Abstract
In his article "How Burroughs Plays with the Brain, or Ritornellos as a Means to Produce Déjà-Vu" Antonio José Bonome discusses how the recurrence and significance of one of William S. Burroughs's most potent refrains, "dim jerky faraway," was inspired by its source text, Paul Bowles's second novel Let It Come Down (1952), where Tangiers-Interzone fuels the unwholesome descent of a US-American expatriate not unlike Bowles or Burroughs himself. "Dim jerky faraway" was used by Burroughs during more than two decades in different contexts, and its textual variations have sparked a mélange of colors, sounds, smells, and feelings oscillating in consonance with context. Bonome collates Burroughs's literary refrains with certain instances of the image-litany in a number of unpublished scrapbooks and the supplementary reverberation of ritornellos erupting from his tape-recorder experiments.
Recommended Citation
Bonome, Antonio José
"How Burroughs Plays with the Brain, or Ritornellos as a Means to Produce Déjà-Vu."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
18.5
(2016):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2962>
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