Utopia and Fantasy in the Late 1960s: Burroughs, Moorcock, Tolkien

Abstract

I want to begin with a disagreement — but one situated at some little distance from the youth culture of the late 1960s with which I will chiefly be concerned. In November 1963 a fierce controversy broke out in the letter columns of the normally august Times Literary Supplement, a controversy occasioned by a hostile review of William Burroughs’ first published novel in Britain, Dead Fingers Talk. Leading literary figures of the day sided for and against the author in what proved to be an unusually protracted and acrimonious debate: ‘we have never had a keener correspondence’, observed the concluding editorial. Amongst those springing to Burroughs’ defence were Michael Moorcock and Burroughs himself. For Moorcock the significance of Burroughs’ work was apparently metaphysical, ‘concerned with Space and Time, its nature, its philosophical implications, the place of the individual in the total universe’. ‘A moral message’, he confidently asserted, ‘is not its prime concern.’ In his own defence, however, Burroughs chose to emphasise precisely this moral message, since it ‘should be quite clear to any reader … and I say it is to be taken as seriously as anything else in my work’.¹