In the 50 years since its publication Naked Lunch has surely repelled more potential readers than it’s attracted, yet anyone compelled to work through William S. Burroughs’ seminal work knows how eerily fresh it remains, despite the novel’s refrain of putrefaction. Perhaps it endures because of its still arresting insights into the nature of addiction, a public health issue that does not seem to go away, that Burroughs renders in such a multitude of forms it becomes a multi-purpose metaphor of almost singular resonance. Perhaps it’s because the puzzle pattern of the text never yields to full cohesion, remaining tantalizingly just beyond our grasp. After all, Bill Lee, Burroughs’ alter ego and the closest Naked Lunch has to a protagonist, seems always to be departing, always refusing to sit for his appointed interrogations. Perhaps it’s the flamboyant grotesquerie and gallows humour, since besides Swift I’m not sure of any writer who’s mixed this particular cocktail so deftly. Though he’s testified to the contrary, Burroughs was indeed an entertainer.
I used the expression “to work through,” but when I picked up Naked Lunch as a teenager it didn’t seem like work at all. Tom Clancy, John Grisham, celebrity memoirs—now those would have felt like work. By contrast, the series of “routines” that comprised Naked Lunch were so casually inflammatory and recklessly stitched together it seemed positively inviting, something to be picked up, devoured and put aside when you’ve had your fill. Returning to the book for the first time in many years however, I no longer buy the ostensible randomness of its structure at all.
Naked Lunch is a lot of things, among them memoir, satire, science-fiction, vaudeville, metaphysical travelogue, hard-boiled junky pulp, grand guignol, pharmacological dissertation, avant-garde prose poem, hardcore pornography, and, as the author attests in the final passage, “a blueprint, a How-To book,” presumably on how to generate more like material, which Burroughs energetically followed. But while we can argue over how it might be finessed in some parts— personally, I think the abrupt interruption of the ‘Hauser and O’Brien’ sequence so late in the game by the belated “preface” kind of drops the ball—Naked Lunch is not random. Burroughs was a frequently masterful storyteller, if a rigorously fragmentary one. His first editors were Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, friends as well as fellow writers who knew Burroughs probably better than anyone and would have had a keen sense of how best to—literally—collect these pages from the floor and arrange them. For so much of Naked Lunch the accumulation of story fragments follows a propulsive internal logic and thematic causality, developing associations, characters, theses and sense of place, undulating and building like some demented mock-opera.
“I can feel the heat closing in…” It begins as New York crime fiction, allowing us our genre bearings, however briefly, immediately introducing the motifs of escape and paranoia. Bill Lee is on the run, and once he gets going the fleeing from one place to another never lets up. He soon encounters Doctor Benway, the quintessential Burroughs creation, a fountain of sinister wisdom and wisecracks, a villain of vampiric brilliance who represents the most innocuous and dangerous forms of societal control. He’s also good for ribald irreverence toward the human body, bragging about how he once performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can. The US will bleed into Latin America, into North Africa, into the fecund and deadly “Interzone,” into the blue movie Edenic deathless adolescent orgy of bizarre intercourse and orgasmic hangings that doubles as a protest against capital punishment. We’re regaled about the man who taught his asshole to talk until the asshole took over, a hysterically funny spin on parasitism, on the habit taking control of its master. It also exemplifies the anal fixation and Naked Lunch’s deep unease with homosexuality, this novel that careens with countless scenes of oddly touching, formative homoerotic bonding between boys and exceedingly graphic and often brutally violent gay sex.
The episodes of Naked Lunch bloom and recede like persistent hallucinations. But hallucinations are not mere fancy; they reconstruct and renovate experience. “Fall asleep reading and the words take on code significance.” Burroughs deliberately blurs the perspectives of half-sleep and wakefulness, trusting that there’s something of value to be found along the frontiers. And at its most lyrical, Burroughs’ prose displays an intoxication with language itself that inevitably aligns it to Joyce, sex and all. The compression of images couples with the ache of flooding memories. Following an act of torrid sexual climax, Burroughs writes, “A train roars through him whistle blowing… boat whistle, foghorn, sky rockets burst over oily lagoons… penny arcades open into a maze of dirty pictures…” And a paragraph later: “Time jumps like a broken typewriter, the boys are old men…” Over the course of this one page we see ecstasy produce an effect most commonly attributed to death: cryptically, William Burroughs’ life is flashing before our eyes.
If you know anything about Burroughs, who died in 1997 at the age of 83, you know that his writing, ideas and biography are inextricably merged. And you probably know that in Mexico City in 1951 he accidentally shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer while performing a drunken game of William Tell. He would eventually write about this event as forever haunting him yet ironically functioning as the catalyst for his writing career, but in Naked Lunch the only ghost of a memory of Vollmer appears and quickly disappears at the close of one of one of the more lucid autobiographical episodes. In Cuernavaca or Taxco—he can’t remember which—Lee and “Jane” smoke weed with some pimp and Lee flees in a fit of paranoia, finally catching a bus on his own back to Mexico City. “A year later in Tangier,” he then writes, “I heard she was dead.” David Cronenberg was right to make his film of Naked Lunch an overt hybrid of the novel and Burroughs’ life, with Vollmer’s death at the forefront. Burroughs’ novel has been rightfully heralded for speaking dark truths about social evils and human frailty, but in making blatant the loop that keeps Bill Lee circling back to confront the horrific event that formed the poisoned nucleus of Burroughs’ work, Cronenberg’s Lunch was the more Naked by far.
No comments:
Post a Comment