Pleasures of Hanging

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Mason at the hangings in St. Helena makes me think of a novel from the 
early 1980s which Pynchon perhaps knew when writing M&D, --- "Cities of 
the Red Night" by William S. Burroughs. As a teenager I read this in 
translation.  It's not anymore on the level of "Naked Lunch" or "Nova 
Express", but maybe Pynchon, whose satiric sound in GR profited from 
Burroughs, had a look and/or wanted to place a nod.

Thomas M. Disch, reviewing the novel for the newspaper of record, was 
not exactly enthusiastic, though:

 > Cities of the Red Night'' is a book of limited but, for its own happy 
few, intense appeal. Opium addicts who are sexually aroused by 
witnessing and/or enacting garrotings and hangings will find ''Cities'' 
a veritable gallows of delight. Admittedly, female hanging-buffs and 
those of the heterosexual persuasion may feel cheated of their due, for 
the Muse of Strangulation - ''Ix Tab'' William S. Burroughs calls her in 
his invocation -seems not to extend her patronage to the fair sex. 
Guided by Ix Tab, a jealous goddess, Mr. Burroughs has eliminated from 
his book everything incidental to the central task of spinning and 
respinning the same yarn - characterization, wit, stylistic graces, 
anything that might detract from the erotic fascination of death by 
hanging. Even the romance of heroin addiction, which offered an 
alternative Universal Metaphor to interpreters of ''Naked Lunch,'' has 
dwindled to a few rather pro forma evocations of his new drug of 
preference, opium. In this book drugs are merely a means to an end, and 
that end is the gallows. <

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/09/specials/disch-burrows.html

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