William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch
The book starts out as the disjointed narrative of a well-educated heroin addict who’s fleeing from something, although we don’t find out what until the book’s end. With no obvious transition, we’re shifted into the Interzone, a dystopian North African city populated by deviants, addicts, and at least one Josef Mengele-type doctor, leading to a barrage of stories about orgies and murders, often at the same time, all told in deliberately explicit language reminiscent of the way that kids curse when they’ve learned that certain words are bad and start inserting them at random throughout their speech. There’s an obvious anti-consumerist, anti-conformist message somewhere under the text, but it’s half-formed and is left on the floor under the bodily fluids Burroughs pours all over his text.
If Naked Lunch has a saving grace, it’s that Burroughs could spin a phrase, from the insightful witticism (“Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded – so many people do, nowadays, hoping to jump the gun”) to inspired silliness (“where they are referred to the We Don’t Want to Hear About It Department”). He was also capable of extending his humor over longer passages, such as the story within the story about a man whose anus learns to eat and then speak, after which it takes over the man’s body. The story implies a question of whether we as individuals are anything more than consumers (and waste producers) within the global ecosystem – reminding me of Robert Rankin’s references to humans as “meat” in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
How in the world is this on the list? Does anyone outside of kids looking to shock their parents read this book?
Perhaps you had to be there to understand it’s impact because I found it to be ridiculously dull save for the Black Meat marketplace which is amusingly over the top. That coupled with the fact that Burroughs was, to put it mildly, a bad, bad person makes this one of the 100 that I doubt I’ll ever revisit.
I’ve always thought that Naked Lunch gets by on reputation alone possibly due to the 1962 obscenity trial, following it’s first US printing. The story of that trial interests me much more than the book itself.
It’s not a great book, but it deserves its place in the same way that cubists belong on museum walls. Neither is important any more, but both were.
‘Bad, bad person’ seems a real stretch, too, in the world of well-known English-language authors. Do I really need to break out how other big names have behaved outside the walls of their writing?
wcw – Point taken, I should have left my personal opinion of the author aside because they shouldn’t interfere with my feelings about the novel.
You’re right that Naked Lunch mattered however (and you may agree with me on this) I don’t feel that it’s importance has much to do with it’s merit as a novel. Naked Lunch matters because the obscenity trial surrounding it was, to the best of my knowledge, the last major case of it’s type in this country. The courts finding that the book was not obscene and had artistic merit (which it does)was a major victory for freedom of speech and artists in all disciplines but that doesn’t make it a great novel, it just makes it an important footnote. I suppose my problem here is that I’m confusing influence and greatness which don’t always go together.