Naked Lunch

I have owned a copy of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch for years, but had been afraid to try it. I read a great biography of Burroughs several years ago, Literary Outlaw, by Ted Morgan, and he described Burroughs experimental writing style (in particular his "cut-up" novels). I've never been very good with experimental prose, so the book sat in my unread pile, patiently waiting.

I've been thinking a lot about the period, though (the book was first published in 1959), so figured no time like the present. As I expected, Naked Lunch is virtuosically brilliant, but throughout most of the book I had no idea what was going on.

Burroughs is one of those writers whose life was at least as interesting as his fiction, if not more so. The scion of the family that invented the adding machine, he went to Harvard but ended up a street hustler, a junkie, and one of the foundations of the Beat movement, being one of the triumvirate of himself, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He wrote many books, but Naked Lunch remains his most famous work.

The book starts in a straight-forward manner, about a junkie named William Lee (clearly modeled on the author) who is trying to outfox the cops. The writing is bracingly honest about being a low life, with helpful annotations about the language of the streets: "I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up the devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train."

Lee hightails it to Tangier, an international North African city, specifically the "Interzone." He goes to work for a Dr. Benway and a corporation called Islam, Inc. It's here the narrative completely collapses. Burroughs intended the chapters of the book to be discrete, read in any order, and the point of view shifts without warning. The characters, well, I'm not sure there were any characters, just descriptions. Some of the passages are extremely pornographic, polymorphously perverse dalliances both hetero- and homosexual. I'm not surprised it was censored. A chapter called "Hassan's Rumpus Room" reads like a Penthouse letter written in an opium haze: "Two Arab women with bestial faces have pulled the shorts off a little blond French boy. They are screwing him with red rubber cocks. The boy snarls, bites, kicks, collapses in tears as his cock rises and ejaculates."

Burroughs delights in the visceral, and the book has long been disdained as being disgusting and vile. He doesn't stint in talking about any and all liquids that emanate from the human body, particularly those that originate in the alimentary canal. At times he seems like a child who has discovered that discussing bodily functions gets a rise out of adults.

It was only natural that when a film version of the book was finally made, it was by David Cronenberg, who has made some disgusting films (or films that contain disgusting scenes). I took another look at the film just this weekend. I first saw it before it was released in 1991. I worked for Penthouse and somehow got a ticket to an advance screening. I remember distinctly that Allen Ginsberg was in attendance (he is a character in the film) and that after the film was over I was in the men's room, at the urinal next to one of the great poets of the twentieth century.

The film doesn't tell the story in the book, as the book has no real story. Instead Cronenberg wisely stitches together several of Burroughs' works as well as his life story, particularly the incident where he shot and killed his wife in a "William Tell act." Cronenberg turns it into a paranoid hallucination, with espionage and hybrid insect/typewriters.

Peter Weller plays Lee, who is an exterminator. His friends are Hank and Martin (stand-ins for Kerouac and Ginsberg), and he is married to Judy Davis. When he kills her in the William Tell act he flees to Interzone, and is involved in some sort of thriller, receiving instructions from the typewriter/cockroaches. There is also the Mugwump, mentioned in Naked Lunch, a creature that has no liver, and can only eat sweets. In the film, they emit a goop that gets people high. I should add that the roach powder is used as a narcotic. Cronenberg omits mentions of actual drugs such as heroin, choosing instead to make metaphorical references.

The rest of the plot is a little hard to summarize, but it's the kind of thing someone zonked out of their mind could make up. It's very vivid, but by the last act it becomes a little tiresome and the resolution falls flat. What works is the mise en scene. The title sequence is very reminiscent of Saul Bass, and Howard Shore's jazzy score is played by Ornette Coleman, who revolutionized jazz back in '59.

A bit of trivia: the rock band Steely Dan got their name from Naked Lunch. It's a kind of dildo.