SOURCE: Lydenberg, Robin. “Sound Identity Fading Out: William Burroughs's Tape Experiments.” In Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, pp. 409-37. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Lydenberg analyzes Burroughs's literary voice as it is expressed on his experimental tape recordings.

Most writers don't use their voices in their work. … But Burroughs writes with his voice. … One cannot simply read his texts; one must, in reading them, also hear them. It is necessary to throw oneself into the voice.

—Philippe Mikriammos, “Vox Williami, vox monstrorum”

For thirty years reviewers of William Burroughs's fiction have acknowledged the power of his literary voice. In her 1966 review of The Soft Machine, Joan Didion ridicules critics who judge Burroughs's work on the basis of its moral, political, or thematic content. In Burroughs's case, Didion argues, “the medium is the message: the point is not...