Part Three

Winding into the home stretch of my cancer treatments.  Eleven more chemo days and eight more radiation treatments, winding up on Wed 10/2, same day as the 20^th anniversary of my sister Melody’s 39^th birthday.  Returning to work on 10/7 and will resume traveling on 10/14 or perhaps later.  Back for scans and the big verdict at the end of October.

Finishing up the Beats series today more out of self-obligation than anything else.  Not many people seem too interested in it.  Taking a look at the third document in the Beat holy trinity canon (with Howl and On the Road): William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

Burroughs was born into wealth as an heir to the Burroughs Corp, which manufactured adding machines, typewriters, and later computers.  After graduating Harvard in 1936, he drifted to Europe, where he spent most of his time picking up boys in Vienna steam baths.  He returned to the U.S. in 1942 and spent a brief time in the Army before getting a quick civilian discharge.  He shared an apartment with Jack Kerouac and his first wife, and Joan Vollmer, who would become Burroughs’s common law wife.  The couple had a child together and moved to Mexico City in 1949.  Burroughs became a morphine addict during this period.

In Mexico City, Burroughs wrote his first two novels, Queer (not published until 1985) and Junkie (published in 1953.)  He accidentally shot and killed his wife Joan during a drunken game of “William Tell” and spent several months in prison before bribing his way out.  He drifted through South America and eventually made it to Tangier in Morocco to visit his novelist friend Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), eventually settling there for several years and writing Naked Lunch.

The novel Naked Lunch can barely even be called a novel.  It is a series loosely connected vignettes with some recurring characters and locations.  Burroughs has said you can begin reading it at any point in the book.  It depicts a nightmarish world of various drugs and addicts that is by turns horrifying or brilliantly funny.   Attempting a plot synopsis is completely pointless.  The mostly shocking content, consisting of graphic descriptions of intravenous drug use, bizarre homosexual sex, and every kind of darkly scatological reference that Burroughs’s depraved imagination can conjure, is consistently offset and undermined by Burroughs’s ironic and humorous narrative style.  If you have ever heard recordings of Burroughs reading, it’s impossible not to hear him describing these horrific images in his trademark laconic drawl.

Although Naked Lunch took over five years to write, it was still more or less rushed into publication by Olympia Press in 1959.  A more definitive version, assisted greatly in its editing by Allen Ginsberg and to a lesser degree by Jack Kerouac (who came up with the title), was published by Grove Press in 1962.  The book survived an obscenity trial in 1966 and is actually the last work of literature (no photos or illustrations) prosecuted for obscenity in the U.S.

Most people could not imagine a more appropriate filmmaker to adapt Naked Lunch as a film that Canadian writer-director David Cronenberg.  The creator of Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, and Dead Ringers, his films are known for creating physical manifestations of psychological horrors, with a fear of infection and transformation also a strong element.

Naked Lunch does not even attempt to be a direct adaptation of the book.  Rather, Cronenberg uses it as a jumping off point to create a bizarre narrative about a bug exterminator named “Bill Lee,” (Burroughs’s frequent pseudonym), played in perfectly Burroughs-like deadpan style by Peter Weller.  Judy Davis plays two incarnations of Lee/Burroughs’s wife Joan and gets to be shot and killed not once, but twice!  The film succeeds in using Lee’s addictions to the bodily fluids of various size bugs as a humorous stand-in for morphine or heroin.  The homosexual elements of Naked Lunch and other Burroughs works are generally soft-pedaled in this film adaptation.

Neither the novel nor the film adaptation of Naked Lunch is for all tastes.  If bizarre homosexual encounters or absorption of giant insects are not among your favorite things, you might wish to steer clear.  But if you have a strong enough stomach and enjoy wickedly brilliant writing, give Naked Lunch another try.