapse: unable to distinguish between the temporal and the eternal, Jim becomes trapped in an endless cycle of guilt and regret, much like the crew of the Narcissus who, having succumbed to the sea’s violence, are “lost to sight.”
23Such fractured temporality is echoed in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and later works, where the linearity of time is persistently disrupted. For both authors, the sea becomes a space of existential crisis, where identity and authority are dissolved, and the rigid structures of time and power are thrown into question. The sea in Lord Jim is not merely a physical location but a symbol of the profound disorientation that arises when familiar structures of authority and meaning collapse. Jim, unable to navigate this space, finds himself adrift, much like the figures in Burroughs’ works who are similarly lost in fluid, shifting realities.
24A similar striation in space and time, via the sea, occurs in Burroughs and Jack Kerouac’s novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008, written in 1945), where protagonist Philip Tourian seeks escape from the straight-line shackles of U.S. heteronormative society to the imagined utopia of post-war France. The striation of the sea by a pencil line symbolizes a largely existential route for both narrator Ryko and Tourian, the line implying that their future is fixed and hierarchical, rather than fluid. For Ryko and Tourian, the sea becomes a Romanticised site of idealized homosociality and homoeroticism, as embodied by symbolist poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, pseudonyms the characters employ when signing a political petition. The petition is presented in vague terms, showing their sense of disconnection from the political process, while their drive to sail to Paris is symbolic of their wish to escape the repressive social forces regulating sexuality in binary terms in the U.S. As Geoffrey Harpham notes, the sea is a space that allows the “liberation of nonstandard sexuality,” and on Conrad’s Narcissus, as in And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, this fluidity of gender codes allows a homoerotic atmosphere to thrive (117). Not for the last time in Burroughs’ works, the smooth, levelling space of the sea reflects a sexual fluidity, populated by ships full of men free from the strictly demarcated shackles of social convention.
25Analysis of the closed space of the ship can be expanded to the sea, seamen, and fluidity to allow for a much broader multiplicity, appropriate to Conrad and Burroughs’ narrative strategies of resistance to fixed meaning. For Martina Kado, the ship is a space of assemblage, a site of near-constant deterritorialization and reterritorialization, where “the social and material practices of navigation continually shift between smooth and striated spaces” (3-4). In this context, the ship serves as a metaphor for fluid, unstable zones where identity and space are in perpetual flux. Such spaces are distorted in Lord Jim and Naked Lunch by the breakdown in distinctions between real and imagined, smooth and striated spaces. At the start of Lord Jim, Jim is a dreamer who would “live in his mind the sea-life of light-literature” and who “knew the difference between sky and water.” Although Jim can tell reality from fantasy, he chooses fantasy, and in doing so is caught in a fluid, liminal space between poles, unfixed and unafflicted until the disaster of the Patna alters the course of his imagined life of heroism to one of failure and redemption (17). The “sea and sky” are aligned three times in the novel as spaces of “high peace,” which a squall turns into an “abyss of obscurity” (64). Finally, Jim sees a brown mist representing the smoke of a steamship “through which you could see the boundary of sea and sky” (77). In contrast to Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897), where “No one knew the color of the sky … and all the men knew the colors of the sea” (57), Conrad’s backdrops of sea and sky are mutable and fluid, neither smooth nor striated.
26Similarly, in Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs conflates space and time, juxtaposing bodies of water, land, and sky with angular symbols of civilization and striation: “The scenes shift and change: tropical seas and green islands, a burning galleon sinks into a gray-blue sea of clouds, rivers, jungles, villages, Greek temples, and there are the white frame houses of Harbor Point above the blue lake” (286). In Naked Lunch, the sea is a site of liminality; indeed, the title of the novel was, for a time, intended to be “Sargasso Sea,” as a metaphor for being “occluded from space-time … Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection” (181). The novel ends with the “city” being rebuilt—described through waves of words separated by ellipses (a punctuation similarly favored by Conrad):
A heaving sea of air hammers in the purple-brown dusk tainted with rotten metal smell of sewer gas… young worker faces vibrating out of focus in yellow halos of carbide lanterns … broken pipes exposed …
‘They are rebuilding the City.’ (196)
27The “air hammers” become a sea, with a “purple-brown” dusk like the brown mist Jim sees obscuring the horizon line, while discharge in the sewer emits metallic-smelling gas from exposed broken pipes—the out-of-focus faces present a dissolving quality where solidity, and hence fixity, is melting. Instead of lines striating the sea, pipes that move fluid in straight lines are broken.
28When Jim is disabled by a falling spar, a wooden straight line that holds the sails, the ship closes his access to space, while the liminality of the sea inhabits his consciousness, foreshadowing the squall that will obscure the boundary between sea and sky. He must “spend many days stretched on his back, dazed, battered, hopeless, and tormented as if at the bottom of an abyss of unrest” (11). It is unclear whether opiates were part of Jim’s treatment during his hospital stay, but a “railway contractor … indulged in secret debaucheries of patent medication which his Tamil servant used to smuggle in with unwearied devotion,” and the same paragraph references the “endless dreams” offered by Eastern waters (12). Burroughs’ Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953) describes how addiction alters the perception of time: “A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start” (72). In Naked Lunch, the destabilizing effect of drugs on time is even more overt, but there is a similar liminality in the chapter “The Sailor.” Linking the fluidity of the sea with the ultimate mutable subject of the junkie—ruled by liquid narcotics, syringes, and blood—the Sailor is introduced with the “dead, cold, undersea eyes” of the dehumanized junkie, trapped in liminal space with one consuming desire: junk (43). Like the skipper of the Patna, whose voice is described as “harsh and dead, resembling the sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank” (17), both figures are partially “dead,” suspended out of time. This distorted fluidity is reflected in the Sailor’s appearance, which dissolves on contact with the striated space of the “Interzone,” Burroughs’ imagined cityscape: “He pulled the pen out and broke it like a nut in his thick, fibrous, pink fingers. […] A black mist poured out and hung in the air like boiling fur. The Sailor’s face dissolved. His mouth undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the black fuzz, vibrating in supersonic peristalsis, disappearing in a silent, pink explosion” (Naked Lunch 45). The pen acts to demarcate space, just as Jim’s pencil line on the chart and the wake of the Patna do. Yet here, as with the Sailor, the boundaries are not fixed; they are “dissolved” and “exploded” in waves. The spaces between the symbolic sea of the Sailor and the coming trading port city of Interzone, between the harsh reality of junk pushing and the imagined settings of the mind, are necessarily blurred and fluid.
29In Naked Lunch, fluidity is directly linked to opiate addiction, most evident in narcotics agent “Bradley the Buyer,” whose addiction morphs into a more complex entanglement with sexuality. Bradley attempts to “get fixed” by a young junky, who reports: “Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets wet all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax” (15). This depiction mirrors the dissolution of the body and the shifting of identity, not just in terms of addiction but also sexuality. Eventually, the buyer assimilates his district supervisor, “‘Schlup … schlup schlup’” (16). Harris interprets this onomatopoeia as Burroughs’ “fantasy of union”—a deferred desire for the fluid joining of disparate parts, representing both assimilation and bodily destruction. This represents the fluid nature of the body and its relation to temporality (204).
30Fluidity is not confined to the body, though. It permeates constructions of identity, social relations, and space. In the novel’s liminal space, the city of Interzone, inhabitants are caught in a disordered, fragmented existence. The city’s suspended transit lines—“At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars”—suggest an endless state of flux (45). These structures provide a backdrop for the prose-poetic descriptions of the city’s inhabitants, whose occupations are equally indeterminate:
Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states[.] (45)
31This is a portrait of the city’s corrupt underbelly, where temporal stasis is matched by the fluid and “unconstituted” nature of its policing. It recalls Conrad’s depiction of a European city as a “Whited Sepulchre” that conceals horrors beneath its surface (Conrad 9). Interzone similarly reflects a decaying, aimless flow, akin to Conrad’s description of the people of Macassar in An Outcast of the Islands:
They were a half-caste, lazy lot, and he saw them as they were—ragged, lean, unwashed, undersized men of various ages, shuffling about aimlessly in slippers; motionless old women who looked like monstrous bags of pink calico stuffed with shapeless lumps of fat, and deposited askew upon decaying rattan chairs in shady corners of dusty verandahs; young women, slim and yellow, big-eyed, long-haired, moving languidly amongst the dirt and rubbish of their dwellings as if every step they took was going to be their very last. (7)
32This languid decay contrasts sharply with the energy of the city in Naked Lunch, where bodies and identities are shifting and mutable, connected through both addiction and perverse sexualities. In Burroughs’ novel, the city is represented by liquid receptacles and nautical imagery: “So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish” (13). This decaying, perverse landscape continues to reinforce the theme of a fractured, fluid world.
33The final lines of Naked Lunch mark the return to a city that is perpetually rebuilding itself: “‘They are rebuilding the city.’ Lee nodded absently ... ‘Yes ... Always’” (196). Cyclical destruction and reconstruction suggest that identity and society are in a constant state of flux, eternally deferred, much like the physical and social space of Interzone. This fluidity is further underscored by the repeated, negative deferral in the Chinese coolie pidgin: “No glot ... C’lom Fliday,” which is repeated earlier in the novel when a Chinese drug pusher informs a Western addict that there are no drugs until Friday (121). This reversal of East-West power dynamics, queering the roles between the addict and the drug dealer, ties into the recurring motif of addiction as both a form of control and fluidity in relation to space: “Home is the heroin, home from the sea” (Burroughs 121, 191). Addiction becomes a decentered, fragmented home, one that is continuously in flux, yet anchored in the body. The metaphor of home as heroin collapses distinctions between the familiar and the alien, creating a space where identities dissolve into one another.
34As narrator Lee notes in Junkie, “Junkies tend to run together into one body” (183). The merging represents Burroughs’ imagining of liquid time and space: junkies must traverse the city, striating space as the needle striates the arm, creating tracks that mark their temporal and spatial journeys. This is further explored in Port of Saints (1973), where Burroughs revisits disaster at sea with the inclusion of the woodblock print of the mysteriously abandoned ship, the Mary Celeste, on the cover. The protagonist, James Lee, is a collector of sea disasters who compiles clippings of events like the Mary Celeste and the Titanic in his scrapbook (111). Burroughs transforms historical tragedy into a fluid, fragmented narrative, queering both space and time. As Lee reflects on the disasters, he rewrites history into a fragmented utopia: “Everybody did what he wanted to do” (119). This reimagining of history represents a radical queering of time whereby the rigid boundaries of past and present dissolve, and the past is continually rewritten in the present.
35In Burroughs’ hands, the sea becomes a metaphor for freedom and escape. In Port of Saints, sexual release and ejaculation are intertwined with maritime imagery. The protagonist dreams: “Boat whistling in the harbor. A tension growing in his crotch … Boat whistling in the harbor. He woke up ejaculating” (169). This connection between the sea and sexual climax is heightened in Cities of the Red Night, where pirate crews engage in chaotic, animalistic behavior that merges revolution and sexuality. “On deck, naked tars throw their hats into the air jacking off and leaping on each other like randy dogs: ‘Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ They scramble into uniforms as bugles call them to battle stations” (277). This scene contrasts military uniforms with raw, uninhibited desire, queering the notion of military and societal discipline. Unrestrained sexuality becomes a revolutionary force that challenges convention and pushes against traditional gender and sexual roles.
36In Port of Saints, Burroughs returns to more conventional narrative prose than in his earlier cut-up novels, but temporal fluidity remains central. The character of Audrey, whose feminine name and icy demeanor embody smooth space, introduces himself as “Audrey, your chill of interstellar space John” (126). This reference situates the fluidity of the body and time in a broader cosmic scale, suggesting that Burroughs views human evolution as transcendence beyond the material body, toward fusion with space itself. Burroughs famously stated, “I have postulated that the function of art is to show us the way to space” (The Adding Machine 171). For him, art and space represent the final frontier for evolution, transcending mind-body dualisms and moving into a fluid multiplicity, fully realized in Cities of the Red Night.
37The publication of Cities of the Red Night in 1981 marked a return to narrative for Burroughs and a departure from his earlier cut-up transmedial experiments. However, this apparent retreat is not without antecedents in the sequence of Burroughs’ work. In many ways, Cities of the Red Night extends aspects of cut-up experimentation while further exploring the mutable, fluid subjectivity of the later novels. Fluidity in Cities of the Red Night can be understood as a form of “fusional multiplicity,” to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s term (154), which exists within an uninterrupted continuum.
38Multiplicity in Cities of the Red Night is not merely an abstract concept, but a key feature of its material history and creative process. Burroughs’ collaboration with various individuals, including Steven Lowe, who researched pirate material and typed much of the first draft, and James Grauerholz, who played a pivotal role in editorial restructuring, signifies a marked departure from Burroughs’ earlier solitary writing practices. Gysin and Burroughs’ publisher Richard Seaver suggested further changes (Zurbrugg 22–24). The novel becomes a site of entangled voices, a characteristic central to Burroughs’ creative philosophy, which Wayne Koestenbaum identifies as the author’s “desire and pursuit of the whole—the wish to unite with a lost twin and to form a blended soul” (4). This yearning mirrors the transgressive and shifting identities in Cities of the Red Night, and reflects Burroughs’ exploration of the fluidity of gender, sexuality, time, and space, crossing the boundaries of author and work.
39The novel’s pervasive use of maritime imagery and nautical language further accentuate its sense of fluidity. The sea, in particular, is a recurring symbol of crossing, traversal, and globalization, as well as a site of mystery, death, and equalization. This maritime motif is evident not only in the narrative content but also in the novel’s visual identity, particularly the use of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1562 painting The Triumph of Death on the first edition’s cover. Bruegel’s work, lodged temporally at the threshold of the modern era, features a ship in the distance, seemingly escaping disaster. The image resonates with the themes of Cities of the Red Night, where survival and escape are central motifs, embodied by the queer utopian spaces of Port Roger and The Great White.
40The mutability of identities within the text is also mirrored in its formal fluidity. The novel shifts between a range of narrative voices and genres—detective fiction, seafaring historiographical metafiction, non-fiction, and medical drama—further underlining its refusal of fixed identity and linear temporality. This defies traditional narrative structures and creates a constantly shifting, non-hierarchical experience for the reader. The text’s formal experimentation and multiplicity can be understood as a further extension of the ideas Burroughs explored in his earlier cut-up works, particularly the Body without Organs, via the rejection of the fixed, organized body in favor of a fluid, ever-changing multiplicity. In Cities of the Red Night, this idea is translated into the fluid and fragmented identities of the characters and the constantly shifting narrative structures, mirroring the concepts of fluidity and multiplicity that define the novel.
41The spaces in the novel are not just geographical or historical; they are imbued with a fluid temporality, as time is not experienced as a steady forward march but as a dynamic and changing parameter. Burroughs’ world functions as what Amideo calls “waterscapes”—spaces that are continuously shifting and changing, not tied to linear progression. They embody a critique of the ways traditional narratives, shaped by historical and social conventions, attempt to lock time and identity into fixed, linear structures. In this regard, the narrative of Cities of the Red Night challenges the conventional chronotope. The term was coined by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to describe how time and space are interwoven in narrative. The chronotope is crucial in shaping how narrative functions within a given cultural and historical context, but also in defining the possibilities for action, subjectivity, and temporality within a text (84–258). It is linked to how actions are temporally organized within the narrative: it shapes the movement of characters, how relationships evolve, and how the passage of time influences meaning. In Burroughs’ novel, this passage is fragmented and non-sequential, emerging in a space where time is constantly collapsing and reforming. This interruption of linear time disrupts not only narrative cohesion but also the conventional understanding of historical progression.
42This narrative fluidity is a queer temporality that resists the “normative, heterosexualized” conception of time that progresses toward a fixed end (Freeman 4). Burroughs’ narrative, much like Freeman’s conception of queer time, embraces the instability of temporal experience. The characters in Cities of the Red Night do not experience time in a uniform, ordered way. Instead, time functions as a fluid, malleable force where the past, present, and future are both intertwined and disconnected, rejecting any traditional understanding of straightforward sequence.
43In the novel, this fluidity of time is linked to the characters’ fluid identities. Burroughs uses identity as something unstable, transitory, and subject to change—an ongoing process of emergence and transformation. This approach to identity mirrors queer temporality, outlined by Halberstam in reference to New Queer Cinema, which he argues “eschewed gay identity as a point of departure or return and instead represented same-sex relations in terms of acts, situations, aesthetics, and unpredictable historical or social collisions.” (27) Fluid time effectively allows for the dissolution and reconfiguration of identity, emphasizing that identity cannot be fixed, but is instead continuously shifting. The de Fuentes/Iguana twins in Cities of the Red Night serve as an example of this fluidity. They exist outside traditional gender boundaries, defying the binary gender system: “His twin sister has the manner and directness of a man, with none of the coy enticing ways usually found in her sex .… Yet I must confess myself more attracted to her than to any woman I have yet seen” (66). The fluidity of gender in the narrative reflects the queering of time. At one point, one of the twins “peels off his cunt suit,” suggesting identities are not static, but in constant flux, shaped by shifting historical moments and personal desires (283).
44In his short story “Il Conde” (1908), Conrad also delves into temporal fluidity, offering a narrative where time is fragmented and broken into “sudden holes” (Peters 200). Conrad’s narrative’s portrayal of the likely secret homosexual relationship between the eponymous Count and a young Italian man operates within a temporal framework that resists linearity and progressive time. Time in “Il Conde” is perpetually running out or missing, with the first meeting between the narrator and the count occurring in the National Museum, containing the frozen-in-time bronzes of “Herculaneum and Pompeii” (313). The “deucedly queer story” the Count tells his friend, while frozen in time, is presented in such a way as to underline the fluidity of meaning that underscores his robbery at the hands of the young man, and how it would be easy for the aggressor to play the victim and create a scandal (323). This creates a space where the fluidity of identity is made possible, much as in Cities of the Red Night, where time is disrupted and queered. Just as John G. Peters notes in his essay on Conrad’s “sudden holes” in time, Burroughs’ novel offers “ruptures,” where the continuity of the narrative is disrupted to make room for non-normative expressions of desire and action. Both Burroughs and Conrad show how time, when freed from its conventional boundaries, offers space for identity to evolve beyond fixed categories.
45The temporal dissonance in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), where Conrad fragments time in a disjointed narrative structure, also speaks to a critique of historical determinism and social order. Conrad’s anarchist plot mirrors both the utopian ideals and fractured temporality of Cities of the Red Night, where time becomes an unreliable guide. In The Secret Agent, time is presented as uncertain and fragmented, with the future always unclear, mirroring the disintegration of the social order. Likewise, in Burroughs’ novel, time is not linear but fluid, with overlapping moments that collapse, fracture, and reform in ways that resist any fixed conception of history.
46The interplay between identity and time in Cities of the Red Night is further complicated by the introduction of B-23, a virus that causes permanent genetic mutations that pose a biological and cultural challenge to fixed notions of race and gender. The virus’s ability to cause gender transformation and affect racial identities also provokes the queering of temporality: as identity mutates, so too does the experience of time. The characters in Burroughs’ novel live in a world where temporal and identity categories are fluid, constantly subject to change and recombination. This transformation in identity is not just biological but also epistemological, mirroring the argument made by Freeman that queer temporality creates new epistemologies of identity that are not grounded in fixed, linear categories but are instead shaped by multiplicity and flux. The character of Clem Snide, whose true gender identity is revealed to be Audrey Carson, is emblematic in this respect.
47A further example is the chapter “Cities of the Red Night,” which presents the city of Yass Waddah as a space of sexual and gender fluidity:
Yass-Waddah: This city is the female stronghold where the Countess de Gulpa, the Countess de Vile, and the Council of the Selected plot a final subjugation of the other cities. Every shade of sexual transition is represented: boys with girls’ heads, girls with boys’ heads. Here everything is true and nothing is permitted except to the permitters. (142)
48That it is a female stronghold is significant; it is an outlier in Burroughs’ work as a site of female power that reverses his maxim that “nothing is true everything is permitted”, which first appeared in the cut-up texts Minutes to Go and The Exterminator (Harris & Ghadami 31). The reversal is significant as Yass-Waddah subsequently becomes the main target of the protagonists in the novel, later equated with Manhattan; its smouldering ruins signify Burroughs’ attempts to destroy gender binaries and resist linearity, regimentation, and regulation (285). For Burroughs, as for Freeman, a queer utopia necessarily resists hetero-chrononormativity
49Burroughs radically reimagines temporality and identity in Cities of the Red Night, rejecting linear progression and fixed subjectivities. His fluid treatment of time and space aligns with Freeman’s notion of queer temporality, privileging discontinuity, simultaneity, and refiguration over normative chronological order. Identity in Burroughs’ world is not stable but constantly shifting, a continual becoming. The influence of Conrad’s preoccupation with non-linear temporality is palpable on Burroughs’ work. Peters’ analysis of Conrad’s “sudden holes” in time captures the way narrative ruptures expose the instability of history and causality. Burroughs extends this technique, not only fragmenting time but queering it—rendering historical and personal narratives permeable, contingent, and multiple. As with Conrad’s Secret Agent and “Il Conde”, Burroughs’ novel dismantles linear time, but with a sharper focus on the intersection of sexuality, power, and temporality.
50Deleuze’s concept of becoming further illuminates Burroughs’ portrayal of identity. Characters mutate, transmigrate, and destabilize binaries of gender and race, enacting a fluidity that resists territorialization. The B-23 virus, the shifting allegiances of characters, and the blurred boundaries between bodies all point toward identity as assemblage rather than as fixed essence.
51Formally, Burroughs’ techniques exemplify David James’ description of postmodern collagist strategies: fragmented voices, shifting genres, and destabilized settings (124–25). His textual experiments foreground the disintegration of authorship itself, echoing Roland Barthes’ vision of writing as the space where the subject “slips away” (1977: 142). In correspondence with Conrad’s elusive narratives, Burroughs’ fiction displaces interpretive authority onto the reader, inviting continual reinvention. Diana Knight’s notion of the “labor of displacement” is key here: Burroughs disrupts genre, narrative, and ideology, queering every convention he touches. His invocation of what Barthes labels androgynous neutrality is crystallized in the recurring, enigmatic smiles of his characters—such as Captain Strobe’s smile at death (“On Strobe’s face is a strange smile”; 291)—in moments of ecstasy when meaning itself becomes unfixed.
52The novel’s endless deferral and refusal of resolution is encapsulated by the reference to the Marie Celeste (“The mystery was never solved”; 316), an emblem of Burroughs’ commitment to mystery, multiplicity, and open-ended transformation. Like Conrad’s temporal fractures, Burroughs’ disruptions resist closure, offering instead a radical vision of queer time, fluid identity, and narrative openness.