The Yage Letters Redux (Paperback)

~ William S. Burroughs (Author), Allen Ginsberg (Author), Oliver Harris (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This epistolary novel, first published in 1963, is actually a fascinating travel log written mostly by Burroughs of a trip he made to Peru and Colombia in 1953 to track down the legendary yage vine (also called ayahuasca), valued among the Indians for its telepathic and anesthetic powers. After a padding of manuscript history from scholar Oliver Harris (The Letters of William S. Burroughs), we find Burroughs writing to Ginsberg, recording his mostly harrowing, occasionally enlightening experiments with the drug, as well as his experiences picking up stray boys and eluding nosy officials. The second half of the book, dated seven years later, contains letters and poems from Ginsberg to Burroughs from the same region and, in turn, record Ginsberg's more intensely spiritual trips ("visit the moon, see the dead, see God"). When not violently poisoned by the drug, Burroughs attained wild, beautifully rendered hallucinations of the "Composite City," and his reflections on the corruption of government and the insidious spread of disease prove haunting and masterly. (June)
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Review

" . . . incredible new edition of Yage Letters . . . " -- RealityStudio.org, April 2006

"Albeit unusual but still a solid addition to the Beat canon." -- Library Journal, March 2006

"For readers and aficionados of Beat history this new edition is something of a gem." -- Beat Scene Magazine, Summer 2006

"new edition of the book . . . places it more centrally in the list of key Burroughs texts." -- The Independent, UK, May 2006

"understanding the literary legacy of Burroughs and Ginsberg is impossible without reading this amazing collection of letters and documents" -- Bloomsbury Review, July/August 2006

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers; 4th edition (January 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872864480
• ISBN-13: 978-0872864481
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #418,276 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars interesting beat history, July 25, 2007

By	Lee V. Jordan "lvj" (ukiah,CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I found this to be very interesting when put into historical perspective.strange tales from both burroughs and ginsberg.I give this a high rating just because it's such an interesting read.You have many different avenues with witch to approach the many layers this has to offer. L Jordan

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fake Letters And Real Drugs., July 17, 2007

By	Wordplayboy "Page Turner" (Pseudo Nam) - See all my reviews

'The Yage Letters Redux' is a contemporary update of 'The Yage Letters,' a lesser-known Burroughs epistolary text (or pseudo-epistolary text - more on which in a moment) from 1963. It mostly takes the form of letters from Burroughs to his lover and literary cheerleader Allen Ginsberg when, after the death of his wife Joan in the notorious much-debated shooting accident, Burroughs takes off to South America on a fractured internal amnesiac quest in search of Yage (pronounced 'Ya-hey'), the supposed 'Final Fix' (a powerful draw for such a hardcore drug addict) used by brujos for prophetic effect. In the letters the Harvard-educated junkie-cum-ethnobotanist describes the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of the country, giving us a vivid, sweatsoaked travelogue of the place and the people and places he finds there.

'Redux' is edited by Oliver Harris, who edited an excellent book of letters by Burroughs from 1945-1959, and for anybody interested in El Hombre Invisible it's a fascinating, revolutionary version of a revelatory text that is definitely worth checking out. Containing 40 new pages of text, it encompasses pieces of writing from 1953-1960, including some by Ginsberg, the book has a very tangled, complex literary history (expertly unraveled by sui generis Burroughs scholar Harris in the introduction). Long presumed to have been genuine letters between the two men, the epistolary nature of the text turns out to be an elaborate literary construction by Burroughs (hoping for a book that could have been published as a companion piece to 'Junkie,' published by Ace Press), to try and sell piecemeal material. In retrospect it's easy enough to see this when it's pointed out. Take, for example, this for a description of a priest from a 'letter' from Burroughs dated January 30th:

"There was no mistaking the neurotic hostility in his eyes, the fear and hate of life. He sat there in his black uniform nakedly revealed as the advocate of death. A business man without the motivation of avarice, cancerous activity sterile and blighting. Fanaticism without fire or energy exuding a musty odor of spiritual decay. He looked sick and dirty - though I guess he was clean enough actually - with a suggestion of yellow teeth, unwashed underwear and psychosomatic liver trouble. I wonder what his sex life would be."

That is far too studied and crafted a passage to merely be a passing comment on a person the writer met. And nobody but Burroughs would wonder what the sex life of so unappealing a character would be! And only he would write musings about music heard on his trip like "A phylogenetic nostalgia conveyed by this music - Atlantean?" because only he could believe that he could be nostalgic for music supposedly heard in Atlantis.

There are many examples in the text of upper class Burroughs being the ultimate rich 'Ugly American' abroad, and his condescension towards the South American natives he encounters is very obvious and sneering and supercilious, though becoming more ambivalent as his experience amongst them goes on and he becomes educated to their tardy ways. However. The text herein is divided into three sections: 'In Search of Yage' (1953), 'Seven Years Later' (1960) and 'Epilogue' (1963). Right at the end of the first section Burroughs takes Yage and experiences a complete literary and psychic overhaul. I was deeply surprised to encounter practically verbatim the 'The Market' section from 'Naked Lunch' here, written when Burroughs is under the influence of Yage and obviously inserted into the text for that seminal novel at a later date. It's an incredibly beautiful, strange, stunning piece of writing, visionary and exotic and unknown and unsurpassed (to my mind) and, in case you don't know what I'm talking about, I present here, in case you haven't seen it, one of my all-time favourite prose poetry passages in the English language, and one which has proved deeply inspirational to me in my own writings (the version here being slightly different to the one in 'Naked Lunch'):

"Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, cut antiobiotics, Tithonian longevity serum; black marketers of World War III, pitchmen selling remedies for radiation sickness, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit taken down in hebephrenic shorthand, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states; a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy; sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will; doctors skilled in treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human hosts, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit.

A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum. Larval entities waiting for a live one."

I could go on and on about that passage, and others in 'Naked Lunch,' (notably 'Atrophied Preface: Wouldn't You' and the description of the Composite City, the latter of which is in here too; these few passages alone make buying this book worthwhile) one of my all-time favourite books, for hours, content and structure and imagery and obsessions laid down and on and on and on, but I won't, so don't worry. But knowing that that beautiful, damaged, disturbing sequence was from Burroughs's South American adventure, and not from Tangiers, as I had always assumed, was an eye-opener, as was the knowledge he wrote it under the influence of Yage and that this drug and writing forever changed his outlook and writing style. It certainly comes off as being visionary, otherworldly writing, Burroughs out of his head on drugs and communicating back to us from the dense dripping green rainbow-bird primeval evil eye jungles of South America what the grinning sweating knowing mentally flying brujos have been getting off on for centuries. Gorgeous stuff indeed, and language unlikely to be replicated again in such a dreary regimented age of non-experimentation and drug paranoia and fear of the Unknown. But at least we had mad old Mr. Burroughs there to document it for us.

Some of the other stuff in the book is not so hot, ie a couple of letters from Ginsberg where he writes of drug trip and manages to waffle tedious fractured semi-religious nothing-meaning white syllabic noise for page after page - "- but God knows I don't know who to turn to finally when the chips are down spiritually and I have to depend on my own Serpent-self's memory of merry visions of Blake - or depend on nothing and enter anew - but enter what? - Death? - and that that moment - vomiting still feeling like a Great lost serpent-Seraph vomiting in consciousness of the Transfiguration to come - with the Radiotelepathy sense of a Being whose presence I had not yet fully sensed -" and blah blah blah and on and on and on. There's a Burroughs cut-up passage here too, 'I am Dying, Meester?' and that's pretty pointless as well, ultimately. I never ever liked Ginsberg and all his religious psychobafflebabble, and the cut-up is, to me, a pointlessly alienating parlour trick. But I suppose it's all literary history and we would never have heard of Burroughs without Ginsberg, so I suppose it all balances itself out. Sort of.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Non-fiction., March 1, 2007

By	James Robert Smith (Matthews, NC United States) - See all my reviews

Of all of Bill Burroughs' works, I enjoy his fictions that were closest to his life as he lived it. QUEER and JUNKY are my favorites, as they deal so honestly with the very strange world in which he moved. I realize that his cut-outs and dream-like novels are important and quite moving to many, but they just never impressed me the way his earlier books do.

THE YAGE LETTERS recounts Burroughs' trip to South America to search out the legendary drug "Yage" which he hoped would enable him to grasp something like mental telepathy. Yes, it's a mad notion and this journey is certainly equally mad, as he moves freely among primitive folk and capitalist exploiters and thieves and holy men and jungle bureaucrats and fellow travellers and drug addicts. Ultimately, the feeling that I was left with was that Yage, like so many other drugs, was nothing but poison. WB lovingly details the search for the material, the preparation of the matter, and the nausea-inducing reactions to the drug that proved only to be a mild hallucinatory.

But it isn't the Yage itself that drives this book. Rather, it's the journey. I highly recommend joining Burroughs in this prose trek.