The Naked Lunch

The Naked Lunch remains Burroughs's masterpiece of plumbing (I think Beckett accused him of this) and architecture. The Cities of the Red Night might have been a better, more cohesive and consistent novel and The Western Lands might have codified and expanded his personal Mythos with less hyperactivity and Folded-in ADHD and more discipline / focus but The Naked Lunch started him down a road that, at the time, it seemed he hadn't even noticed he was on.

Burroughs strikes me as a man struck by his own visionary experience without the means to access or disseminate it. He resisted the usual Shamanic / Blakean route into poetry - the stuff I've read shows no obvious talent for this medium - and instead opted for the somewhat Derridian (?) notion of the primacy of the spoken word, in this case operationalised into the 'routines' that make up most of The Naked Lunch - which ironically has been understood by some literary theorists as realistic, emphatic dialogue - an idea that still assumes that the routines are writing pretending to be speaking; a kind of literature that seeks to simulate (like photo-realism in painting) rather than to be.

There seems no apparent irony in his use of the phrase 'Let me unleash my word (w)horde' because, in his early works, Burroughs is less than precious about the sanctity of the written word; devolving the novel not because it was a literary experiment but because it's subject matter was de(arranged) as anecdote and mischievious slur, designed to amuse around the drinking table rather than to tantalise the theorists looking for a new Joyce.

My impression is that Politics and Theory (the word as virus, the concept of control, the algebra of need etc) came sometime after the bulk of The Naked Lunch was written, perhaps as a sop to the intellectual masses, perhaps as an interpretative afterthought.

I'm not saying he isn't a genius, just that he's a genius of accidental allusion.

Reviewers bind him to metaphor and symbolism when it seems they'd sometimes be better off taking the Freudian 'sometimes a pipe is just a pipe' literalness, while accepting that this literalness may in itself be a flawed representation of some awful mismanaged Ego Defence or an opium pipe-dream. Drugs are undoubtedly in this work but it's not trippy in the conventional sense... this is Heroin chic, in its original iteration. Burroughs seemed deeply suspicious of LSD et al, perhaps not wanting to lose a grip on a world that he knew was already losing its grip.

Did Burroughs feel that women were literally Venusians? I think maybe he did (biographical evidence doesn't seem to contradict this idea) but perhaps this casual female-phobia was too much for the average Academician to take. After all, they already had Norman Mailer.

Naked Lunch is a book of horror and comedy, both themes scooped up and hurled around like primate faeces, not so much designed to disgust or reveal as destined to repulse. To this extent, I'm with the writer of the famous Urgh! review; Burroughs may have been a serious writer by the time the book was published but I doubt very much he was when he was writing it. Let's face it; he was stoned. That the future leaked through was a accidental consequence rather than an intentional hypothesis.

Unlike the Urgh! reviewer, however, I love this book for its primal rage, for its use of the spoken word, for its literalness, for its playground humour and for its honesty. I like the drugs/ politics metaphors of control as much as anyone (and I think that Burroughs is right) but I can't bring myself to think that he knew he was writing along these themes as he threw the pages around the room for the scampering younger Beats.

He was trying to amuse them, trying out some routines "Heroin addict...hardest job in the world. Thirty years, man and boy..." to laugh them into bed or force them into the making the tea.

Later, as the theory began to unwind and he started to consciously and rationally work his way through the algebra of need (and move away from the romanticism of The Naked Lunch) he came up with The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded both of which were dry, experimental, slightly dull and notable for having far better titles than content. These emerged to slowly-boiled critical acclaim but perhap only because they were now bolstered by Burroughs far superior non-fictional contextualising in books like The Electronic Revolution

There's a PDF of The Electronic Reviolution here https://www.swissinstitute.net/2001-2006/Images/electronic_revolution.pdf

From this moment on, until the return of Burroughs as full-blown novelist (with the Cities of the Red Night trilogy), Burroughs story-telling went beyond fiction into a kind of netherland between non-fiction and shaggy dog stories and it is these works (plus the many published interviews) which make up the majority of his best work in the 60s/70s.

As for the Croneberg film, well that's a whole 'nother post...