The 1950s were a time of repression, or at least that’s what popular media would have you believe. Married couples on television shows had separate beds in those rare instances when bedrooms were allowed to be shown. When people got shot in the movies they didn’t bleed. Elvis Presley could only be shown on TV from the waist up. Interracial social relationships of any kind were forbidden while lynchings were common in the South. But they would never put that on the evening news. Politics were a taboo subject. Simply saying you disagreed with certain politicians could get you labeled a communist and your career could be ruined even if you weren’t actually a communist. Any discussions about sexuality of any sort were censored either by law or by choice. The use of narcotics was hidden from public view and Cold War era paranoia about the nuclear bomb was rampant and even encouraged by the government through the spread of propaganda.
But all this was going on fifty years after the publication of Ulysses. The ideas of Freud and Nietzsche were no longer new. People were aware that a chthonic, underground world existed and there was a whole lot more going on in America just beyond the surface of what was socially acceptible. But things were bubbling up to the surface. One of them was the Beat Generation, a new manifestation of the bohemian tradition in which poets and criminals listened to jazz, experimented with drugs and free love, and lived the life they wanted according to their own rules. Out of this counter culture came the gay, heroin addicted author William S. Burroughs, who may or may not have accidentally shot his wife in Mexico City, and his ground breaking novel Naked Lunch. The title says a lot because it is a work that reveals the hidden and the suppressed without restraint in all its naked glory. But glorious it isn’t, and in fact most would say it is a literary expression of all that is vile and repulsive.
Burroughs started out writing short pieces that were like bursts or explosions of verbiage depicting the underworld life he was familiar with. Some are like vignettes or prose poems. Sometimes they are almost like stories. But Burroughs couldn’t get his life together enough to put a whole novel together so Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin pieced some of these into a montage that came to be known as Naked Lunch.
The book begins with descriptions of heroin addiction and the lifestyle that accompanies it. The unpleasant tactile sensations and smells of filth, grime, slime, stickiness, and bodily fluids are ever present. Insects and other vermin are more numerous than people. The difference between people and vermin is hard to distinguish at times. Also the boundaries between the body and all the rotten mess is permeable and sometimes hard to identify. The reader is immediately plunged into a pool of sewage.
And as far as ugly creatures go, some of the ugliest are the Mugwumps. These are humanoid beings straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting that are half insect and half man. They secrete a substance that is addicting to some other creatures that suck it off their skin. This may be a metaphor for the relationship between the drug pusher and their buyers with a gay element thrown in. If that creepy image is what Burroughs meant to represent, you might say he isn’t comfortable with fitting into either category. The term “mugwump” by the way, refers to a constituent of voters in the 19th century at the end of the Reconstruction era. They were disgusted with both the Democrats and Republicans and insisted on voting according to a candidates policies and moral character rather than partisan alliance. The word itself is derived from an Algonquin word meaning “superior man” or “boss”. It’s hard to tell if a political statement is intended here, but the concept of Mugwumps as a voting bloc would fit in with the passages later in the novel that satirize American political parties, none of which are made to sound appealing from Burroughs’ point of view.
As the passages take on more form, we are introduced to the recurring character of Dr. Benway, the sleazy surgeon who massages a patient’s heart with a toilet plunger while dropping cigarette ashes into the incision. He gives an unnamed narrator a tour through his hospital where he performs arbitrary operations of no medical value whatsoever. The tour ends with a visit to a locked ward where patients have been reduced to a vegetative state of idiocy because of Dr. Benway’s experiments with behavior control. The passage ends when inmates of a psychiatric ward break out, have a riot, and do all kinds of foul and disgusting things to each other and the people on the street. In another scenario, Dr. Benway does surgery on a stage in front of an audience as if he is a practitioner of the performing arts just as much as he is of the medical arts. The term “operating theater” actually goes back to the Renaissance when surgeries were performed for educational purposes in front of an audienc. But Dr. Benway’s arbitrary and pointless surgery is interrupted by what we might call a heckler with a scalpel.
Dr. Benway is the crux of a lot of Burroughs’ writings post-Naked Lunch. He is an agent of control whose medical practices serve two purposes. One is mind and behavior control, although he usually fails in this by either destroying his patients or unwittingly causing outbreaks of chaos. The other is art. Dr. Benway performs surgery for surgery’s sake the way artists creates art for art’s sake. He is amoral, unethical, has no interest in helping his patients and his surgeries make no sense from a rational point of view, but he does them because that’s all he can do. He doesn’t know how to do anything else. He is just an agent, an elementary force who acts out of inner necessity. You can say a lot of artists, especially in the modern era, do the same, channeling what they do, letting the artistic process guide their hands rather than creating with definite intention.
Dr. Benway makes a further appearance near the end of the book when he brings Carl Peterson, another recurring character in Burroughs’ works, into his office to run some tests designed to uncover any hidden traces of homosexuality in the ex-soldier. Carl struggles to repress any evidence of an affair he had with another man while in the military. Here again we have the element of control and chaos because Dr. Benway represents the attempted institutional control over sexual behavior while Carl Peterson’s sexual orientation is something outside the scope of psychiatric domination. For lovers of obscure literary references, the passage ends with Carl trying and failing to approach a green door; the term “green door” is a military terminology meaning “top secret” or “highly classified”. Carl wants to open the door and reveal his sexual secret but he is unable to because he is a rat caught in Dr. Benway’s maze. The theme of control through repression is on full display here.
On the other side of the control through repression theme is the continual outbreaks of sex and violence that permeate the novel. The riot resulting from patients’ escaping from Dr. Benway’s psychiatric hospital has already been mentioned, but other passages have things like “Hassan’s Rumpus Room”, where a surreal, unresrticted orgy takes place, and the film introduced by Slashtubitch is shown. (I’ve read this book several times and still have no idea who Slashtubitch is supposed to be. Hassan is possibly Hassan I Sabbah, another recurring character in later works) The film is pornographic and shows a love making scene between Mary and Johnny involving the use of the Steely Dan dildo. And yes, the rock band Steely Dan did lift their name from Naked Lunch. The film ends with Mary hanging Johnny who ejaculates when he dies. Burroughs is obsessed with this image since it appears ad nauseum in almost every book he ever wrote. Mary then eats his face reminscent of the way a female praying mantis eats the head of the male after sexual intercourse, something that also preoccupied the Surrealist pioneer Andre Breton. Here we have another recurring theme in Burroughs’ works, that of the female as a destructive force of control. His portrayal of women is unapologetically misogynist and his obsessive, hyper-masculine writings about guns and exotic weaponry can be interpreted as a defense against what he perceives to be the controlling instincts of women.
One other interesting chapter is that of “The Talking Asshole”. A man discovers that his asshole can talk. At first the novelty of this amuses people and he becomes famous, but then his asshole takes over his life and he turns into nothing more than a giant asshole that never shuts up. This is obviously a satire of people who “talk out their ass”, be they politicians, drunks, college students, or other varieties of know-it-alls who don’t know what they’re talking about. The internet is bursting with these types and in the days of Fox News and the Trump presidency, the Talking Asshole rings more true than ever. In the twisted mind of Burroughs, there is also an element of opiate addiction in this passage since the asshole starts out by being amusing and then grows so large it consumes the man’s entire life. Kind of like heroin addiction. What Burroughs is getting at is that talking, especially bullshitting, can be an addiction like anything else. This comes back to Dr. Benway who is characterized as a control addict with the commentary added that control serves no purpose other than control in the same way that heroin addiction serves no other purpose than addiction. Burroughs may be projecting his own problems onto the world, but when elements of his problems correspond to reality, it feels like a revelation.
On the surface, a lot of Naked Lunch appears to be little more than obscene drivel. It’s true that some parts are nothing but surreal imagery, nonsense, and literary diarrhea. By the way, this was written before Burroughs began using the cut up technique so anything that confuses you is done on purpose; it is meant to be disorienting. But then the passages about control are those that are most clearly written and those are surrounded by other passages of explosive violence and chaos. The explosive nature of those passages serves to illustrate the results of repression. Burroughs’ obsessions with guns, orgasms, orgies, defecation, dismemberment, hangings, and all other outbursts of violence can be seen as the repression of his homosexuality and drug addiction coming undone and bursting out into plain sight. The repressive nature of American society creates a pressure cooker leading to explosions of everything we aren’t supposed to see. The more American society tries to repress the underground cultures of sexual expression, drug use, and criminality, the more those cultures try to undo their repression and the result is the rise of counter cultures concerned with free expression of desires and artistic projects like the novel that is Naked Lunch.
This novel doesn’t represent Burroughs’ best writing. What makes it so great is that it introduces so many themes that pre-occupied him in his later years when he went in the direction of more science-fiction type books. It is also a lot more accessible than his later works, at least for the first time reader. Even if you don’t understand everything written or struggle to put it together as a whole, it still has a strong impact that will stay with you for years to come. Even after 70 years, the wild and untamed nature of this legendary book can still blow your hair back the other way. Burroughs’ ability to write great sentences that create imagery is first rate as well. The language he uses is like a mixture of surrealist poetry and bare bones, pulp crime novel directness. In fact, during the obscenity trial in which the government tried to censor and ban this book, one of the things that saved it was the lyrical use of vocabulary that sometimes captured snippets of haunting beauty.
Finally, I’d like to address a couple stray thoughts. The first is that of the racism depicted in the book. Some people have complained about it, but I feel they are misreading what Burroughs is saying. The racist comments are sick, but you have to consider the context and who is making them. They entirely come from the mouths of police, bureaucrats, rednecks, and other boorish kinds of people. If you understand the author, you know that he despises these kinds of people. Their offensive racist humor is depicted here as more shit and garbage flowing through the sewer world being portrayed. He isn’t celebrating the world he is writing about; he is showing us how terrible it all is.
The other stray thought is related to some obscure details regarding Burroughs’ wife Joan, the one he shot in Mexico City. In one paragraph, and without any context, Willy Jr. gets angry because the unnamed narrator eats his sugar skull on the Day Of the Dead. Then the narrator says that after he moved to Tangier, someone told him that his wife had died. Those in the know will recognize the reference to the unwanted son Burroughs had with his wife and his move, minus his wife, from Mexico to Tangier. Another subtle reference to Joan comes when Carl Peterson is in Dr. Benway’s office being accosted about his gay tendencies. Dr. Benway says that sometimes gay men get married and the result is...here Dr. Benway’s speech trails off with the implication that gay men who marry women sometimes murder their wives. It is fair to consider that William S. Burroughs is arguable one of the most autobiographical authors in history, something that becomes clear if you know his biography and understand how to decode his writings. But if this is so, why are there so few references to the killing of his wife as some critics have said? The answer is that they are there all over the place. He hides it in plain sight and if you understand how psychological displacement operates, you can see it more clearly.
Naked Lunch is an ancestral work that rides on the coattails of Freud and James Joyce. Freud said that being a member of society means suppressing the selfish desires of the individual where they get left to fester as the id, sometimes breaking into consciousness in the form of dreams. James Joyce in Ulysses used stream of consciousness writing to turn away from the public and go inwards to portray the inner workings and linguistic free associations of the human mind with no restrictions on what that might be including any bodily functions or disturbing thoughts. Naked Lunch is an expression of the id, the inner landscape, the unconscious, and everything we aren’t supposed to see in public. William S. Burroughs ingested elements of human society, disgested them in the inner workings of his mind, and then expressed them in the dream state of writing without holding anything back. It’s too easy to say it’s all a projection of his inner landscape onto the world because what he projects is a product of what he experienced in the world. He reminds us that vomit and feces started out as food. In this way, Naked Lunch is like shitting on a plate and serving it to you as a meal as to remind us of what we do that we wish to hide. Hell isn’t in some dimension we go to when we die. It is in the hidden recesses of our minds and all around us wherever we go and in whoever we meet. You are a part of it, like it or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment