The Autobiographical Ploy in William S. Burroughs’s Early Work 493 Twentieth-Century Literature 56.4 Winter 2010 493 Implicating the Confessor: The Autobiographical Ploy in William S. Burroughs’s Early Work Alex Wermer-Colan A fnal glossary, therefore, cannot be made of words whose intentions are fugitive. ––Burroughs ( Junky 133) So disinterest yourself in my words. Disinterest yourself in anybody’s words. ––Burroughs (White Subway 51) In one of the most innovative studies of William S. Burroughs’s experi- mental writing, Robin Lydenberg identifes Burroughs as a precursor to the deconstructionist movement and argues persuasively that Burroughs strived for “the obliteration of the author” (5) far before the likes of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Nevertheless, Lydenberg substan- tiates her claims by citing ambiguously extratextual prefaces, postscripts, and appendices, as well as interviews and letters, in which Burroughs reluctantly acknowledges his allergy to allegory, his skepticism of duali- ties, and, most pertinently, his intentions to counter the academic and popular cultural reifcation of the author. Like the majority of Burroughs scholars, Lydenberg appeals to Burroughs’s extratextual claims to prove that he intends to make authorial intentionality irrelevant to the literary text. Whether Lydenberg’s approach is paradoxical or just plain misguided is, however, largely beside the point. Rather, the tendency of scholars to incorporate biographical data and extratextual claims even to prove an intended abnegation of authorial intentionality, agency, and author-