Novel: Cities of the Red Night

Overview
William S. Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night (1981) launches his late trilogy with a hallucinatory blend of pirate chronicle, noir investigation, and biohazard dystopia. The book imagines a lost confederation, the six Cities of the Red Night, governed by libertarian Pirate Articles that promise radical personal autonomy and sexual freedom. Across alternating eras and voices, Burroughs stages a struggle between insurgent, erotic utopia and the metastasized systems of police, medicine, and military “Control,” pushing his long‑standing motifs of language, desire, and viral contamination into a broader, more architectonic narrative than the cut‑up experiments of the 1960s.

Plot and structure
The novel braids two principal narratives. In the 18th century, Captain Mission and his renegade companions carry the Articles of the pirate republic from the Indian Ocean toward a rumored inland sanctuary, the Cities of the Red Night. Their odyssey reads as a counter‑history, a speculative continuation of the libertarian enclave of Libertatia, with skirmishes against slavers, colonial navies, and priestly authorities. The pirates’ code, taken as a living constitution, frames scenes of recruitment, ritual brotherhood, and erotic camaraderie as they seek a refuge where no police or priests can reach.

In a contemporaneous strand, a narrator who slides between hardboiled gumshoe and field reporter, often under the mask of Clem Snide, pursues the disappearance and apparent snuff‑murder of a teenage boy across New York, Mexico, Morocco, and South America. The trail reveals a sexual‑police underworld intertwined with clandestine laboratories, black‑ops contractors, and the recurring quack‑surgeon Dr. Benway. Threaded through both plots is the emergence of B‑23, a designer plague that corrupts tissue and behavior like a programmable language, fusing biological contagion with memetic control. As the investigation collapses temporal boundaries, the two narratives begin to refract one another, hinting that the pirate past and the present plague world are parallel scripts that can be swapped, spliced, or rewritten.

The Cities and the Articles
The Cities of the Red Night themselves are presented as atlas entries, travelers’ notes, and ritual manuals: desert metropolises rumored to lie beyond Central Asian caravan routes, with names like Tamaghis and Ghadis, where the Pirate Articles govern in place of monarchy or law. The Articles guarantee consent, free sexual association, communal defense, and the right to mutiny against any emergent authority. Burroughs composes these sections as guidebook fragments, maps, and proclamations, so that the cities function both as places and as a method, an operating system for bodies, alliances, and speech that might immunize life against Control.

Themes and style
Burroughs folds adventure fiction, detective pulp, and science‑horror into a mosaic of routines, dossiers, trial transcripts, and incantatory slogans (“Nothing is true; everything is permitted”). Language operates as both weapon and cure: orders, diagnoses, and news copy carry the virus of Control, while the pirate Articles, love oaths, and cut‑up spells offer counter‑programming. Queer desire is not ornament but engine, binding crews, setting terms of consent, and marking the line where the state’s biopower asserts itself. The book’s prose moves between laconic hardboiled banter and lush visionary travelogue, returning to extended narrative without abandoning collage, repetition, and sudden shifts of person and time.

Ending
The detective strand fails in realist terms, the boy is killed and commodified, but the book refuses a single outcome. In the closing movement, ritualized narrative “replay” overwrites the snuff scenario: the boy is intercepted, history is detoured, and a pirate crew spirits him toward the Cities. Burroughs frames this as an act of practical magic, a readerly collaboration that swaps scripts at the level of word and image. The last pages leave the utopia conditional yet persistent, asserting that stories, like viruses, replicate futures. The Red Night remains a horizon, an outlaw commons kept alive by the Articles and by the insistence that another cut, another splice, can still set bodies free.