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Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

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I am going to risk a less than one hundred percent positive review of Naked Lunch. I have never been a heroin addict, but I have had the electricity turned off in my house for a month. First, there's a CRASH; then NOTHING; the TV, OFF, lights, OFF, clock, MOTIONLESS. You can't bath, you can't cook, you feel too oppressed to eat, and worst of all from about five o'clock on you can't see. You wait for the dark to fall, the house like a dimmed cafe, knowing that there are hours of blindness ahead. This is depression. When even the TV soap operas don't want you . Then well before you are ready for bed STASIS; utter SHUT DOWN; DARKNESS, SIMULATED DEATH; A COMPLETE FEELING OF EMOTIONAL ISOLATION.

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.

The novel is hard to read at first- a hazy, acid trip filled with gay sex, monsters, arabs and many other oddities. As you read more and more, you begin to understand it better, and pretty soon you're having a good time.

There has been much written about Naked Lunch, so much that the basic facts can be stated from memory: written in Tangiers while the author was addicted to heroin, edited by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, sold to Olympia Press in Paris and Grove Press in New York, made the author famous and ranked him with Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, suffered obscenity trials that ended literary censorship in America, filmed as a movie by David Cronenberg almost twenty five years after publication. And don't forget that Steely Dan got their name from this novel but they claim they never read it.

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.

"Naked Lunch" is William S. Burrough's masterwork. Reading this is a little like reading James Joyce's "Ulysses" crossed with the Marquise de Sade. It has a stream of consciousness form, and often reads like a poem. Burrough's said that the purpose of it was to open up one to possibilities. In this sense it is meant to be open ended, and can be opened and begun anywhere, not unlike the music of John Cage. The book takes the reader beyond the cozy confines of one's world and throws one into the challenging, and unsettling world of a junkie. Burrough's wrote this novel during his many years on heroin and multiple other drugs. Finally in Tangiers his friends, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, helped Burrough's put his multitude of writings together into book form. Burrough's has said that this is not a novel, but a book. It is an assortment of thoughts and ideas, not a narrative story that follows a logical progression to an end.

In 1959 in Paris, Olympia Press published "Naked Lunch". It would be three years later before an American edition(Grove Press) would come out in 1962. This 50th anniversary edition includes an appendix section which includes numerous letters, out takes, and alternate versions of various sections in the book, as well as an exhaustive discussion by the editors about how they compiled this particular version of the novel given that the Olympia and Grove Press editions were so different from one another, and that in 1998 the original typescripts were found in the Ohio State University which reveals fragments lost between the last typescripts and the Olympia edition. How the book came together makes for nearly as interesting a read as the book itself.

The definition of great art (or books) is that they change what comes after them, either as a reaction to, or a continuation of, whatever said "art" is. Such is the case with NAKED LUNCH, the literature-changing work by Burroughs. So many authors owe Burroughs a nod in that he freed up the way to their books. DeLillo comes to mind, with his UNDERWORLD, as does Jackson McCrae and his KATZENJAMMER which, though more linear and more plot-oriented, is still influenced by NL. But Burrough's NAKED LUNCH is more than just the ravings of a heroin junkie, it's an entirely new concept in composition. I read somewhere that Burroughs, while a real junkie himself, nevertheless took on several techniques to get the right feel for LUNCH. One was to take the pages he had written and cut them up, so that they made no sense. Oh, the words were all still there, but jumbled and incoherent, the way an addict would speak, or try to. Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but if you read this book, you'll definitely get that feel. There's a bizarre disturbing poetry in the words and lack of linear plot. This dream-like landscape will pull you in, if you let it. Wild and wonderful, dark and even funny at times, NAKED LUNCH is a must read for those who want to see how literature can "open up" what we're used to.

NAKED LUNCH is the ultimate cut-up/quote bible/scrapbook of what it was like to be alive and a free-thinker in the Fifties. As well, the horrors of the "oil-burning junk habit" and the worlds in which the visionary dwells, are covered in great detail. There is somewhat of a back-story, dealing with a kind of Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-meets-HR-Giger-meet-sthe X Files cabal of aliens and other species infiltrating the human race. Burroughs sees himself as a catch-as-catch-can reporter on all this, "like an agent who has forgotten his own cover story [but] all agents defect and all resisters sell out."

This book is one wild ride, and as I said, should be read as a poetic scrapbook. Burroughs' contributions to all forms of media have been absolutely invaluable. This book was declared innocent of obscenity charges by the United States Supreme Court in 1959, and thus are we allowed to cuss (to an extent) on TV and on the radio. Burroughs made a great leap for free speech that is still being felt today: if a work uses questionable material within contextual merit, then it is not obscene. And NAKED LUNCH is anything but a hemmorhage of the imagination.

The role of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavor, the role of the writer as idol-breaker, and the very form of writing itself. His work is hard to access, and very much an acquired taste. But when you acquire the taste....the world never looks the same. Pick up a copy of this great book, and take your time. If nothing else you're bound to appreciate the exotic settings, Burroughs' imagination, his dry caustic wit, and some gorgeous surreal visuals: i.e. take in the Mugwumps (p.46): if this is not worth the price of a book, nothing is! Another cult novel I'd like to suggest is THE LOSERS CLUB: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez

I have read this book three times and every time I feel something twisting and breaking inside of my head. Like I'm losing part of my sanity with each passing sentence. It is one complex yet enjoyable read. It's disturbing and beautiful. If you've only seen the movie then you owe it to yourself to read the book. Because the book is incredible. You'll get a lot more out of it. Though the Cronenberg film is one of my favorites.

Stronger than a thousand 'just say no' campaigns, Burroughs wanted to show the reader what's "on the end of that long newspaper spoon" by taking his own drug addiction both concretely and as a metaphor for human existence--in a strange sense, that we're addicted to being who and what we are, and that forces in our "civilization" are living vampirically off the energy of our frozen patterns of behavior, like a power-pyramid whose apex is anywhere the Man can be found. There are those addicted to controlling their own and others' humanity, and those who let reality speak through them.

The form of this book is a revolt against habit as well. "Naked Lunch" is a loose collection of writings about the yearning for freedom from embodiment. In this, it's like a contemporary work of Gnosticism. While reading it you get the sense of a tremendous self-exorcism, a huge confession from a diseased state of being. Burroughs' content will be the most repellent imagery you'll ever encounter in fiction--visceral and dehumanized sex and violence, overlapping conspiracies between transpersonal agencies who are fighting each other for continual exploitation and total control on all levels. Burroughs' truncated medical training (and his interests in anthropology and "primitive" religions) shows up almost continually, through an obsession with exotic diseases and bodily functions and in the character of Dr. Benway, a perverted scientist obsessed with mind control. On top of all this, it's written in underworld slang which is frequently hilarious and for which he provides a glossary.

The "Deposition Concerning a Sickness" and "Atrophied Preface" of "Naked Lunch" are the best things Burroughs ever wrote; they are powerful indictments of the misguided policies of law-enforcement zeal for purity. Yes, Burroughs may have had a terminal case of "shock-the-bourgeois", but as Norman Mailer once said of "Naked Lunch" it was written with utter seriousness of intent. Burroughs' writings are simultaneously some of the most precise, shocking, evocative, and almost poetic prose I've ever read.

You don't need me to tell you this is a great book. Writing has never been this good.

But are you ready for it?

The images are out there. The style is out there. If you haven't been out there with Burroughs, you may want to start with a similar message in a more traditional form, namely his trilogy that begins with "Cities of the Red Night".

But the power is here in this book. The power of the truths about control, about desperate needs, about everything that is lurking beneath even well-structure, settled lives.

If you're studious, then after the thrill of Naked Lunch, if there is an "after Naked Lunch", you can grow your understanding of your social conditioning with Peter Handke's play "Kaspar" and with B.F.Skinner's study "Verbal Behavior" (read Skinner's "Science and Human Behavior" before "Verbal Behavior"). These are all you need to be able to stand on your own two feet. But start with Naked Lunch to get the jolt you'll need to start understanding how the control systems have you pinned down.

Heroin addiction and outlandish sex are only small adornments in "Naked Lunch", the escapes could have been instead workaholism and fundamentalism, or reading books and writing Amazon reviews. But you probably wouldn't be drawn to a book about Amazon book reviewers. Still, Naked Lunch isn't describing anything far away. It's not "out there" after all but right in our guts. Enjoy.

Look, either you hate this book or you love it. Burroughs didn't set out to write a classic or make art, he had no choice whatsoevever, he just had to write this down. OK there is no story but so what? A writer/artist should try to express himself not try to write the next classic. This book isn't a scam or a sick joke, it's a man's heart bleeding vitriol. There is no purer book than this, it conceals nothing, it pretents nothing, it's a naked lunch, everybody gets to see what's on the end of their fork. While other writers make use of great stories and plots to cover up the fact that they've got nothing original to say, Bill just spits it at you. The emperor has no clothes? That's because he shed them, they were too constricting.