Naked Lunch [Paperback]

This is the nearest approximation in my memory with the experience that you go through with Naked Lunch. The book is cold: ice cold: the frostiest literary experience I know of, a vision of the BIG SHUT DOWN. But after the SHUT DOWN the mind keeps going -- cause you ain't dead -- and, continuing the house analogy, as you lay in the darkness of AN UTTER LACK OF HEALTHY STIMULATION what tends to fill the void are images of sex and violence. Repetitive thinking, revenge fantasies, paranoia, mindlessly elaborate and vicious sexual combinations, warped logic and the twisted images of all the people you are going to get back when you get back on your feet again. Degradation this extreme doesn't make you thoughtful. You lose after awhile the need or desire to justify yourself; your body stinks, your mind stinks, and you sink to juvenile,narcissistic level of existence. Junk does all your thinking for you.

And therein lies the rub. For all its flash, dazzle, and pop relevance, Naked Lunch has the emotional maturity of a fifties comic book. The style can't save the substance.The prose really does make sense, and follow a loose kind of narrative sequentiality. I thought of angular panels, big thought bubbles and exaggerated illustrations. It's beautifully effective: more like a comic than any other book: language in the pithy, violent and elliptical style that's usually associated with words accompanied by visuals. The visuals are absent. They are unnecessary. They are in our heads as a symptom of today's visual culture. Naked Lunch is the finest example I know of a book that follows more a visual, or cinematic than a traditional literary logic.

Now for the part that will likely anger some of Burroughs more dedicated believers. The flaws of Naked Lunch are the same flaws of the hip culture that so admires it: a lack of seriousness, a superficialness. For all his interest in everything that influences junkies Burroughs doesn't know what self-reflection is. As he states in his previous novel Junkie, he "doesn't believe in psychotherapy." The question that ought to be at the center of his vision WHY SOMEONE BECOMES A JUNKIE? is shunted aside. Burroughs doesn't seem to really believe there is an emotional side to life. Burroughs loves to smirk, smirk at everything, including groups he belongs to. He offers a positive alternative to nothing. I think his popularity with hipsters is due to this hardboiled attitude. Everything is a joke; nothing can hurt me; I'm so cold and hard inside that I'm safe.

Naked Lunch is hilarious but at its core it is a very defensive book, a flippant hard shell. Burroughs' cynicism and paranoia remain very much angry white male attitudes. He is too flippant, and heartless to write otherwise....-- every cliche about black and Asian sexual organs is pulled out at some point or another. Naked Lunch is particularly weak in its attempts at social commentary. The great enemy is the STATE. The Forces of CONTROL, THE MAN. This is a cool attitude, but a too simplistic one. Naked Lunch needs more sociology, more psychology, and more caring. More of the qualities that make 1984 and Animal Farm so much superior analyses of the state, class, and the human condition. For Burroughs the BIG SOLUTION is to form our own communities and get the STATE off our back. Maybe, except the idea that such a community, populated by Burroughs clones, would be happy place is a laughable one.

His admirers should seriously consider that in his addiction Burroughs shot and killed his own wife: was the state at fault for that? Naked Lunch needs less vitriol, and acuter self-examination. As it is, Burroughs tells us more about the paranoia and defensive attitudes of addicts than anything else. A greater degree of self analysis would build a firmer basis for his social analysis, but that would also wipe the smirk off Burroughs' face, and above all else he wants to keep the smirk. The smirk provides some wonderful entertainment; verbal fireworks; wild, enticing language acrobatics, sick humor. He was a great trickster, a language gypsy. If no one can quite understand what you are saying, no one can accuse you of anything. Insofar as that goes, he was a master.

So I don't mean all this to sound like Naked Lunch is "a bad book" Quite the opposite. In my opinion it remains a very good one. I don't however think it is a masterpiece on the level of Notes From the Underground . The core problem is that there is more pose here than substance. The clever, coded language disguises the contradictions in Burroughs' own thought and only secondarily assists mankind against its enemies. The junk world, try as he might, isn't an effective position from which to criticize the straight world, or really much of anything. Social commentary and the human condition are compromised by junkie con.

That is the story of its life: few people have actually gotten through the whole book. It reads in fragments with inconsistent characters morphing, changing and altering identities. Dream, hallucination, reality and drug visions blend and merge and disperse. Scatalogical routines take coherant form and read like vaudville humor from a bathroom wall, then deteriorate into filthy fragments and irreverant and often disgusting descriptions of sado-masochistic sex acts. Everyone is a junkie, everyone is gay, everyone screws teenaged North African boys, everyone is insane, psychotic or diseased. Doctors kill their patients, police murder their suspects, drug addicts infect their marks with insect diseases and turn into centipedes during sex acts that threaten to nauseate the reader.

So what does it all mean? What is the motivation or the reasoning behind it all. Burroughs was no fool and he had a strong moral intent all the way. He considered himself a reporter who has entered behind enemy lines, like a photojournalist who returns from Vietnam with pictures of napalmed babies. The title Naked Lunch evokes an image of someone being wised up to what they are eating. Burroughs is depicting the relationship between the junkie and the drug dealer to be a metaphor for all control systems, for all vampiric systems whether it be capital punishment, abuse of political power, police states, etc. By the time Burroughs wrote this novel he had suffered through decades of abuse at the hands of federal agents, narcotics police and the customs officials of all the third world borderlines that he crossed as he moved from New York to Texas to New Orleans to New Mexico to Mexico City to Tangiers, all the time running from the police, none the least of reasons being that he shot his wife through the head during a drunken game of William Tell (she put a glass on her head and challenged him to shoot it off -- he lost the challenge).

Burroughs was a troubled junkie from a distinguished southern family, a Harvard student who studied archeology and linguistics, who studied medicine in Vienna, who went to New York to find work and wound up hooked on heroin. He took part in the birth of the Beat Generation in 1944 before setting off on his long tortured odyssey that led to more drug addiction, the death of his wife, and the bottom that he hit in Tangiers. He went there in the mid-50's to impress the exiled community of writers including Paul Bowels (who wrote the Shelting Sky) but who rejected him because he was just a filthy junky with a gun fetish. Instead he wrote Naked Lunch. It is a descent into Hell chronicled by a man who was to become one of the best writers of the 20th Century.

The events that led to the writing of Naked Lunch is chroniciled in the amazing documents known as the Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959. These letters were the source of Cronenberg's screenplay of Naked Lunch, more so than Naked Lunch itself. Read the letters first, then read Naked Lunch. Then see the movie. In that order. It will all make sense...in the end.

A book that changed our cultural landscape. It never became dated. It exists outside of time and space, in the Interzone of our polluted minds.