The book 'Naked Lunch'

[IcarusAngel]

Has anybody read this book? If so, what did you think of it? Were you able to find anything like a coherent plot in the book, or is it supposed to be highly regarded for its artistic descriptions of junk life.

[x359594]

Naked Lunch has a coherent theme if not a coherent plot. Drug addiction is a metaphor for control, and the theme is developed in Burroughs' other novels from that period including The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express. They more or less describe guerilla warfare against trans-galactic capitalism and its police forces.

But do not expect to read a well-made bourgeois novel. Burroughs subscribed to the thesis that only new forms are appropriate to revolutionary art and that old forms reproduce bourgeois relations. The idea is a version of Marx's "The social revolution of the 19th century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future."

[-marx-]

Haven't read it all yet, although I have read quite a few of Burroughs' books as he's my favorite fiction author.
"Queer" is my favorite Burroughs book and its one of his more coherent books.

[x359594]

..."Queer" is my favorite Burroughs book and its one of his more coherent books.

Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters and the recently published And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (written with Jack Kerouac in 1944) come from what Burroughs called his "factualist" period, heavily influenced by Dashiell Hammett.

Naked Lunch was transitional to the "cut-up" style he adopted for his novels up to The Wild Boys (though he always used the cut-up for certain passages.) The later books are in the style of Naked Lunch: episodic narratives held together by an underlying theme.

[Random Precision]

Tried reading it. I gave up after yet another of the mass paedophilic rape sequences. But I mean to try again someday.


But do not expect to read a well-made bourgeois novel

What exactly do you mean by that? Can't realist literature express revolutionary messages and themes just as well as, well, whatever label you could stick Burroughs with? I mean the work of Emile Zola, Jack London, Isaac Babel, Victor Serge, etc.

[x359594]

What exactly do you mean by that? Can't realist literature express revolutionary messages and themes just as well...

I was being descriptive comrade, though I do not think that realism is synonymous with the well-made bourgeois novel, school of Jane Austen and any number of other novels about the manners and mores of the middle class, or the psychological extravagances of Henry James and his contemporary followers like the late John Updike. You must admit that all the writers you cited were in opposition to the dominant ideologies of their respective eras; this not true of James, Austen, etc.

What Burroughs has in common with Zola, London et al is the treatment of the lumpen proletariat, the outsider, the wretched of the earth, especially in Queer and Junky.

I don't claim that avant garde or experimental literature is by definition revolutionary, only that William Burroughs moved in that direction after his first books because he believed that the realistic form wasn't adequate to what he wanted to express, and anyone new to Burroughs should be aware that it takes some getting used to in order to appreciate his work.

[IcarusAngel]

Wow. Thanks for the info comrade.

Yes, I can see what you're saying. I also see how certain passages in the book can be seen as the naked truth about our society, so to speak. I have heard the claim that Burroughs himself had said that you could start at any passage in the book you wanted. This, combined with the fact that you have to sort of "derive" what he means, and that his writing was to give you a feeling of the state of mind he was in, was the trouble I was having.