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| This month features Naked Lunch by William Burroughs |
Note: William Burroughs is a smacked-out intermittent aphorist with a great sense of style but no sense of form. Realising this, he turned his lack into as much of a virtue as he could; or rather, he did his best to make everyone else consider perfectly achieved form a demerit.
Burroughs, I would say, is not strictly a Beat. He shared with them a time-period, a few locations, meals, some bodily fluids, and an amount of now-dead drugslang. The cut-up, as a working method (thank you Mr Brion Gysin), is as contrary to the aesthetic spirit of Kerouac (spontaneous bop prosody) and Ginsberg (first thought, best thought) as could be imagined. The fact that Kerouac assisted in the organisation of the Naked Lunch manuscript (and the titling of the novel) is... awkward, but doesn't alter the fact that Burroughs is a far more brutally radical writer than the late late Romantic Beats.
The tone of Naked Lunch is its greatest coup. As one reads one keeps checking back to the copyright declarations:
First published in English by Olympia Press, Paris 1959
First published in Great Britain by John Calder Ltd, 1964
1959 - really, 1959. By which time Burroughs had already written this: 'The author has observed that Arab cocks tend to be wide and wedge shaped.)' And this: 'And the President pays a huge price for the Oblique Habit.' And this: 'Blind boys grope out of huge pies, deteriorated schizophrenics pop from under a rubber cunt, boys with horrible skin diseases rise from a black pond (sluggish fish nibble yellow turds on the surface.'
It is this voice that has turned Naked Lunch into perhaps the richest of all pop-cultural primers. Without Burroughs, no Dylan (see 'Desolation Row'), no Lou Reed (see 'Lady Godiva's Operation' and 'Street Hassle'), no Becker & Fagen (who named Steely Dan after a Burroughs-invented dildo).
And what exactly is Burroughs' tone? It is the insanely sane druggist leaning over the pharmacy counter to buttonhole you with a yarn so charmingly disgusting that you can't help but listen: his breath comes up out of the pet cemetery during a heat wave, his eyes emit fewer signals than the moon. He is the post-modern Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three. His obsessions - ugly things, slimy things, insects, drug pedantry - are entirely distinctive. Yet writers such as JG Ballard (who wrote the introduction to my edition of Naked Lunch) and Will Self (who has written more than once of his debt) have set up tents in his big black shadow.
Burroughs has one of the best senses of on-the-page timing you'll ever come across: 'Three months back sitting in the Metropole nodded out over a stale yellow eclair that would poison a cat two hours later...'
You missed the step, didn't you? - jolted on 'two hours later'.
Finally, Naked Lunch is thoroughly and openly political: 'Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to the complete parasitism of a virus.' All this, and Management Theory, too.
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