NAKED LUNCH 50th Anniversary Edition
by William S. Burroughs,
Edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles
Grove Press, 299pp, $30.50
***
Naked Lunch, published in Paris in 1959, was initially greeted by a prudish display of purse-lipped indignation. Then amidst a rising tide of acclaim, William S. Burroughs's druggy anti-novel was translated into a dozen languages and eventually sold a million copies worldwide.
Before he died at 83 in 1997, Burroughs did Nike commercials, plaques were erected in front of the houses where he once lived, and entire online "communities" were devoted to his work. Now generally considered a classic, his most famous novel has influenced everybody from J. G. Ballard, Hunter S. Thompson and William Gibson, to Barbara Gowdy, not to mention the jazz rock band Steely Dan, named after the dildo that stars in one of Burroughs's more pornographic fantasies.
At the time of its publication, Naked Lunch was revolutionary and audacious. It was the last great work of the modernist avant-garde that began with Joyce and Eliot and it was also a pioneering work of frankness on matters sexual, especially of the gay variety. It also was, as Mary McCarthy pointed out, the first global novel, boldly exploring the planet from New York to Morocco to the Upper Amazon to Scandinavia.
In ways more than geographic, it also set an exhilarating standard for high literary bravery and adventurousness. Naked Lunch was the naked truth, and Burroughs, scion of a distinguished family, was the original American psycho, daring to view life under the most unsparing of operating room lights. Consequently, it's never been a book for the squeamish, nor do most women like it much. With its catalogue of human sacrifice and forcible sodomy, obsessed with the orgasm of the hanged man, unwatered by the quality of mercy, it remains nothing less than a encyclopedia of the monstrous and nightmarish.
Burroughs's American aristocrat's sense of entitlement, combined with a pervasive feeling of social rejection as a homosexual, resulted in his being possessed by gusts of murderous hate, which he dubbed "the ugly spirit." Accordingly, he writes as a connoisseur of horror, in love with plagues, disasters, shipwrecks, riots, a zealous promoter of chaos and disruption. For diabolic Willy Lee Burroughs, the nighttime is always the right time.
Reread in our current climate of cozy bourgeois domestic fiction, Burroughs's sociopathic desire to rip the joint, even though conceived in response to the repressive McCarthy period, has produced a work that retains all of its power to make you laugh out loud, even if some of his "routines," such as the famous Talking Asshole, now bear the stamp of the Golden Oldie.
As well as everything else, Naked Lunch is still the most original political satire since Jonathan Swift and Gulliver's Travels. When the book first appeared, Terry Southern called it an "absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, vicious, and primitive in American life." Considering some of Burroughs's more cracker-barrel characters, such as The County Clerk, of Pigeon Hole, Texas, you feel that Burroughs has invented the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck from beyond the grave, along with giant interstellar insects.
Naked Lunch is prescient in much else. Fifty years ago, Burroughs predicted the worldwide spread of what he was pleased to call "the narcotics industry." Writing his novel in Tangiers in the mid-fifties, Burroughs remarked on the similarity between fundamentalist Muslims and Americans. He observed the "continual crises of fear and rage" on both sides. The suicide bomber in Yemen who concealed an IED up his posterior, where it was undetectable by airport security before it was detonated by cell phone, has walked right out of the pages of Burroughs's novel. (Goddamn it, Al, intestines everywhere.)
Naked Lunch is written in a remarkable charged prose that lunges like a live wire, ready to shoot off sparks of poetic imagery in a deliberately fractured syntax. "Mel the waiter," he writes, "overdose after a cure, turning blue around the lips under the neon lights in a cheap hotel, flash on and off and the dropper hanging to his arm full of blood like a glass leech..." It's a style so hard-boiled as to make Raymond Chandler seem effete.
