”The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED lunch--a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of the fork.” The book title was suggested by Jack Kerouac. If not for the intervention of William S. Burroughs friends, Naked Lunch would have never seen the light of day. Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac decided to visit Burroughs in Tangiers and see if they could salvage any of the fragmented writing that had been dripping from the mind of Burroughs while he was nursing addictions to heroin and young male prostitutes. This is not a novel and if you venture into it thinking it is going to be a novel, with a linear plot line, you will be disappointed from the get go. This is a collection of horrors, fears built upon a wicket of paranoia, fantasies shared with brutal honesty, and demented, unhinged sex. Love does not tread through the shadows of this delusional; and yet, dare I say brilliant work of writing. Burroughs explains:You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point...I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to the Negro race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her Afghan hound...Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To-Book...Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow down to a black turd or a pair of aging conjones... Naked Lunch influenced music, most famously: Kurt Cobain, Bob Dylan, and Lou Reed. Band names emerged from characters in the book including Steely Dan. References to Burroughs spring up in literature and his influence is apparent in the works of Martin Amis and Will Self. Norman Mailer once referred to Burroughs as, “possibly the only living American writer of genius.” Essayists speculate that Mailer may have only said that to irritate the trio of Roth, Updike, and Bellow. Mailer was always the guy on the outside looking in. So the Beat Generation ambassadors that sat down and tried to make sense out of the ramblings of the haphazardly collected writings, found among this mess of a manuscript something fresh and scary. The publishers they took it to saw the mess more than they saw the brilliance. Only after a few bits were published in a magazine called Big Table in 1959 and the writing was declared obscene and prosecuted did Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, always spoiling for a fight on censorship, decided to publish. Ahhhh nothing like banning books to generate sales. Edith Sitwell loftily rejected this “filth”. ”I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories. I prefer Chanel No 5.”Can’t you just see Burroughs laughing gleefully, rubbing his hands together, at all the press: good, bad, and indifferent? He must have been thrilled that Sitwell even deigned to crack the cover of his book. You might be still a babe in the woods who has not armchaired travelled down the stench filled alley of a Naked Lunch inspired nightmare. You might be thinking at this point in the review that you might want to read this book. I can assure you that you may NOT want to read this book. If you are a person who intends to be a serious writer then... yes... you really should read this book. It does open up vistas of thought if you can relax your moral compass for about 215 pages. Burroughs was riding fifteen years of addiction and self-indulgence. These writings, to me, were merely an outlet to get some of the muttering ideas out of his head. The process may have curbed the ragged edge of insanity. I suppose some titillation can be gleaned from these writings. Perversity and obscenity has appeal. Pain has a following. ”She seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous galvanized need (hunger of insects in dry places) has broken the dropper off deep in the flesh of her ravaged thigh (looking rather like a poster on soil erosion).” Writing about sex and desire is always of interest.”I was young myself once and heard the siren call of easy money and women and tight boy-ass and land’s sake don’t get my blood up I am subject to tell a tale make your cock stand up and yip the pink pearly way of young cunt or the lovely brown mucus-covered palpitating tune of the young boy-ass play your cock like a recorder...and when you hit the prostate pearl sharp diamonds gather in the golden lad balls inexorable as a kidney stone.”At times Burroughs is whimsical. ”The nostalgia fit is on me boys and will out willy silly...boys walk down the carny midway eating pink spun sugar...goose each other at the peep show...jack off in the Ferris wheel...throw sperm at the moon rising red and smoky over the foundries across the river.”He shares his junky dreams.”Cooking smells of all countries hang over the City, a haze of opium, hashish, the resinous red smoke of yage, smell of the jungle and salt water and the rotting river and dried excrement and sweat and genitals.”His terror.The scream shot out of his flesh through empty locker rooms and barracks, musty resort hotels, and spectral, coughing corridors of T.B. sanitariums, the muttering, hawking, grey fishwater smell of flophouses and Old Men’s Homes, great, dusty customs sheds and warehouses, through broken porticoes and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin by the urine of a million fairies, deserted weed-grown privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil, erect wooden phallus on the grave of dying peoples plaintive as leaves in the wind, across the great brown river where whole trees float with green snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore out over a vast plain (vulture wings husk in the dry air). The way is strewn with broken condoms and empty H caps and K.Y. tubes squeezed dry as bone meal in the summer sun.”Anybody want a hit of H?Burroughs during a William Tell reenactment with his wife, after I’m sure copious amounts of alcohol and chemical assistance had been inhaled, attempted to shoot a drink off her head for the entertainment of their friends. He missed. She died. He called his lawyer. The quotes I’ve selected to share in this review are nowhere near the worse or most perverse of the writing that will be experienced in this book. If anyone has been offended I am truly sorry, but I do not want people reading a book that is not a good fit for them. Consider these quotes to be a warning sign to decide if you want to avoid more of the same (only much more shocking) or that you are game to see what else Burroughs can fling on you, can etch into your skin, can smear in your hair, can wiggle into your brain, can “hot lick” your... This book put me in mind of the first time I went to a strip club, which happened to be in Kansas City. At first I was looking around like a farm boy fresh off the back of the turnip truck, jaw dropped, eyeballs extended amazed at all the BOOBS just walking around everywhere. After about a half hour, my brain made adjustments, and it became... well... boring isn’t the right word but the shock value had worn off. I was ready to go somewhere else, do something else. My reaction to this book was similar, even though it was my second trip through it, still for about the first fifty pages I was uncomfortable and second guessing my decision to reread it and horrified at the thought of trying to review it. I hung in there mainly because I’d survived the experience once and had a feeling that I would adjust. As I advanced through the pages, Burroughs would continue to stick needles into my morality, but I was becoming more immune. In fact, at times the book started to feel repetitive. I even reached a point where I could say “hey Burroughs I got it, you can quit hitting me with the hammer now”. I could have written a series of reviews espousing the reasons for giving this book one star up to five stars. It has had an impact on the literary and musical landscape (art as well if you count his shotgun splatter paintings), and not necessarily a negative one. I landed on four stars because Burroughs, in whatever level of hell he is residing in (if you believe in that stuff), will not get the satisfaction of yet another negative review. Bad press has been very, very good to him.
This book is beautiful in a sick-grotesque-wild-hilarious-creative-mind-bending-outlandish-drug-filled-dirty-brave kind of way. If I could use one word to describe it, it would be “bizarre”; although “hilarious” and “important” could work, too. In Naked Lunch you are taken into the mind of William S. Burroughs -- a twisted, drug addicted man, who also happens to be genius. When considering its content, it’s no wonder Naked Lunch was banned and railed against when it was first released; it’s also no surprise that it was as popular as it was, given its creative brilliance. I can’t recommend Naked Luncht to anyone; it’s as graphic as the imagination allows. In fact, I would say that it’s the sickest book I’ve ever read, but I just happened to read Bataille’s Story of the Eye the other day, too. Between the two, there’s really no way of telling which pushes the limits more: Naked Lunch describes events such as young men being hung by nooses while they cum and shit on other young men. Story of the Eye contains scenes such as those involving a just-plucked eyeball, drenched in urine, being immersed in a young women’s vagina and asshole. So you see, it’s tough to decide which is more bizarre; which is sicker. Novels like these -- that stretch limitations -- are important, though, because they remind us of our baser instincts. Becoming aware of and familiarizing ourselves with the sicknesses that can exist in human beings can actually further our empathy and appreciation; it can increase the likelihood that we note everyday acts of generosity, and therefore increase the chances that we, in kind, continuously act in such a way.But I know that Naked Lunch isn’t for everybody. If you can’t handle or don’t like this kind of thing, that’s fine with me: what you prefer and decide to read affects me very little; and it’s your right, really. Read a worthless, mind-numbing romance novel for all I care. But don’t you dare try to take a book -- no matter how graphic or nasty -- out of the hands of others. Sure there are gross books out there that have no deeper meaning; but even these, I believe, have every right to be read. After all, who are you -- in your blatant subjectivity -- to choose what defines worthwhile art for others? But that’s beside the point, really, because Naked Lunch is powerfully imaginative and creative. If you can take its vile nature, waste no time in adding it to your “to read” list, because it can open-up some perceptual doorways.
What do You think about Naked Lunch (2004)?
“THIS IS NOT A NOVEL”, capitalized emphatically Burroughs in a letter to his editor, mimicking the horrified denial of any respectable 16th century writer suspected to have embraced such a minor genre. And he's right, Naked Lunch is definitely not a novel – not even in a post-modern, experimentalist or nouveau roman sense – it’s at its most a series of short stories or rather vignettes, kept together by some narrative hooks, which are sometimes a narrator, William Lee, or characters migrating from a story to another and of course, by the main theme, which is addiction. The result? Some deliberately frightening, hilariously incoherent, sarcastically irritating and ultimately carelessly annoying, nonsensical tales depicting a world where in the absence of reason, monsters happily break free, where the mixture between fantastic and reality is not some clever technique to create magic realism but a faithful description of an astute, even if drug-clouded, mind. Similar to that old surrealist technique ("automatic writing" I think it is called), only this time the narrative is not the description of a dream – or not really.Two main ideas seem to develop in this weird book: firstly, that we are more or less a world of addicts of some sort, and sometimes the drug addicts are not the worst of all, since “The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell… Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.” Secondly, that the human being can be redeemed even after a complete and apparently irreversible harrowing of hell: “The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.” But this redemption, watch this, happens only if the Man’s insignificant, ridiculous place in the Universe is duly assumed, since even Art expresses only his decaying flesh: Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flash bulb of orgasm… Through these orifices transmute your body… The way OUT is the way IN…Between this two ideas oscillate the unconventional tales of the volume, building a hallucinating world, where absurd discussions pretend to deliver some profound hidden sense, like in Campus of Interzone University, a mixture of Ionesco’s "Lesson" and Orwell’s "Animal Farm" on a (why the hell not?) Romantic subject: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", by Coleridge.You'll often find some absurd or simply untrue information delivered in a serious, erudite tone, like the description of the simopaths: A simopath – the technical name for this disorder escapes me – is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it.Often you’ll come across some deliciously licentious images: There’s a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine” but sometimes, in the middle of all this sarcasm and cynicism, you can be surprised by a tremendously delicate one: When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light, lurked enigmatically in the high cool corners of the room.The most impressive are, in my opinion, his comparisons, from subtle oxymoronic (“The air is cloyed with a sweet evil substance like decayed honey.”) to forceful plastic (“Time jump like a broken typewriter…”) or just discriminating, politically incorrect, but oh-so-funny ones (“This foul crime shrieks like a wounded faggot for justice at least!”)However, do not expect an easy lecture, not even a pleasant one. David Lodge, I recall, seriously questioned the novel's merit, doubting the writer's talent. As for me, I was sometimes pissed off, sometimes fascinated, sometimes it irritated the hell out of me. It is not easy a lecture to follow, but who cares? Definitely not the author, who declared: “Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse…”
—Stela
So, basically, the meaningless drivel of the very first circuit boi? Seriously? Maybe I would have liked it better if I weren't already sick to death of all the hallucinatory narratives this book spawned. This is a structure that needed to be created only once to get the bastard over with and properly buried.Drug narratives are always only autobiographies obsessed with the author's secret obscene wishes and (inevitably) Neanderthal politics. They are the literary equivalent of a frotteur on the subway recounting an especially long and boring dream.As a dear friend once told me, "Shut the fuck up, you stupid stoner."
—Joe S
I tried this one on for size when I was but a downy-cheeked lad in highschool, in love with Beat writing. It didn't take.Years later, I poked back into it and was astounded by how CLEAR it actually is. As in, language-wise. Obviously the episodes are totally beyond rationality and even good sense, but as he sets his scenes you can actually get into this book.I just read about the ultra hygenic Recondition laboratory and found myself laughing out loud. Its stunning how Burroughs actually made sen
—matt
