RevolverNo9
25th August 2006, 02:46
I've just been reading Naked Lunch (and, I can tell you, Kerouac now seems highly tame!), Burrough's sickening nightmare of surrealist vignettes based on his experiences in the junkie and homosexual underculture, particularly in North Africa. It combines seething satire, ingenious use of language ('pink as a pulsing cock in a red light' becomes a visceral image in his hands) with a relentless opening of repressed desire and fantasy.
Nothing is untouched - the most taboo of sexual fetishes, the hanging of young boys for sexual pleasure, nauseating images of drug-use... and all the while we are warned of the methods, modes and forms of control.
I was fascinated to come across this half way through the novel (right after the routine detailing the man who teaches his anal orifice to talk, before it's personality and increased efficiency begin to take over - ultimately causing his mouth to be sealed up and his brain to be redirected):
The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. 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.
How amazing is that?! Even Marx's theory of alienation is approximated at the end!
Just thought that might interest some people. (Anyone got anything to say on Burroughs - all the Beats generally?)
Nothing is untouched - the most taboo of sexual fetishes, the hanging of young boys for sexual pleasure, nauseating images of drug-use... and all the while we are warned of the methods, modes and forms of control.
I was fascinated to come across this half way through the novel (right after the routine detailing the man who teaches his anal orifice to talk, before it's personality and increased efficiency begin to take over - ultimately causing his mouth to be sealed up and his brain to be redirected):
The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. 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.
How amazing is that?! Even Marx's theory of alienation is approximated at the end!
Just thought that might interest some people. (Anyone got anything to say on Burroughs - all the Beats generally?)