A History of Violence: From Satire to Transgression

Abstract

Burroughs and Nabokov, as seems fitting, are each somewhat anomalous in literary tradition. Nabokov considered himself American but is innocent of the Emersonian tendencies usually detectable in the American makeup. Burroughs was grouped with the Beat Generation but did not share their essentially humanistic desire for experience as a means to knowledge. Older than the main Beats, Burroughs was not a participant in anything as mundane as a “counterculture.”¹