The Making and Meaning Of Naked Lunch

If William S. Burroughs truly feared a word virus, an idea he often made reference to in his later Nova Trilogy, then Naked Lunch was the ultimate inoculation against that verbal disease. Though it was written before the three books that would comprise the Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express), Naked Lunch was the cure that came before the illness. It was his version of the needle to cure all literary lesions and stem the tide of evils that language has the ability to produce through its constantly changing, adapting, regrouping control systems.


Burroughs' war against language was ironic, though, as he used the very language he sought to destroy in his attempt to develop his arsenal. Only through his use of language could he disentangle the web that all words have the ability to create. It was fighting fire with fire, and through the medium that culminated to become Naked Lunch, he launched a career of constant battle against words and their constraints. Naked Lunch, a collection of old stories turned on their ear and hilarious routines at one time devised as tools to romantically entrap Allen Ginsberg, became Burroughs' expression system.

An expression system is the vehicle used by a pharmaceutical company to deliver the drug that has been developed to combat against an identified disease or ailment. It can come in the form of a pill or a liquid, a powder, even a gas. Either way, it is the vehicle used to deliver the drug product itself. But, no drug is ever delivered in its pure form. All drugs are delivered in a form that encapsulates the active ingredient that is intended to cure the stated problem, watering down and diluting the drug to make it safe for human consumption. In Burroughs work, Naked Lunch is the initial inoculation, a less concentrated form of what was to follow immediately after in the Nova Trilogy.

Because Naked Lunch is an expression system, the vehicle designed to deliver the message that will become an ongoing mantra, a continuous death knell for language and words, it introduced a new way of telling stories meant to be guideposts for the reader. At the end of Naked Lunch is the famous line that Burroughs wrote about releasing his Word Hoard, virtually unleashing a legion of his Words designed to kill the Word Virus that had invaded and taken over the minds of all humans everywhere. In much the same way a pharmaceutical is designed to combat an enemy virus, Naked Lunch was designed to combat the conservative Western ideas that proliferated throughout the Western world at the time of the book's writing.

The vaccination that Naked Lunch proposes is the forerunner to all of Burroughs later novels, and specifically the novels of the 1960's and 1970's. The race to eliminate language, and then take it back form those who would use it for nefarious purposes is still an idea in its infancy in Naked Lunch, drawing on his earlier work and realized in the letters he wrote home during his exile in Tangiers, but quickly evolving into a realized attack against morals that appear outmoded and literature that, in Burroughs estimation, could have been written by anyone. A totally different work form the writing he had done up until that point, Naked Lunch became the model for the rest of his career's work.

However, the extreme graphic nature of the work, as well as its ambiguous take on accepted morals of the time caused much controversy, and has often lead, even in the present, to readers looking more to the life of the writer than to the content of the novel. How could anyone write such things and not live the life described in the book himself? For many writers, this would be a case of mistaken fantasy. Writers often observe and record the lives of others instead of actually experiencing something for themselves, being a relatively conservative lot, on the whole. What caused many to question, and eventually confront in court, was that Naked Lunch and its writer, Burroughs, never really denied his lifestyle to the outside world.

He certainly didn't apologize for it. Often in early interviews he could be found side-stepping more complicated issues such as homosexuality and its reality below the surface of society in the early 1960's. Yet, this was never an admittance of guilt or criminality (especially in regards to drugs), but a cautious approach to his new found interest from the media.

This ambiguous feeling towards what many consider "wrong" has both hurt and helped the book. As will be discussed, this is often the real naked Lunch for the first time reader: the life of the author, Burroughs, which many readers know about and assume the book is an accurate description of.

This is not exactly true.

Naked Lunch is fantasy, for the most part. It is a description of many real events that have been stretched and twisted even farther along than thought possible, making them part of a world beyond real, but somehow still mocking ours. Often, upon reading Naked Lunch for the first time, readers do not understand this.

And perhaps it is not a book that can be readily understood. It has been widely read (though not nearly as other books by Burroughs), but it is not always taken seriously. It is known to be a powerful work of satire and the perfect indictment of conservative social morals, but somehow it is too extreme for many college or university curriculums. Somehow, in the present day, it is still often considered to be distasteful, or irresponsible to put it on the reading list. This is as likely due to its structure and accessibility, which are deemed low or difficult by many, as it is due to its sexual content or rampant drug use.

So, quite often, though it is a valuable antidote to the typical class syllabus, it is passed over for more conventional novels that are both easier to teach and require less background work on behalf of the teacher to make the initial, difficult reading more sensible to the class. Truthfully, to get anything valuable from a reading of Naked Lunch, a fairly large amount of time and discussion is needed.

Readability is probably the major factor in making Naked Lunch a book that is often a novelty item, rather than a distinct part of the canon of English. Part of this is due to the very slow changes that come to the written language and the human consciousness' ability to accept new forms of telling stories and relating fictional ideas. It takes time to go from one convention to another, as the move from poetry to the novel in the 17th century shows. However, it is inevitable that English always changes and adapts to reflect the way the world around it is changing, sometimes being the impetus, sometimes being the reflection.

Naked Lunch and its influence lay clearly on the side of impetus. Its influence is fairly astounding if one traces the roots of its influence back from the present to 1959. If one wants to take into account the work of Ginsberg and Kerouac, an argument can be made that it began seriously influencing other writers long before it was published.

However, it is an often overlooked, as well as often misunderstood, as has been mentioned. The goal of this book is to try and illuminate the fact that Naked Lunch is a very readable book, designed to engage the reader. It was written through the medium of letters in its earliest stages, and so the intention was always to try and draw out the reader and evoke a reaction of some kind.

Without the outlet of Ginsberg as a `receiver', Burroughs could not have formed the book. His letters to Ginsberg throughout the mid-1950's are a continuous appeal for response and reaction, as well as leaving much of the editing to him. In a sense, though Burroughs was very detailed in when it came to his published, or soon to be published work, he was open to Ginsberg using only the portions he felt were useful in the formation of the novel. While he often wrote things on the fly, leaving previously admired protions out atfer a re-read of the manuscript, or spontaniously including something new, when it came to the finished product, Burroughs became exacting. Nonetheless, and to the benefit of the novel, Ginsberg changed very little and made sure to edit out what he felt was irrelevant rather than demanding rewrites of sections. Much of the novel's immediacy comes through because of this, leaving the complicated structure and difficult language intact, even though Burroughs did not edit the early portions as much as Ginsberg did.

Naked Lunch tends to confuse many readers, as they are unused to having to tackle difficult language. However, there is no question that a book of its nature would not have the basic purpose of instruction and methods for better living. As Burroughs writes near the end of the book, Naked Lunch "is a how-to book." The very real moral purpose behind many of the routines, grotesques though they might be, is clear: this is a book designed to point the reader in a direction, offering a way of living and seeing the world, which was certainly a part of the character of Burroughs himself.

The very nature of the book is to involve the reader at a level beyond that of the common novel, forcing them to choose between simply continuing to read on, or putting down the novel because they object to the idea of its ambiguous message on issues that were generally considered controversial at the time of its publishing. It should be noted that the issues at hand, homosexuality, drug addiction and the power of governments to do with common people as they will, are still very controversial and complicated subjects for most writers to adequately confront. Burroughs made this kind of confrontation his prized possession. With the added element of difficult format and brutally succinct language, couched within a specifically satirical structure, Naked Lunch stills maintains its place in the early 21st century as a "difficult" novel for many to read.

The purpose of this book is to discuss the various aspects of Naked Lunch in a close reading that shows the book as an accessible, but cacophonous novel. The reader is forced to participate in the fantasy world that emerges from the pages of the book. Through examinations of Burroughs' own personal myth, and the way it takes away from the book at times, the use of drugs, the use of sex, irony, satire and the use of the book as a tool for social criticism (especially of the powers that control the world as we know it), we are able to show that Naked Lunch is a very relevant book even nearly fifty years after its publishing.

The view that is taken of the novel in this book is that much of it relates exclusively back to Burroughs first, and then has a wider significance for the rest of the world after. This is due to its being formed initially in the letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg throughout the 1950's, making it a very personal book, though very much set in a satirical fantasy world.

The expression system Burroughs developed with Naked Lunch would go on and continue with varying degrees of success for the rest of his career. Naked Lunch is clearly his most famous book, though probably not his most read book. That honor is reserved for Junky, an obviously important document, but one that lacks the complicated structure and language which allows Naked Lunch to have such a deep reservoir to draw from. Though Junky is widely read, and it showcases the talent Burroughs had for straight narrative, it was never considered by Burroughs to really demonstrate what he wanted to in writing. Naked Lunch was his first attempt to truly convey ideas in what he considered to be an original form. Through the vehicle of his routines and extended grotesques, he was able to formulate a way of telling a story that has been literally impossible for anyone else to emulate with a credible voice.