Burroughs in Wonderland
Naked Lunch.
by William Burroughs.
Grove Press. 255 pp. $6.00.
Living, as I do, almost exclusively among bohemians and intellectuals who, like myself, possess hardly anything, not even one another, the only people I know really well who would rather be dead than red are my relatives in Brooklyn, and they possess a great deal, including each other. Often enough I feel I would rather be dead than anything at all, but when I’m less gloomy I would give up my loves, my typewriter, my apartment, all my ideas and my freedom (whatever that is) sooner than my life. The only thing I might not sooner give up is someone else’s life—but then I’m not sure of this. I feel, in fact, like Nathan Hale’s antichrist, for I could only regret that I had but one country to give for my life.
I am a ne’er-do-well, I suppose, a cynic, an immoralist, and therefore very contemporary. In a pinch, I would give up everything, because I value nothing, except my skin. And there is no glorious justification to call to my aid, not even Nature who could surely not value anything with which She is as prodigal as skin. If all the world’s flesh were fried up tomorrow with mushroom clouds, would She care? No. After the smoke cleared, after the bodies and the land stopped simmering, the viruses would start spinning again, and the pistil would lust for the stamen, and if what passed for mankind was a doglike creature with ten heads, hat industries would flourish, rulers would be gloriously crowned, and Nature would be as satisfied and unimpressed as ever. She is divinely indifferent to details. So, without her, I have no rationalizations: I just don’t want to give up my skin. It feels so good, especially in the sun or in the woods or in the sea or against another. Philosophy, politics, furniture, books, paintings, human relationships, the whole of Western civilization—none of it feels so good, none of it is me.
Obviously I am not the man for whom novels should be written, and yet I think I am precisely the man for whom serious modern novels are written, since I am one of the men they are written about. Look at four of the most influential novelists of the last twenty years: Camus, Genet, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet. By influential I mean, of course, that which has impact on the thinking of those capable of thinking, and this, at least in France, is without reference to sales or to the behavior patterns of beatniks and college students. What these four men reveal is not only contemporary man’s celebrated “alienation” and the cosmos’s celebrated “absurdity”—these concepts, which in Europe are metaphysical, are, in this country, merely sociological, and therefore, when applied to the work of American writers, they are more relevant to Greenwich Village than to Ultimate Reality—but the progressive and increasing abandonment of any attempt to decide what is good in a universe in which all things are equal and equal to nothing. Camus, the most traditional, the gentlest, and the wisest of the four writers I’ve named, has his Stranger find, or fabricate, good in the idea that his own beheading will amuse others. Genet, the wildest and loveliest, still recognizes the need for a moral position, but unable to find one, he inverts the traditional one: dishonesty is better than honesty, cowardice is better than bravery, betrayal is better than loyalty, homosexuality is better than heterosexuality, and so on. (Incidentally, it is inconceivable that for the last twenty years this country has done without Notre-Dame des Fleurs—the greatest novel Genet or probably anyone else has produced in that time.) Beckett, the most boring and ungainly, throws up his hands in defeat, and his decrepit characters tie their shoelaces endlessly or pick their noses infinitely. Robbe-Grillet, who isn’t the most anything except recent of the four, moves ahead radically. His protagonists simply do not exist; they may be inferred from the objects and situations they presumably perceive, but they do not exist. How is the good to be chosen if there is no one there to do the choosing?
Burroughs is actually Robbe-Grillet-Without-Tears. He is easier and more fun to read, very different in manner and technique, but his idea and effect are the same. According to literary legend, Allen Ginsberg, while visiting Burroughs in his Paris apartment sometime during the 1950’s, found the floors littered with hundreds of sheets of paper that Burroughs had scrawled on while high on heroin. Ginsberg, it is said, gathered the papers together, read them with reverence, and put them into the form, or rather sequence, they now have. He needn’t have bothered to sort them, since the book would have almost the same effect if he had shuffled the manuscript like a deck of cards.
The Naked Lunch appeared in Paris in 1959 as number 76 of The Traveller’s Companion Series, those green-jacketed little volumes published by Olympia, the press to which the English-speaking world is indebted not only for an unceasing flow of well-written and clever pornography but also for keeping in print much of the work of Miller, Genet, and Sade, as well as John Cleveland’s 18th-century masterpiece, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill. In the years between Olympia and Grove, The Naked Lunch dropped the definite article in its title and acquired an introduction and an appendix (informative essays on narcotics) as well as so great, notorious, and chic a reputation that if you happened to be square enough to dislike it, you immediately risked the scorn of those who were hipper than thou. Even Norman Mailer unpredictably mislaid himself long enough to write: “Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.”
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Well, Naked Lunch is no work of genius, but the first half of it is pleasantly readable without too much skipping, and the second half of it is pleasantly skippable without too much yawning. What has given Burroughs the air of genius, aside from the up-to-date erotic passages that stud the book, and aside from having his name connected with Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso, is that his implications are metaphysical, almost unique in an American, and that he follows the Europeans in his abandonment of the quest for a moral position. He is the first American novelist to be not merely childishly iconoclastic about his civilization, but to have turned his back upon it totally.
Though he reminds me of other writers, he falls short by comparison. In his tireless and tiresomely intellectual use of obscenities and in his shrieks of outrage, he is like an adolescent Henry Miller. In his savage political parodies, he is like a naive George Orwell. In his brutal sexual fantasies, he is like a timid Marquis de Sade. In his overpowering belief that the mention of petroleum jelly, baboons’ behinds, and contraceptives will infallibly provoke laughter, no matter how many hundreds of times repeated, he is like a senile Joey Hirsch, the boy next door to me when I was ten.
But most of all he reminds me of Lewis Carroll. Whether or not Burroughs wrote his book in a narcotic trance, his debt to Alice in Wonderland is enormous, and to have got himself thus indebted is so right and so brilliant that it makes me wish I liked Naked Lunch better than I do. In attempting to write a novel that will pull the wash-plug out of the universe, that will wither with scorn and smear with muck all the works of man and God, what could be more superb or to the point than to take as one’s method the method used in the most loved story of the English language?
Burroughs’s rabbit hole is heroin, and like Alice he falls down, down, down—into a world of dreams. Unlike Alice’s, his dreams are brief and unsustained, rarely lasting a page, often enough lasting barely more than a sentence or two. They are shattered, violent, haphazard, and their component images are drawn from almost every corner of contemporary life, almost every stretch of the human body. Nothing escapes the hiss and lava of his hatred. Flesh rots and tears, seals suddenly, rots and tears. Endless pairs of boys make love, breaking each other’s neck for climax, dying, living, breaking, dying. It is all somehow a work of spite, a work of revenge—revenge against beer bottles and God, against matchsticks and love, against war and peace and Tolstoy and fingertips and sealing wax. Some of it is funny and some of it marvelously dirty, but it just goes on and on; it begins to sound like the whine of a girl who’s been stood up. It begins to sound like a tantrum. The gigantic image of a man dumping a bucket of you-know-what on the universe turns into that of a child crying because he’s lost his cookie. Burroughs, the girl, and the child have all lost their cookie, and all they want of course is another one.
If you take the trouble, you can probably relate the things and people and events in this book to your own life, just as we do with Alice, although only two or three times does Burroughs approach the precision, wit, and truth of Carroll. I want to quote one of these passages, for it will give you not only some idea of his method but also of how good he can so rarely be. I admit that this passage is somewhat untypical: it is more sustained, less violent, less dirty, better written—most of the book is in journalese—and more brilliant than Burroughs usually is.
On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid . . . which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. (In fact all longevity agents have proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life.) Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these flow over chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb fluid sprouts from behind each ear. . . .
During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing themselves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis. In those days of gray terror the Reptiles cart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony.
Let us now make our adieux to Alice for we are returning to the 20th century where no good little girl belongs or is likely. We might as well also say goodbye to Burroughs, but not because he doesn’t belong. We say goodbye because he isn’t there, and I mean by this Burroughs the hero of the novel. He is a fantast created by narcotics, and his world is dreams in which he seldom figures. Who is the man? The man is no man, a receptacle of fantasies, like Robbe-Grillet’s inferential man, who we presume has been created by narcotics. But this is only a presumption, since the author gives us no reason to believe that the dreamer isn’t merely dreaming his own creation. It toils back upon itself. Life is a series of horrible and disconnected illusions which, alas, cannot even be relegated to the mind of a drug addict. The statement is absolute, the illusions are the whole of reality. But extend the implications further, to include yourself and myself. Who then are we, the dreamers who may not exist, or ghosts of the dream who then surely do not exist? And who then is dreaming us?
So if we take this back again to the moral quest, we find Burroughs holding hands with Robbe-Grillet in spite of their own non-existence. Well, what am I to do if writers will tell me that not only is there nothing worth giving up my skin for, but that I don’t even have a skin to give up? I will not, of course, be logicked out of my body that easily, but out of the problem of the good—perhaps. It occurs to me that a search for the good is already an admission of defeat, for morality, as we all know, is necessary only between people who do not love each other. Where there is love, morality is superfluous.
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