William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction

The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

William Burroughs and the Literature of AddictionAuthor(s): Frank D. McConnellSource: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 665-680Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25087654 .Accessed: 10/04/2014 22:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Massachusetts Review, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheMassachusetts Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 196.21.233.64 on Thu, 10 Apr 2014 22:53:34 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Frank D. McConnell

William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction

Then glo%ening decanters that reflect the street Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow

Afflause flows into liquid cynosures: ?I am

conscripted to their shadows' glow. Hart Crane, "The Wine Menagerie"

although William burroughs' Naked Lunch has existed -** as a book for nearly eight years, the best commentary on it

is still slight enough to be contained as a preface to the Grove Press paperback edition: I mean the testimony of Norman

Mailer and Allen Ginsberg given at the Boston obscenity trial in 1966. That testimony, at least, has the merit of restraint im

posed by having to translate a living understanding of the book into the ludicrous terms of the Supreme Court's shibboleths for

distinguishing "literary merit" from "obscenity"?the final test

being whether "the material is utterly without redeeming social value." One has the strong feeling that both witnesses?espe cially Ginsberg?are "camping" to some extent, putting the court on by answering questions in precisely the sort of school

marmish, bad-Arnoldian jargon the court obviously requires3 and certainly one of the funniest moments in the trial is Gins

berg's reading of a poem on Burroughs' work from his own

volume, Reality Sandwichesy followed by defense attorney Ed ward de Grazia's bathetic one-liner, "No more questions.yy

665


The Massachusetts Review

But camp or not, this testimony remains more useful than almost anything else that has been written about Naked Lunch.

Even bad Arnoldian criticism is better than what has otherwise

normally been done with the book, which is to convert it into either the sacred text or the abomination of desolation for the

hippie generation, depending on one's age, education, social

status, and opinions about drugs versus liquor as a relaxant. This is partly the fault of the government itself, of course, in forcing underground a book which, in the last analysis, does not belong there: the generation now reacting so viscerally to

Naked Lunch is the same generation which only a few years ago was handing surreptitious copies of it around with other such high school delights as clandestine beer or pot and photo copied pornographic cartoons. Naturally this has imposed on the book an aroma which persists after it becomes suddenly "legal," and which determines its meaning as a newly public statement: not necessarily, however, an aroma inherent to Naked

Lunch itself. Miss Susan Sontag (who is rather a more mas culine Tom Wolfe in her espousal of the hippie style) has kind

words for Burroughs in Against Interpretation, but they are the wrong words. To say that what we must grasp in Naked

Lunch is "not the 'content,' but the principles of (and balance

between) variety and redundancy" is simply to perpetuate the image of Burroughs as an ultimately debased Byron which has

already done so much harm to the book and many of its readers. The leitmotif of our new youth may or may not be a euphoric celebration of no-content, but this is certainly not the message of Naked Lunch, which shouts from every page the horror of

vacuity and the terrible necessity for the rebirth of will. Surely it is one of the most ironic perversions of a text in literary

history that an author for whom capitalism is a stronger symbol of imaginative death than for anyone since Brecht should be come the hero of a cult revelling in the repeatability of the

mass-produced artifact, and have his picture immortalized in a pattern for "psychedelic" wallpaper.1

1 See Richard and Gwyneth Cravens, "Underground Incorporated," Made moiselle (April, 1967), p. 164.

666


Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction

Even more disconcerting than the book's adulators, however, have been its detractors?for the most part older academic critics

who should really know better. Accepting Naked Lunch along with On the Road, V.y and other contemporary novels into the

syllabus of modern literature classes is scant recognition indeed, coupled as it usually is with the tacit assumption that Burroughs' book is primarily of sociological interest as a deranged apologia for the drug life?an assumption actually taken over from the

wild youngsters, and transvalued by a pose less critical or in tellectual than parental in the worst, Theobald Pontifex, sense of the word. The most surprising?and most articulate?ex

positor of this approach is none other than Leslie Fiedler, a critic to conjure with for almost any American novel written before 1955, but strangely homiletic after that date. In Waiting for the Endy Fiedler devotes a whole chapter to Burroughs, and it is a disappointing moment in a brilliant career. Beginning

with the premise that Burroughs, along with Kerouac, Gins

berg, and Norman O. Brown, is primarily a writer for adolescents ?not simply one read widely by adolescents?Fiedler addresses himself not to the problems of the book itself, but to the pseudo problems with which the adolescents have surrounded the book.

The drug problem, according to Fiedler, is simply another per mutation of the American myth of westering, out of which he has gotten so much mileage: a retreat into the last undiscovered

territory, the inner space of the mind. And, he tells us, the dilemma from which Burroughs and his tribe of young junkies are fleeing is their love-hate relation to the affluent society, the

knowledge that in seeking poverty they are seeking "a state

costing someone (usually their absentee parents) ... a sum equal to that demanded for fairly comfortable living in the years of the depression." These are the tones of a post-New

Deal Lord Chesterfield, and they do not improve as the essay progresses: we are finally informed that Burroughs is naive in every conceivable respect, hardly a man any human family

would want to acknowledge, and redeemed?if at all?by "only a

stupidity monumental enough to be called holy." Waiting for the End was written while Naked Lunch was

667



still contraband, and one likes to assume that Fiedler read the book under unfavorable circumstances: the whole essay is very unlike him. At any rate, it is a misuse of the book. Granted that

Burroughs' work is intimately related to what is rapidly be

coming the social problem in the United States, and that the critic has perhaps less right than anyone to abdicate his involve

ment in such problems (Fiedler has always been a prime exem plar of this duty), there is little to be gained by also abdicating the prerogatives of criticism itself: and in this case that means

allowing even a book as "in" as Naked Lunch to articulate its own values, which may not be the values of its enthusiasts. Of

contemporary critics only Ihab Hassan in such essays as "The Novel of Outrage"2 has managed to attain this necessary imag

inative poise toward Burroughs' work. We return, then, to the trial testimony of Mailer and Gins

berg, constrained?but refreshingly so?to evaluation rather than polemic. Both men have not only to defend the book, but

prior to that, to prove to the court's satisfaction that Naked Lunch is a book. Mailer is at his most cogent when he answers

de Grazia's questions about the putative "notes" Burroughs is

supposed to have made during the most abject stages of his addiction, and which, runs the tale, Ginsberg later collected and edited into Naked Lunch. The question of these notes had

apparently been brought up earlier by Assistant Attorney Gen eral Cowin in his prosecution of the book?and significantly, it is one raised by Fiedler in his very different prosecution of

Burroughs. Mailer answers it in a lengthy defense of what used to be called "automatic writing"?the idea that "one's best

writing seems to bear no relation to what one is thinking about."

He goes on to testify to the strong sense of an underlying struc

ture he has in reading Naked Lunch, and to its importance for

him as a deeply religious book?"It is Hell precisely." The

citation of the book's religious character is important, and we

shall return to it later. But in the matter of the book's unity or

lack of it?and the folklore that has grown up around the exist

2 Ihab Hassan, "The Novel of Outrage," The American Scholar (Spring, 1965), pp. 239-53.

668



ence of "notes"?the more interesting testimony is given im

plicitly by Ginsberg, supposedly the miglior fabbro of its gene sis. In answer to what must be the defense's first question,

whether he has read the book entitled Naked Lunch, Ginsberg replies "Yes.. .. Yes, a number of times," and proceeds to an

immensely useful explication of some of its "ideas having social

importance" and of the political parties of Interzone, the mythic territory in which the bulk of Naked Lunch takes place. It is a tacit recognition of the autonomy of the book, precisely as

Burroughs^ book, and it should serve as an object lesson in read ing Naked Lunch. Whether or not Ginsberg did collect and arrange snippets of Burroughs' writing, and whether or not, as

Burroughs himself says, even the title of the book was suggested by Jack Kerouac and only later understood by the author, the book's unity is a function not of such information but of some

thing at once more simple and more subtle than this: the final fact of its inclusion between covers or, in the most honest terms, its packaging. For we mistake Naked Lunch if we read it as any

thing other than one of our most packaged, consumer-oriented

books, and therefore one of our most insidious: set like a depth charge within the inmost form of a cash-and-carry culture, an eminent prefabrication to subvert prefabricators and all their

works.

This is something very different from the act of faith we make in the unity of allegory like, for example, Blake's or

Swift's: in a radical way, Naked Lunch is a stern criticism of

allegory. Burroughs is not concerned with objectifying the pos sible directions of the moral will. He is doing instead something that could not possibly have been done without the precondition of a full-flowered drug traffic: writing a book in which the only alternatives are absolute (and therefore dynamically formless)

will or its absolute lack. The question whether Burroughs' tal ent has been helped or hurt by his long addiction is meaningless: his talent is, irreducibly, his addiction and his cure from it, at least at the time of writing the Introduction to Naked Lunch.

That Introduction, indeed, is an essential and central part of the

book, in spite of Grove Press' numbering its pages in small case

669



Roman numerals. It is the act of retrospective packaging which

gives the book its peculiar and brilliant satiric form, and the

key to the basic economic theme in all its ramifications:

Junk is the ideal product. . . the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.

. . .

The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his

merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk.

This is the meaning of the title, as Burroughs, always anxious to avoid any allegorizing, tells us: the naked lunch, where ev

eryone really sees what is on the end of the fork, where there is no chance left for the allegorical or metaphoric translation

(and avoidance) of the alternatives of will and not-will, be cause the packager?proprietor of "Bill's Naked Lunch Room"

?has made a commitment to language which involves not less than everything. In a poetic system of this austerity, allegory is a capitulation, metaphor a final temptation to not-will. As

Burroughs writes in his later Nova Express, "Since junk is image the effects of junk can easily be produced and concen trated in a sound and image track...." The presiding genius of Naked Lunch is that most anti-metaphoric of writers, the

Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Tractatus:

Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosofhicus: "If a proposi tion is not necessary it is meaningless and approaching meaning ZERO."

"And what is More unnecessary than junk if You Don't Need it?"

The party of Interzone with which Burroughs obviously identifies, the Factualists, are the logical positivists of the imagi

nation, dedicated to warfare against the Divisionists, Liquefac tionists, and Senders, all of them concerned in some way with the translation of one thing or one person into another, by

duplication, annihilation, and control (the Factualists become the Nova Police of the later book). This is why readings?

670



some of them highly laudatory?of Naked Lunch which take the book as a relatively straightforward use of drug addiction as a symbol for all that is wrong with our society do it an injustice. There is no symbolization (past the sheerly verbal level of naming) at all in the book, and Burroughs would not want us to look for any. Junk is image, and therefore image is junk: the terrible purity of Burroughs' style will not allow us to ex

trapolate symbolic matrices because it will not allow terms for the problem other than its own. Any second series of corre

spondences would be, in the book's own terms, a retreat into

image-junk and a final betrayal into addiction. I am saying, of course, that Burroughs' book operates on

probably the most severely minimal linguistic principle out of which poetry can be made at all, and that the critic approaching it is faced at the first turn with the book's internal hostility to the act of explication. After such knowledge, what action?

Naked Lunch is, I think, undeniably a great book. And its

greatness constitutes a very serious challenge to criticism?a

perfectly just test of the relevance of its techniques not only to the present of literature but, in fact, to the past which is

everywhere and always a function of that present. For in spite of the assertions of some theorists that criticism as a craft is

normally ten years or so behind the avant-garde of literature

itself, the only alternatives to a criticism able to cope intelli

gently and productively with what is most vital in the contem

porary scene seem, in the last analysis, either the autistic exam ination of an a priori unavailable past or the politely sterile

non-statement of our Sunday Book Reviews. The minimal poetry of Naked Lunch is not, in fact, without

precedent. But the tradition to which it belongs, what I have called "the literature of addiction," is one whose importance for our imaginative heritage has never been fully articulated? could not have been, perhaps, before its stark incarnation in

Burroughs' book. It is an approximate form and an approximate tradition, developing slowly and for the most part only in flashes in larger works: but it can be identified as primarily an

671



English-American tradition of literature, and as definitively Romantic in its origins and its imaginative direction.

In the simplest terms, of course, the junky himself is an in vention of the Romantic era. The disreputable, shabby, com

pulsive wanderer carrying his mysterious and holy wound is a

figure first incarnated in the alcoholic Burns or in the mad Chatterton who so fascinated Wordsworth, and brought to a

nearly final development in Coleridge himself, who really died an imaginative death in his addiction, to be reborn as "S.T.C.," defender of Christianity and architect of Victorianism. Bur

roughs' strange and disgusting characters called Sollubi are a

permutation of this archetype:

The Sollubi are an untouchable caste in Arabia noted for their abject vileness. De luxe cafes are equipped with Sollubi who rim the guests

while they eat?holes in the seating benches being provided for this

purpose. Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded?so many people do, nowadays, hoping to jump the gun?offer themselves up for passive homosexual intercourse to an encampment of Sollubis. . . . Nothing like it, they tell me. ... In fact, the Sollubi are subject to

become wealthy and arrogant and lose their native vileness. What is

origin of untouchable? Perhaps a fallen priest caste. In fact, untouch ables perform a priestly function in taking on themselves all human vileness.

It is only after the Romantics had taught us, with their strong radical Protestant bent, the impossibility of a transubstantiation of things from above, that the negative eucharist of the outlaw and the sensualist became an aesthetic possibility. And the ad dict?the nature of the addiction, of course, being of no real

importance?was the inevitable celebrant of the new mass, an

absolute exile into the world of things in themselves. This is a

reaction, finally, neither Byronic nor "Satanic" in the melodra matic sense of Mario Praz' The Romantic Agony: it is much

closer to the resolute materialism which informs Shelley's finest poems, and to the emotional and intellectual ambivalence

about addiction which runs through the first great drug-book, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

672



We must distinguish, however, between the literature of ad diction proper and the vast number of works in which addiction and the addict serve simply as more or less serious type-cases of sensual exotica or social

"problems" in the editorial-writer's sense. Wilde's Dorian Gray in the last stages of his degradation feels "the hideous hunger for opium," but we note the fact

only as another minor flourish in that masterpiece of titillation. Even less central to what I am talking about is the kind of treatment given addiction in a book like Nelson Algren's 1949 novel, The Man with the Golden Arm. That book, which was not as much debased by its movie version as some critics would like to believe, is finally a study in anti-heroism in the hard boiled vein for which addiction as an imaginative, phenom enological fact is of very little importance, as witness the purple prose describing the anti-hero's first "fix":

It hit all right. It hit the heart like a runaway locomotive, it hit like a

falling wall. Frankie's whole body lifted with that smashing surge, the

very heart seemed to lift up-up-up?then rolled over and he slipped into a long warm bath with one long orgasmic sigh of relief.

Whatever the considerable merits of Algren's book, in its treat ment of the drug life itself, it is not really much beyond the handling of the "dope fiends" who shuffle around the corners of Dashiell Hammett's mystery novels. In fact, Burroughs' own book, Junky, a tough-realistic novel written straightfor

wardly to make some money, belongs more in this class than in the tradition of Coleridge, De Quincey, Malcolm Lowry and

Naked Lunch. What differentiates that tradition from other, more external

treatments of the addict is not so much the element of auto

biography in the works I have mentioned?although it cer

tainly exists and is important?but rather the strong ambivalence toward the drug which is present from the real beginning of the tradition, the prefatory note to Kubla Khan. It is precisely this ambivalence which has proved so dangerous a component of

Naked Lunch, leading many to suppose the book really is a defense of drugs rather than a work which transcends the poles

673



of approval or disapproval of addiction. Those who are not ad dicted should really find Naked Lunch no less accessible than those who are?in fact, most of those who prize the book as secret cult-knowledge actually belong to a movement toward the non-addictive hallucinogens and marijuana which has less to do with the imaginative energy of Naked Lunch than the "straight" attitude toward drugs. The "hallucinations" which

make up the bulk of the book are not the futuristic and numi nous visions reported by users of LSD, but are rather clarified visions of present reality made more terrible by what we have

already described as the addict's absolute dependence on real

things in their aspect of maximum power. Burroughs, in Naked Lunch and more blatantly in The Soft Machine and Nova Ex

press, is a brilliant writer of science fiction (as, in a very different fashion, are John Barth in Giles Goat-Boy, Thomas Pynchon in

V., and Kurt Vonnegut in Cafs Cradle) $ and science fiction, as should be obvious by now, is the least futuristic of popular genres, attempting as it does a constant purification of the pres ent through the neo-romance landscape of the future.

The ambivalence at the heart of the prefatory note to Kubla Khan is Coleridge's central ambivalence toward the Romantic

epistemology: his refusal to accept both the full import of the autonomous imagination and, at the same time, the world of

untransfigured phenomena. And so addiction and the drug be come an aesthetic necessity for the poem: the sunny pleasure dome, literally what the mind can do to the world of things, is transposed into the Active past of an opium dream and labelled a

"fragment." Kubla and the youth with flashing eyes and

floating hair are both the new man of the non-numinous uni

verse, and Coleridge fears them both with that orthodox side of his mind which cries "Beware," as much as he identifies with them with another part of his being. So the drug is not the cause of the vision as much as it is, for Coleridge, the inevitable result of vision at all: if the "person from Porlock" had not existed to interrupt the dream (which is probably the case), he would have had to be invented, just as fragmentation is not the actual state but the necessary and sufficient condition for pre

senting the poem.

674



Coleridge helps us see the drug life as only the latest permu tation of our basic imaginative patrimony, the problem of the

sublime, of the world as consumer commodity and poetry as, literally, the packaging of experience. The expansion of con

sciousness, achieved with the aid of British sensational philos ophy until the mid-nineteenth century and increasingly with the aid of pharmacology after that point, was a poetic difficulty long before it became a social one. But from its beginnings, almost, it was intimately bound up with drugs and with eco nomics. Wordsworth, thinking about Coleridge (then abroad and trying to recover from his addiction) writes, in Resolution and Independence:

But how can he expect that others should Build for him, sow for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?

And De Quincey, remembering the mysterious and celestial seeming druggist who sold him his first tincture of opium, be comes fascinated by the economics of ecstasy:

Here was the secret of happiness about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach.

A century later, Malcolm Lowry says of his own addiction: "The real cause of alcoholism is the complete baffling sterility of existence as sold to you." And with Burroughs, what had

begun as an aesthetic necessity becomes the necessary aesthetic, the addict is finally sold to the addiction, and Naked Lunch comes into being as an attempt to retranslate the "ultimate

merchandise" of the chemical sublime into meaningful and thereby surmountable fact.

It is no surprise, then, to find at the heart of Naked Lunch Coleridge himself, in the guise of his most important creation, the Ancient Mariner: the first great Romantic junky, addicted to the natural world itself. The Professor's lecture on the Cam

675



pus of Interzone University is perhaps the stylistic matrix of the whole book:

Consider the Ancient Mariner without curare, lasso, bulbocapnine or strait jacket, albeit able to capture and hold a live audience. . . . What is his hurmp gimmick? He he he he. ... He does not, like so-called artists at this time, stop just anybody thereby inflicting unsent-for boredom and

working random hardship. ... He stops those who cannot choose but

hear owing to already existing relation between The Mariner (however ancient) and the uh Wedding Guest.. . .

It is a remarkable parallel to the moment in that other great modern drug-book, Under the Volcano, where the Consul

analyzes his alcoholism?and the movement of Lowry's entire novel?under the aspect of another Romantic quester, the poet in Shelley's Alas tor. But the reference to Coleridge has if any thing greater relevance than the invocation of Shelley. For just as the Ancient Mariner's compulsion arises from his never really finding the appropriate language for his experience, so that he

must tell his tale again and again ad infinitum, in exilio, so the deliberate reduction of linguistic power we have noted in Naked Lunch is a desperate attempt to tell the tale truly once for all, and so be rid of it. Naked Lunch is, as Mailer implied at the trial, a religious confession: that is, it is not the journal of a cure, but is the cure from word-image-junk, a talking cure which

makes a striking Active anticipation of the method used by the

organization called Synanon in rehabilitating addicts. The

drug, as the option to total not-will, is totally demonic?so

totally that possession as a term for it becomes pitifully inade

quate. "

'Possession' they call it," writes Burroughs toward the end of the book. "As if I was usually there but subject to goof now and again.... Wrong! I am never here...." And the cure lies inevitably in possessing the demons?in exerting the narrative control which can describe them as

"fragmentary," can place them in past time, and can finally achieve the point toward which the whole book moves, the absolutely denotative

language of the Appendix, an article by Burroughs published in The British Journal of Addiction. The release is the book, the

676



whole book, which without either Introduction or Appendix would be immeasurably crippled, dull and "unpoetic" as those sections may be in themselves. "I am not," Burroughs writes, "an entertainer."

This is the context in which we must understand the 231

pages of "hallucination." Those hallucinations themselves, how

ever, describe a general movement which is anything but frag mented. Roughly, the first 20 pages are a narrative, "realistic" in flashes, of the problems of obtaining junk and fighting off the

police: then with increasing disjunction of narrative time and realistic detail, the story moves toward the central, long vision of "Interzone": the last 20 pages tend again toward "realism," ending with Burroughs' fantasy of killing the narcotics detec tives Hauser and O'Brien, only to learn that they do not exist

?"Far side of the world's mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O'Brien." Bracketed between the diminishing realism of the induction and the growing realism of the de

nouement, the Interzone section is forced inevitably into the

fictive shape of a withdrawal symptom?whatever Burroughs' actual state at the composition of the episodes. "Interzone" is

precisely that?the world between human will and its negation: the point at which, in the absence of the drug, speech at all be comes possible, but correlatively, the point at which the drive toward resumed addiction is at its strongest. The induction ends

with the death in Tangier of a girl addict; the denouement con

cludes with the narrator's first willed act, a killing, however illusive. Between these two deaths, the images of Interzone con

tinually tend toward an allegorization of the drug life (which for Burroughs, the poet, would be, of course, re-addiction), and are continually reduced to the anti-allegorical, minimal visions

which are perhaps the single greatest imaginative triumph of Naked Lunch.

Interzone is, in fact, a blasted idyll, where the will projects and then destroys its own suspension in a polysexual, universally addicted junky's reverie. And in this respect, the two episodes

which account for by far the lion's share of "shock" in Naked

Lunch, "Hassan's Rumpus Room" and "A.J.'s Annual Party,"

677



are both brilliantly managed and unroariously funny subver sions of two of our most cherished myths of escape, "party time" and promiscuity?they are the nearest thing we have, in fact, to

Petronius' epochal annihilation of the symposium in the Ban

quet of Trimalchio.

Angus Fletcher, in his superb study, Allegory, has indicated how intimately bound up is the allegorical method with the assumptions of primitive demonism. It is only another sign of

Burroughs' masterful control of his work, then, that the intense demonisms of Interzone are so consistently thwarted in their

movement to become allegories. The key point of control over this technique is Burroughs' revaluation of "possession" which I have already cited. The master addict is never there: the body is not a carrier of demonism, but itself demonic. Burroughs tells

us that what the addict craves is the presence of an alien sub stance in his bloodstream, a possession carried to the ultimate

metabolic level of physicality. And in Nova Express he de velops this motif in one of his most striking correlations of

image, junk, and what Whitehead called "the withness of the body":

What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: "the word." Alien Word "the." "The" word of Alien Enemy im

prisons "thee" in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the word j or ever.

It is under the sign of corporeality itself seen as addictive that the intensely grotesque sexual episodes of Interzone are gen erated. The process, in fact, is almost Swiftian in its range, a re verse alchemy transmuting semen into excrement in much the same way The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit transmutes

pneuma into flatulence. And here, too, the pervasive economic orientation of the book is operating. For it is no distortion of the text to see in it the basic economic equivalences of Jungian psy chology, semen as an archetype of gold and divinity, and ex crement as an archetype of money (non-valuable currency) and infantilism.

678



Finally, my reading of Naked Lunch leads back, at this level of abstraction, to the Supreme Court's own terms for evaluation: for the last question we can ask about the book is, actually, one

about its social value (the only substitute for bad Arnoldian criticism being, naturally, better Arnoldian criticism). In one of the finest critical aphorisms of this century, Leslie Fiedler has described America as "a world doomed to play out the imag inary childhood of Europe." It is only appropriate that the literature of addiction, European and Romantic in genesis, should find its fullest articulation in an American novel, just as it is inevitable that America should become the most addicted country in the West, and that only within the last half-century.

And the "redeeming social value" of Naked Lunch, as a novel

written within, and taking advantage of, the predispositions of addicted America, is not anything as simple as an anti-drug temperance tract. The "soft flutes of Ramadan," prime image of temperance in Burroughs' work, are heard only at a distance and faintly, disappearing around the corner. For Burroughs, the will to health and cure is fundamentally the will to look directly and honestly at the terms of his exile, and the problem becomes one of revising our characteristic humanist myth, the archetype of the Central Man inherited from Emerson and Whitman.3 The illusion that one has become God, achieved by Coleridge and De Quincey through the drug, is a basic datum of the

American poetic experience, entering our tradition as the birth

right of man himself rather than the gift of mturt-cum

chemistry. It is the indelible achievement of Burroughs to re turn this myth to its origins; to give the Whitmanian body

which is a part of all that grows and moves its most somber articulation. Naked Lunch is the grim and absolutely honest

testimony of one who has come back from the last reaches of

the Romantic self, the completion, as it were, of one of F.

Scott Fitzgerald's most important creations, the monumental

alcoholic of "The Lost Decade" ("Jesus_Drunk for ten

8 See Harold Bloom, "The Central Man," The Massachusetts Review (Winter, 1966), pp. 23-42.

679



years"). And miraculously it somehow manages to preserve the fundamental nobility of that vision of the self, even in its re vulsion. Burroughs will tell us that it is our duty to will health, but he will also insist that we will it meaningfully, without re gression to easy but exhausted versions of the spirit. And as our

most seriously Whitmanian novelist, he fittingly gets perhaps his best reading from our most Whitmanian poet, Allen Gins

berg:

A naked lunch is natural to us, we eat

reality sandwiches.

But allegories are so much lettuce.

Don't hide the madness.

680


Article Contentsp. 665p. 666p. 667p. 668p. 669p. 670p. 671p. 672p. 673p. 674p. 675p. 676p. 677p. 678p. 679p. 680

Issue Table of ContentsThe Massachusetts Review, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 585-784Volume InformationFront MatterThe Blues as a Literary Theme [pp. 593-617]I Object, Said the Object [pp. 618-619]One of Those Days [p. 620-620]The Hotel [pp. 621-628]Training the Eye [p. 629-629]For an Old Teacher [p. 630-630]Wall [pp. 630-631]Crumbgiving [p. 631-631]University Cafeteria [p. 632-632]R. P. Blackmur and the Criticism of Poetry [pp. 633-649]Emily Dickinson: Partial PortraitCousin [p. 650-650]Niece [pp. 650-651]Editor [p. 651-651]Poet [p. 651-651]

For Queen Eleanor on the Anniversary of Her Birth [p. 652-652]End of a Year [pp. 653-664]William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction [pp. 665-680]Feelings of Love and Violence [pp. 681-688]Sappho and Other Stories [pp. 689-702]Drama: Harold Pinter's Happy Families [pp. 703-712]Drama: The Theatre of Assault: Four off-off Broadway Plays [pp. 712-725]At Her Going [pp. 726-727]On the Tidal Ledge [pp. 728-729]The Jellyfish [p. 730-730]ObserverThe Last Seven Years in Cuba [pp. 731-746]Change and the Individual in Modern Japan [pp. 746-760]

Both Ways [p. 761-761]In ReviewReview: Voltaire and the Enlightenment [pp. 762-766]Review: The Other Boswell [pp. 767-768]Review: Ford Madox Ford as Poet and Editor [pp. 768-771]Review: The Utility of Civil Liberties Imagery [pp. 771-774]Review: Donaldson's Beowulf: The Critical Art of Translation [pp. 774-779]

Documents

William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction