Burroughs equated overcoming heroin addiction with liberating language

Evidence

Writing for Burroughs was an act of self-reconstruction that he wanted to share with the world. Concerted writing and emerging from heroin addiction were concomitant for him, and he saw them as linked manifestations of one process. Since ”junk is image” (Nova Express 15), liberating himself from the control of heroin was equivalent to liberating language (word-and-image) from the control of its oppressive conventional structures of association and meaning. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 623

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Burroughs treated word-and-image combinations as literally addictive like drugs. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 590