Collection: Exterminator!

Clarification
There are two closely related Burroughs titles that are often conflated. The 1960 collaboration with Brion Gysin is The Exterminator (without an exclamation point), a slim, experimental collection from Auerhahn Press. More than a decade later, Burroughs published Exterminator! (1973), a different, more accessible set of short pieces. The summary below concerns the 1960 collection.

Overview
The Exterminator is a compact laboratory of techniques and obsessions that shaped Burroughs’s post–Naked Lunch writing. Composed with painter and poet Brion Gysin, it splices prose fragments, routines, slogans, and bureaucratic detritus into a non-linear collage. The title’s pest-control figure becomes a shifting persona: a working stiff with a sprayer, a saboteur of language systems, and a metaphoric agent sent to eradicate infestations of control. Rather than offer stories with beginnings and endings, the volume orchestrates jolts of scene and voice, moving from Tangier alleys to American offices, from street talk to mock-official notices, from junkie confession to deranged advertisement copy. Reading it feels like twisting a radio dial across scrambled frequencies where the same motifs recur with altered charge.

Form and Technique
The book is an early showcase for the cut-up method that Burroughs and Gysin were developing: pages assembled from sliced and recombined texts, retyped collages whose seams are sometimes visible and sometimes smoothed into uncanny flow. Gysin’s visual interventions, calligraphic forms, layout disruptions, and a painter’s eye for juxtaposition, make the pages into graphic fields as much as vessels for narrative. The technique yields meanings by collision: headlines and clinical notes misfire into satire; travelogue and police report cohabit; instruction and incantation trade places. The effect is to loosen the grip of expected syntax and sequence so that language behaves like a foreign substance with its own vectors, habits, and parasites. Burroughs is already worrying the idea, later made famous in his talk of “the word” as a virus, that language can carry and reproduce control.

Themes and Content
Addiction, withdrawal, and cure-alls course through the fragments alongside images of vermin and toxins, so that narcotics and pests blur into a shared ecology of exposure and eradication. Authority appears as a dispersed apparatus, doctors, cops, censors, diplomats, clerks, issuing forms and threats in tones that only sometimes know they are jokes. Sex and violence flicker as abrupt cuts rather than erotic or action set pieces, their impact heightened by the discontinuity that frames them. The recurring city is an “Interzone” of ports, rooms, and corridors, more diagram than map, where money, bodies, and information change hands and the same routine might be replayed with new lines spliced in. Burroughs’s black humor is prominent: the breezy salesman’s pitch for nightmare commodities; the official memo that derails into delirium; the stiff procedural voice undercut by a sudden, obscene aside. Across the collisions, the exterminator’s sprayer doubles as a writer’s tool, attempting to flush out infestations not of rats or roaches but of cliches, propaganda, and conditioned reflexes.

Tone and Impact
The Exterminator reads like an instruction manual for unlearning. It resists the reader’s impulse to stabilize plot or character and instead rewards attention to rhythm, recurrence, and contradiction. What coherence it offers comes from iterative images and the pressure of its campaign against received sense. As a collaboration, it captures the catalytic moment when Gysin’s visual and procedural provocations met Burroughs’s routines and paranoia, setting the stage for the cut-up novels that followed. It is a small book with an outsized legacy: a deliberately jagged, funny, abrasive artifact whose formal mischief doubles as a political and aesthetic wager on what happens when you turn the sprayer on language itself.

Note on the 1973 book
Exterminator! (1973) is a separate collection of short pieces by Burroughs that, while sharing concerns with control and subversion, is more conventionally readable and gathers discrete stories and sketches rather than a typographic collage.