|
COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
In 1956, before it was published, before it was even finished, Naked Lunch was described by Allen Ginsberg as "an endless novel which will drive everybody mad" (Howl, dedication). At that time the novel must have seemed endless to Ginsberg: Burroughs had been working on it at least since 1953.(1) Eventually he would compile more than a thousand pages of material before selecting and settling on the final contents and their organization.
Data on the number of people driven mad by the novel are unavailable (certainly a handful of critics and commentators, at least), but as a precaution against being included in those statistics, we ought to situate Naked Lunch in a number of contexts, both literary-historical and contemporary. To begin with, it would be most useful to compare it with On the Road, supposedly an equally revolutionary novel by a colleague and cofounder of the Beat generation. Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs met in New York in 1944 and continued to be important friends and influences for each other for more than two decades. On the opening page of Naked Lunch, Burroughs acknowledges Kerouac as the source of his title. In 1944 they collaborated on a spool contributing alternating chapters to a parody detective-thriller novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.(2) Yet what's so fascinating about their two most famous books is not just how different they are, but how they stack up as precisely opposite to one another.
According to the mythology of the Beat generation, On the Road was the result of Kerouac's attempt to find a voice in which he could talk to his muse "as frankly as [he could] talk with [himself] or with [his] friends," as Allen Ginsberg put it in a Paris Review interview (21). In this effort, On the Road was produced in one unbroken three-week, coffee-and-Benzedrine-stoked session of marathon typing, on a single roll of paper in an apartment in Manhattan (see Nicosia 342-43). This myth pictures On the Road as the unified production of one man, working heroically, like John Henry, the "steel-driving man" of American folklore, in a single, sustained outburst of creativity, the coherence of the work guaranteed by the single page on which it was composed and by the unity of the effort that produced it. The myth of Naked Lunch is exactly the opposite: "I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch," says the author of these pages in his introduction (ix). Pages--more than a thousand of them, according to the myth--put together by sifting and selecting, shuffling and reshuffling, over some nine years in at least a half-dozen cities on three continents.
On the Road is further unified by its narrative voice, spoken throughout by the same Sal Paradise, while Naked Lunch is further dispersed by its many narrators and many voices, styles and formats that shift kaleidoscopically from straight first person to omniscient third person to sci-fi to play or film script, to legal or scientific treatise, from conventional hard-boiled detective fiction to parodies of pornography, lyric poetry, and spy adventures.
Kerouac found that in order to talk to his muse as frankly and authentically as he talked to his friends, he had to struggle against his own awareness of a reader being out there at all. This was the literary "outside reader," whom Kerouac imagined judging him from the perspective of Literature, an audience that expected all the conventionalities Kerouac chafed against. By contrast, Burroughs was aware of his need for an audience from the very beginning--at first to develop as an artist and to preserve himself from his own obsessive fantasizing: "I have to have receiver for routine," he wrote to Ginsberg in 1954. "If there is no one there to receive it, routine turns back on me and tears me apart." Later that same year he wrote directly to Kerouac, "I'm not like you, Jack, I need an audience. Of course, a small audience. But still I need publication for development" (Letters 27, 58).
Over the years Burroughs made it clear, both privately and publicly, that his concern for his audience wasn't just personal or literary but deeply moral and spiritual: Burroughs is concerned to preserve his reader's soul as well as his own. The "real theme of the novel," he told Ginsberg in a 1957 letter from Copenhagen, is the "Desecration of the Human Image by the control addicts" (Letters 195). In an interview in 1965 he told Conrad Knickerbocker: "I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally. Yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our time, to wise up the marks" ("Art" 49). A "mark" is the victim or potential victim of a confidence scam, someone who has invested his faith in the world as it's presented to him. To wise him up is to alert him to the duplicity of the world, a service that almost always seems to make him sadder if it makes him wiser at all. How does Burroughs conceive of these "marks" whom he hopes to wise up? What does this "wising up" consist of? And how does he image the relationship between his narrator(s) and these marks?
Earlier writers also took upon themselves the burden of wising up those marks, and it will be useful to see what models Burroughs is following. In spite of its postmodern babel of voices, formats, and overlapping structures, Naked Lunch actually follows very closely in the footsteps of at least three classic examples of didactic literature, how-to books of moral instruction that teach, by example more than by precept, about the world's double-dealing, how the world presents a deceptive appearance, behind which lurks or indwells a very different reality: Dante's Inferno, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.(3) These are all allegories that recount the extravagant adventures of perfectly ordinary people in far-off, bizarre geographies that--in spite of their remoteness and/ or their unabashed fictionality--have a mockingly familiar look to them. They positively smirk at times.(4)
By the time Naked Lunch was finally assembled in Paris in 1959, Burroughs, a native of St. Louis, in the heartland of America, had already lived for extended periods as an expatriate, in Europe, Mexico, South America, and Tangier. So the experience of geographical and cultural dislocation, being a foreigner in a strange land (like Dante or Christian or Gulliver), was already a familiar metaphor to him, as was the experience of recognizing, in the exotic land that he was exploring for the first time, elements that are potentially familiar to him. Of course, even before his expatriate travels, Burroughs had grown up--in St. Louis, at the boys' school he attended in New Mexico, and at Harvard--aware of his homosexual orientation, so he'd also had the experience of cultural alienation, feeling like a foreigner or an alien while at home.
In order to accomplish his educational mission of wising up the mark, Burroughs has to take the mark along with him on his horrific journey through the inferno of addiction and withdrawal, since the true "wising up" consists mostly of demonstrating to the mark that this bizarre, inconceivably remote, unearthly world to which he has been shanghaied is in fact his own familiar world, the reality behind its appearances revealed only now in the carnival mirrors of allegory. This is in fact how allegories have always worked: Dante put people in his Inferno who were alive and sinning when the poem was published, and his Florentine readers recognized them; the same is true for the Big End-Small End controversy that fuels the Lilliputian wars that Gulliver takes part in.(5) This is why Naked Lunch dramatizes in its structure the cycle of addiction and withdrawal.
Burroughs had been through this cycle of getting hooked and "kicking his habit" at least five times by 1959, when he assembled Naked Lunch.(6) He experienced addiction as a descent into a hell where he was menaced by everything, including his own body--especially his own body. "Kicking" his habit was a wrenching, agonizing return to the world of the living. Burroughs's pronouncements about the biological mechanisms of addiction are usually more valuable as metaphors that reveal his vision than as scientifically reliable information, and this is particularly true of his conception of "kicking" as a cellular resurrection: "Kicking a habit involves the death of junk-dependent cells and their replacement with cells that do not need junk" (Junky 23).(7)
Burroughs insists that he was enabled to kick his habit by using apomorphine, a kind of synthetic, nonaddictive morphine that, according to Burroughs, destroys "the enzyme system of addiction" (Naked Lunch xiv). In Naked Lunch addiction to drugs serves as the master metaphor for addiction in general--to sex, to power, and to security. "Because there are many forms of addiction," says Burroughs, "I think that they all obey basic laws" (xvi). Elsewhere he says, "Drug addiction is perhaps a basic formula for pleasure and for life itself" (Interzone 110). The cost of these addictions is always the loss of individual will and subjecthood. Burroughs images the takeover of...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
