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 Ugly The Rustle of Language in William S. Burroughs The indulgent Machine and The Ticket That Exploded Ugliness is everywhere. It is on the sidewalksthe black lurch phlegm of old flattened bubblegumsquashed beneath the scraped soles of suited buns 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 toilet with bathtub scum sunsets rosier than any Homer finger-painted dawn. Like the treble call out of helpless children, ugliness is piercing, unavoidable, everywhere. Yet, some powerful pieces of literature, with the assistance of paroxysmal talking to 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 Melvilles Moby-Dick Rhodas descent towards suicide in Virginia Woolfs The Waves Walt Whitmans telling of the crash of the San Francisco in Song of Myselfin these works, the lilting power of language, with its ability to damp raw and tender flesh, exposes the friction between unsightly sores and the soaring majesty of the greatest machinationthe ability to transform the ugly into the beautiful. What I give away in the previous paragraph pertains to the literary realm of the aesthetic. George Levine frames the aesthetic dig as being composed mostly of moments when readers have felt overwhelmed, perchance on the verge of tears, the whole body thrillingly interested (4). Geoffrey Galt Harpham describes it in the chase terms Precisely as theoretical confusion, as the undecidablitity between object and subject, liberty and the repressive law, critical and uncritical passages, grievous and necessary misreadings, even art and ideology (135). Yet, in certain theoretical publications about postmodernism, at that place 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 any consideration of the aesthetic.