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1 results

  • Chapter 17 - The Visionary

  • from Part III - Space-Time Travel
  • Edited by Oliver Harris, Keele University, Davis Schneiderman, Lake Forest College, Alex Wermer-Colan, Temple University
  • Book:
    William Burroughs in Context
    Published online:
    02 July 2026
    Print publication:
    23 July 2026, pp 222-235

  • Summary

    This chapter traces William Burroughs’ encounters with yagé (ayahuasca) as a critical inflection point in his literary development and spiritual imagination. Marcus Boon explores the 1950s Amazonian journeys that led to The Yage Letters (1963) and its expanded edition The Yage Letters Redux (2006), arguing that Burroughs’ experiences with the vine laid the groundwork for his later explorations of language as virus, the cut-up method, and his cosmological vision of control and resistance. Intertwining Cold War paranoia, psychedelic experimentation, and postcolonial critique, Boon situates yagé not as an outlier in Burroughs’ oeuvre but as a key to understanding its epistemological and aesthetic radicalism. The chapter maps Burroughs’ legacy in the broader literary and anthropological discourse on ayahuasca, showing how his early visions resonate with – and complicate – contemporary movements for psychedelic healing, spiritual tourism, and decolonial thought. Burroughs, Boon suggests, helped carry yagé out of the jungle and into a globalized discourse of language, healing, and power.