Naked Lunch

Burroughs wrote in his introduction that "The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."

Burroughs originally used the title Interzone for his manuscript.[4] He also considered several titles involving the Sargasso Sea, including Meet Me in Sargasso and The Sargasso Trail, possibly inspired by William Hope Hodgson's Sargasso Sea Stories.[5]

The final title began as a mistake. Reading aloud from the manuscript for Queer, Allen Ginsberg misread the phrase "a leer of nakedlust wrenched" as "a leer of naked lunch", and Jack Kerouac suggested Burroughs embrace this mangled wording as a title. The title originally referred to a planned three-part work made up of "Junk", "Queer" and "Yage", corresponding to his first three manuscripts, before it came to describe the book later published as Naked Lunch.[6] Ginsberg would later interpret and expand on the title in his poem On Burroughs' Work, published in the collection Reality Sandwiches:[7]

A Naked Lunch is natural to us,
  we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
  Don't hide the madness.

— Allen Ginsberg, On Burroughs' Work

The book was originally published with the title The Naked Lunch in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press. Because of US obscenity laws,[8] a complete American edition (by Grove Press) did not follow until 1962. It was titled Naked Lunch and was substantially different from the Olympia Press edition because it was based on an earlier 1958 manuscript in Allen Ginsberg's possession.[9] The definite article "the" in the title was never intended by the author, but added by the editors of the Olympia Press 1959 edition.[10] Nonetheless The Naked Lunch remained the title used for the 1968 and 1974 Corgi Books editions, and the novel is often known by the alternative name, especially in the UK where these editions circulated.

Scholarly research has also suggested Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) of 1863 as Burroughs' inspiration for the title.

Burroughs moved to the Tangier International Zone in 1954, shortly after the publication of his first novel Junkie. He was attracted by its reputation as a place with few restrictions on drug use or homosexuality, as portrayed in the works of Paul Bowles, and declared his intention to "steep myself in vice".[11] Bowles himself briefly appears in Naked Lunch under the name Andrew Keif.[12]

While living in the zone, Burroughs witnessed violent clashes between Moroccan nationalists and French authorities over its political status. Burroughs did not take a strong stance on the conflict, at one point calling himself "the most politically neutral man in Africa". He defended the riots as just and denounced the brutality of European imperialism, but worried about the impact of Islamic rule on individual freedom. As the conflict went on, he seemed to become less sympathetic to the nationalists. This political upheaval and Burroughs' ambivalence informs the depiction of Naked Lunch's Interzone, which is also marked by riots and imperial control. The narration exaggerates and caricatures both sides of the conflict, but avoids moral judgment and does not align itself politically.[13]

Upon publication, Grove Press added to the book supplementary material regarding the censorship battle as well as an article written by Burroughs on the topic of drug addiction. In 2001, a "restored text" edition of Naked Lunch was published with some new and previously suppressed material added.

Naked Lunch is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot. The following is a summary of some of the events in the book that could be considered the most relevant.

The book begins with the adventures of William Lee (also known as "Lee the Agent"), who is Burroughs' alter ego in the novel. His journey starts in the U.S. where he is fleeing the police in search of his next fix. There are short chapters describing the different characters he travels with and meets along the way.

Eventually he gets to Mexico where he is assigned to Dr. Benway; for what, he is not told. Benway appears and he tells about his previous doings in Annexia as a "Total Demoralizator". The story then moves to a state called Freeland, a form of limbo, where we learn of Islam Inc. Here, some new characters are introduced, such as Clem, Carl, and Joselito.

A short section then jumps in space and time to a marketplace. The Black Meat is sold here and compared to "junk", i.e. heroin. The action then moves back to the hospital where Benway is fully revealed as a manipulative sadist.

Time and space again shift the narrative to a location known as Interzone. Hassan, one of the notable characters of the book and "a notorious liquefactionist", is throwing a violent orgy. AJ crashes the party and wreaks havoc, decapitating people and imitating a pirate. Hassan is enraged and tells AJ never to return, calling him a "factualist bitch", a term which is enlarged much later when the apparently "clashing" political factions within Interzone are described. These include the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Factualists, and the Divisionists (who occupy "a midway position"). A short descriptive section tells of Interzone University, where a professor and his students are ridiculed; the book moves on to an orgy that AJ throws.

The book then shifts back to the market place and a description of the totalitarian government of Annexia. Characters including the County Clerk, Benway, Dr. Berger, Clem and Jody are sketched through heavy dialogue and their own sub-stories.

After the description of the four parties of Interzone, we are told more stories about AJ. After briefly describing Interzone, the novel breaks into sub-stories and heavily cut-up influenced passages.

In a sudden return to what seems to be Lee's reality, two police officers, Hauser and O'Brien, catch up with Lee, who kills both of them. Lee then goes out to a street phone booth and calls the Narcotics Squad, saying he wants to speak to O'Brien. A Lieutenant Gonzales on the other end of the line claims there's no one in their records called O'Brien. When Lee asks for Hauser instead, the reply is identical; Lee hangs up, and goes on the run once again. The book then becomes increasingly disjointed and impressionistic, and finally simply stops.

The majority of Naked Lunch does not follow any clear structure or chronology. Instead, it abruptly jumps between a series of loosely-connected episodes (called "routines" by Burroughs), which can be read in any order.[14] Although the novel is book-ended with a realistic crime story, most of these routines are abstract and surreal, blurring any distinction between fantasy and reality.[15][4] These routines are sporadically interrupted by parenthetical asides, which comment on or clarify the text. For example, when describing a scene as taking place "...under silent wings of the Anopheles mosquito," Burroughs adds the parenthetical "(Note: This is not a figure. Anopheles mosquitoes are silent.)"[16][17]

Burroughs mostly arranged the novel's chapters following the "arbitrary" order in which he received the galley proofs, but he consciously moved the "Hauser and O'Brien" chapter to the end, creating a frame narrative in which William Lee evades "the heat" of the law.[6] The first chapter retells events previously described in Burroughs' semi-autobiographical first novel Junkie, but with a new character called "the fruit", who serves as a parody of Junkie's implied reader; the fruit presents himself as hip and street-smart, but Lee mocks his naivety and plans to sell him catnip by claiming it's cannabis.[18] Other routines are also based on Burroughs' real life, such as Lee's visit to the County Clerk[19] and his addiction to Eukodol.[20]

These routines emphasize addiction, especially to heroin, which can be read as a metaphor for broader social problems and obsessions.[21][4] However, Frank McConnell argues that Naked Lunch is straightforwardly about heroin addiction in itself, and should not be read as symbolic.[15] Lydenberg argues that Burroughs' parenthetical asides challenge the reader's instinct to "evade" the darkness of the book by treating its disturbing elements as symbols or allegories, and instead show that Burroughs insists on a literal reading.[17]

The novel has been described as "an essentially nihilistic work"[22] and "consistently hostile, contemptuous, forcefully hateful [...] without joy."[23] Robin Lydenberg suggests that the novel advocates "a violent rejection and undermining of the entire dual system of morality."[24]

Burroughs' writing aims to provoke disgust.[25] The novel contains many explicit sexual scenes, emphasizing "sterile, inhuman, malevolent" acts of castration, sodomy, pederasty, and sadomasochism (especially via hanging).[26][27] Many "routines" involve body horror, especially grotesque transformations of humans into insects or amorphous blobs.[26]

Naked Lunch has sometimes been classified as dystopian science fiction in the tradition of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.[28][29] Marshall McLuhan considered the novel an "anti-Utopia" response to Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.[30]

Naked Lunch is considered Burroughs' best work.

Mary McCarthy was an early proponent of the novel. She wrote that Burroughs was one of only two authors who had recently interested her (along with Nabokov), defended his crudeness by placing him in the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift, and praised his "broad and sly" humor by comparing it to vaudeville.[31] John Ciardi, defending the book against charges of obscenity, praised it as "a masterpiece of its own genre" and "a monumentally moral descent into the hell of a narcotic addiction."[32] Norman Mailer praised Burroughs' "exquisite poetic sense" and considered Naked Lunch a powerful religious work, describing it as "a vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity" and akin to the work of Hieronymus Bosch.[33] J. G. Ballard considered the novel (along with The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded) to be "the first authentic mythology of the age of Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen" and favorably compared Burroughs' work to Finnegans Wake and The Metamorphosis.[34]

In contrast, John Wain called it "a prolonged scream of hatred and disgust" and "the merest trash, not worth a second glance".[35] Lionel Abel compared the work to a film that spliced together pornography with footage of Nazi concentration camps, writing "Now it is foolish, I think, to justify Naked Lunch as literature. Its descriptions of hallucinatory states under drug addiction are neither beautiful nor exquisite nor brilliant nor informative. I even wonder whether they are true."[36] David Lodge admitted that Burroughs had "a certain literary talent", but felt that the novel's initial excitement quickly became boring, confused, and unsatisfying. He considered comparisons between Burroughs and Swift "either naive or disingenuous".[37] John Willett wrote an anonymous review in The Times Literary Supplement simply titled Ugh..., in which he called the book disgusting and monotonous and wrote "If the publishers had deliberately set out to discredit the cause of literary freedom and innovation they could hardly have done it more effectively."[38] This led to the longest set of responses the Literary Supplement had ever received.[39]

Fans of Beat Generation literature, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker named their band Steely Dan after a "revolutionary" steam-powered dildo mentioned in the novel.[40][41][42] Lou Reed also identified the book as a major artistic influence.[43]

Naked Lunch is considered a key influence on the cyberpunk genre.[44] William Gibson has cited it as one of the novels that most influenced his own writing.[45]

Extremely controversial in both its subject matter and its "zealously obscene"[4] language (something Burroughs recognized and intended), the book was banned in Boston and Los Angeles in the United States,[46][47] and several European publishers were harassed.[48] In 1962, the German translation of the novel intentionally left some of the most explicit sections as untranslated English.[49]

Sections of the manuscript were published in the Spring 1958 edition of Robert Creeley's Black Mountain Review[50] and in the Spring 1958 edition of the University of Chicago student-run publication Chicago Review. The student edition was not well received, and caused the university administration to discuss the future censorship of the Winter 1959 edition of the publication, resulting in the resignation of all but one of the editors.[51] When the editor Paul Carroll published BIG TABLE Magazine (Issue No. 1, Spring 1959)[52] alongside former Chicago Review editor Irving Rosenthal, he was found guilty of sending obscene material through the U.S. mail for including "Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch", a piece of writing the Judicial Officer for the United States Post Office Department deemed "undisciplined prose, far more akin to the early work of experimental adolescents than to anything of literary merit" and initially judged it as non-mailable under the provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 1461.[53]

Grove Press hired Edward de Grazia to challenge the Boston ban in court.[54] During the trial, Allen Ginsberg, John Ciardi, Norman Mailer, and other authors testified to the book's literary value. Despite these testimonies, the trial judge upheld the ban, leading Grove Press to appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Court.[55] The higher court did not defend the novel's substance: The majority opinion called the book "grossly offensive", and Justice Paul Reardon called it "literary sewage" in his dissent. However, the supreme court acknowledged it had been accepted by the literary community, and thus could not be "utterly without redeeming social value", part of the legal definition of obscenity at the time.[56] The court overturned the ban, and Grove Press leveraged the trial as a marketing strategy. Grove compared Naked Lunch to Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Tropic of Cancer, which had also been challenged for obscenity, and included transcripts of the court testimonies in a new edition of the book.[55]

One argument for the book's literary value was its protest of the death penalty. In Burroughs's "Deposition: A Testimony Concerning A Sickness", "The Blue Movies" (appearing in the vignette "A.J.'s Annual Party") is deemed "a tract against capital punishment".

From the 1960s, numerous film-makers considered adapting Naked Lunch for the screen. Antony Balch, who worked with Burroughs on a number of short film projects in 1960s, considered making a musical with Mick Jagger in the lead role, but the project fell through when relationships soured between Balch and Jagger.[57][58] Burroughs himself adapted his book for the never-made film; after Jagger dropped out, Dennis Hopper was considered for the lead role, and at one point game-show producer Chuck Barris was considered a possible financier of the project.[59]

In May 1991, rather than attempting a straight adaptation, Canadian director David Cronenberg took a few elements from the book and combined them with elements of Burroughs' life, creating a hybrid film about the writing of the book rather than the book itself. Peter Weller starred as William Lee, the pseudonym Burroughs used when he wrote Junkie.

Italian comics artist Gianluca Lerici, better known under his artistic pseudonym Professor Bad Trip, adapted the novel into a graphic novel titled Il Pasto Nudo (1992), published by Shake Edizioni.[60]

Unabridged readings of both the original text and the Restored Text edition have been made available through services such as Audible. Burroughs himself made many recordings over the years of excerpts from the book, many released on albums from Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) and on Burroughs' later pseudo-musical albums Dead City Radio and Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales.

A recording of Frank Zappa reading the book's "Talking Asshole" body horror vignette was made during the Nova Convention of 1979 and later included on the GPS soundtrack album of the event.

• Burroughs, William S. (1992). Naked Lunch. Grove Atlantic. ISBN 0-8021-3295-2.
• Burroughs, William S. (2001). Grauerholtz, James; Miles, Barry (eds.). Naked Lunch (the restored text ed.). Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-4018-1.
• Harris, Oliver (2003). William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-8093-2484-9.
• Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, edited by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen (Carbondale, Il: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009).
• Finlayson, Iain (2015). Tangier: City of the Dream. London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks. ISBN 9781780769264. Retrieved 25 July 2023.
• Lydenberg, Robin (1987). Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-01413-8.

• Naked Lunch title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Boston Trial of Naked Lunch
• Naked Lunch illustrations
• Naked Lunch: the First Fifty Years An online exhibition at Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library