A Lunch of Naked Side Dishes

I was very nervous going into Naked Lunch.  I’ve never found Ginsberg’s poetry particularly thrilling, and my latest experience with Kerouac’s On the Road left me wanting much more than it was able to give.  I saw Cronenberg’s adaptation of Burroughs’s book when it came out in 1991, but I remember very little about that experience except the William Tell scene and my being generally confused and disturbed. 

I am happy to report that Naked Lunch is nowhere near as bad as I feared, even if it is not nearly as good as I would have hoped.  At its most brilliant moments it is a dystopic novel about a place called the Interzone.  In the final quarter of the novel (when it is at its best), Burroughs lays out the major characters and political parties of the Zone.  Connections that had been alluded to are made clear, and a clever, if bizarre, world comes into focus.  Personally, I wanted to spend a lot more time rooting around in the politics of power and control that are at the heart of the Interzone and that are clearly of great interest to Burroughs himself.  At its worst moments it is a collection of narratives about emotionless and cruel sexual encounters in which Burroughs seems to challenge himself to create the most disturbing images he can while including as many bodily fluids and orifices as possible.   In these section characters come and go (pun intended) with names but without presence, making no emotional claim on the reader and requiring no additional thought.

In the section titled “Atrophied Preface,” which of course comes near the end of the novel, Burroughs offers us insight into what he is stabbing at in this novel.  Burroughs himself complained that critics need to judge a book by how well it succeeds at doing what it sets out to do rather than judge it by what they want the book to do.  While I think that is a problematic approach to criticism since it demands that we know the author’s intentions and it assumes that art does what the artist intends and nothing more, I am happy to work within his parameters here.

Obviously central to Naked Lunch is junk and the physical effects junk has on the junkie.  Within the novel itself and in the “Atrophied Preface,” Burroughs emphasizes that junk affects the brain in such a way that the user cares only about the junk and nothing else, that it switches off the part of the brain that lets us respond emotionally to the world around us:

Morphine having depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion, and since the front brain acts only at second hand with back-brain titillation, being a vicarious type citizen can only get his kicks from behind, I must report virtual absence of cerebral event.  I am aware of your presence, but since it has for me no affective connotation, my affect having been disconnect by the junk man for the nonpayment, I am not innarested in your doings . . . Go or come, shit or fuck yourself with a rasp or an asp—‘tis well done and fitting for a queen—but The Dead and the Junky don’t care . . .

That lack of “affective connotation” is the defining tone of the novel.  Within the covers of the book, no one cares about anyone else.  People interact with each other; talk; buy drugs; invade every orifice; work nooses around necks; cover each other with shit, piss, and semen; but through it all, there are no “affective connotations.”  The result is a heartless and compassionless world full of human-like shells.  Burroughs succeeds perfectly in communicating this aspect of the junky life.  The difficulty is that such an approach gives the reader nothing to hold on to, nothing to emotionally engage with, so that all we are left with is disgust or intellectual curiosity. 

Personally, I prefer to have something to feel, but I can’t fault Burroughs for not wanting to give me that.  It does seem odd though that Burroughs wants to claim that the murder scenes are anti-capital-punishment.  To move us to be against capital punishment he first has to . . . move us.

Also in his “Atrophied Preface,” he notes:

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing . . . I am a recording instrument . . . I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity’ . . . Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function . . . I am not an entertainer . . .

Yeah, that’s a weird thing to say.  I don’t know anyone who writes about “what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.”  Aside from that bizarre notion, it is here that Burroughs succeeds by failing.  Those moments when story, plot, and continuity are forced into the novel during the Interzone passage—those are the moments that the book is most entertaining and most gripping.  The book achieves in spite of itself.

Many readers have observed that they quit reading in the middle of the novel.  I suspect that they all quit during the plotless portion of hangings and degradation and meaningless orgies.  My advice is to push through those middle doldrums, for  Dr. Benway and the Interzone are waiting on the other side with some food for the intellect even as it starves the emotions.