The most overrated cultural icon of the late 20th century has just come grinding back into town, words trailing like bloody tendrils, gears shifting lugubriously, voice stentorian as ever. Death warmed up. If you have spent the last few years wishing old William Burroughs was still around, good news! He is currently filling acres of gallery space in part two of GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy. Personally, I could do without him when he was alive and I can do without him now. I just hope his attempted resurrection doesn't disprove my theory.
The theory is as follows. Some cultural figures achieve vast proportions in their lifetime not so much by their works as their voice, attitude, persona. This is a phenomenon we take for granted in popular culture but it has a more ambiguous and often more pernicious effect in the "high" arts. It can be extraordinarily difficult to separate work and personage when someone is giving interviews, posing for photographs, being a cult. Then death comes, and the talent's true size is revealed. Derek Jarman may have been interesting but are any of his films worth watching again? Joseph Beuys? Genius! Beuys's works get better and better as the intrusive image of the man himself fades. Harold Pinter? It's still too soon for that one.
Burroughs is the modern writer adored by people who don't read enough modern writing. Everything he did was done better by others. Above all, I don't see how anyone's adolescent admiration for the Burroughs prose machine can survive an encounter with the novels of Thomas Pynchon - the true, dazzling titan of the avant garde novel in our time. Pynchon's marvellous sentences and immense, arcing fictions have all the wit, richness and humanity (even in their utter strangeness) that Burroughs lacks.
What does the exhibition at the Royal Academy do to champion him? It includes artworks by him - but these all turn out to be narcissistic self-portraits or paintings that allude to his spooky, gun-totin' persona. Ah yes, the guns. Still vaunting your gunmanship after shooting someone dead is ... what? Psychotic? Shallow? Either way it doesn't need this or any more outings. Forget him, he's gone. Maybe he was never all there. As ever, Damien Hirst produces a surprise (some are nasty, this is nice) - a collaged portrait of Burroughs made with what was presumably an expensive collection of literary ephemera. David Hockney's plain portait is touching, too, and makes me wish Hockney was still in California where his blunt realism has such a piquant relationship with American raw material. But still, these again are portraits - so what survives of Burroughs? Real art? Or just an image?
Or a voice. In the exhibition only Burroughs' voice, delivering his bitter Thanksgiving Prayer, cuts into you. That voice - that voice!
But a voice is all he was.
