ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues the ghost of the Parisian avant-garde, whose hauntings of Cafe Select corresponded obliquely in Ginsberg's mind with his impulse to write her elegy. The second part of the chapter throws the haunted space-time of Ginsberg's Paris poetry into relief by the work of his friend and collaborator. The chapter shows how Burroughs understood cut-ups as a means to ventriloquize the historical avant-garde, in a way that might be compared to Ginsberg's own mediumship. It also shows how Ginsberg's backwards-oriented temporality runs against the grain of American futurity, conjuring the historical avant-garde in search of alternative models for cosmopolitanism across time and space, models that might provide a ghostly counterhistory to the dominant narratives of Cold War American imperialism. Burroughs's self-fashioning as avant-garde innovator, his appropriation of space-age metaphors and science fiction motifs have tended to encourage the idea that any time-travel undertaken in and by his work is into the future.
