Hello and welcome to the Discourse. Naked Lunch was the second published novel by William S. Burroughs that was published in 1959. In his first novel Junkie (1953), Burroughs introduced the character William Lee. The character of William Lee was closely based on William S. Burroughs himself and may be called an alter-ego of Burroughs. He continued with the same character, expressing some more experiences of himself in his second novel Naked Lunch.
When first published, the novel faced bans as it was subject to various obscenity trials in the United States. The novel is disturbing, ambiguous, and controversial. The novel is narrated by one of the central characters, a drug addict named William Lee, based on Burroughs himself. While taking various drugs, Lee leaves the United States and travels to fictional cities where he becomes involved in their politics, homosexual scene, and drug culture. The novel is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot. William Burroughs experimented with the “cut-up, fold-in” technique of writing that he continued with the other three novels of the Nova series.
The Naked Lunch attained huge success and is termed as one of the best examples of Beat Literature of the Beat Generation. In Naked Lunch and the three sequel novels of the Nova Series ( The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded); Burroughs created an intricate and horrible allegory of human greed, corruption, and debasement that can be compared with the dystopian works like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
The title Naked Lunch:
The term “naked” refers to the ability to perceive reality in its natural form which can be obtained by eliminating confusion. That confusion is regarded as a result of artificial, social boundaries. Burroughs challenges contemporary repression by addressing the reader directly and, thereby, confronting him with the excessive use of drugs which the author embeds in a surrealistic narrative. By emphasizing the sharp contrast between individual concepts of freedom and social conventions, Burroughs shows the reader “what is on the end of every fork.” Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Burroughs said that the title “relates to the nakedness of seeing, to being able to see clearly without any confusing disguises, to see through the disguise”
Characters of Naked Lunch:
William Lee is the main character of the novel. Lee is a morphine and Heroin addict who experiments with various other drugs. He is married and a father of two kids but he hardly cares for his family that left him in the previous novel (Junkie). Dr. Benway is a discredited surgeon who continues to practice medicine in increasingly disreputable circumstances, which doesn't seem to bother Benway because of his highly flexible ethics. Benwey introduces Lee to a free ‘welfare state’ named Freeland. A.J. is an agent of Islam Inc who works under the guise of a funloving international playboy. He commits disruptive and dangerous acts under the guise of harmless pranking, sowing chaos wherever he goes. Hassan is another agent of Islam Inc., also known as Salvador Hassan O'Leary. He began as a hustler and rose to become a prominent international merchant in drugs and sex. Clem and Jody are operators of Islam Inc with leanings towards Russia and thus, they commit crimes around the world while trying to demean the United States. Andrew Keif is a novelist living in Interzone, while Aracknid is a chauffeur working in Interzone. Dr. Berger is a psychologist who runs a radio program in which he talks to sufferers of various mental illnesses. Clarence Cowie is the subject of Dr. Berger's experiment to produce a "deanxietized man." Jane is a prostitute in Mexico whose pimp forces his ideas on her.
Summary of Naked Lunch:
The novel begins in New York City where William Lee is still trying to evade police. The police are seeking for illegal use of marijuana, heroin, and other drugs. One day, after dodging the police, he hops on a subway train and begins discussing his experiences with a young man. He talks about his fellow junkies Rube and Vigilante. Lee describes how addicts use safety pins and medicine droppers to administer a fix. After leaving the train at another station, Lee witnesses the bodily decay of other junkies who hang out in an automat, a vending machine-type cafeteria. As the police pressure continues to grow, Lee decides to leave New York along with Rube and Vigilante. The narrator abandons Rube in Philadelphia while Lee goes on to Chicago, St. Louis, and Houston before buying a large quantity of heroin in New Orleans and proceeding to Mexico. In Mexico, the narrator obtains cocaine on someone else's prescription and meets a marijuana-smoking pimp who mistreats his prostitute named Jane. In Mexico, he comes in contact with Dr. Benway and is assigned to work under him in a new ‘welfare state’ named Freeland. Later on, Lee learns that Dr. Benway works for Islam Inc., a shadowy organization whose motives are unclear and primarily driven by individual agents. Benway runs a Reconditioning Center where he conducts unethical and tortuous experiments on drug addicts and homosexuals. Freeland is run by a totalitarian government that controls the public through generosity. While working on their subjects, Dr. Benway and Lee are forced to flee the facility when a computer malfunction sets the inmates free and unleashes total chaos.
Lee finds himself in Interzone where he sees a man named Carl who becomes divorced from reality when he goes to visit his friend Joselito in a sanitarium. Interzone is a city where drugs and sex of all kinds are freely available. The threat of revolution against colonial influences hovers around the margins of daily life. Interzone is run by four opposing political parties: the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Divisionists, and the Factualists. These parties also influence the narrator's involvement in Islam Inc., an organization without a clear agenda aside from the preferences of its individual agents.
A dealer/addict identified as the Sailor goes to a plaza in the city to buy a substance called Black Meat from creatures called Mugwumps. Lee gets admitted to a hospital to detox himself of drug usage where he meets Dr. Benway again. After successful detoxification, Lee meets one of his old friends who has attempted to kick his heroin addiction with questionable results. Lee too decides to get rid of his addiction again. He spends around 10 years in Interzone during which he is forced to please the County Clerk regularly so that he may not get evicted. The County Clerk is a racist jerk.
During his stint with Islam Inc., Lee comes in contact with Hassan, and A.J. A.J. hosts an annual party where he shows a blue (pornographic) movie featuring a trio engaging in lurid sexual acts that culminate in hangings. Two other agents, Clem and Jody, disrupt a Muslim funeral in Interzone's marketplace. This act typifies their worldwide travels, sowing mayhem in ongoing attempts to make the United States look bad on the world stage.
Lee decides to leave the Interzone and reaches New York again where he is again pursued by police officers. Two narcotics officers, Hauser and O'Brien catch him and a struggle ensues during which Lee shoots the officers and goes into hiding at a bathhouse. The next day he can find no reports of the shooting in the papers, so he calls the city's narcotics bureau. He speaks to a lieutenant who has never heard of Hauser or O'Brien. The narrator takes this as a sign he can no longer access the intersections of different realities.
Symbols used in Naked Lunch:
Lee describes how addicts use safety pins and medicine droppers to administer a fix. The use of safety pins and droppers suggests that there is an acute scarcity of heroin or other drugs and it is hard to get them. The narrator uses Safety Pins and Droppers as a symbol to represent the sense of desperation addicts feel when they need a fix. When withdrawal symptoms set in, they are willing to use any instruments available to get the drugs into their bodies. The safety pin reveals little concern for sanitation or for personal pain. The only thing that matters is the fix.
The author used Nooses and execution by hanging while describing two explicitly sexual scenes, one during Hassan’s orgy, and the other in the blue film shown by A.J. Noose was used as a symbol to suggest the hypocrisy of social authorities that would be concerned with the obscenity of the sex acts, but not the obscenity of the executions their own government sanctions.
The narrator often describes garbage in Naked Lunch and each time, he depicts the used condoms thrown here and there. Used condoms signify the way sex is commodified among drug addicts. It is impersonal and disposable like condoms are. They are dirtier than the rest of the garbage, containing bodily fluids that may also be diseased. They decay in these discarded containers just as the addicts' bodies are decaying containers for the drugs they take. Black Meat serves as a symbol of all drugs because it is addictive, hard to get, and requires users to enter into arrangements with unsavory characters called Mugwumps.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of American English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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