Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Antonín Zita

“The Exterminator Does a Good

Job:” The Discourse of Naked Lunch
Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr.

2011
 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..
Bc. Antonín Zita
 Acknowledgement:
I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr., for his valuable comments
and suggestions during the writing of the thesis.
I. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1

II. Biography of William S. Burroughs................................................................... 3

III. Discourse Analysis of Naked Lunch .................................................................. 9

III.A Introduction .................................................................................................... 9

III.B Narrative and Narrative Voices .................................................................... 13

III.C The Structure of the Discourse ..................................................................... 30

III.D The Treatment of Time and Setting ............................................................. 38

III.E: The Characters of Naked Lunch .................................................................. 56

III.F The Tone and Language of Naked Lunch ..................................................... 67

III.G Conclusion .................................................................................................... 91

IV. The Interpretations of Naked Lunch .............................................................. 94

IV.A Introduction .................................................................................................. 94

IV.B Naked Lunch as a Humorous Work.............................................................. 97

IV.C Naked Lunch as a Moral Metaphor ............................................................ 101

IV.D Naked Lunch and Literal Meaning ............................................................. 112

IV.E Naked Lunch as an Indeterminate Work .................................................... 122

IV.F Wising Up the Marks: A Commentary on the Discourse ........................... 128

V. Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 135

VI. Bibliography.................................................................................................... 139

VII. Résumé/Resumé ............................................................................................ 145

VII.A Résumé ..................................................................................................... 145

VII.B Resumé ...................................................................................................... 146

 I. Introduction

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the discourse of the book Naked Lunch by the

American writer William S. Burroughs and to comment on the possible interpretations

of the text. There are several reasons I have chosen to analyze Naked Lunch. First,

William S. Burroughs was a part of the Beat Generation which is credited for

challenging the social values of their time and experimenting with new forms of

writing. Secondly, Burroughs himself was undoubtedly a highly influential figure, being

a direct influence on numerous artists and it is Naked Lunch that is considered his most

famous work. Thirdly, the last ten years have seen an increased interest in Burroughs

which is reflected in the number of publications related to the author. Not only has the

last decade seen the release of anniversary and/or revised editions of his early work,

namely Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters and Naked Lunch, but also numerous critical

and biographical writings on Burroughs and his work have been published, the most

important being a collection of critical essays titled Naked Lunch@50 and William

Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, a study of the early texts and their genesis by

Oliver Harris. In other words, these and other recent publications often unveil new facts

and perspectives which in effect might lead to new interpretations. Lastly, the discourse

of Naked Lunch is not only an interesting subject for a comprehensive analysis, but it

also provides an insightful commentary on critical interpretations and the shortcomings

of interpretations in general. To sum it up, I consider Naked Lunch more than worthy to

be the subject of my thesis.

Before I start the analysis, I will provide a brief biography of the author to

secure a background for the discussed work. In the next section I will perform the

analysis of the work’s discourse that will provide the necessary information for the

commentary on the text’s critical interpretations. The analysis will take into account

1
several aspects of the work, namely its narrative voices, structure, handling of time and

setting, treatment of characters, and the language used throughout the text and its

overall effect on the discourse. The analysis will show that the work is highly

indeterminate and it is often up to the reader to decide on an interpretation. Naturally,

openness and indeterminacy is present in more or less every text; however, Naked

Lunch is an extremely indeterminate—and therefore interesting—piece of writing. This

section of the thesis will use several critical approaches to describe the various aspects

of the work, the most prominent being the insights and thoughts of Roland Barthes,

Franz Stanzel and Umberto Eco. An evaluation of the discourse as a whole will be also

present in this section.

The following part of my thesis will provide an overview of Naked Lunch

interpretations by various literary scholars. However, it will not be a simple overview of

past and present criticism as I will use the information obtained by the discourse while

describing the various interpretations. Furthermore, I will evaluate each interpretation

by using the results of the analysis and comparing them with the criticism in question.

In other words, the interpretations will be assessed according to their actual

understanding of the nature and mechanics of the discussed text. Moreover, the results

will be contrasted with each other and a commentary on the interpretations of Naked

Lunch will be made. This commentary will not only touch upon the issue of interpreting

Naked Lunch but also on interpretation of a literary text in general and on the

alternatives the work in question offers.

2
 II. Biography of William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs has had several monikers during his life: el hombre

invisible, the godfather of Punk (Miles 1), literary outlaw (as in the title of Ted

Morgan’s biography); J.G. Ballard called him “the greatest author in post-war America”

(qtd. in Stevens 7) and Norman Mailer’s blurb that Burroughs is the “only living

American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by a genius” appears on most of

his books. Burroughs has been undoubtedly central to the Beat Generation, yet his

classification as a Beat writer is not without difficulties: he differs from the other Beats

in style and Burroughs himself did not consider himself a part of the literary movement

(Harris, “Burroughs” 31-32). Burroughs was certainly a controversial persona for the

most part of his life: not only he was a homosexual and drug addict, but also talked and

wrote about it openly and these experiences greatly influenced his writing. Due to the

themes above and the often shocking nature of his writing, his writing was often

condemned: a British tabloid once had a picture of Burroughs in a suit with the

accompanying text saying “he has the appearance of a Protestant minister or a banker,

but actually he’s very subversive, dedicated to subverting all decent values” (qtd. in

Baker 118). Nevertheless, Burroughs had a significant impact on popular culture,

perhaps even bigger than on literature: “It was the idea of Burroughs that appealed, not

the man [. . .]. This Burroughs was the man who saw the abyss and came back to report

on it” (Miles 1).

Burroughs was born on 5 February 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, to a rather well-

off family. Some of his relatives achieved fame during their lives: Burroughs was

named after his grandfather who invented the adding machine and his uncle Ivy Lee

was a pioneer in the then-beginning public relations—among his clients was IG Farben,

the German firm that manufactured Zyklon B, which paid Ivy Lee to improve Hitler’s

3
image in the United States in the 1930s (Baker 8). In 1932 he went to Harvard, where he

majored in English Literature. During his Harvard years, he attended lectures on

Shakespeare and took a course on Coleridge by John Livingston Lowes. 1

His parents gave him as a graduating present a $200 monthly allowance and sent

him to Europe. Burroughs briefly studied medicine in Vienna and there he also met Ilse

Klapper, a Jewish woman that wanted to get out of Europe to escape the Nazis. In order

to help her, Burroughs married her.2 The several years following his return to the United

States were marked by his search for a purpose in life as well as reacting to a rather

unexpected turn of events: he studied anthropology at Harvard, applied for the service

in the OSS,3 then moved to New York where he briefly worked in advertisement only to

be drafted after the Pearl Harbor attack into the infantry at Jefferson Barracks near St.

Louis; however, several string were pulled and Burroughs moved to Chicago where he

worked in a detective agency and later as an exterminator.4 Finally, he again moved to

New York where he through a mutual friend met Allen Ginsberg and later Jack

Kerouac. The three quickly became friends and their future writing established them as

the most influential figures of the Beat Generation.

The influence Burroughs had on the two was significant as he introduced them

to numerous writers they had previously never heard of, such as Franz Kafka, Oswald

Spengler or Jean Cocteau (Baker 35); Baker notes he was “the wise man of the group.”

Through Kerouac he also met Joan Vollmer, a student at Columbia University School of

Journalism, and they soon became intimate; it was Burroughs first and only serious

1
John Livingston Howes is the author of The Road to Xanadu, an important writing on Coleridge
(Baker 21).
2
The union was a marriage of convenience from the very beginning and it most probably saved Ilse’s
life—she lived in New York and returned to Europe after the war (Miles 31-33).
3
The OSS (Office of Strategic Security) was the precursor to the CIA. The job interview was going
well until the interviewer introduced his colleague James Phinney Baxter. Baxter was Burroughs’
housemaster from his Harvard days and he disliked Burroughs for keeping a ferret and a gun in his room
(Baker 31).
4
As Barry Miles writes, Burroughs enjoyed the work; furthermore, his experience as an exterminator
often appeared in his texts (38).

4
relationship with a woman (Miles 44). It was also around this time that Burroughs tried

hard drugs for the first time and he soon developed a small habit; although he tried

several times to stop doing drugs and tried numerous addiction cures, he was never

entirely clean from now on and spent most of his life on heroin or its substitute used for

the treatment of heroin addiction, methadone. In addition, he got introduced to

numerous pushers, addicts, thieves and petty criminals during his stay in New York,

learning many tricks of the trade in the process and references to the junk industry

formed one of the staples of Burroughs’ writing. In 1946 he was forced to leave New

York because of a forged narcotics prescription and after moving several times with

Joan, her daughter from previous marriage Julie, and their newborn son Billy he tried to

become a farmer near Pharr, Texas. Nevertheless, firearms and drug offenses forced

Burroughs to move again; he chose Mexico City as his next destination and moved in

with his family. In Mexico City he started writing what later became Junkie. However,

an incident that forever changed Burroughs’ life happened during his Mexico City days:

in the evening of September 6, 1951, he shot and killed Joan in a drunken game of

William Tell.5 This unfortunate event, which he greatly regretted, lead to Burroughs’

travels through Latin America in the search of the drug yagé.6 He wrote his next novel

Queer during this period; however, its subject matter—homosexual attachment—

5
There was–and still is–a lot of confusion about this incident. According to several witnesses,
Burroughs said to Vollmer: “It’s about time for our William Tell act.” (Miles 57). Barry Miles
subsequently comments, “[t]hey have never performed a William Tell act” before. However, Ted Marak,
who knew Burroughs from his farming days in Rio Grande Valley, claims that “Billy used to shoot pieces
of fruit off Joan’s head in the Valley. […] [He] was a hell of a shot.” (Johnson 155) Marak’s evaluation
of Burroughs’ shooting skills can surely be trusted, since he qualified “as an expert marksman during his
time as a member of the army cavalry in the late 1930s” (33). Burroughs’ statements about this incident
were often contradictory: in a 1965 interview with Conrad Knickerbocker, Burroughs states that he was
merely inspecting the revolver “and it went off – killed her” (41); however, that was merely the version
invented by his Mexican lawyer Bernabé Jurado (Johnson 1, 156). Since Burroughs later changed his
version of the story and admitted that he actually suggested the William Tell act but that they never
performed it before (Grauerholz 2), it may very well be true that Burroughs and Vollmer actually did
practice the William Tell act on numerous occasions.
6
It should be noted that Burroughs’ journey in search of yagé was a novel effort because it was at “a
time when yagé (aka Banisteriopsis Caapi, ayahuasca, natema, pinde) was only of emerging interest to a
few professional ethnobotanists, principally Richard Evans Schultes [. . .], the Russians, and the CIA”
(Harris, Secret 165).

5
deemed it impossible for publication at that time. In December 1953 Burroughs decided

it is time to move again and traveled to Tangier.

The port city of Tangier was at that time an international zone administered by

France and Burroughs managed to live a rather comfortable lifestyle of an expat due to

his monthly allowance. During his long stay in Tangier he started writing what would

later become Naked Lunch. The process of writing was complicated one: not only it was

troubled by Burroughs’ addiction reaching a new high, but he also struggled with the

ideal literary form for the work (Harris, “Burroughs” 36). In January 1958 Burroughs

moved to Paris where he met with Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso at the

so-called Beat Hotel and there he also continued working on the text. Naked Lunch was

finally published in 1959 by Olympia Press, although, as Harris notes, “it took a legal

battle and another six years for it to go on sale in the United States.” It was also the first

work published under his real name, as Junky was released under the pseudonym

William Lee and Queer as well as The Yage Letters, although written several years

earlier, were published only after the release of Naked Lunch. In the end, the text ranks

together with Ginsberg’s “HOWL” and Kerouac’s On the Road as the most important

text of the Beat Generation.

During the next decade he lived in London where he worked on his experimental

“cut-up” trilogy. The technique was accidentally discovered by his Tangier friend and

painter Brion Gysin and Burroughs felt it is precisely what his writing needed,

employing it to a larger or smaller extent in all his future work.7 Furthermore, he also

experimented with cut-ups in film, photography and audio recordings. In early 1974,

7
As Barry Miles writes, cut-ups “free the writer from the tyranny of grammar and syntax. [. . .] Cut-
ups create new juxtapositions, breaking down ‘either-or’ logic and providing a way of thinking in
association blocks” (128-29). The technique is employed by literally cutting a page of text with a pair of
scissors into several parts and then putting these parts together in different combinations, possibly even
including cut-ups from different sources; as Burroughs confessed to Conrad Knickerbocker, Nova
Express, the last book in the trilogy, contains cut-ups of Joyce, Rimbaud, Shakespeare and several other
writers (28).

6
Burroughs returned after 25 years to the United States, settling first in New York and

moving after several years to Lawrence, Kansas, a small university town. Although he

was almost sixty years old when he arrived to New York, he remained extremely

prolific: he continued writing, went on successful reading tours organized by his new

secretary James Grauerholz, took up painting, recorded numerous spoken word albums,

and collaborated on a vast number of projects with such artists as Gus van Sant, Kurt

Cobain or Tom Waits and the bands U2, Ministry, and R.E.M.8 Interestingly, Burroughs

probably had more direct influence on musicians than writers.9 During his stay in New

York he lived in the downtown punk centre only two blocks south of CBGBs, the music

bar that was the center of the punk movement, and all the musicians regarded him as the

father of the punk scene (Miles 217). Furthermore, David Bowie and Dead Kennedys

frontman Jello Biafra both used Burroughs’ cut-up technique in order to write lyrics for

their songs and the musicians Patti Smith and Lou Reed claim to be directly influenced

by the writer (Miles 9; A Man Within). However, Burroughs influence upon literature

should not be overlooked; among other things, he is credited as of utmost importance

for the development of the “cyberpunk” sci-fi genre founded by William Gibson’s

Neuromancer (Miles 16).

Burroughs remained in Lawrence until he passed away in early August 1997 and

he was extremely saddened to hear about the death of Allen Ginsberg earlier the same

year; his other friends Timothy Leary, Terry Southern and Herbert Huncke died the year

before. These were some of the last surviving members of a generation of artist and

thinkers Burroughs belonged to as well. Nevertheless, his last journal entry says:

8
Rob Johnson explains Burroughs’ influence on popular culture: “His gaunt, erudite person was so
well known that Nike paid him to hawk sneakers in a controversial 1994 commercial” (Johnson 1, 7).
9
Miles further comments on Burroughs and music: “One of the earliest, and perhaps the most
enduring, proofs of Burroughs’ prestige in rock circles is his presence on the front sleeve of Sergeant
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band which shows the Beatles standing before life-size cut-out photographs
of people that they personally liked and admired. Burroughs was chosen by Paul McCartney” (7).

7
“Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE” (qtd. in Baker

198).

8
 III. Discourse Analysis of Naked Lunch

III.A Introduction

Naked Lunch begins in its first part “And Start West” as a first person narrative:

“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves” (3). The

narrator, thanks to a “[y]oung, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec

type fruit,” boards a subway train just in time to evade capture by a “narcotics dick in a

white trench coat,” then begins talking to the fruit, telling him about some of his

acquaintances such as the Gimp or the Shoe Store Kid. After meeting Old Bart and

mentioning some junk beliefs (“Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and

amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar” [6].) and rather strange

characters (such as Willy the Disk, a blind police informer with “a round, disk mouth

lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs” [7]), the narrator concludes this part of Naked

Lunch with the following: “So we stock up on H, buy a secondhand Studebaker, and

start west” (8). Naked Lunch thus, at first, appears as a story told from a point of view of

a police-evading drug addict, in effect offering to the reader a possible cornerstone of

the discourse. Franz Stanzel explains that a first person narrator who begins the

discourse is an assurance of revealing in the right time all the necessary information

needed to understand the work to the reader (196); in other words, Naked Lunch should

continue in the tone set by the first couple of pages.

However, the further one continues reading Naked Lunch, the more

deconstructed the discourse becomes. It becomes invaded by obscure characters such as

the aforementioned Willy the Disk, “blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and

palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass of scar tissue hard as dry wood” (7), or

the Vigilante, an addict who “winds up in a Federal Nut House specially designed for

the containment of ghosts” (9). Furthermore, the Vigilante subsequently undergoes

9
some vast physical changes: “[N]o organ is constant as regards either function or

position . . . sex organs sprout anywhere . . . rectums open, defecate and close . . . the

entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments . . .” In

addition, not only are many slang words such as “heat” or “pigeon” present in the

discourse, 10 but the discourse soon shifts from the familiar setting of the United States

or Mexico to imaginary countries of Freeland Republic or Annexia. Importantly, the

text as a whole does not seem coherent at all: the tense of the discourse changes back

and forth from present to past and the language abruptly switches from a

straightforward first-person account (“I cut into the Automat and there is bill Gains

huddled in someone else’s overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis” [5]) to a

poetic stream of images (“Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorticated wops, smell of

atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halsted, Cicero, Lincoln

Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid machines of slot machines

and roadhouses.” [11]). In addition, the narrative voice, which often disappears in a

multitude of monologues by various characters entering the discourse only to later

disappear without a trace, is on numerous occasions replaced by several other narrative

voices and time seems simply non-existent. Michael Sean Bolton explains Burroughs’

discourse strategy:

Burroughs’s novels destabilize chronology to such a degree that time no

longer provides firm context. Distortions of temporality in the novels
include the destabilization of the present time of the narrative, the
inclusion of characters who are not bound by time, and the blending and
blurring of genres, all resulting in anachronisms and temporal
instabilities that sabotage attempts to make historical connections. (57)

Burroughs’ destabilizing of discourse can be further portrayed by the following excerpt

of Naked Lunch synopsis found in the Encyclopedia of Beat Literature:

10
Meaning “the police” and “informer,” respectively. For the translation of problematic slang words,
see the “Glossary” section of Junky.

10
 The narrative jumps to the next section, “Joselito,” where Carl
watches a German doctor examine a young man named Joselito, who is
diagnosed with lesions in both lungs. Carl asks if he will receive
“chemical therapy,” and the words and the doctor’s manner (“seedy and
furtive as an old junky”) create an intersection or digression [. . .] with a
separate storyline involving a junky [. . .].
“The Black Meat” section begins with The Sailor [. . .] looking to
score, and it is written in the hard-boiled style of Junky. However, the
setting – a Times Square cafeteria – transforms into a surreal, other-
worldly setting where the addicts are “Reptiles” and “Meat Eaters,” and
the pushers are creatures called Mugwumps [. . .]. The Mugwumps
produce an addictive substance that they secrete from their penis [sic]
and that addicts the Reptiles by slowing their metabolism and thus
prolonging life [. . .]. Periodically the Dream Police create a panic among
the Heavy Fluid addicts, and the Mugwumps go into hibernation until the
scene is clear. (Johnson and Hemmer, 220-221)

While the above-mentioned summary of two Naked Lunch sections might seem clear,

understanding of the work from such a summary is quickly muddled for the two

sections are only a small part of Naked Lunch and the summary in the encyclopedia

continues in similar fashion for a total of seven pages. Furthermore, characters only

rarely reappear in the subsequent sections, thus each new paragraph of the summary

usually introduces new characters and even if they do reappear—such us the above-

mentioned the Sailor and Carl—they are neither affected by the previous events nor do

they in any way reflect on them. In addition, frequent explanations in parentheses made

by the authors of the article (for example, “digression” mentioned in the first paragraph

is “the major plot device in the book” or the Sailor is “based on Phil White”) only

further portray the complex nature of Naked Lunch, a novel in which “randomness is the

principal of organization” (219). Of course, it might be objected to using a synopsis as a

proof of discourse complexity. As Anderegg points out, there are only few works of art

that do not look ridiculous or absurd in a synopsis (qtd. in Stanzel 36). However,

Stanzel quickly explains that reduction to mere synopsis often shows the text’s

discourse techniques and the way they contribute to the content of the work and it is

11
already apparent that the traditional prose elements such as characters or time setting are

employed by Burroughs in an innovative and radical way (Stanzel 36).

However, before the discussion of discourse techniques of Naked Lunch begins,

it is important to mention the genesis of the work, since it not only explains many of its

stylistic features, but also shows that all efforts to write an understandable synopsis

must end in vain. Originally, as Oliver Harris points out, Naked Lunch was conceived as

a triptych made up of “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage” (“Beginnings” 17), that is

manuscript versions of what later became Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters,

respectively.11 Therefore, even if Naked Lunch had been published as the intended

triptych and not reworked into its current form, the resulting work would still be rather

peculiar, since Junky is written in the first person, Queer in third person, and The Yage

Letters is a hybrid mixing travelogue, letters to Allen Ginsberg, and other material into

epistolary form (Harris, Yage Introduction xxvi). Although the idea of a three-volume

manuscript was later abandoned, elements of the concept survived into the final shape

of the work; nevertheless, instead of neatly separating the stylistically different parts,

Naked Lunch mixes all the elements of its predecessors into a great and complex text

that ignores many traditional ways of writing.

With the above being said, I can move to a more detailed discussion of Naked

Lunch and since it is a complicated work, I must begin the discussion of its discourse in

a more general way—only then, after the outer layers of the work are “peeled off,” can

one truly see its textual strategy. Therefore, my analysis of the work’s discourse is

separated into five parts: first, the description of the work’s narrative voices; second, the

structuring of the work and its effect on its interpretation; third, the treatment of time

11
While originally published as The Yage Letters, it is currently available as The Yage Letters Redux,
an edition revised and edited by Oliver Harris which includes several texts that were originally intended
to be included in the work but were omitted from the first editions. However, for the sake of clarity, the
diploma work uses the original title.

12
and setting; fourth, a commentary on the characters present in the work; and fifth,

Burroughs’ usage of language, its dynamics, and the way it affects the discourse. The

discussion contained within these five parts will be then summarized in a conclusion. In

addition, it must be explained that because the discourse of Naked Lunch is complex, I

will often comment on one textual element several times throughout the analysis as well

as provide detailed examples for each element. One may consider my thesis lengthy and

perhaps even repetitive; however, I believe that that the approach I have chosen is not

only valid but even necessary when dealing with a complex work such as Naked Lunch.

III.B Narrative and Narrative Voices

As it was already mentioned, the discourse of Naked Lunch is complex and often

destabilizes itself; however, such destabilizing is not apparent at first. For example, the

“Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” section begins as a first person

account describing the narrator’s experience with one of the many reappearing

characters, A.J.:

I was working for an outfit known as Islam Inc., financed by A.J., the
notorious Merchant of Sex, who scandalized international society when
he appeared at the Duc de Ventre’s ball as a walking penis covered by a
huge condom emblazoned with the A.J. motto: “They Shall Not Pass.”
(Burroughs, Naked Lunch 121)

However, as the reader continues in reading the section, the first person perspective

seems to disappear, since the narrative voice only routinely describes several episodes

forming the section without actually showing personal relationship to the events

described. Such is the case in the Chez Robert or Clem and Jody episodes included in

the “Parties of Interzone” section: in the former A.J. asks for ketchup in a restaurant so

luxurious that “many a client [. . .] has rolled on the floor and pissed all over himself in

convulsive attempts to ingratiate” with the chef (124); in the latter Clem and Jody,

13
“two-old time vaudeville hoofers, [who] cop out as Russians agents whose sole function

is to represent the U.S. in an unpopular light” are introduced (132). The following

section, “The County Clerk,” is on the other hand narrated from a third person

perspective, describing the efforts of a character named Lee to “file an affidavit that he

is suffering from bubonic plague to avoid eviction from the house he has occupied ten

years without paying the rent” at the desk of a racist County Clerk (142). In other

words, the narrative point of view switches without further notice from one person to

another. Stanzel explains that discourse can be developed either by a narrator who is

presented as an individual person or by a narrator who hides behind the discourse to

such degree that he/she becomes practically invisible (65). Therefore, one may be

tempted to simply conclude that both narrating types are present in Naked Lunch;

however, the issue of the work’s narrative voices is much more complicated and needs

to be discussed in a more thorough manner.

Now it is important to introduce Franz Stanzel’s theory of narrative analysis. He

explains that narrative is formed by three elements—modus, person, and

perspective12—and each element is constituted by a binary opposition. Modus is by

Stanzel explained through the term “reflector” as opposed to “narrator” (65): while

narrator not only tells the story, but also reflects upon it and often addresses the reader,

reflector thinks, feels, and perceives, but as opposed to narrator reflector never

addresses the reader nor comments upon the narrative itself (180); the reader merely

looks through the eyes of the reflector on the events of the plot—the plot is not told

directly, only reflected upon (13). The second element, person, consists of a character

living in the discourse as opposed to a character outside of the discourse—the

opposition is described by traditional terminology as first person and third person

12
My translation.

14
narrative—and Stanzel uses the words “I” and “he” to distinguish the person of a text

(66). Lastly, perspective is the opposition of “inner” and “outer;” in other words a

narrative is shaped either through the perspective of a certain person or through the

mind of an omnipotent being (67).13 Simply put, narratives are formed by using one of

the elements forming the binary. That of course does not mean that only one of the

opposites can be used throughout a discourse: a writer might, for example, choose a

minor character to comment in the first person on the actions of the given work’s main

hero, who might happen to be a reflector for the most part of the work. It must be also

noted that Stanzel’s categorization of the narrative elements is based on ideal models

and therefore some overlap between the elements is possible (69). Stanzel’s narrative

theory is perhaps more of a theoretical model and as Stanzel himself points out, the

narrowly defined narrative elements can sometimes cause problems and a critic using

Stanzel’s model might feel being forced to develop a detailed, yet impractical

systematization (68). On the other hand, the categorization is certainly useful, since it

allows defining in depth the particulars of a given narrative.14

Naked Lunch features many various narrative voices. For example, the first

section of the work, the already mentioned “And Start West,” is written in the following

way: modus narrator, person I, perspective inner. On the contrary, “The Examination”

section, in which Carl is subjected to a humiliating interview concerning his sexual

orientation by Dr. Benway, an immoral and unscrupulous person “who became one of

Burroughs’ best-loved characters” (Miles, El Hombre Invisible 32), uses: modus

narrator, person he, perspective outer. Therefore, it is now evident that the narrative is

13
For a more complex discussion of the narrative elements, see Stanzel.
14
It must be also noted that “narrative” in Stanzel’s terminology is connected only to narrated
passages, that is only to parts of a text which can be identified in terms of Stanzel’s narrator or reflector.
Therefore, I will use the term “narrative” only in connection with Stanzel’s narrative theory from now on.
Furthermore, in order to distinguish between the different variations of the binaries present in the
discourse, I will use the term “narrative voice” to describe a combination of the three binaries.

15
complicated, yet may not seem too difficult for a modern reader. However, Burroughs

employs many techniques beyond mere change of person or perspective that greatly

affect the text.

In the “Atrophied Preface” section that closes the work the reader is offered an

explanation of the discourse: “Lee The Agent [. . .] is taking the junk cure” (182). Such

statement might seem plausible at first—after all, if “Atrophied Preface” is not taken

into account, the discourse is framed by two first person sections, “And Start West” and

“Hauser and O’Brien” respectively. The latter clearly identifies its narrator as William

Lee: Hauser and O’Brien are two detectives sent to “pick up a man named Lee, William

Lee” and to “bring in all books, letters, manuscripts. Anything printed, typed or written”

(175); unfortunately for the policemen, the narrator shoots them both and escapes.

Furthermore, in a different section its narrative voice confides his secret to the reader:

“A.J. is an agent like me, but for whom or for what no one has ever been able to

discover. It is rumored that he represents a trust of giant insects from another galaxy . . .

I believe he is on the Factualist side (which I also represent)” (122-23). In other words,

the reader is tempted to believe the discourse’s main narrator is an agent for the

Factualists—“who resist the reductive operations of the others in favor of an

uncontrolled, multiple society” (Murphy, Wising 70)—and fights the remaining parties

of Interzone: the Liquefactionists, the Divisionists, and the Senders.

However, such interpretation falls apart upon closer inspection, since there are

many sections of Naked Lunch that refuse and challenge such reading. For instance, a

part of “The Hospital” section is named “habit notes” and is supposedly written by Lee

during his cure; one of the notes describes the process of finding the right vein for a

heroin dose:

Sometimes the needle points out like a dowser’s wand. Sometimes I must
wait for the message. But when it comes I always hit blood.

16
 A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. He hesitated for
a full-second, then pressed the bulb, watching the liquid rush into the
vein as if sucked by the silent thirst of his blood. [. . .] He reached over
and filled the dropper with water. As he squirted the water out, the shot
hit him in the stomach, a soft sweet blow.
Look down at my filthy trousers, haven’t been changed in months . .
. (56)

In other words, the person unexpectedly switches in a piece of writing that at its

beginning seemed to be a rather straight-forward text—modus narrator, person I,

perspective inner—and then it switches back to its original position. Therefore, a

serious issue is presented: is the change in person a mere stylistic device by Lee the

narrator that emphasizes the detachment of a drug addict, or is there another narrating

voice, a voice that usually lies outside the frame of events and that from time to time

claims the discourse for itself? The answer to the question is an important one, since if

the latter is true, then the interpretation of the excerpt varies greatly because the work

offers three conflicting interpretations of the narrative: either modus—and perhaps even

perspective15—changes and Lee becomes a reflector; or the modus stays unchanged and

only the perspective changes, therefore revealing to the reader a distant narrator who

only sometimes comments on the events of the work; or modus, person, and perspective

remain the same as at the beginning of the part in question, with the important

difference that it is not Lee but another character of the text, perhaps A.J. or the Sailor,

who is able and willing to continue the discourse in the case of Lee’s absence. In other

words, if such a change in the narrative voice is possible, the reader must realize that he

or she is faced with a more indeterminate text than previously thought. Another similar

destabilization of the narrative voices occurs later in the work: “The danger, as always,

comes from defecting agents: A.J., the Vigilante, the Black Armadillo […], and Lee and

15
It is difficult to tell from the short text forming the habit notes; Burroughs’ usage of short
narratives forming many parts of Naked Lunch and the way they influence the overall discourse will be
discussed shortly.

17
the Sailor and the Benway. And I know some agent is out there in the darkness looking

for me” (172). As in the example mentioned before, the reader is again faced with a

highly indeterminable narrative, since the discourse suddenly distances from Lee who

was until now perceived as the actual narrator (or at least a reflector) of the work.

The narrative shifts may be regarded as mere stylistic devices and, in the end,

not crucial for the overall experience of reading Naked Lunch. However, it must be

understood that these changes in narrative take place in a text in which one narrative

voice is often interrupted by another one. For example, the work is full of parenthetical

explanations that provide further information on a particular subject mentioned in the

text:

“Grassed on me he did,” I said morosely. (Note: Grass is English thief

slang for inform.) I drew closer and laid my dirty junky fingers on his
sharkskin sleeve. “And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle. I can
tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot.” (Note: This is a cap of
poison junk sold to addict for liquidation purposes. Often given to
informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like
junk.) (4)

While these textual intrusions may be still considered to be made by the drug addict

Lee, it is important to note that these explanations are not restricted to information about

drugs. On the contrary, subjects of these intrusions vary greatly—from the effects of

curare poison to Pen Indef, the “longest term possible under New York law for a

misdemeanor conviction” (132)—and since there are more than 50 of these explanations

in the text, they must be taken into account when explaining Burroughs’ narrative

strategies.16 Furthermore, while such intrusions may not seem important for the

interpretation of the narrative, there are many other narrative intrusions employed which

further question the interpretation of all these intrusions as made by Lee. For example,

Dr. Benway’s monologue on drugs and their effects on human body is interrupted by
16
Importantly, of all the major Burroughs critics only Lydenberg pays at least some attention to these
intrusions.

18
the following in parenthesis: “Interested readers are referred to Appendix” (30). The

note refers to “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs,” Burroughs’

seventeen-page, first person description of the effects of a vast number of drugs

originally printed in The British Journal of Addiction in January 1957 (Miles and

Grauerholz 241).17 In other words, the parenthetical note refers not just to a real-life

fact, but also to a fact outside the discourse itself, a fact that lies outside the available

knowledge of the characters of the work. Therefore, it can be only made by the author

himself and such direct authorial intrusion should not be overlooked, especially when it

is repeated throughout the discourse. To provide another example of such intrusion,

“The Market” section ends by the following in parenthesis: “Section describing The

City and the Meet Café written in state of yagé intoxication . . . yagé, ayahuasca, pilde,

nateema are Indian names for Banisteriopsis caapi, a fast-growing vine indigenous to

the Amazon region. See discussion of yagé in Appendix” (91). While Lee the Agent

might certainly write an account of his yagé state, he could not refer to an appendix of

the book he is present in. In other words, these notes must belong to the author himself

and in effect help to question the narrative voices: while they due to their clear

demarcation as an authorial insertion do not deconstruct the narrative themselves, their

very presence questions the authorial voice of other passages. To put it differently,

Burroughs employs the use of parentheses on a large scale and while some are clearly

inserted into the discourse by the author, the authorship of other parenthetical notes and

references is difficult to decide. For example, a parenthetical note saying “[t]he author

has observed that Arab cocks tend to be wide and wedge shaped” is most probably an

authorial intrusion (65); however, the author of the parenthetical comment on the

“narcotics dick in a white trench coat” from the beginning of the book—“imagine

17
Burroughs’ publishing in a medical journal should not be surprising: after all, Allen Ginsberg
urged Timothy Leary to get Burroughs interested in psilocybin by saying that he “knows more about
drugs than anyone alive” (qtd. in Baker 135).

19
tailing somebody in a white trench coat. Trying to pass as a fag I guess” (4)—is

substantially more difficult to trace. As the discourse begins, the reader probably

suggests that Lee is the author of the comment; however, the mere existence of

numerous notes and intrusions by the author himself makes such a reading indecisive at

best. Another example of such intrusion can be found in the “Benway” section where

Dr. Benway is corrected during his monologue: “Doc Brubeck was party inna second

part. A retired abortionist and junk pusher (he was a veterinarian actually) recalled to

service during the manpower shortage” (26). Again the reader is faced with the issue of

authorship: Is it William Lee correcting Benway? Or is it someone else in the story? Or

is it the author himself? As it is already apparent, such question cannot be properly

answered—that is, there is no correct answer to the question as the discourse makes

such answer impossible.

Of course, one might be tempted to read all narrative intrusions and deviations

as the work of Burroughs himself. In other words, the habit notes discussed several

pages above become notes written by William S. Burroughs as opposed to William Lee,

a Factualist agent. However, there are several instances that oppose such reading. For

example, among the numerous notes most probably made by the author himself are

several parenthetical notes in the text that refer to facts and places taking place only in

the imaginary world of Naked Lunch. “The Black Meat” section, for instance, describes

the effects of the Black Meat, which is actually “flesh of [a] giant aquatic black

centipede” (45), in the following way: “Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to

move. (The Black Meat is like a tainted cheese, overpoweringly delicious and

nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.)”

(47). Other notes in the text which refer to the reality of the discourse itself deal with

liquefaction, selling merchandise in Interzone, and the inhabitants of the Island (found

20
on pages 69, 154 and 155, respectively). Therefore, reading parenthetical explanations

and notes as authorial intrusions—or, more precisely, only as authorial intrusions—is

not valid: the narrative voices constantly changes and shifts thus avoiding any stable

interpretation and whenever the reader decides on a specific reading, the discourse

sooner or later challenges the adopted reading, therefore dismissing the chosen reading

as inappropriate. To provide an example, the following parenthetical comment informs

the reader about the use of nutmeg as a drug: “Nutmeg. I quote from the author’s article

on narcotic drugs in the British Journal of Addiction (see Appendix): ‘Convicts and

sailors sometimes have recourse to nutmeg. About a tablespoon is swallowed with

water’” (26). Simply put, some of the comments are clearly made by the work’s

narrative voices while several others are made by Burroughs himself. Therefore, the

authorship of the remaining commentaries is indeterminable, since there are numerous

possible authors of these passages that might claim credit for these parts.

While the insertions in the text certainly help in destabilizing the identity of the

narrative voices, they are not a major feature of the text itself; on the other hand, these

insertions, while innocent at first, reflect the strategies of the discourse as a whole. For

instance, there are several passages which actively question the truthfulness of the

discourse, among them the following part in “The Hospital” section:

Reading the paper . . . Something about a triple murder in the rue de la

Merde, Paris: “An adjusting of scores.” . . . I keep slipping away . . . “The
police have identified the author . . . Pepe El Culito . . . The Little Ass
Hole, an affectionate diminutive.” Does it really say that? . . . I try to
focus the words . . . they separate in meaningless mosaic . . . (58)
(emphasis added)

Of course, it might be said that the above part merely portrays the stream of

consciousness of the part’s narrator; however, there are several other passages in the

text that bring attention to their own content, therefore dismissing the above part as of

21
no importance may not be entirely valid. Another instance of self-examination can be

found in “The Exterminator Does a Good Job” section, where the Sailor with a boy in

tow enters his apartment: “The boy’s peeled senses darted about in frenzied exploration.

Tenement flat, railroad flat vibrating with silent motion. Along one wall of the kitchen a

metal trough—or was it metal, exactly?—ran into a sort of aquarium or tank [. . .]”

(169). Of course, both sections could be easily dismissed as parts which do not question

the authority of all narrative voices, only the perception of the characters in question:

the former on the grounds that Lee’s withdrawal cure causing hallucinations, the latter

because the discourse uses the boy as a reflector, therefore showing to the reader his

perception of the Sailor’s flat. However, several other passages, when analyzed closely,

reveal the efforts of the text in questioning itself. A.J., as it was already mentioned

several pages above, is a Factualist: “I believe he is on the Factualist side (which I also

represent)” (123). The narrator—whoever that might be—does not stop the discussion

of A.J.’s allegiance here; on the contrary, he or she continues by saying: “[O]f course,

he could be a Liquefaction Agent (the Liquefaction program involves the eventual

merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption). You can

never be sure of anyone in the industry.” Here the text reflects on the issue of narrator

reliability—Lee is, just like A.J., an agent. However, since the reader “can never be sure

of anyone in the industry,” the discourse offers only two choices and none of them helps

the reader in evaluating the truthfulness of the narrative voices: one is either supposed

to distrust Lee because he is a part of the industry—and therefore distrust the parts of

the work Lee narrates as well—or one can distrust the statement itself as unreliable.

Nevertheless, the result is the same, since one is forced to disbelief the accuracy of the

accounts presented by the work’s narrative voices. In other words, the narrative voices

directly challenge the reader by implying they cannot be trusted. Such distrust towards

22
narrative voices by the text itself is even more apparent later in the work: “The Danger,

as always, comes from defecting agents: A.J., the Vigilante, the Black Armadillo [. . .],

and Lee and the Sailor and Benway. And I know some agent is out there in the darkness

looking for me. Because all Agents defect and all Resisters sell out . . .” (172)

(emphasis added). Although the above-mentioned part was discussed earlier in the

context of narrator indeterminacy, now it is clear that it actually goes even further:

instead of only questioning the author of the given narrated part, the text also questions

itself. One has to decide—again—between not trusting William Lee (because he is an

agent and all agents defect), in effect disbelieving the accuracy of the parts of the

discourse narrated by Lee, or the statement about the Agents and Resisters should not be

trusted instead, which, of course, is virtually the same decision. The reader might try to

find answer in the lines preceding those quoted above:

They call me the Exterminator. At one brief point of intersection I did

exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches
suffocating in yellow pyrethrum powder. [. . .] My present assignment:
Find the live ones and exterminate. Not the bodies but the “molds,” you
understand—but I forget you cannot understand. (171-172)

Instead of finding explanations, the reader is assured by the Exterminator that he or she

cannot understand the given passage. Even knowing that Burroughs worked briefly as

an exterminator does not truly help (Miles, El Hombre Invisible 37), since such

knowledge does not contribute to evaluating the trustworthiness of the narrative. As

Murphy comments, the machinations of the parties of Interzone and their agents remind

the reader that one “can never be sure what cause or organization one is serving”

(Wising 70), and similar statement applies to the narrative voices of Naked Lunch.

Throughout the work, the reader receives numerous invitations from the various

narrative voices to doubt all the other narrative voices. Naturally, that is a problem

without an acceptable solution: the reader is left with the conclusion that more often

23
than not the narrative voices of Naked Lunch are not only indecisive but also unreliable.

Burroughs in a letter to Ginsberg explains his philosophy of “factualism,” which

indirectly comments on indeterminate nature of the narrative:

Myself I am about to annunciate a philosophy called “factualism.” All

arguments, all nonsensical considerations as to what people “should do,”
are irrelevant. Ultimately there is only fact on all levels, and the more one
argues, verbalizes, moralizes the less he will see and feel of fact.
Needless to say, I will not write any formal statement on the subject. Talk
is incompatible with factualism. (24)

To put it simply, the reader cannot often decide on the origin and reliability of the

work’s narrative voices because the more he or she examines them, the more suspicious

and contradictory the results are (“I try to focus the words . . . they separate in

meaningless mosaic . . . .” [58]). Moreover, the narrative voices are contradicting one

another in such way that a precise determination of the narrative voices is impossible: if

the nature of the narrator cannot be often decided—William Lee/another person from

(or outside) the discourse/the author himself—then modus, person, and perspective of a

given narrative voice are not determinable. One might, of course, describe all the

possible variations of the narrative voices; however, if subsequently asked to specify the

narrative voice of a particular passage, the person would often have no other choice that

to conclude there is no way to precisely determine the narrative voice in question.

One might object to the conclusions of the preceding paragraph: after all, only a

small portion of the text was analyzed and drawing such a conclusion about a book-

length work might be rather premature. However, it must be understood that beside the

narrated/reflected parts are also parts in the work where narrative voice is practically

invisible or not present at all. Franz Stanzel explains that there are two basic forms that

constitute a written work: narrative forms (including reports, descriptions, or

commentaries) and dramatic forms (including dialogues or scripted scenes) (86). In

24
other words, while the profile of a narrative text is created through the way its narrative

and dramatic forms are successively ordered, dramatic forms such as monologues or

scripted dialogue do not comment on the way narrative is being developed because they

are not narrated in the narrow sense of the word (90). However, that does not mean such

parts do not affect the overall impression of the discourse as a whole, since they

constitute one of the many parts forming the discourse as a whole (65). Simply put,

narrative in its strict sense—that is narrative forms which can be described by modus,

person, and perspective—is constituted by a narrator or a reflector, not by long

monologues or scripts, which cannot say anything about the way the narrative develops.

As it was mentioned above, a rather large amount of the text does not contain

any or almost any narrative elements; however, it is also important to note that these

parts often belong to the most quoted and examined sections of the book. As Oliver

Harris in William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination explains, there are certain

passages in the text “that present the reader, weary from the teeming heterogeneity of

Naked Lunch, with what appear to be master keys to the text” (216), and these passages

are often constructed primarily from long monologues or scripts.18 For instance, “And

Now the Prophet’s Hour” part of “The Market” section, most of the “Benway” section,

and almost the whole “The County Clerk” section are virtually long monologues which

contain almost no narrated passages: while “Benway” employs monologues rather

sparingly, “Prophet’s Hour” is a more than three pages long monologue and “The

County Clerk” is—without the introductory two pages—a five-page long monologue

interrupted by only nine sentences of actual narrative such us “Lee cleared his throat”

(147). Burroughs seems to be aware of the non-narrative aspect of monologues because

they are often included within another monologue or a dialogue, and the above-

18
I will discuss the “master keys to the text” and their importance for the interpretation of the text
later in the thesis.

25
mentioned “The County Clerk” section is a prime example of such usage. In the

following part the County Clerk is talking to his six assistants:

“So I says to Doc Parker: ‘My old lady is down bad with the menstrual
cramps. Sell me two ounces of paregoric.’
“So Doc says, ‘Well, Arch, you gotta sign the book. Name, address
and date of purchase. It’s the law.’
“So I asked Doc what the day was, and he said, ‘Friday the 13th.’
“So I said, ‘I guess I already had mine.’
“‘Well,’ Doc says, ‘there was a feller in here this morning. City
feller. Dressed kinda flashy. So he’s got him a Rx for a mason jar of
morphine . . . Kinda funny looking prescription writ out on toilet paper . .
. And I told him straight out: “Mister, I suspect you to be a dope fiend.”
“‘“I got the ingrowing toe nails, Pop. I’m in agony,’” he says.
“‘“Well,” I says, “I gotta be careful. But so long as you got a
legitimate condition and an Rx from a certified bona feedy M.D., I’m
honored to serve you.”’” (144-145)

Through parts of the work such as the above Burroughs not only confuses the reader

with its several layers, but also introduces narrative into monologues. After all, the

County Clerk tells—that is narrates—a story to his six assistant, in effect becoming the

passage’s reflector: “Well, later on I went down to Doc Parker’s again to get me a

rubber . . . and just as I was leaving I run into Roy Bane, a good ol’ boy too. There’s not

a finer man in this Zone than Roy Bane . . .” (146). Similar instance of a reflector

entering a given narrative can be seen in the already mentioned “Prophet’s Hour:”

“Buddha? A notorious metabolic junky . . . Makes his own you dig. In India, where they

got no sense of time, The Man is often a month late . . . ‘Now let me see, is that the

second or the third monsoon? I got like a meet in Ketchupore about more or less’” (95).

Put differently, parts such as “The County Clerk” do not contain any narrative on the

one hand, since they are long monologues and as such do not belong to narrative but

dramatic forms, but on the other, through Burroughs’ technique of adding layers of

speech into the monologues, they contain a narrative voice who is at the same time the

originator of the monologue in question. Stanzel notes that there is no clear-cut

26
definition of fiction and the distinction between its narrative and dramatic forms can be

sometimes rather vague due to possible overlapping (87); he also explains that

dialogues or monologues can in certain cases contain elements of narrative forms (89).

However, it must be understood that Stanzel assumes it is the main narrator or reflector

of a given work that inserts narrative elements into its dramatic parts and such

conclusion therefore does not take into account Burroughs’ use of narrative elements in

dramatic forms: the writer achieves the inclusion of narrative elements into monologues

through adding additional narrative layers, therefore creating several narrated stories

inside the main narrative frame. Importantly, Burroughs also indirectly questions the

reliability of the narrative itself: after all, the additional layers of the monologues are

told by their speakers who often have their own views—“There’s not a finer man in this

Zone than Roy Bane” (146)—therefore not only reaffirming that there are numerous

narrative voices in the discourse, but also stressing that these voices are not to be taken

at face value due to their inherent bias. As the racist County Clerk says:

“So they burned the nigger and that ol’ boy took his wife and went back
up to Texarkana without paying for the gasoline and old Whispering Lou
runs the service station couldn’t talk about nothing else all fall: ‘These
city fellers come down here and burn a nigger and don’t even settle up
for the gasoline.’” (147)

In other words, the reader faces either narrated parts where the narrative voice is

ambiguous and unreliable, or parts of the discourse that belong to the dramatic forms

which are not narrated but show elements of narrative after a more thorough inspection,

in effect questioning the reliability of the narrative voices in general.

Another important narrative irregularity in the discourse is Burroughs’ usage of

scripted dialogues; however, I will discuss these only briefly because the scripted

dialogues use similar mechanics that apply to the long monologues mentioned above

and their use is not as frequent as of the multilayered monologues. The script technique

27
is used throughout the novel in sections like “Hospital,” “Ordinary Men and Women,”

or “Islam Incorporated:”

The Party Leader strides about in a djellaba smoking a cigar and drinking
scotch. He wears expensive English shoes, loud socks, garters, muscular
hairy legs—overall effect of a successful gangster in drag.
P.L. (pointing dramatically): “Look out there. What do you see?”
LIEUTENANT: “Huh? Why, I see the Market.”
P.L.: “No you don’t. You see men and women. Ordinary men and
women going about their ordinary lives. That’s what we need . . .” (101-
102)

It might be argued whether the introductory information preceding the scripted text

contains a hint of narrative or not: after all, Stanzel explains that a scripted dialogue that

contains directorial advices or brief descriptions of stage and characters might be

included either among narrative or dramatic forms, depending on the frequency of

narrative elements in the scripted part (86). However, most scripted parts of the text

clearly contain at least some narrative elements. In the following part the Party Leader

discusses the possibility of a massacre committed by Latahs, persons who must imitate

other persons’ movements when given a specific signal:

LIEUTENANT: “But, chief, can’t we get them started and they imitate
each other like a chained reaction?”
The Diseuse undulate through the Market: “What’s a Latah do when
he’s alone?”
P.L.: “That’s a technical point. We’ll have to consult Benway.
Personally, I think someone should follow through on the whole
operation.”
“I do not know,” he said for lack of the requisite points and ratings to
secure the appointment.
“They have no feelings,” said Doctor Benway, slashing his patient to
shreds. (118)

As it is apparent, the “he said for lack of the requisite points and ratings to secure the

appointment” is a comment that could be possibly made only by a narrator or a

reflector. Therefore, the reader is again faced with the fact that the narrator’s (or

reflector’s) identity cannot be decided. To put it simply, Burroughs inserted a typical

28
prose narrative into the scripted part, in other words mixing narrative and dramatic

forms together in a manner similar to the multilayered monologues; however, while the

reader can identify the narrative voice in the additional layers of the monologues, the

narrative voice at times present in the scripted parts is difficult to identify. The scripted

parts with elements of narrative forms are few and far between to be properly identified

in terms of their modus, person, and perspective, therefore contributing to the

indeterminate nature of the text.

Importantly, while other scripted parts of the text are, in spite of the inserted

narrative elements, quite clear in terms of character voices, the above-mentioned part

taken from “Ordinary Men and Women” section is muddled by additional voices of

unknown origin. It continues by the following, starting by Benway:

“Just reflexes . . . I urge distraction.”

“The age of consent is when they learn to talk.”
“May all your troubles be little ones as one child molester say to the
other.”
“It’s really ominous, my dear, when they start trying on your clothes
and give you those doppelgänger kicks . . .”
Frantic queen trying to claw sport jacket off departing boy.
“My two hundred dollar cashmere jacket,” she screeches . . . (118)

There are three utterances without clear origin and at least four possible candidates for

their ownership in the passage in question: the Party Leader, Lieutenant, the Diseuse,

and Benway. Put simply, while in most scripted parts of the text the reader receives help

from the inserted narrative elements, here there is none. The reader is sentenced to be

forever puzzled by the origin of the voices, which in effect reflects the complications in

determining the narrative of the work as a whole. Throughout the text, the reader

encounters passages where the narrative voice is indeterminate, in effect forcing the

reader to decide the identity and reliability of these voices on his or her own. In other

words, it is probably becoming clear that Naked Lunch is a writerly text. Roland Barthes

29
in S/Z explains there are two kinds of text, readerly and writerly: while readerly is a text

which only gives to reader “the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text,”

writerly manages to “make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text,”

therefore fulfilling the goal of literary work (4).19 In other words, a writerly text can be

re-written by its reader and, as I have already shown, Naked Lunch more than invites

such rewriting. By including multiple narrative voices and multiple layers of narrative,

the reader is forced to interpret these often unidentifiable narrative elements on his or

her own, in effect leading to a text that can be always different from one reading to

another. Of course, the reader is always more or less required to interpret various

elements of a discourse; however, as I will show throughout the thesis, Naked Lunch

features so many indeterminable elements that the reader may often be “lost in

translation” of the text.

III.C The Structure of the Discourse

While the last quoted scripted scene is important in discussing the work’s

narrative voice, it is also valuable in pointing out the work’s structure. Put differently,

the three sentences whose origin is unidentifiable indirectly symbolize the overall

arrangement of the work: it is not only, to certain extent, random, but also constantly

interrupted right in the middle of a narrated scene by seemingly unimportant parts. The

statement above becomes apparent when the “talking asshole” part of the work, due to

its outrageous humor probably the most famous section of the work (Johnson and

Hemmer 222), is analyzed in detail, since the disjointed nature of the part is reflected by

the work as a whole.20

19
The definition and significance of Naked Lunch as a writerly text will be discussed later in the
work in more detail.
20
While Harris refers to the part as “Talking Asshole,” I will refrain from capitalization in order to
distinguish it from the capitalized sections of the work.

30
 The “talking asshole” is a part of the “Ordinary Men and Women” section and

begins by a scripted dialogue between Dr. Schafer and Dr. Benway; however, it soon

evolves into a monologue by Benway. As Harris points out, “talking asshole” is clearly

separated into five parts: part one is formed by the introductory dialogue between

Schafer and Benway; part two marks the beginning of Benway’s monologue and

concerns a carnival man who taught his anus to talk; part three is a paragraph of cultural

criticism; part four presents to the reader a political allegory about bureaucracy; and part

five mentions an Arab boy who could play the flute with his behind (Secret 218). The

work itself is also separated into numerous sections which are not connected in terms of

plot. As I have already mentioned, the initial “And Start West” is a first person narrative

of Lee, a drug addict running away from the police who decides to drive to Mexico. The

next two sections, “The Vigilante” and “The Rube,” describe to the reader the narrator’s

view of Mexico as well as mention two rather unreal characters. In “Benway” the reader

sees the doctor’s opinions on torture and control, but also witnesses the escape of all

subjects from Benway’s Reconditioning Center and the resulting chaos and obscenities

taking place in the streets. In the following “Joselito” section the discourse centers on a

man named Carl and his attempt to find an appropriate treatment for his friend Joselito,

who is suffering from lung lesions. The subsequent “The Black Meat” section describes

the Sailor’s attempt to obtain a “fix” but also the already mentioned Meat Eaters as well

as the City of Interzone, while the following “Hospital” section concerns Lee’s

addiction cure. The changing rhythm is kept even later in the work, for example

represented by the already mentioned “The Examination” or “The County Clerk” as

well as the two “pornographic” sections of the work, “Hassan’s Rumpur Room” and

“A.J.’s Annual Party,” “which had more or less rendered publication in the United

31
States or Britain an impossibility” and lead to the book’s famous obscenity trial (Miles,

El Hombre Invisible 103-05).

As Naked Lunch jumps from one section to another, the reader is disoriented by

the constantly changing narrative voices and absence of plot: instead of expanding the

initial premise—William Lee fleeing the United States—the discourse introduces

Benway as its main focus who is subsequently replaced by Carl and so on. While events

do take place in the work, there is no apparent development of the text as a whole: For

instance, although Carl appears in two sections of the work, in the above-mentioned

“Joselito” and “The Examination,” there is no apparent connection between these two

parts except the fact that they use the same main character: Carl does not reflect in “The

Examination” upon any of the events from “Joselito,” nor does he provide any hints that

might connect the two sections together. In fact, the events of “Joselito” do not

necessarily precede those of “The Examination.” Actually, the only reason one might

consider “The Examination” to take place after “Joselito” is the fact it is presented later

in the book. Burroughs further discomforts the reader: as he writes in the “Atrophied

Preface” which provocatively appears at the conclusion of the work (Lydenberg 43): “I

do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity’ [. . .]. You can cut into Naked

Lunch at any intersection point” (184, 187). Put simply, the work eschews traditional

plot development through its organization into plotwise rather unrelated parts and as

Harris points out, the image of the “talking asshole,” that is the anus’ slow gaining

control over the carnival man, is “an apt figure for so disorderly a textual body, where

one part is continually being taken over and transformed by another” (Secret 220).

However, describing the work’s sections as “rather unrelated” should not lead

one to think that there is no connection between the parts. Here I turn again to the

“talking asshole” as a means of reflecting on the textual strategies of the whole work,

32
since both the “talking asshole” and Naked Lunch are comprised of several substantially

different parts. Oliver Harris explains that the parts of the “talking asshole” “are all

linked, but each is nevertheless formally or thematically quite distinct, which is why the

material can only be mastered into coherence by being partialized—cut down for

analysis—and naturalized—responsibility for it passed onto a familiar source” (219).

The same goes for Naked Lunch as a whole: the narrative voices change abruptly

throughout the work, dramatic forms such as scripted scenes and monologues are

introduced into the text, and the thematic scope is wide—from drugs and drug addiction

to homosexuality and political control. The structure of the work—due to its non-

existent continuous plot—actively resists basing the interpretation of one section of the

text on another section. Therefore, the reader is often forced to either take into

consideration only a fraction of the text while ignoring the rest—an important point in

interpreting Naked Lunch, as I shall later point out—or develop a system that might help

in understanding the work. The latter is the case of Timothy Murphy, who in

“Intersection Points: Teaching William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch” devises

interpretations of the work based on recurrence of characters, phrases, or specific

themes; however, such approach is, naturally, a confirmation of the text’s writerly

nature.

I have already mentioned the issue of interpreting Naked Lunch. While it will be

fully addressed only after all important elements forming the discourse are discussed, it

is important to note that the structure of the work plays important part in “deciphering”

the discourse, in effect influencing the interpretation of the text. The “talking asshole,”

again, helps in the explanation of the work’s structure and its strategy. As it was already

said, the “talking asshole” consists of five different parts and while the first two are

rather humorous, the third and especially the fourth mark a significant reversal in tone.

33
The third part starts after the story of the carnival man and his talking anus is finished:

“That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because

there’s always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the

basic American rottenness” (112). The next part is a scathing attack on bureaucracy and

an argument for a cooperative organization: “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.” As the reader moves through the “talking

asshole,” the third part appears in front of the reader suggesting it contains the real

“point” of the whole “talking asshole” piece, but it is then replaced by the fourth part,

which suggests the same (Harris, Secret 220). Then the reader reaches the fifth part and

the tone changes again: the last part is about an “Arab boy who could play a flute with

his ass” and who, thanks to his disposition, was a great lover (Burroughs, Naked Lunch

113), in effect suppressing the cultural or political reading of the preceding two parts by

offering to the reader an erotic reading (Harris, Secret 220). In other words, the

structure of the “talking asshole,” which moves from two comical parts through two

“main” parts back to a comical part, affects the way the section is understood and the

same applies for the work as a whole. As the reader proceeds through Naked Lunch, it

seems to demand different interpretation throughout the discourse: a tale of drug

addiction, a statement against harassment of homosexuals, or a political statement.

Stanzel points out that reader is affected by inertia: once the reader decides on an

interpretation of the discourse, it does not change until a significant shift in the narrative

forces the change (88). Since none of the elements actually dominates the discourse, the

reader has two choices: either repeatedly try to accommodate to the new elements

constantly emerging from the text, in other words constantly update the interpretation of

34
the work, or decide on the first possible interpretation of the discourse, which is the

interpretation offered in the “Atrophied Preface:” “Lee The Agent (a double-four-eight-

sixteen) is taking the junk cure” (182). The second choice might appear at first as the

road to follow: after all, not only is the actual discourse framed by sections with Lee in

the role of their narrator, but also such interpretation explains many of the violent and

sexual imagery in the text simply as Lee’s hallucinations during his withdrawal period,

in effect giving the discourse more credibility: such interpretation argues that the vast

number of strange creatures or places present in the text—such as Mugwumps or

Interzone—are not real but only imaginations of a drug addict. However, there are two

shortcomings to such interpretation, thus rendering it rather useless: first, the

interpretation relies on an unstable and evasive discourse: after all, the above-mentioned

“Lee The Agent (a double-four-eight-sixteen)” suggests that Lee is an agent for

Factualist, in effect establishing Interzone and other aspects of the text as real and not

imaginary;21 second, the result of such interpretation is, as it was already pointed above,

a result of the text’s structure and the reader’s need to understand and explain as much

of the work as possible. Furthermore, as Oliver Harris claims, such reading ignores the

fact that Burroughs is being ironic in “Atrophied Preface” as well as in the sections

added by the editors, that is “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” and “Post-

Script . . . Wouldn’t You?” (Secret 187). The reader’s inertia and the work’s structure

are also the only reasons why should “Joselito” be considered to precede “The

Examination” and not vice versa. On the other hand, reading Naked Lunch as it is

described in the “Atrophied Preface” offers a safe haven for the reader who might be

terrified by the indeterminate and constantly changing discourse.22

21
Lee is described as an agent also in the first-person “Hauser and O’Brien” section: “I spent the
night in the Ever Hard Baths—(homosexuality is the best all-around cover an agent can use)” (180).
22
The indeterminate nature of the discourse is why the most pervasive reading of Naked Lunch is
that of “William Lee quits drugs and therefore engages in a series of hallucinations” (Schneiderman 191).

35
 As Robin Lydenberg comments on the “talking asshole” section and the way it

reflects the overall discourse, “Burroughs’ strategy of resistance is to open many

orifices, many holes which would dissolve and disseminate the tyranny of the single

hole” (29); these “holes” are, as it is apparent, not only the narrative voices of the work

but also its structure. Put differently, Burroughs’ actively uses the elements of discourse

in an untraditional way to move from the readerly to the writerly, from mere

consumption to production of the text. Burroughs in an interview with Daniel Odier

comments on his technique of discourse development:

When people speak of clarity in writing they generally mean plot,

continuity, beginning middle and end, adherence to a “logical” sequence.
But things don’t happen in logical sequence and people don’t think in
logical sequence. Any writer who hopes to approximate what actually
occurs in the mind and body of his characters cannot confine himself to
such an arbitrary structure as “logical” sequence. (35)

In other words, not only there is no conventional treatment of narrative present in the

work, but also the structure of the text is composed in a way to make the discourse even

more indeterminate. As one section follows another and the narrative voices change

between the sections, the reader is faced with a structure that further challenges a

straightforward interpretation of the work: the sections succeed one another in a manner

that forces the reader either to perceive each section separately or base the interpretation

on a selection of sections that highlight some of the parts as important—that is, as

containing reliable information about the world of Naked Lunch—while suppressing

the rest of the work. Lubomír Doležel in Heterocosmica explains that the status of

discourse’s entities is usually portrayed through a “dyadic verification,” that is through

direct speech of fictional characters and the comments of the narrator (who might be, in

In other words, while interpreting the work according to the explanations in “Atrophied Preface” might
seem rather naïve, it must be understood that such interpretation is very common.

36
Stanzel’s terms, also a reflector) (151).23 These two different sources of dyadic

verification divide the factual area of the fictional world—that is the sum of all verified

facts of the discourse—into two categories: those absolutely verified (through the

authority of the narrative voice) and those collectively verified (through the agreeing

accounts of the fictional characters) (154). Furthermore, the virtual area of the fictional

world—the sum of all subjective entities, whether caused by belief, illusions, or

mistakes of the characters—encompasses all entities/subjects excluded from the factual

area. Burroughs achieves to blur the lines between the factual area and the virtual area

by including multiple, often unreliable narrative voices but also through structuring the

work into numerous rather unrelated sections: since little to no connection is provided

between the sections, the reader is challenged by the fact that there are not many

collectively verified facts in the discourse. Apart from such elementary facts like “there

is a person named Benway” or “a place called Interzone exists,” the discourse often

does not provide multiple views or descriptions of a particular place or character. After

all, since both the setting and the narrative voices often change between the sections, it

might be said that the text presents only a small amount of verifiable acts to the reader

while most of the text belongs to the virtual area. Significant portions of the discourse

are subjective and do not have to necessarily correspond to the reality of the fictional

world: “You can never be sure of anyone in the industry” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch

123). Put simply, Naked Lunch is, in the words of Ian MacFayden, “not a ‘discourse’

but an uncensored eruption” (“Dossier Two” 37) and its structure significantly

contributes to such perception.

23
As I was not able to obtain the English original, all terms related to Lubomír Doležel’s theories are
my translations of his own Czech translation of the English text. For more information on verification of
the narrative, see Doležel (149-169).

37
III.D The Treatment of Time and Setting

To summarize so far, the structure and the narrative voices of Naked Lunch

constitute much of its textual strategy; however, there are other elements of the

discourse which further underline the text’s resistance to stable interpretation, and one

of them is the work’s treatment of time and setting. As Lubomír Doležel argues, it is

important to take into account not only the development of the discourse, but also the

world of the discourse itself; “narrative world,” not “plot,” is the fundamental term of

narrative theory, since plots merely takes place in a particular world (45). A reader

faced with unstable narrative voices and disorganized structure of Naked Lunch may

hope to find explanations in its temporal and spatial aspects; however, such hopes must

end in vain, since the work treats time and setting in a very indeterminate manner, thus

further contributing to the writerly nature of the text.

While the narrative starts at Washington Square Station, it soon moves to a place

called Interzone, “[t]he Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a

vast silent market” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 89). The city is an amalgam of different

cultures and races:24

All houses in the City are joined. Houses of sod—high mountain

Mongols blink in smoky doorways—houses of bamboo and teak, houses
of adobe, stone and red brick, South Pacific and Maori houses, houses in
trees and river boats, wood houses one hundred feet long sheltering entire
tribes [. . .]. (90)

Every street of the city slopes down to “a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness”

with a “criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars” hanging above them (45). It is a

24
The description of Interzone in “The Market” section is taken almost verbatim from a July 10,
1953 letter to Ginsberg describing Burroughs’ notes from yagé state. However, the original letter stressed
the multinational, multiracial nature of Interzone even further: “The blood and substance of many races,
Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad. Polyglot Near East, Indian, and new races as yet
unconceived and unborn [. . .]. The Composite City, Near Eastern, Mongol, South Pacific, South
American where all Human Potentials are spread out in a vast silent Market” (Letters 182-83). While the
above quoted part appeared in some of the previous editions of Naked Lunch, it was cut from the restored
version.

38
city that is always being rebuilt (196), “a city so old that it had been rebuilt layer upon

layer, one building upon another” (Miles, El Hombre Invisible 70). Importantly, the

collage-like nature of the city is reflected in its inhabitants: “Followers of obsolete,

unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of

souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, [.

. .] black marketers of World War III” (91). Interzone is the place where anything can

be gained or lost:

Gaming tables where the games are played for incredible stakes. From
time to time a player leaps up with a despairing cry, having lost his youth
to an old man or become Latah to his opponent. But there are higher
stakes than youth or Latah, games where only two players in the world
know what the stakes are. (90)

Although imagined places like Freeland Republic, Annexia, or the Island prevail

in the text, there are also some real-world places as well, such as the already mentioned

Mexico or Venice. However, the shifts in setting are abrupt and often occurring without

any explanation. For example, the first-person narrative section “The Rube” takes place

in many US cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, or Houston, as well as some

other places around the world; however, the following section, “Benway,” which is also

a first-person narrative, begins by the narrator saying that he is “assigned to engage the

services of Doctor Benway for Islam Inc” and the section itself is set in Freeland (19).

Such jumps are not exceptional and occur throughout the discourse. Importantly, not

only are there several sections with unspecified setting, such as “Lazarus Go Home” or

“A.J.’s Annual Party,” but furthermore, the reader is constantly reminded that the

discourse of the work—including the description of its setting—is often unreliable: “In

Cuernavaca or was it Taxco? Jane meets a pimp trombone player and disappears in a

cloud of tea smoke” (18). The narrative voices are not able—or willing—to provide the

reader with a coherent description of the work’s setting. On the one hand, as it was

39
already mentioned, “[a]ll houses in the City are joined” (90); furthermore, the city

contains “[m]inarets, palms, mountains, jungle . . . A sluggish river jumping with

vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in the grass, play cryptic games”

(89). On the other hand, the following description of Interzone is offered later in the

work:

The Zone is a single, vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic
cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd
into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall
right into the next house—the next bed, that is, since the rooms are
mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted. A hum of sex
and commerce shakes the Zone like a vast hive. (149)

The discrepancy between the two descriptions of Interzone is explained at the end of the

work: “’They are rebuilding the city.’ Lee nodded absently . . . ‘Yes . . . Always . . .’”

(196). Put simply, the main setting of the work, Interzone, is not only a place where

virtually everything is possible, but also a place which constantly changes, thus

reflecting the shifts in setting throughout the discourse. As the discourse takes the

reader from one place to another, it is often up to the reader to determine the setting of a

given section—whether the place of the setting or the place’s actual visual

representation. Doležel explains that not only failure to verify the accounts of narrator

or characters, but also establishing contradictions of a fictional world into a text leads to

creating an unstable discourse (164). Burroughs’ ever-changing Interzone is surely such

unstable place.

Before I continue the discussion of the sudden changes of setting and their

significance for the discourse, it must be also noted that even the more ordinary

locations of the text, such as the several US cities mentioned above, often embody many

qualities of the ever-changing Interzone. For instance, the journey from Houston to New

Orleans is described in the following way: “[We] start for New Orleans past iridescent

40
lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around

in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream

obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish . . .” (13). Although “marooned

pimps scream obscenities at passing cars” refers to an existing two-lane Louisiana road

“lined with nightclubs, casinos, and whorehouses” (Johnson, “Good Ol’ Boy” 44), the

whole sentence is one of the signs that mark the work’s dissolution of the real—that is

reliable—places into unreliable, indecisive places like Interzone. The work’s setting is

filled with a peculiar combination of familiar and peculiar, the normal and the obscene:

The Burroughs landscape is an unmistakable place, with its penny

arcades and vacant lots, China blue skies, 1920 movies, a small
woodsmoke and piano music down a city street, train whistles, frayed
light from a distant star, rose wallpaper and brass bedsteads, ginger
haired boys with red gums, deformed fish snapping lazily at jissom on
the surface of a dark lagoon, and lesbian agents with penises grafted on
their faces, sitting outside a café in white trenchcoats [sic], drinking
spinal fluid from long alabaster cups. (Baker, 146)

Simply put, even the real-life places have the tendency to change into strange

and sometimes even alien landscape. Burroughs superimposes familiar, at times almost

nostalgic images of the landscape with phantasmagorical portraits, in effect creating a

rather familiar, yet reality defying world.25 The usage of such landscapes as well as of

the indeterminable Interzone and at times unspecified setting is Burroughs’ move from

readerly towards writerly. Roland Barthes in Image Music Text explains there are two

main units constituting a narrative: functions and indices (92). While the former connect

the elements of the narrative through a direct link, for example “the purchase of a

revolver has for correlate the moment when it will be used (and if not used, the notation

is reversed into a sign of indecision, etc.),” the latter do not refer to “a complementary

and consequential act but to a more or less diffuse concept which is nevertheless

25
Kathryn Hume explains that Burroughs uses five different landscapes in his texts: the desert, the
jungle, the city, America, and home—an unreachable place; see Hume for a further discussion of the
landscapes.

41
necessary to the meaning of the story: psychological indices concerning the characters,

data regarding their identity, notations of ‘atmosphere,’ and so on.” In other words,

while functions constitute the necessary skeleton of the narrative, indices are the flesh,

skin and organs—that is additional layers—of discourse.26 It is also important to note

that the units can be further distinguished: while functions are divided into cardinal

functions (or nuclei) and catalysers, indices are composed of indices proper and

informants (93, 96), and application of the latter pair to Burroughs’ description of

setting is important for understanding the work. As Barthes explains, indices proper

always have implicit signifieds (96): for example, dark clouds on the horizon index a

storm which in turn indexes the atmosphere yet to come. Informants, on the contrary, do

not contain any signifieds, because “they are pure data with immediate signification”

such as age of the characters; informant “always serves to authenticate the reality of the

referent, to embed fiction in the real world. Informants are realist operators and as such

possess and undeniable functionality not on the level of the story but on that of the

discourse” (emphasis added). Put simply, indices proper help in foreshadowing the

future events while informants provide a text with a sense of realism, and Burroughs

refuses to use setting-related indices or informants throughout Naked Lunch. The

absence of indices connected to the work’s setting is best seen when considering its

structure: because the structure of the work is seemingly arbitrary, there cannot be, for

instance, any foreshadowing between the work’s sections. As it was said several pages

before, while “The Rube” takes place in several US cities, “Benway” jumps to Freeland

Republic; however, not a single hint of such jump nor any explanation is provided, the

narrative voice simply states at the beginning of the “Benway” section that he is

“assigned to engage the services of Doctor Benway for Islam Inc” (19). Furthermore,

26
Such description is, of course, a simplification. For more on information on the main units of a
text, see Barthes Image 91-97.

42
there often are not any indices present even within a single section. To provide an

example, “A.J.’s Annual Party” is comprised of several numerous sections: first, A.J.’s

introduction to his party; second, a “blue movie” describing the copulation and

subsequent death by hanging of Johnny, Mark, and Mary; third, the Beagle’s last shot

before the drug cure; fourth, the “Meeting of International Conference of Technological

Psychiatry” featuring Doctor “Fingers” Schafer (also known as the Lobotomy Kid) and

his latest work, “the Complete All American Deanxietized Man,” who later turns into “a

monster black centipede” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 86). While the first section provides

a smooth transition—i.e. an index—for the second section, the subsequent parts are not

related to each other in any way. The reader has to create a relation between the

different, unrelated parts; however, any relation thus created is only arbitrary. The

created connection is a manifestation of the reader’s need to grasp the elusive discourse

and a confirmation of the writerly nature of the text. The same applies to the use—or

rather non-use—of place informants. As it was pointed out above, any information

provided by the discourse can be—and often is—negated later in the work: not only is

the Interzone an ever-changing place with conflicting descriptions, but even the

ordinary places contain unreal elements, in effect changing the once-thought familiar

place into unfamiliar, thus replacing a set of informants connected to one place with

another one. In other words, the reader is constantly reminded that the real in the

discourse is the unreal, in effect forced to create a setting of his own.

The usage of time in the work also often denies application of Barthes’ indices

and informants. First of all, the time setting of the work is not specified. One of the few

time specifications in the discourse are the “black marketers of World War III” (91);

however, that hardly qualifies as a reliable informant since Naked Lunch does not

feature any technology that might be considered unconceivable at the time of the

43
novel’s publishing. For example, the characters in “The Rube” section drive a 1942

Studebaker and Ford V-8. Furthermore, due to the indeterminable and changing nature

of the text, the marketers may be only one of the many anomalies of the text—in other

words, there may not have been any World War III at all. More importantly, though,

there is also no apparent time relation between the work’s sections. Neither the

characters nor the discourse of a given section reflect on any of the events of the other

sections. Even the at first rather unproblematic parts of the discourse show visible dents

in their expression of time and continuity when examined more thoroughly. For

example, there is no way to determine the chronology of the sections “And Start West”

and “Hauser and O’Brien.” If the former occurs first, the reader is puzzled by the

narrator’s sudden return to New York without any further explanation; after all, Lee

should be staying in Interzone. On the contrary, if the latter precedes the former, then

Lee’s actions do not make sense: although he kills the two detectives in the “Hauser and

O’Brien” section, he is concerned that the police may find his spoon and dropper he

disposes of at Washington Square Station. In other words, there are no time-defining

indices proper in the text because there simply is no coherent discourse to follow—

Naked Lunch “only” offers many texts connected thematically, but not chronologically

or in terms of plot. Importantly, such refusal of exact definition of time and setting

should not be viewed as a fault; on the contrary, it is the text’s another step towards the

writerly. Bolton further comments on the issue exact definitions of time and place

setting:

One of the most unique features of Williams S. Burroughs’s

experimental novels is the absence of any stable setting, any consistent
geographical location or time period, through which to read these
experimental texts. The material contexts of time and place shift,
transmute, and turn back on themselves. Readers cannot find objective
points of reference as the narrative perspective moves through time and
space with no causal logic and no fully recognizable points of departure
or arrival. (53) (emphasis added)

44
 Bolton’s comment is not only useful because it further explains Burroughs’

defiance to use standard notions of place and time, but the highlighted passage also

touches upon another important issue of the text, that of departing and arriving of the

characters. As it was already mentioned, there are two main units of narrative according

to Barthes, functions and indices, and the former are further divided into cardinal

functions and catalysers. As Barthes explains, function is cardinal when the described

action of the function opens, continues, or closes a possibility that directly influences

the subsequent development of the story; in other words, cardinal functions are both

logical and chronological (Image 94). On the other hand, catalysers are actions that

occur between two cardinal functions and while they help to explain what occurred

between the two functions, they do not bear any significance to the development of the

plot; catalysers are chronological but not logical, they only fill in the blank spaces

between the cardinal functions. Barthes provides an example of the functions: while

“the telephone rang” and “Bond answered” (or, alternatively, “Bond did not answer”)

are cardinal functions necessary for the development of the plot, the space between

these two phrases can be filled with “a host of trivial incidents or descriptions,” such as

“Bond moved towards the desk,” “picked up one of the receivers,” or “put down his

cigarette.” To put it simply, while cardinal functions are the necessary basis for the

development of discourse, catalysers help to “smooth out” the given text by introducing

phrases or sentences between two cardinal functions, therefore facilitating the work’s

progress.

The understanding of the difference between cardinal functions and catalysers is

important, since Naked Lunch often refuses to use catalysers. While the more narrated

parts of the text, such as “The Examination,” contain a number of catalysers—“He sat

45
down and crossed his legs. He glanced at an ashtray on the desk and lit a cigarette”

(156)—the absence of plot as well as Burroughs’ use of language often makes

distinguishing between cardinal functions and catalysers in many parts of the work

impossible:

“Giggling rioters copulate to the screams of a burning Nigra. Lonely

librarians unite in soul kiss halitosis.” [. . .] The vibrating soundless hum
of deep forest and orgone accumulators, the sudden silence of cities when
the junky cops and even The Commuter buezzes clogged lines of
cholesterol for contact. Signal flares of orgasm burst over the world. A
tea head leaps up screaming “I got the fear!” and runs into Mexican night
bringing down back brains of the world. (174).27

Of course, the above quoted text and other similar parts may be considered to belong

among indices or informants instead of functions; however, the decision is difficult if

not impossible to make. The above-mentioned part is taken from the section “The

Algebra of Need,” which employs such language on two of its two and a half pages;

therefore, the two pages might belong to indices (since they might allude to future

events), informants (since they portray the world of the discourse), catalysers (since

they might provide events that move the characters towards in the discourse), or

cardinal functions (since they portray the setting in a discourse which often changes its

narrators or reflectors, therefore the setting being the only stable “character”). Even if it

is decided that categorizing the part as belonging to indices (since time is relative in the

work and there is almost no existing relation between the different sections) or

catalysers (the part does not enlighten any actions of the character for the reader, at

least not directly) is rather improbable, such crossing out still leaves two possible

categories of the part “in play.” In other words, the reader has to decide how important

for him or her is the setting of the work and, therefore, determine in an entirely writerly

27
Burroughs’ style and its effect on the discourse will be commented upon in the part of the thesis
dealing with the work’s language.

46
fashion the actual function of the discussed part—and other similar parts—in the

discourse.

However, the discourse avoids catalysers even in its more conventional parts.

For example, the discourse often does not display the way a character transports from

one place to another, thus cutting the narrative to the bone of cardinal functions. For

example, in “The Rube” the narrator says: “Came at last to Houston where I know a

druggist” (13); however, no explanation of how the narrator appeared in Houston is

given. One more example of such unexplained transition can be found in “Joselito:”

while in the first part of the section Carl inquires about the whereabouts of a sanitarium,

the second part starts by description of Joselito’s sanitarium room as seen through the

Carl’s eyes. The discourse does not explain how Carl got to the sanitarium; he simply

appears in the room. Burroughs explains his refusal to use such transitions in the

“Atrophied Preface:”

Why all this waste paper getting The People from one place to
another? Perhaps to spare The Reader stress of sudden space shifts and
keep him Gentle? And so a ticket is bought, a taxi called, a plane
boarded. [. . .]
I am not American Express . . . If one of my people is seen in New
York walking around in citizen clothes and next sentence Timbuktu
putting down lad talk on a gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he
(the party non-resident of Timbuktu) transported himself there by the
usual methods of communication . . . (182)

In other words, not only Burroughs explains that his characters travel outside the

discourse itself, but also the reader must make his or her own connections concerning

the places of departure and arrival. Roland Barthes in S/Z further comments on arriving

and departing, explaining that the readerly, as opposed to writerly, needs such

transitions:

What would be the narrative of a journey in which it was said that one
stays somewhere without having arrived, that one travels without having
departed—in which it was never said that, having departed, one arrives or

47
 fails to arrive? Such a narrative would be a scandal, the extenuation, by
hemorrhage, of readerliness. (105)

To put it simply, the reader creates the transportation process to fill the gaps of the

discourse, therefore again confirming the writerly aspect of the work.

In addition to omitting textual segments that would normally feature time or

place transitions, the text employs several additional techniques that further emphasize

Burroughs’ distortion of time and setting in Naked Lunch. For instance, the usage of

multi-layered monologues throughout the discourse enables the writer to switch the time

and setting of a given passage between sentences, as exemplified by “The County

Clerk” section. The section is comprised of four different layers: the first is the initial

layer of the section—Lee tries to file an affidavit at the Old Court House, a vast

Kafkaesque center of bureaucracy; the second describes the County Clerk’s account of a

Friday; the third is comprised of a discussion between the County Clerk and Doc Parker

during the one particular Friday; and fourth concerns Doc Parker’s story of him selling

morphine to a stranger that morning. While the first layer constitutes the initial

discourse base, it is soon overtaken by the County Clerk’s monologue that consists of

the other three layers, in effect moving back and forth through the events of a single

day; however, at the end of the section, Lee manages to stop the County Clerk’s endless

monologue, thus penetrating the section’s layers once more.

Of course, instances such as the above have been for the most part already

covered during the discussion of the narrative and narrative voices. However, apart

from the multi-layered monologues that enable the discourse to shift the time and

setting of a particular part without further notice, there is at least one more technique

destabilizing time and setting of the discourse worth mentioning—the technique of

numerous repetition. There are several passages throughout Naked Lunch that later

48
reappear verbatim to its original source but set in different contexts. As Burroughs once

explained to Miles, these repetitions were in the text by mistake, caused by the rushed

preparation of the text for its publishing (Miles and Grauerholz 245).28 Nevertheless,

although accidental, these passages further destabilize the notion of concrete time and

setting. For example, in the “Hospital” section the narrator meets Marv with two Arab

boys and is asked whether he would like to see the boys have sex with each other. When

being told that the boys will “perform for fifty cents. Hungry, you know” (50), the

narrator answers: “That’s the way I like to see them.” The phrase reappears later in the

text as the answer given by Clem to the Nationalist who complains that his people are

hungry (119). In the “Benway” section the text describes in a two-page long

parenthetical commentary a venereal disease, saying: “Until quite recently there was no

satisfactory treatment. ‘Treatment is symptomatic’—which means in the trade there is

none” (37). The same answer is given to Carl by Benway in “The Examination” section:

“‘Treatment of these disorders is, at the present time, hurumph, symptomatic.’ [. . .]

‘Don’t look so frightened, young man. Just a professional joke. To say treatment is

symptomatic means there is none, except to make the patient feel as comfortable as

possible’” (158). To provide one more example of repetition in the text: “‘Have you

seen Pantapon Rose?’ said the old junky . . . ‘Time to cosq,’ put on a black overcoat and

made the square . . . Down to Skid Row to Market Street museum shows all kinds

masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special . . .” (165). The above quoted

part reappears later in “Atrophied Preface:” “The old queen meets himself coming

round the other way in burlesque of adolescence, gets the knee from his phantom of the

Old Howard . . . down Skid Row to Market Street museum shows all kinds

28
However, it must be also noted that Burroughs recognized the possibilities of such repetitions in
the text, since they are regularly employed in his subsequent work. It is also important to note that the
restored edition of Naked Lunch removed some of these repeated passages while “left others that seem to
work well in both places where they appear in the text” (Miles and Grauerholz 245).

49
masturbation and self-abuse . . . young boys need it special . . .” (193). Although the

sentences or phrases reappearing later in the work remain mostly the same, the context

changes: while the anecdote of Marv and two boys concerns prostitution, the anecdote

featuring the Nationalist and Clem and Jody, who are dressed “like The Capitalist in a

Communist mural” (119), concerns nationalism and oppression:

CLEM: “We have come to feed on your backwardness.”

JODY: “In the words of the Immortal Bard, to batten on these
Moors.”
NATIONALIST: “Swine! Filth! Sons of dogs! Don’t you realize my
people are hungry?”
CLEM: “That’s the way I like to see them.”
The Nationalist drops dead, poisoned by hate . . . (emphasis added)

The shift in context is also visible in the remaining passages provided as examples

above: while the “treatment is symptomatic” is related to a venereal disease in

“Benway,” it is connected to homosexuality in “The Examination;” while the “young

boys need it special” part is at first connected to drug usage, it is later reattached to an

“old queen,” although the setting—Market Street—is left unchanged. In other words,

Naked Lunch uses segments of one particular text in two or more passages, in effect

creating a sort of time-place travel: when the reader reaches the second instance of a

particular part, he or she is not only immediately reminded of the previous time and

place setting of the given part, but also faced with its new context. Through the usage of

repetition, Burroughs tries to achieve simultaneity in the text—one event takes place at

two different times and/or places.29 As he explains his tape recorder experiments to

Daniel Odier: “There are all sorts of things you can do on a tape recorder that cannot

possibly be indicated on a printed page. The concept of simultaneity cannot be indicated

on a printed page except very crudely” (29). To put it simply, Burroughs’ usage of

29
Also it might be argued that it is the other way round—two or more events happen in the same
time and/or setting—as the reader is reminded of the first event while reading about the second event.

50
repetition of sentences and phrases in the text manages to further underline the unstable

nature of time and setting in the work as well as show the writerly aspect of the text.

While the discourse is framed by the “And Start West” and “Hauser and

O’Brien” sections, there is no apparent “end” of the rather vague plot.30 As it was

already mentioned, any of the two sections—or virtually any section of Naked Lunch—

might serve as the conclusion of the plot. However, although stating that the work

invites the reader to choose any of its sections as its conclusion would only underline

the indeterminate nature of the discourse, insistence on such a statement in reality

dilutes the actual strength and possibilities of the discourse. One of the greatest

achievements of the work is its claim that there does not need to be any beginning or

end: “You were not there for The Beginning. You will not be there for The End . . .

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative . . .”

(Burroughs, Naked Lunch 184). As Barthes explains, writing “the end” “posits

everything that has been written as having been a tension which ‘naturally’ requires

resolution, a consequence, an end, i.e., something like a crisis” (S/Z 52). The scholar

continues:

By participating in the need to set forth the end of every action

(conclusion, interruption, closure, dénouement), the readerly declares
itself to be historical. In other words, it can be subverted, but not without
scandal, since it is the nature of the discourse which then appears to have
been betrayed: the girl can not stop laughing, the narrator can never be
aroused from his daydream [. . .]; curiously, we call the knot (of the
story) what needs to be unknotted (dénouement), we situate the knot at
the peak of the crisis, not at its outcome; yet the knot is what closes,
terminates, concludes the action in progress, like a flourish below a
signature; to deny this final word (to deny the end as a word) would in
fact scandalously dismiss the signature we seek to give each of our
“messages.”

30
I intentionally ignore the “Atrophied Preface” section when stating that “Hauser and O’Brien”
concludes the work. While “Atrophied Preface” does feature few references to other sections and
therefore might be considered by some as belonging among the other sections, I will later show that its
primary importance lies in shaping the reader’s perception of the work.

51
Simply put, a proper conclusion of a plot is necessary for a readerly text and such a

conclusion is exactly what Naked Lunch deliberately avoids. Even if “Hauser and

O’Brien” is thought of as the last section of the work, it itself stresses the non-

development of the discourse. After the narrator shoots Hauser and O’Brien, he decides

to call the Narcotics Bureau and ask for the two detectives; however, he is informed that

there are no detectives of the two names in the department and later concludes the

following:

In the cab I realized what had happened . . . I had been occluded from
space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to
Sargasso . . . Locked out . . . Never again would I have a Key, a Point of
Intersection . . . The Heat was off me from here on out . . . relegated with
Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past where heroin is always
twenty-eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen pox in the Chink
laundry of Sioux Falls . . . (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 181)

Once such a possibility of being frozen in time is taken into account, the reader must

reevaluate his or her ideas concerning the chronology of the work, especially if the

possibility of movement backwards in time is proposed. The narrator of “Hauser and

O’Brien” is “moving into the past with Hauser and O’Brien . . . clawing at a not-yet of

Telepathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts.” In

other words, if one chooses to believe the narrator’s account, he or she must reconsider

the work’s treatment of time; if, on the other hand, one chooses to disbelieve the claim

as a mere delusion, he or she has to reconsider the narrator’s credibility, and, in effect,

the reliability of the discourse as a whole. Either way, the chronology and time relations

of the sections are in question and it does not matter whether it is due to the unusual

treatment of time or the inability of the narrative voices to perceive time correctly.

As it was already mentioned, a beginning—that is a starting point of a plot—is

also excluded from the work. Since there are not many references present in the text that

might help in chronologically structuring the discourse—or, in Doležel’s terms, the

52
factual area of the discourse is not verified enough to guarantee safe interpretation—the

reader is forced to either choose one of the sections as the beginning of the discourse or

accept the notion that there simply is no beginning. The acceptance of the latter leads to

a conclusion that greatly changes the perception of the work:

[Burroughs’] narratives are not simply nonlinear, as nonlinear narratives

still operate in terms of a recognizable present and past, but are
essentially atemporal. Though some nonlinear narratives may obscure
which narrative strain represents present or past, the difference between
the two is almost always discernible as the position of the narrator
determines the present. However, the stable present of the
narrator/narrative simply does not exist in Burroughs’s novels. Narrators
or, more to the point, narrative perspectives do not maintain stable
temporal positions, do not hold onto or remain within a “present of
narration.” Readers are confronted with narrators and narrative forms that
not only have no control of the narrated time, but do not occupy any
fixed narrative present. (Bolton 61)

To put it simply, the events of Naked Lunch take place in a “no-time,” that is in an

atemporal zone. In other words, while there is certain development in time within

several of the sections, there is no apparent progression between the individual sections

precisely because such development is not wanted. The sections, while they often

feature characters or places from other sections, do not show any sort of reference in

regards to the events of each other. Umberto Eco explains that “[s]ince in every state of

a story things can go on in different ways, the pragmatics of reading is based on our

ability to make forecasts at every narrative disjunction” (72); however, no such

junctions take place between the sections and often within the sections themselves: for

example, the “Ordinary Men and Women” section is composed of several completely

unrelated parts, mostly either long monologues or scripted parts. Put differently, events

of Naked Lunch are not affected by the progress of time, as if its sections and their parts

took place in separate realities, each containing roughly the same elements but

connecting them in different order, thus creating all possible permutations of the world

53
of Naked Lunch. Even the repetitions of the text seem to affirm the existence of

different realities at the same time: encountering the copy of a particular sentence or a

phrase later in the text is merely one of the many possible variations of the “original”

reality.

The world of Naked Lunch is a very specific place. While it starts as a fictional

account of real cities and areas, it soon transforms into a world with its own principles.

It is a place which constantly changes and shifts from one form to another: “[N]o organ

is constant as regards either function or position . . . sex organs sprout anywhere . . .

rectums open, defecate and close . . . the entire organism changes color and consistency

in split-second adjustments . . .” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 9). Doležel points out that

readers need to access the “fictional encyclopedia” of a given work, that is the

knowledge of a possible world created by a work of fiction (178); the “encyclopedia of

the actual world” is usually only basis for fictional encyclopedias, and sometimes even

less than that. Naked Lunch starts in New York and Mexico, but it soon moves into

imaginary places like Interzone or Freeland. The reader must in such cases gain access

to the fictional encyclopedia while transgressing the boundaries of actual and fictional

worlds (179). Doležel explains that the knowledge of the particular fictional

encyclopedia—and its mastering—is necessary for the reader to understand the world of

the discourse: while the knowledge of the actual encyclopedia can be, to some extent,

useful, it alone is never enough and in the cases of many fictional worlds it leads the

reader on the wrong track—the reader must be always ready to modify, complete, or

even entirely scrap the encyclopedia of the actual world (181). In other words, the

discourse must reveal its fictional encyclopedia so that the reader is not lost in an

unknown world and that is one of the ways Naked Lunch challenges its readers in

understanding the text. To explain, the reader understands that there are real and

54
fictional places and/or creatures present, but the discourse does not offer any

explanation concerning the mechanism of the world. The real in Naked Lunch is the

unreal where everything is possible: as the discourse continues, characters reappear or

disappear without further notice, places change spontaneously, and time seems to have

no effect on the content of the discourse. Because the world of Naked Lunch works on

different principles than our own, leaving and departing of characters is omitted and, in

fact, unnecessary. Even when the discourse does explain something, the reader is

continuously reminded that the narrative voices are not to be trusted, therefore the

information presented to the reader may or may not be valid. To put it simply, there is a

fictional encyclopedia of the world present in the discourse, but since constant change

and atemporalness is the very nature of the displayed world, the encyclopedia does not

help in understanding the discourse.

The world of Naked Lunch is, in Eco’s terms, an instance of impossible possible

world, a world “that the Model Reader is led to conceive of just to understand that it is

impossible to do so” (76).31 “An impossible world,” the critic continues, “is presented

by a discourse which shows why a story is impossible. An impossible possible world

does not merely mention something inconceivable. It builds up the very conditions of its

own inconceivability” (78). Places and characters move back and forth in time without

any regard for continuity or chronology. Nothing in the portrayed world is constant,

everything can be different from one page to another. The discourse shows the results of

actions or events while it leaves out the way these results were achieved—characters

can appear or disappear, places can change from one description to another. In the end,

the world of the discourse is a world which does not comply with the temporal or spatial

rules of our own reality. Burroughs achieves the creation of such an impossible possible

31
Model Reader is Eco’s term for an ideal reader of a text produced by the text itself; Eco also
explains that many texts aim at producing two kinds of Model Readers: a naïve one and a critical one. For
more information see Eco 52-60.

55
world through defragmenting (which leaves out informants and proper indices),

omitting (thus leaving out catalysers as well as the functionality of the fictional

encyclopedia), contradicting (forcing the reader to accept all, some, or none of the

contradictory versions), and repetition (creating additional instances of the same event

or character). As it was already mentioned (see footnote 31), Eco devises two Model

Readers: a naïve one and a critical one. While a naïve Model Reader reads a text for the

first time and is surprised by its textual strategies, a critical Model Reader is able “to

enjoy, at a second reading, the brilliant narrative strategy” of a text (77). It is now clear

that the world of Naked Lunch is created in a way to offer a reality substantially

different than our own to the reader, a reality that is unique with each reading and that

the critical Model Reader can revise and change with each rereading.

III.E: The Characters of Naked Lunch

John Fowles once said that the pleasure from writing novels lies in all the

aspects that can be left out from every page and every sentence (qtd. in Stanzel 145). As

it is already apparent, omission is one of the strategies the text employs to become a

writerly text, and it is also one of the several textual strategies used to describe the

work’s characters. Not only do the characters transport themselves from one location to

another, but the characters themselves are rather indeterminate.

To begin with, the description of a character’s appearance is often ignored: while

at least visual representation of clothing is provided for characters such as The Great

Slashtubitch, Mark, A.J., Hassan, or Carl, others are not described at all. For instance,

the only information provided by the discourse about Benway (who is after Lee the

most recurring character of the work) is the fact that he wears glasses, and even that

may not entirely reliable information: Benway is a person who “[m]ight do almost

56
anything . . . Turn a massacre into a sex orgy” or “a joke” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch

104), in other words a highly unstable person; since his glasses “slid down onto his nose

in parody of the academic manner” during his conversation with Carl (156), the only

description of the character provided by the discourse might be questioned as well.

Naturally, the limited description of characters is not that unusual. However, the

description of the other above-mentioned characters is usually either rather brief or,

more importantly, unexpected. For example, Hassan wears a ten-gallon hat, cowboy

boots, dark glasses, and a “well-cut suit made entirely from immature high-

denomination bank notes” (130). Interestingly, almost every detailed description

provided by the discourse shows the elements of the unusual and the bizarre: The Great

Slashtubitch wears “full evening dress, blue cape and blue monocle” (75) while the

Party Leader “strides about in a djellaba smoking a cigar and drinking scotch. He wears

expensive English shoes, loud socks, garters, muscular hairy legs—overall effect of

successful gangster in drag” (101-02). To provide another instance of the unusual: the

Guard from the “Hospital” section wears, apart from other things, “a uniform of human

skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in

burnished Indian copper [. . .], [and] sandals from callused foot soles of young Malayan

farmer” (49). Such descriptions are in sharp contrast with the more casual observations:

when the main narrator of the “Hospital” section ogles boys from the French school, he

simply states that “[t]hey wear shorts” (50).

The way of describing characters—that is accentuating the unusual the more

detailed a description becomes—is reflected in the physical features of the characters,

namely in the description of their faces. For example, Mark is described as having

“[c]old, handsome, narcissistic face” and “[g]reen eyes and black hair” (78). On the

contrary to such ordinary description, a more detailed description again hints at the

57
unusual, the unreal: “The Guard [. . .] has a Latin-handsome smooth face with a pencil

line mustache, small black eyes, blank and greedy, undreaming insect eyes” (49).

Nevertheless, such descriptions of faces are rather rare; the discourse prefers to mention

the way a face changes rather than its original appearance: Paregoric Kid’s “face swells

and his lips turn purple like an Eskimo in heat” (5); Benway’s face is “subject at any

moment to unspeakable cleavage or metamorphosis. It flickers like a picture moving in

and out of focus” (25); The Sailor’s face “smoothed out like yellow wax over the high

cheekbones” (44) and later dissolved (45); Hassan’s “face swells, tumescent with

blood” (66); Jonny’s face “disintegrates as if melted from within” (81). It is important to

note that the faces of all the above-mentioned characters are not described by the

discourse, only the way they change; in other words, the reader is provided with the

portrayal of the change but is not told from what exactly the faces changed. In other

words, the discourse provides only few informants related to the work’s characters (or,

in Doležel’s terms, it does not provide the reader with usable encyclopedia of the

fictional world). Most of the provided information reflect the indeterminate nature of

the text; furthermore, the more details the discourse provides, the stranger it becomes, in

effect providing the discourse with informants after all, but subverting them at the same

time: the more informants one obtains from the discourse, the more he or she

understands that the real of Naked Lunch is the unreal where everything is possible. One

might of course claim that the descriptions above are merely reflections of the narrators’

skewed perception; however, since the narrative voices change throughout the discourse

on numerous occasions, such claim would mean that most of the narrative voices are

inaccurate in the descriptions they provide, therefore again highlighting the

indeterminate and unreliable nature of the text.

58
 As I have already pointed out in the previous section of the thesis, the discourse

avoids informants as well as catalysers when working with characters: they suddenly

appear out of nowhere and without any explanation how they managed to transport

themselves to the particular place. For example, in one part of the “Ordinary Men and

Women” section, Party Leader discusses with his Lieutenant the question of a Latah’s

behavior when he is alone: “P.L.: ‘That’s a technical point. We’ll have to consult

Benway. Personally, I think someone should follow through on the whole operation.’ [.

. .] ‘They have no feelings,’ said Doctor Benway, slashing his patient to shreds. ‘Just

reflexes . . . I urge distraction’” (118). There is no explanation provided to Benway’s

sudden appearance—he is present in the discourse when he is needed and the way he

appears on the scene is to be decided only by the reader. The “Ordinary Men and

Women” section is a prime example of such sudden appearances—not only do other

characters suddenly appear in the Latah part of the section (the Junky, the Professor,

Chorus of Fags, to name a few), but also the section itself is a good example of

Burroughs’ construction of the discourse and the way characters are introduced. The

section is comprised of several parts, including (but not limited to) two parts centered

around the Party Leader, the already discussed “talking asshole” segment, Dr. Berger’s

Mental Health Hour part, a part dealing with a jeweler and the counterfeits he is forced

to make, and a section which is dedicated to four different characters—the American

Housewife, the Salesman, the Male Hustler, and the County Clerk, respectively. In other

words, not only do characters suddenly appear in a given section, but the section often

shifts focus from one character to another without providing any explanation for the

transitions. It must be also noted that although there are a few sections focused solely on

one or more characters (such as the “Benway” and “Examination” sections), these

sections still display the traits outlined above, although in a lesser degree.

59
 To summarize, characters of Naked Lunch are either highly indeterminate when

it comes to their physical description or the description is such as to highlight the unreal

nature of the work’s world. In addition, the more recurrent a character is, the more

uncertainty is employed by the discourse when working with these characters—they

unexpectedly appear in the middle of a narrative and, although appearing in several of

the work’s section, these characters are still indeterminate when it comes to their

visualization. More importantly, similar tendencies can be seen in the behavior of

characters—most characters are either without personality or their behavior changes

rapidly, as if having more than just one personality. To provide some examples of the

latter, Benway is one of the more indeterminate characters. On the one hand, he is

described in the “Benway” section as “a manipulator and coordinator of symbol

systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control”

(Burroughs, Naked Lunch 19).32 On the other hand, he uses “one of those rubber

vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets,” after washing it by

“swishing it around in the toilet bowl,” to massage a patient’s heart (51):

DR. LIMPF: “The incision is ready, doctor.”

Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and
down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall . . . The
cup makes a horrible sucking sound.
NURSE: “I think she’s gone, doctor.”
DR. BENWAY: “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.”

The character’s ambiguity—that of a “control addict” as well as of a rather humorous

character—is underlined later in the work by Benway’s ability to “[t]urn a massacre into

sex orgy” or “a joke;” he is an “[a]rty type” with “[n]o principles” (104). A.J. is

portrayed by the discourse in a similar manner: he is an agent, “but for whom or for

what no one has ever been able to discover. It is rumored that he represents a trust of

32
Benway describes himself in the following way: “‘I deplore brutality,’ he said. ‘It’s not efficient.
On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied,
to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt’” (19).

60
giant insects from another galaxy” (123). He might be on the Factualist as well as the

Liquefactionist side: “You can never be sure of anyone in the industry.” A.J. is also an

“international playboy and harmless practical joker” who “had at one time come on like

an English gentleman” (123, 122). However, “no one believes [his] cover story;”

although he claims to be an independent, “[t]here are no independents any more . . . The

Zone swarms with every variety of dupe but there are no neutrals there. A neutral at

A.J.’s level is of course unthinkable . . .” (130). To put it simply, A.J. has—at least

according to the narrative—two different personalities, one of the playboy and joker and

the other of an unidentifiable agent. Throughout the work, especially in the “Islam

Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” section, the reader encounters several of

A.J.’s practical jokes; however, it must be always remembered that behind the rather

innocent façade of A.J. the prankster is another, completely different personality. In

other words, the discourse describes both Benway and A.J. in one particular way only to

provide conflicting descriptions later in the work: the more recurring a character is the

more subject to changes of his or her personality he becomes later in the discourse.

Compared to the recurring characters like Benway, Lee, A.J., or the Sailor, other

characters appear more stable on first sight. As Murphy puts it:

As [. . .] characters reappear throughout the novel, some (like Dr.

“Fingers” Schafer) are consistently associated with certain dominant
themes (like economic and scientific control of individuals), while others
(like A.J.) develop more ambiguous identities that cut across the book's
already unstable epistemo-ethical categories. (“Intersection”)

Interestingly, even the characters that appear more stable are not necessarily protected

from the sudden changes throughout the discourse. For example, Mark in the “A.J.’s

Annual Party” section suddenly changes into Johnny, who was killed by Mark with the

help of Mary only several moments earlier. Similar change occurs in the “Meeting of

International Conference of Technological Psychiatry” part of the section mentioned

61
above, in which Doctor “Fingers” Schafer presents his “Master Work: The Complete All

American Deanxietized Man . . .” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 87). Nevertheless, the

presentation backfires after the Man—that is the Schaffer’s creation—changes into “a

monster black centipede.”

However, the above-mentioned sudden changes do not play a major part in

understanding the discourse’s treatment of characters; on the contrary, the way minor

characters are treated does. Throughout the text, the reader encounters many characters

with generic names: the Party Leader, the Lieutenant, the County Clerk, the American

Housewife, the Students, the Professor, the Sheriff, the D.A., and many more. These

characters are usually not described because they are not important due to their

personalities or character traits, but due to what they represent. As Murphy writes, these

characters are “molds,”33 “character templates or types (whether arche- or stereo-) [. . .].

They are prefabricated images rather than individuals” (“Intersection”).34 These

characters are similar to the previously mentioned Clem and Jody who “sweep in

dressed like The Capitalist in a Communist mural” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 119):

replaceable when it comes to their individual qualities (which are not, with a few

exceptions, shown anyway), but vital as a representation of a specific character type. In

other words, these characters are important not for their inside personality, but for their

outside status. In addition, these characters are not directly described by the discourse: it

is up to the reader to write their visualization into the text, a visualization often based on

the “mold” of the character.

33
The reference to “molds” comes from Naked Lunch itself: “They call me the Exterminator. At one
brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating
in yellow pyrethrum powder [. . .]. My present assignment: Find the live ones and exterminate. Not the
bodies but the ‘molds,’ you understand—but I forget that you cannot understand” (171-72).
34
It is important to note that Murphy identifies the “molds” with the defecting agents and not the
generic characters I discuss.

62
 For instance, the discourse mentions sheriffs several times throughout the work;

while the first mention is of “soft-spoken country sheriffs with something black and

menacing in old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt” (11), the discourse

subsequently speaks of “nigger-killing sheriffs” (14). Later in the work, the Sheriff in

the “A.J.’s Annual Party” section receives more attention, overseeing a hanging of a

boy and offering to the onlookers to lower the boy’s pants so the onlookers can see the

boy’s involuntary orgasm while he is being hanged: “I’ll lower his pants for a pound,

folks. Step right up. [. . .] Only one pound, one queer three dollar bill to see a young boy

come three times at least [. . .] completely against his will” (86). As the discourse does

not provide any description of the Sheriff, the reader working with the discourse’s

fictional encyclopedia tries to characterize the Sheriff somehow, in effect associating

the Sheriff not only with his or her own preconceptions of a sheriff (such as: Caucasian,

middle-aged, Southern accent, etc.) but also with the few details provided about sheriffs

earlier in the discourse. Therefore, the Sheriff of “A.J.’s Annual Party” is also a

“nigger-killer” with “old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt”—after all, nothing in

the discourse does not say that the Sheriff from “A.J.’s Annual Party” is not one of the

sheriffs mentioned earlier.

Some might argue that the preceding paragraph is stretching the argument.

However, the point becomes clear when applied on the other minor characters of the

work—majority of the minor characters are not only capitalized, but also do not appear

in any other parts of the discourse in a lower case spelling (therefore the Sheriff is an

exception to the rule, since mentions of sheriffs—no capitalization—appear earlier in

the text). For example, the Technician—who is given a rather large amount of

dialogue—appears in three sections of the work, namely in “Hospital,” “Ordinary Men

and Women,” and “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” sections (plus a

63
brief mention in “Benway” section). The Technician might be one and the same person

because in all the sections he appears in the text employs the same techniques to

simulate the person’s speech patterns, namely ellipsis and italics: in “Hospital” he

orders one of his men to “[c]ut that swish fart off the air and give him his purple slip.

He’s through as of right now . . . Put in that sex-changed Liz athlete . . . She’s a full-

time tenor at least . . . Costume? How in the fuck should I know?” (53); in a different

section he says: “Send in the cured writer . . . He’s got what? Buddhism?” (116). In

other words, the Technician might be the one and the same person, and although he dies

in the “Hospital” section (which precedes the other sections), his death does not pose

any problem to the discourse, since, as I have already explained, Naked Lunch resists

any attempts at chronological organization. However, it might be also explained by

saying the Technician is only a character type, one of the many “molds” in the

discourse. The discourse even mentions such explanation: one of the parties of

Interzone are the Divisionists who “cut off tiny bits of their flesh and grow exact

replicas of themselves in embryo jelly” (137). Whether or not the Technician is one or

several persons, the only informants provided directly by the discourse are found in the

very name of the character (or, perhaps more accurately, of the character “mold”).

Simply put, the Technician, the American Housewife or the Salesman represent through

their very name a certain set of traits as dictated by the popular culture as well as by the

specific experiences of the reader. The Housewife is concerned about domestic chores,

the Salesman retells stories about making profit, and both Lieutenants that work for the

Party Leader are mere yes-men. In Doležel’s terms, these characters are created by the

reader through the reader’s knowledge of the encyclopedia of the actual world, not

through the work’s fictional encyclopedia. In other words, these characters are fully

64
developed yet empty, mere molds with no inside content provided by the discourse and

supplemented only through the reader’s knowledge of his or her own world.

The sameness of the characters in question and their importance in the discourse

through their non-individualism seems to be further stressed by the frequent

employment of the script technique in parts containing several of these characters. The

individual person does not matter—the discourse does not need any name, description,

or characterization of the specific person—only the “mold” does.35 As long as a

particular mold accordingly represents the specific character type, the given mold’s

personal characteristics are not relevant. However, it must be understood that the molds

are featured in Burroughs’ own world which is, as I have already shown, not only

bizarre but also highly indeterminate. Simply put, these rather all-too-familiar

characters are in opposition with the more unusual elements of the discourse such as the

ever-changing city of Interzone or Mugwumps, the creatures that produce “an addicting

fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism” (46). For

example, the American Housewife fights with household robots wreaking havoc on her

house and herself: “‘The Handy Man is outa control since Thursday, he been getting

physical with me and I didn’t put it in his combination at all. . . And the Garbage

Disposal Unit snapping at me, and the nasty old Mixmaster keep trying to get up under

my dress’” (104). Put differently, these and other molds present in the discourse are not

only mostly characterized by the reader’s encyclopedia of the actual world as opposed

to the fictional encyclopedia of Naked Lunch, but also provide through their familiarity

a sharp contrast to the nature of the displayed world, therefore accentuating the bizarre

nature of the discourse.

35
Whether the usage of “molds” is due to the work’s satirical qualities or not is to be discussed later.

65
 To summarize, the discourse employs several techniques concerning the

characters that further contribute to the indeterminable nature of the text. Not only can

the characters move effortlessly through the discourse’s time or place settings, but they

are also only rarely described: the reader has to create his or her own visualization of

the character and the discourse does not provide much advice to such visualizing. In

addition, the more detailed a description of a character’s personality is, the more the

discourse tries to undermine its own previous statements, since many important

characters are described to the point of absurdness or contradiction. On the other hand, a

vast number of minor characters are not described by the discourse at all: these

characters are portrayed through their position in the reader’s society (most often

through their occupation). It is the reader, not the discourse, who ascribes certain

characteristics to these characters through his or her own knowledge of the actual world.

No characterization is given to these characters, only their utterances somehow convey

their personalities; however, these personalities fit into the preconceptions typical to the

reader’s reality. Put simply, characters of Naked Lunch are either non-descript, thus

forcing the reader to create an image of a given character from the scratch, or they are

“overdescribed,” that is they have such detailed descriptions that they become

conflicting or questionable at least. Through these techniques the reader has to shape the

indeterminate discourse, in effect writing significant portions of the work instead of the

writer, thus confirming the writerly nature of the text.

Before I move from this chapter on characters of Naked Lunch to the next one, it

is important to note how the characters are affected by the work’s structure and the

usage of time and place. As I have already explained, both the structure and the

time/place usage significantly contribute to the indeterminate nature of the discourse.

Since the text resists chronological ordering of the sections and continuity in general,

66
different versions of one event can occur, and places constantly change, the discourse’s

characters are influenced as well. As Roland Barthes explains on the example of

Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine,” characters are dominated by the discourse itself:

Sarrasine is not free to reject the [. . .] warning; if he were to heed it and

to refrain from pursuing his adventure, there would be no story. In other
words, Sarrasine is forced by the discourse to keep his rendezvous with
La Zambinella: the character’s freedom is dominated by the discourse’s
instinct for preservation. On one hand an alternative, on the other and
simultaneously a constraint. (S/Z 135)

Therefore, the characters of Naked Lunch enjoy significant freedom within the

boundaries of the text as opposed to characters in more conventional discourses. Thanks

to the indeterminate and often conflicting nature of the text, the characters are able to

travel from one place to another without any restrictions, instantly appear in the middle

of a section only to disappear few lines later, and ignore outcomes of the discourse’s

many events.

III.F The Tone and Language of Naked Lunch

To summarize so far, Naked Lunch employs numerous strategies in its treatment

of the work’s structure, characters, narrative voices, and the manipulation of time and

setting, namely the textual strategies of indeterminacy, unreliability, absence,

contradiction, and bizarreness. One more element certainly belongs among the above-

mentioned aspects of the discourse: the element of language—or tone—of the work.

The style in which Naked Lunch is written is certainly at least as important as the other

aspects of the discourse and perhaps even more. After all, the work’s “fantastic scenes

of graphic violence and transgressive sexuality exceeded anything that had been

published at that point” (Holton 27) and even today some readers might find these

passages appalling. However, I will not limit myself to discuss only such passages; on

67
the contrary, I will point out several stylistic features such as the use of humor on the

one hand and the depictions of various brutal or shocking scenes on the other to explain

that even the very style of the work reflects the literary techniques described in the

previous chapters, techniques such as contradiction or absence, therefore greatly

contributing to the writerly nature of the text.

As it is certainly clear by now, Naked Lunch is a highly indeterminable text, a

writerly text which invites (perhaps even forces) the reader to create his or her own

relations between the different parts of the text. The text’s indeterminacy is what leads

Frank McConnell to say “that Burroughs’ [Naked Lunch] operates on probably the most

severely minimal linguistic principles out of which poetry can be made at all, and that

the critic approaching it is faced at the first turn with the book’s internal hostility to the

act of explication.” Concurring with the latter part of his argument, it is important to

explain that the former part not only describes the various literary techniques I have

already discussed in the preceding parts, but also the fact that there are numerous parts

that, language-wise, stand out from the rest of the text. For example, the following

scene occurs after Mark starts having intercourse with Johnny:

A train roars through him whistle blowing . . . boat whistle, foghorn, sky
rockets burst over oily lagoons . . . penny arcades open into a maze of
dirty pictures . . . ceremonial cannon boom in the harbor . . . a scream
shoots down a white hospital corridor . . . out along a wide dusty street
between palm trees, whistles out across the desert like a bullet (vulture
wings husk in the dry air). (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 79)

There are numerous passages like the quoted above throughout the text, ranging from

one paragraph to one or more pages. As Murphy explains, these passages not only help

in holding the text together, but they also provide a way to establish and maintain

connections among the fragmentary parts of the work (“Intersection”). However, as

Murphy continues, “such connections are more poetic or even musical than novelistic in

68
that they operate through evocative, impressionistic, or imagistic intensity rather than

logical or causal extension.” Murphy’s claim is best seen on another example, an

excerpt from the “Have You Seen Pantapon Rose?” section:

The Mississippi rolls great limestone boulders down the silent alley
...
“Clutter the glind!” screamed the Captain of the Moving Land . . .

Distant rumble of stomachs . . . Poisoned pigeons rain from the Northern

Lights . . . The reservoirs are empty . . . Brass statues crash through the
hungry squares and alleys of the gaping city . . .
Probing for a vein in the junk-sick morning . . .
Strictly from cough syrup . . . (166)

These parts provide significant challenge to the reader as they resist Roland Barthes’

classification of discourse—that is organization of various parts of the text according to

their roles. In other words, it is quite impossible to agree on interpretation of these parts

as cardinal functions, catalysers, indices, or informants; on the contrary, the reader has

to decide on the importance of these passages in the discourse. One might argue that

these passages can belong to all four Barthes’ narrative units: they might be cardinal

functions on the grounds of the work’s eschewing of traditional novel characteristics

such as plot or continuity (and therefore these passages would play important role in the

work because they further underline its indeterminate nature), catalysers due to their

rather fantastic nature that—to some—might help in explaining the way one cardinal

function follows another (by explicitly saying the world of Naked Lunch is a fantastic

place where everything is possible), indices proper thanks to their ability to evoke

particular feelings or moods in which following passages are read, or informants due to

the fact these passages convey pure data about the world of Naked Lunch—a world in

which the imaginary and the real collide. However, depending on the reading of the text

the reader has chosen, any of these interpretations can be instantly challenged. The role

of these passages as cardinal functions is disposed of in the case the reader searches for

69
a character-oriented discourse, catalysers and indices proper can be ignored due to the

work’s complicated structure and atemporalness (in other words, the passages in

question cannot explain or foreshadow something that is not at all related to the given

passage). In addition, categorizing the discussed passages as informants comes under

scrutiny whenever the reader decides to interpret these passages as hallucinations or

mere tropes. Of course, stating these passages do not mean anything is not a remarkably

good solution; however, the complicating classification of these parts further underlines

the writerly aspect of the work as a whole. The reader has to decide the value of these

passages based on his or her own reading of the remaining parts of the work and their

interpretation and although these passages, as Murphy claims, help in connecting the

fragmentary sections of the work, they also provide further contrast to the other sections

of Naked Lunch, therefore tipping the scales towards “indeterminate” rather than

“determinate.”

In direct contrast to these “meaningless” passages are numerous phrases,

passages, or whole sections of the discourse that not only demand the reader’s attention,

but seem to have the authority to explain numerous elements of the work. As it was

already explained, the “talking asshole” part is one such passage; however, I have also

already explained that the more “talking asshole” seems to explain, the more it should

be the subject of scrutiny. Another such part is the whole “Campus of Interzone

University” section, which features the Professor explaining to his students the

symbolism of the Ancient Mariner, the famous character from ‘The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner’ by Coleridge. Since it is considered to be one of the most important parts of

the work (as McConnell puts it, “[t]he Professor’s lecture on the Campus of Interzone

University is perhaps the stylistic matrix of the whole book”), I will quote the

Professor’s explanation at length:

70
 “[C]onsider the Ancient Mariner without curare, lasso, bulbocapnine or
straitjacket, albeit able to capture and hold a live audience . . . What is his
hrump gimmick? He he he he . . . He does not, like so-called artists at
this time, stop just anybody thereby inflicting unsent-for boredom and
working random hardship . . . He stops those who cannot choose but hear
owing to already existing relation between The Mariner (however
ancient) and the uh Wedding Guest . . .
“What the Mariner actually says is not important . . . He may be
rambling, irrelevant, even crude and rampant senile. But something
happens to the Wedding Guest like happens in psychoanalysis when it
happens if it happens. If I may be permitted a slight digression . . . an
analyst of my acquaintance does all the talking—patients listen patiently
or not . . . He reminisces . . . tells dirty jokes (old ones) [. . .]. He is
illustrating at some length that nothing can ever be accomplished on the
verbal level. He arrived at this method through observing that The
Listener—The Analyst—was not reading the mind of the patient . . . The
patient—The Talker—was reading his mind . . . [. . .]”
“Gentlemen I will slop a pearl: You can find out more about
someone by talking than by listening.”
Pigs rush up and the Prof pours buckets of pearls into a through . . .
“I am not worthy to eat his feet,” says the fattest hog of them all.
“Clay anyhoo.” (73-74)

Apart from McConnell, several other critics interpret this section as the key part of the

text, namely Edward J. Ahearn and Timothy S. Murphy. Ahearn includes the following

riot scene from the “Benway” section in his analysis of the above-quoted text:

Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. Who

can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandrill,
alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can
shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and screams with joy?
Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in mouth like a
vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would spare this, but my pen hath its
will like the Ancient Mariner. (34) (emphasis added)

By adding the above quoted scene to his analysis, Ahearn interprets Naked Lunch as a

visionary text in the vein of Blake, Lautréamont, or the French surrealist, a text that

directly addresses the reader in order to prepare him or her for “a salacious and

visionary, sometimes hilarious, universally frightening depiction of reality in America

and the world.” Murphy goes even further: by stressing the “You can find out more

about someone by talking than by listening” passage from the “Campus of Interzone”

71
section, the critic concludes “that the reader will learn more about him/herself in

reading Naked Lunch than s/he will learn about the narrator (or the author). The novel’s

success, as it itself insists, depends on the reader’s active, shaping involvement in the

process of reconstruction and interpretation” (“Intersection”). In other words, the

discourse offers numerous authoritative-sounding parts that seem to contain numerous

ideas and interpretations apparently central to the work. As it was already stated, these

“central” passages may be of various lengths, from a couple of sentences to several

pages, some of which have been already mentioned: “A functioning police state needs

no police” (31); “You see control can never be a means to any practical end . . . It can

never be a means to anything but more control . . . Like junk . . .” (137); “[t]he broken

image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell . . . Poverty, hatred, war,

police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. The Human

Virus can now be isolated and treated” (141); “all Agents defect and all Resisters sell

out” (172). It must be stressed that these passages are located in a text that is extremely

complex and that uses contradiction and absence as its weapons to achieve its

indeterminacy. Oliver Harris notes these parts “present the reader, weary from the

teeming heterogeneity of Naked Lunch, with what appear to be master keys to the text”

(Secret 216). The critic also adds that these passages—or keys to the text36—are the

work’s “most seductive but also its most suspect parts, because they promise to save us

from the reading experience itself, from its disorienting material contradictions and

aggressive rhetorical self-subversions.” Simply put, one of the several techniques

Burroughs employs throughout the text is used when dealing with these passages and

the “meaningless” parts mentioned above, that is the technique of bringing into focus

some parts of the discourse while ignoring others. However, since these passages are

36
Since these keys play a vital part not only in interpreting Naked Lunch but also in my own thesis, I
will italicize them to set them off the text for clearer understanding from now on.

72
found in a text that directly challenges the reader’s grasp of the work and, furthermore,

are often produced by the characters of the discourse who are, as I have already shown,

often unreliable or unstable as the discourse itself, these passages and the meanings they

provide should be questioned by the reader.

Naturally, not every such passage is uttered by the work’s characters; some, as

the “Atrophied Preface” section concluding the work or “Deposition: Testimony

Concerning a Sickness,” the original introduction demanded by the editors that opened

the Grove edition of Naked Lunch intended for the US market (Miles and Grauerholz

246), are written in the voice of the author himself. For example, “Atrophied Preface”

contains the following often quoted lines: “There is only one thing a writer can write

about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing [. . .]. I do not presume to

impose “story” “plot” “continuity” [. . .]. I am not an entertainer . . .” (184). In

“Deposition” Burroughs explains the title of the work:

I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been
published under the title Naked Lunch. The title was suggested by Jack
Kerouac. I did not understand what the title meant until my recent
recovery. The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED Lunch—a
frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.
(199)

Since these parts come directly from the author himself and not one of his characters,

they are often attributed vital part in understanding the work. For instance, Frank

McConnell claims that the work’s Introduction—that is the “Deposition” segment—“is

an essential and central part of the book [. . .] which without either Introduction or

Appendix would be immeasurably crippled, dull and ‘unpoetic’ as those sections may

be in themselves.”37 McConnell is not the only critic that relies solely on these parts in

interpreting Naked Lunch. Timothy Murphy in “Intersection” considers the following

37
McConnell means by the Appendix section the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”
published in The British Journal of Addiction; ironically, the first edition of Naked Lunch published by
Olympia Press did not have any of these parts (Miles and Grauerholz 241).

73
passage from “Atrophied Preface” as “the key to reading, and thus teaching, Naked

Lunch:”

I [. . .] suddenly don’t know where I am. Perhaps I have opened the

wrong door and at any moment The Man In Possession, The Owner Who
Got There First will rush in and scream:
“What Are You Doing Here? Who Are You?”
And I don’t know what I am doing there nor who I am. I decide to
play it cool and maybe I will get the orientation before the Owner shows .
. . So instead of yelling “Where am I?” cool it and look around and you
will find out approximately . . . You were not there for The Beginning.
You will not be there for The End . . . Your knowledge of what is going
on can only be superficial and relative . . . (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 183-
84)

In other words, the keys in the text, whether coming directly from the author or

indirectly through the work’s characters, provide the reader with an understanding of

the discourse. However, the reader has to choose which keys he or she uses, since there

are too many keys present in the discourse and often conflict each other. Therefore,

these passages in effect repeat the same textual strategy as the often contradictory or

unreliable narrative voices: by choosing several particular keys as the explanation of the

text, the reader must automatically dismiss the remaining keys as unfitting for the

chosen explanation. For instance, “Atrophied Preface” seems to offer a straightforward

interpretation of the text: “Lee The Agent (a double-four-eight-sixteen) is taking the

junk cure . . . space-time trip portentously familiar as junk meet corners to the addict”

(182). In other words, Burroughs himself seems to argue that almost everything in the

discourse—from Interzone to various characters as Doctor Benway or A.J.—is a mere

hallucination produced during the painful withdrawal period Lee undergoes in the

“Hospital” section. However, as I have pointed out previously, not only the reference to

Lee as an “Agent” seems to contradict the assumption that most of the discourse occurs

only inside Lee’s mind during withdrawal, but also such interpretation can lead to

dismissing the other possibly important keys found in the discourse itself as mere

74
hallucinations—and therefore unimportant. To provide an example, while McConnell

includes the discussion of Ancient Mariner in his essay, he reaches a very different

conclusion then the other two critics relying on the same part. By stressing the drug

elements of the text and ignoring the reader-writer keys mentioned by Ahearn and

Murphy, McConnell interprets Naked Lunch as “a religious confession,” stating that “it

is not the journal of a cure, but is the cure” itself from addiction, whether to control or

drugs. In addition, while Murphy and McConnell rely greatly on the keys present in the

sections of the work containing the voice of the author himself (that is the “Atrophied

Preface” section plus “Deposition” and “Post Script . . . Wouldn’t You?” additions of

the later editions), other critics claim that Burroughs is often being ironic in these

sections and therefore not to be trusted (Harris, Secret 187; Lydenberg 7).38

Furthermore, highlighting the various keys as bearers of meaning fundamental for

interpretation of the work ignores the previously discussed “meaningless” parts of the

discourse. Davis Schneiderman explains that these “meaningless” passages, “somewhat

resistant to the critical readings that for the most part ignore the material surrounding

and asphyxiating those few ‘straightforward’ statements, remain for many readers

fundamentally unknowable, extraneous, dangerous—excessive” (195). In other words,

the text again forces the reader into choosing some of its passages while ignoring the

rest as not fitting the explanation provided by the chosen set of keys, therefore changing

its meaning with every reading and every interpretation.39

Of course, facing the reader with seemingly meaningless passages as well as

with their authoritative-sounding counterparts is not the only language-related technique

38
The issue of irony present in these parts is an important one and to be dealt with in the following
section of the thesis.
39
That being said, the keys of the discourse should not be thought of as unimportant; on the contrary,
these keys are probably the most important part of the discourse, but “only” because a different choice of
a set of keys—parts of the discourse seemingly containing explanations of the discourse—often greatly
changes the reader’s interpretation of the work. However, this issue will be dealt with in appropriate time;
now it is more than satisfying to conclude that the discourse again forces the reader to highlight some
parts of the text while ignoring—or at least suppressing the meaning—of others.

75
Burroughs employs in the text. Apart from deciphering the importance (or

unimportance) of such passages, the reader must be also able to unwrap the meaning of

numerous slang and argot words present in the text. For example, the following

dialogue takes place at the beginning of the work: “‘Thomas and Charlie,’ I said.

‘What?’ ‘That’s the name of this town’” (14). As MacFayden explains, the actual name

of the town, pronounced “Thomas ‘n’ Charlie,” is Tamazunchale (“Dossier One” 5);

however, as MacFayden elaborates, the importance of the utterance lies in the fact that

both “Thomas” and “Charlie” are slang terms related to narcotics: Thomas is derived

from Tom Mix (therefore signifying a fix) and Charlie is a euphemism for Cocaine. In

addition, the two words also have hidden sexual meanings, therefore causing the

interlocutory “What?” to have double meaning, “pointing to the hidden significance of

these two words, their multiple coded meanings encapsulating in an extraordinary way

the operations of slang in narcotics parlance and sexual euphemism.” Naturally, not

every usage of a slang word is concealed behind the discourse; actually, most of the

slang terms are directly in front of the reader. Words such as “pigeon,” “chucks,” or

“burn down,” appear throughout the text and while some of these words are later

explained (such as the word “cowboy,” a word from “New York hood talk [that] means

kill the mother fucker whenever you find him” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 174), most are

left unexplained by the discourse.40 As Burroughs explains, these terms come from

various social groups: “‘Jive talk’ is used more in connection with marijuana than with

junk. In the past few years, however, the use of junk has spread into “hip,” or “jive

talking” circles, and junk lingo has, to some extent, merged with “jive talk” (Junky

129). However, the discourse is not limited only to “jive talk” or “junk lingo;” as I have

already mentioned, there are numerous explanatory intrusions in the text, therefore the

40
The terms mean, in the order they appear above: “[i]nformer,” “[e]xcessive hunger, often for
sweets” (after ceasing to take drugs), and “[t]o overdo or run into the ground” (for example a drug store
by frequent visits of drug addicts in order to fill the scripts) (Burroughs, Junky 129-31).

76
discourse not only contains a vast number of slang terms, but also numerous foreign-

language or scientific words. For instance, the discourse explains the word querencia as

a “bullfighting term . . . The bull will find a spot in the ring he likes and stay there and

the bullfighter has to go in and meet the bull on his bull terms or coax him out” (72).

The reader is bombarded by a barrage of unfamiliar words and phrases and although

some of them are explained, the sheer number of such passages adds to the exotic nature

of the text. It is valuable to note that the text is not limited to words or short phrases

when employing the various vocabularies; on the contrary, the use of several

vocabularies is reflected in the multiple voices of the numerous characters present in the

discourse. Many characters—whether major or minor—have their own voices and own

ways of expressing which is often very specific, as no other character contains such

voice. Ian MacFayden sums up the usage of various languages for the characters of the

work:

The voices are mediated, incorporating advertisements, popular songs,

psychoanalytic and medical jargon, business spiel, hipster jive talk,
junkie lingo, candy butcher and carny pitches, film and TV voice-over
narration, radio announcer and newspaper columnist shtick, legal jargon
and officialese, literary and anthropological references, viral and
cybernetic terminologies, switching and combining quite different
parlances while the source material shifts from old radio serials to dime-
store comics and pulps, noir to sci-fi to horror and western film scenarios
and teen gang flicks, characters flipping between quite different
discourses and scenarios in a cultural hullabaloo which is all echoes —
dubbed, spliced, ventriloquized, post-synchronized. (“Mouth Inside”)

While the various character voices are worth mentioning, MacFayden’s

reference to pulp fiction is of primary importance because Burroughs employs the

esthetics of the popular novel on such a scale that it leads Murphy to argue that

Burroughs “makes use of the detective novel and science fiction in order to displace

dogmatic structures of thought and transcendent structures of power” (Wising 7).

Whether Murphy’s claim is true or not, Naked Lunch certainly contains too many pulp

77
fiction references to be ignored. Not only it features the “seedy” world of drug trade and

addiction, but some of Burroughs’ inventions, such as the creatures Mugwumps with

their “[t]hin, purple-blue lips [that] cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which

they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients” (Burroughs, Naked

Lunch 46), look as if coming directly from a pulp fiction (Murphy, “Random Insect

Doom” 227).41 After all, the work is framed by two sections that more or less explicitly

mention pulp fiction, that is by “And Start West” and “Hauser and O’Brien.” While the

latter belongs among the sections that directly uses pulp fiction language—“I felt the

concussion of Hauser’s shot before I heard it. His slug slammed into the wall behind

me. Shooting from the floor, I snapped two quick shots into Hauser’s belly” (177)42—

the former, however, uses pulp fiction references in a slightly different way:

I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves,
setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and
dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and
two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train . . . Young,
good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the
door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the
type: comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks
and the Dodgers, calls the counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A
real asshole. [. . .]
“So long flatfoot!” I yell, giving the fruit his B production. I look
into the fruit’s eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two
hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and
carrying The News as a prop. “Only thing I read is Little Abner.”

41
Burroughs was a fond reader of pulp fiction, especially the hardboiled detective and science fiction
genres, the former having influence on his early writing style (Stevens 20; Burroughs, “William
Burroughs, An Interview” 29). Furthermore, Burroughs’ Junky was first published bound with a memoir
of a narcotics agent by Ace Books as a paperback; at that time paperbacks “were sold mostly from
newsstands and railroad stations rather than through bookshops, but they had huge print runs and reached
far more people than conventionally published hardbacks. They were never reviewed and tended to be
downmarket novels: crime or westerns, or else cheap reprints of classics” (Miles, El Hombre Invisible 59-
62).
42
Naked Lunch was originally intended to contain a more straightforward, science fiction oriented
narrative. As Burroughs writes in a 1955 letter to Kerouac: “My novel is taking shape. Scientists have
discovered an anti-dream drug that will excise the intuitive, empathizing, symbolizing, myth- and art-
creating faculties . . . We—a few counter conspirators—are trying to obtain and destroy the formula. So
there will be a lot of shooting, violence etc. In fact one beginning I kill two cops who have come to arrest
me because I know I am slated to be used as guinea pig in experiments with the anti-dream drug”
(Burroughs, Letters 266-67). “The Conspiracy,” a section complimenting “And Start West” and “Hauser
and O’Brien” that was in the 1958 manuscript of Naked Lunch but did not survive into the final version of
the work, contains the above-mentioned plot. For “The Conspiracy,” see Interzone 106-111.

78
 A square wants to come on hip . . . Talks about “pod,” and smoke it
now and then [. . .].
“Thanks, kid,” I say, “I can see you’re one of our own.” His face
lights up like a pinball machine, with stupid, pink affect. [. . .]
And the fruit is thinking: “What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys
in Clark’s about this one.” He is a character collector [. . .]. So I put it on
him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some “pod” as he calls it,
thinking, “I’ll catnip the jerk.” (Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when
it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or uninstructed.) (3-5)

In other words, the opening of Naked Lunch begins as a rather typical pulp fiction

story—a drug addict running away from the law—but it also features a reflection of the

esthetics of pulp fiction and their interpretation by casual readers. Murphy explains the

relations between the narrator’s “pulp behavior” and the fruit’s reaction as the interplay

between Naked Lunch and its reader:

The fruit, conventionally bourgeois down to his Brooks Brothers shirt,

gets involved because he is a prurient “character collector” whose
expectations of the junky are derived from “B production” movies and
their literary correlative, pulp fiction. Lee plays into the fruit’s genre
expectations and hipster aspirations by treating him as “one of our own”
in order to set him up for a later con. The fruit is clearly a surrogate for
the reader of Naked Lunch, whose familiarity with the means and ends of
pulp fiction is the hook that draws him into the novel’s vast confidence
game.43 (“Random Insect Doom” 223)

Harris explains that the “And Start West” passage quoted above creates two audiences.

The first audience is the reader who is “directly and knowingly” addressed through the

“you” in “You know the type” and the second is the “type” himself who is not only a

reflection of a “1950s model American” but also “coincides with the reader” (Secret

50). In other words, by identifying the “type” as the possible reader of Naked Lunch and

at the same time dismissing him as a rather naïve person the reader is forced to re-

43
The passage also includes page numbers of the quoted Naked Lunch phrases; however, since
Murphy uses the same edition as I do and the phrases he quotes are all included in the large excerpt
above, I have omitted them for the sake of brevity.

79
evaluate his or her position on many elements of pulp fiction, such as the world of drug

addiction.44

To put it simply, the work uses numerous pulp fiction elements on the one hand

but often displays the very same elements as rather naïve and unrealistic. Such dynamic

of the discourse is best seen in the following part of Naked Lunch:

Provident junkies, known as squirrels, keep stashes against a bust. Every

time I take a shot I let a few drops fall into my vest pocket, the lining is
stiff with stuff. I had a plastic dropper in my shoe and a safety pin stuck
in my belt. You know how this pin and dropper routine is put down: “She
seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her
leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting
for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of
sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous galvanized need [. . .] has
broken the dropper off deep into the flesh of her ravaged thigh (looking
rather like a poster on soil erosion). But what does she care? She does not
even bother to remove the splintered glass [. . .]. What does she care for
the atom bomb, the bedbugs, the cancer rent, Friendly Finance waiting to
repossess her delinquent flesh . . . Sweet dreams, Pantopon Rose.” (10)

Lydenberg insightfully comments on the excerpt above: “The description is ‘put down’

in quotation marks, as a voice to be distinguished from the flat factual delivery which

introduces it. This description is full of just the sort of moral rhetoric that demands the

reader’s disgust and righteous condemnation” (12). As the critic points out, the laments

of the part in question such as “What does she care for” are direct references to some of

the numerous voices mentioned by MacFayden several pages earlier, namely references

to “the popular domestic genres of soap opera and tawdry modern romance adventure”

(“Mouth Inside”). The discourse of Naked Lunch immediately corrects the moralizing

part above by the following: “The real scene you pinch up some leg flesh and make a

quick stab hole with a pin. Then fit the dropper over, not in the hole and feed the

solution slow and careful so it doesn’t squirt out the sides . . .” (10). To provide one

44
As Harris in the introduction to Junky notes, Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, with
its depiction of the main character, Frankie Machine, a “low life, poker-dealing junkie,” had a large
impact on the stereotyped image of the addict, who was due to the novel redefined as a “hustling street
criminal” (xx).

80
more example on the discourse’s self-reflexivity: “Will Jim go back to crime? Will Brad

succumb to the blandishments of an aging vampire, a ravening Maw? . . . Needless to

say, the forces of evil are routed, and exit with ominous snarls and mutterings” (109). In

short, the discourse often uses pulp fiction elements, yet it also questions the perceived

notion of many of these elements through either indirect references to pulp esthetics (as

in the beginning of the work) or through direct corrections of given pulp fiction parts.45

The discussion of pulp fiction influences leads to another crucial element of the

discourse already touched upon in the preceding chapters—that is to the presence of

humor in Naked Lunch. Humor is in the work prevalent in such a way that some critics

claim it is of utmost importance to the work; as Thomas Parkinson says, “[people] read

Naked Lunch because it is outrageously funny.” George Gessert agrees with Parkinson

on the importance of humor, saying that “[Burroughs] is one of America’s greatest

humorists, comparable to Twain and Vonnegut. Naked Lunch may be one of the most

horrifying novels ever written, but it is also one of the funniest, and anyone who can

read it without laughing again and again has missed the point” (239). The discourse is

filled with humorous phrases, sentences, and whole sections that make fun of anything

at hand:

“Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform
advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by
throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his
entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: ‘I don’t give them
time to die,’ he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. ‘Fucking
undisciplined cells!’ he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-
fighter.” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 52)

The humor in Naked Lunch is not restricted to scenes related to everyday life such as

the operation scene above; on the contrary, there are many parts in the discourse that are

visible social or political commentaries:

45
See Timothy Murphy’s “Random Insect Doom: The Pulp Science Fiction of Naked Lunch” for
more information on pulp influences in Naked Lunch.

81
 “Well,” [the Resident Governor] says with a tight smile, “so you’ve
decided to let us stay another year have you? Very good of you. And
everyone is happy about it? . . . Is there anyone who isn’t happy about
it?”
Soldiers in jeeps sweep mounted machine guns back and forth across
the crowd with a slow, searching movement.
“Everybody happy. Well that’s fine.” He turns jovially to the
prostrate President. “I’ll keep your papers in case I get caught short. Haw
haw haw.” His loud, metallic laugh rings out across the dump, and the
crowd laughs with him under the searching guns. (153)

The work’s sense of humor often has, as visible from the scene above, satirical

overtones. After all, the section “Ordinary Men and Women” is for the most part an

exhibition of a vast array of molds—ordinary and familiar characters presented in a

non-familiar setting to further ridicule their personalities. In addition, numerous other

sections of the text such as the whole “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone”

section or the “talking asshole” and “Meeting of International Conference of

Technological Psychiatry” parts only invite satirical readings and readers might be

tempted to read Naked Lunch as a satirical work. As McConnell comments on the

“Deposition” section requested by the editors of the Grove edition, it “gives the book its

peculiar and brilliant satiric form.” However, many parts of the work refuse to be

classified as such, which will become clear from Northrop Frye’s explanation of satire

and its use:

Two things [. . .] are essential to satire; one is wit or humour founded on

fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of
attack. Attack without humour, or pure denunciation, forms one of the
boundaries of satire. It is a very hazy boundary, because invective is one
of the most readable forms of literary art, just as panegyric is one of the
dullest. [. . .] To attack anything, writer and audience must agree on its
undesirability [. . .].
Humour, like attack, is founded on convention. [. . .] All humour
demands agreement that certain things, such as a picture of a wife beating
her husband in a comic strip, are conventionally funny. To introduce a
comic strip in which a husband beats his wife would distress the reader,
because it would mean learning a new convention. (Frye 209-10)

82
Put differently, satire not only requires an object to attack but also a humor based on

convention, and it is the latter that complicates the understanding of Naked Lunch as a

satirical work. As the following excerpt told by the County Clerk shows, the humor of

Naked Lunch often goes against the grain of conventional humor and without any hint

of restraint:

“So they burned the nigger and that ol’ boy took his wife and went back
up to Texarkana without paying for the gasoline and old Whispering Lou
runs the service station couldn’t talk about nothing else all Fall: ‘These
city fellers come down here and burn a nigger and don’t even settle up
for the gasoline.’”46 (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 147)

In other words, the joke here—complaining that a couple who burned an African-

American to death did not pay for the gasoline used for the burning—is hardly an

example of conventional humor. Furthermore, the discourse does not provide any

feedback to the reader, no moral reevaluation or condemnation of what the reader has

just read. To provide one more example, the following conversation takes place

between Clem and Jody: “‘So I shoot that old nigger and he flop on his side one leg up

in the air just a-kicking.’ ‘Yeah, but you ever burn a nigger?’” (133). Rob Johnson notes

that these and similar passages caused much of the controversy surrounding the book:

“Like the judge in the Naked Lunch trial [. . .] early critics couldn’t see how a man

could create characters like the county clerk and not be that kind of a person” (Johnson,

“Good Ol’ Boy” 50).47 To sum up, the humor is often based on accentuating the

horrifying or immoral to the point of absurdness. Naturally, the often extreme nature of

46
Lynching—whether burning or hanging—is a recurring image in the work; as Miles explains,
hanging was the method of capital punishment in Missouri at that time and the media was filled with
detailed descriptions of lynching (El Hombre Invisible 27).
47
The history of lynching is still clearly seen in the South; as Rob Johnson notes in an insightful
essay that traces the influences of Burroughs’ life and upbringing in the South on Naked Lunch—
“William S. Burroughs as ‘Good Ol’ Boy’”—there is an advertisement for the “Ol’ Sparky” museum
(“Ol’ Sparky” being Texas’ original electric chair) on the outskirts of Houston (46). The billboard is
sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce from Huntsville, Texas.

83
the humor can be viewed by some as a criticism of the displayed event; however, many

can be repulsed by the often grotesque and violent nature of the humor.

To sum up so far, while there are numerous rather satirical parts in the text, at

least the same number of parts can be by some readers viewed as only disgusting and

shocking passages without any intended critique. Of course, the preceding excerpts may

be still considered satirical on the grounds that they are uttered by the molds that are

parodies by definition. However, there are numerous non-narrated parts (that is parts of

the work not narrated by any of the discourse’s characters) that further sidestep Frye’s

categorization of satire, and there is no better example of such part than the “Hassan’s

Rumpus Room” section.48 In the section, an eager audience watches a boy being raped

and simultaneously hanged by a Mugwump:

The boy crumpled to his knees with a long “OOOOOOOOH,” shitting

and pissing in terror. [. . .]
The Mugwump slips the noose over the boy’s head and tightens the
knot caressingly behind the left ear. [. . .] The Mugwump sidles around
the boy goosing him and caressing his genitals in hieroglyphs of
mockery. He moves in behind the boy with a series of bumps and shoves
his cock up the boy’s ass. [. . .] The guests shush each other, nudge and
giggle. Suddenly the Mugwump pushes the boy forward into space, free
of his cock. He steadies the boy with his hands on the hip bones, reaches
up with his stylized hieroglyph hands and snaps the boy’s neck. A
shudder passes through the boy’s body. His penis rises in three great
surges pulling his pelvis up, ejaculates immediately. (Burroughs, Naked
Lunch 63-64)

Not only the Mugwump then proceeds to further copulate with the corpse; the reader is

reminded of the presence of an audience during this act—and therefore of the

audience’s approval—in the “A.J.’s Annual Party” section by the local sheriff: “Step

right up. [. . .] When his neck snaps sharp, this character will shit-sure come to rhythmic

48
“Hassan’s Rumpus Room” is one of the infamous sections that lead to the Naked Lunch trial,
which concluded the work has “redeeming social value” and therefore is not obscene, therefore marking
the end of “overt literary censorship in the United States” (Miles and Grauerholz 243). For an interesting
analysis of the trial and its subsequent impact on censorship in the United States, see “Still Dirty after All
These Years” by Loren Glass in Naked Lunch@50.

84
attention and spurt it out all over you” (86). Both scenes of the ritualized hanging

contain some humorous parts; for example, the sheriff describes the soon-to-be-hanged

boy’s penis by saying “[t]his character has nine inches, ladies and gentlemen, measure

them yourself inside.” However, the scene is rather distressing and some readers might

be put off by the way the scene is handled. Frye explains, “genius seems to have led

practically every great satirist to become what the world calls obscene” (219). However,

the critic also explains that satire needs apart from the grotesque also “at least an

implicit moral standard” (209) and it is precisely this “implicit moral standard” Frye

mentions that many of the violent and grotesque scenes of Naked Lunch lack: instead of

condemning the scene through a reflector or narrator, the reader is only provided with a

flat description of the scene; instead of commenting on the scene in a later chapter, the

sheriff invites more people to form the audience of the act. As it was stated above, some

might consider these passages satirical on the grounds that they are absurd and

unrealistic; on the contrary, as it will be discussed later, there are several passages in the

text that seem to be creation of pure fantasy without any other purpose that to make the

reader laugh. Furthermore, the absence of any moral condemnation may be truly

troubling for some readers. For example, David Lodge states that Naked Lunch fails as a

satire; in his own words, the work “suspends rather than activates the reader’s moral

sense” (qtd. in Lydenberg 8). In addition, even though Burroughs provides a reading of

this part in the “Deposition” section as an indictment of “capital punishment as the

obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 205),

such statement is not enough for some critics: it is “hogwash,” to quote Parkinson. The

critic continues:

It boggles my mind to imagine any reader of the text, without

Burroughs’s intervention, stumbling unaided on the notion that those
obscene, barbaric and disgusting passages are anything more than an
exhibit of the kind of depravity that the human mind can sink to, and of

85
 which to the guilt and sorrow of humanity, we are all capable. But the
text itself gives no clue to Burroughs’s intended effect. (emphasis added)

In other words, while the text contains satirical passages, there are also passages that do

not possess such characteristics. Whether these parts are thickly-veiled satires or not

satirical at all is difficult to determine, since there are very few elements of the text that

might help the reader to decide for the former or the latter.

As I have noted several pages earlier, Frye claims that pure denunciation forms

one of the boundaries of satire; the pure fantasy forms the other. The critic further

explains:

The humour of pure fantasy, the other boundary of satire, belongs to

romance, though it is uneasy there, as humour perceives the incongruous,
and the conventions of romance are idealized. Most fantasy is pulled
back into satire by a powerful undertow often called allegory, which may
be described as the implicit reference in experience in the perception of
the incongruous. (220)

Simply put, rich imagination coupled with allegory form the other boundary of satire

and there are numerous parts in Naked Lunch that employ such rich imagination, often

exaggerating a situation to a point it becomes almost unbelievable. That is the case in

the passage describing the escape of INDs (Irreversible Neural Damage patients) from a

Reconditioning Center that covers more than six pages of the “Benway” section. The

part is an unrestrained, lurid—and hilarious—account of the patients harassing,

molesting, and in general wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting public:

A contingent of howling simopaths swing from chandeliers,

balconies and trees, shitting and pissing on passers-by. (A simopath—the
technical name for this disorder escapes me—is a citizen convinced he is
an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge
cures it.) Amoks trot along cutting off heads, faces sweet and remote
with a dreamy half smile [. . .]. Arab rioters yip and howl, castrating,
disemboweling, throw burning gasoline . . . Dancing boys striptease with
intestines, women stick severed genitals in their cunts, grind, bump and
flick it at the man of their choice . . . Religious fanatics harangue the

86
 crowd from helicopters and rain stone tablets on their heads, inscribed
with meaningless messages [. . .].
A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit,
exclaiming, “Mmmm, that’s my rich substance.” (Burroughs, Naked
Lunch 32-33)

The passage ends by a message begging the victimized population to remain in the state,

claiming that “[i]t is only a few crazies who have from the crazy place outbroken” (38).

While it might be claimed the passage is aimed as a satire on doctors and their treatment

of patients and/or general public, the allegory Frye requires for such a fantastical

passage to function as a satire is difficult to trace. “Burroughs’ method, surrealistic

exaggeration, forms part of the traditional repertoire of the political satirist,” writes

Murphy, “but his goal of ‘nakedness of seeing’ emphasizes the disturbing revelation of

obscured truth (though that truth may turn out to be paradoxical or ambiguous)”

(“Intersection”) (emphasis added). Murphy touches, although probably unwillingly, on

the use of satire—and humor in general—in Naked Lunch. The way humor is employed

in the work reflects the discourse’s tendency towards indeterminacy and unreliability—

through the presence of often contrasting as well as complementing parts, the discourse

often seemingly moves in one direction only to subsequently move in another.

Furthermore, the text does not provide many clues that might help in interpreting a

given part, and when it does, they are more often than not contrasted later in the work

by passages suggesting the exact opposite.

The constant indeterminacy and undermining of one discourse element by

another is also the reason some critics consider Naked Lunch a satire while others do not

see it as a satire at all, claiming that “Burroughs and his readers are just having a good

time” (Parkinson). The indeterminate nature of the Burroughs’ style, and of humor in

particular, is reflected in a 1955 letter to from the writer to Allen Ginsberg. In the letter,

Burroughs complains of the following: “Why do I always parody? Neither in life nor in

87
writing can I achieve complete sincerity [. . .] except in parody and moments of

profound discouragement” (Burroughs, Letters 272). Now I must return to a passage

discussed earlier in a different context.49 The following passage is inserted in the middle

of the above-mentioned Reconditioning Center passage after the patients escape and

proceed to terrorize the city:

Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. Who

can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandrill,
alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can
shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and screams with joy?
Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in mouth like a
vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would spare this, but my pen hath its
will like the Ancient Mariner. (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 34)

The reader, faced with the passage above, has numerous ways of interpreting it—as a

sincere and direct address towards the reader, an emphasis on a hidden satirical

message, or “just” as a hilarious account making fun of anything at hand (possibly of

the author himself).50 However, no matter which interpretation the reader chooses, it is

only the reader’s own interpretation. The text only rarely leans towards one or the other

without actually restating its position later. In other words, the use of humor reflects the

overall discourse’s strategy of incompleteness, indeterminacy and contradiction, making

a precise conclusion on the nature of a given part impossible.

Importantly, while discussing the humor of Naked Lunch one must not forget to

take into account the large number of non-humorous parts of the work. As it was

already said, there are many parts of the discourse that do not appear to be humorous at

all; on the contrary, they seem to insist on being taken seriously. I have already

mentioned several of these passages during the discussion of the discourse’s keys. To

provide one additional example, the part on bureaucracies and cooperatives found in

49
For the original context, see p. 59.
50
Naturally, one might claim the passage embraces all three interpretations. This issue will be dealt
in a thorough manner in the next chapter of the thesis.

88
Benway’s “talking asshole” monologue is another instance of the discourse’s more

serious tone, often interpreted as an explanation of the whole “talking asshole” part:

Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root
anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotics 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. (112)

As Lydenberg explains, Burroughs’ “scientific or technical voice often intrudes abruptly

in Naked Lunch, breaking in on the tone of a passage or the development of some

farcical and fantastic situation” (13). The latter part of the critic’s argument is of

significance: the above-quoted part is inserted into Benway’s monologue which

describes a man and his talking behind. In other words, the text’s “scientific” or serious-

toned parts are often more or less explicitly contrasted with other, humorous passages,

and the reader is faced with the difficulty of interpreting these passages. Naturally, one

might use the above-quoted part as an explanation of the main “talking asshole” part,

thus interpreting the story of the man and his talking anus as an allegory on

bureaucracy. However, as it was already pointed out, the narrative voices and the

discourse’s characters are rather unreliable and entrusting them with an explanation of

the discourse is only another case of misunderstanding the textual strategies of the text.

Oliver Harris provides a further insight on the issue of the work’s voices by explaining

that Benway, “a manipulator and coordinator of control systems” (Burroughs, Naked

Lunch 19), is forced by the discourse to “speak against his own position” (Secret 221);

at the same time, Burroughs forces his own position, that is his opinion on democracy

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and cooperatives, “into a mouth that must render it suspect,” in effect employing “a

strategic art of self-subversion in which authority is not challenged directly but turned

against itself.” The tendency of the discourse to question its key parts is repeated

throughout the book. To provide one more example, the oft quoted passage from the

“Atrophied Preface” section—“You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point .

. . I have written many prefaces” (187)—is actually only the beginning of a whole

paragraph; however, the tone of the passage changes dramatically: “They atrophy and

amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to

the Negro race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe

bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her Afghan hound . . .”

Frye explains that irony is a sophisticated mode and the important difference “between

sophisticated and naïve irony is that the naïve ironist calls attention to the fact that he is

being ironic, whereas sophisticated irony merely states, and lets the reader add the

ironic tone himself” (38). Put differently, not only are the more serious-toned parts

contrasted with the more humorous, but the importance of the former is often

questioned through various means, whether by the tone or the narrative voice of a given

passage. In addition, it is only up to the reader to decide whether these passages should

be taken seriously or not, as the discourse does not provide any help in distinguishing

the tone of the passages and their overall importance for the discourse as a whole.

To conclude, the language of Naked Lunch is highly diverse: the discourse offers

humorous passages, parts that at the first sight contain the meaning of the text as well as

parts that seemingly have no significance for the discourse. Furthermore, these different

“languages” often contrast with one another, in effect constantly changing the flow and,

for the lack of better words, “shape” of the text. The discourse flows unexpectedly and

moves from a humorous part into a rather brutal one, from a seemingly scathing satire

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to an apparently meaningless and rather poetic passage only to substitute it with a dry,

scientific-sounding statement. Through the contrast of the varying parts, the ever-

changing “shape” of the text emphasizes its different aspects, yet it never settles on one

of the aspects as the central piece of the work. As the text never leans in favor of one or

the other, readers have to balance on the razor edge of possible interpretations, and

possibly move towards one or the other interpretation, on their own.

III.G Conclusion

As it is already clear, Naked Lunch is a text that strives—and I might add

successfully—for indeterminacy and uncertainty. The work ignores traditional notions

of organization, plot, continuity, and chronology in favor of indeterminacy and

multiplicity of interpretations. Such textual strategy, however, should not be viewed as a

negative aspect diminishing the power of the discourse. On the contrary, it should be

seen as a liberating effort to free the reader from the constraints of conventional

reading—and, in effect, thinking. Such conventions, as Burroughs shows, are not

necessary: Oliver Harris notes that at almost exactly the same time as Burroughs was

writing the manuscript of Naked Lunch, John Cage stated in his lecture “Experimental

Music” that “nothing was lost when everything was given away” because the creative

control that seemed to be lost was a mere hindrance (qtd. in Harris, Secret 242).51

Bolton mentions Burroughs’ “dismantling of the material contexts of time and

geography, both as points of orientation for readers and as a [sic] foundations for

ideological interpretations” (54), as an example of the writers sidestepping of

conventional literary techniques. However, as it is now clear, the literary strategies of

Naked Lunch that help in achieving its indeterminacy are not limited to those pointed

51
Burroughs was well aware of the connection between him and the composer; see The Job 33.

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out by Bolton. Other strategies the text uses to reach its goal of refusing a final

interpretation are: unreliable narrative voices, multiple layers of the discourse (that is,

narratives within narratives), or numerous highly contrasting—at times even

conflicting—passages.

In other words, the work is truly complex. Throughout the discourse are

numerous keys offered to the reader—passages seemingly providing the reader with

some stable footing. These keys are not necessarily just the serious-toned or self-

explanatory passages present in the work; on the contrary, the discourse’s apparent

insistence on a narrator (“Lee The Agent [. . .] is taking the junk cure” [182]) or the

insistence on setting might be also considered keys, since they help establish certain

facts that the reader perceives as reliable. Importantly, falling for one or the other key

presented by the text as “the” explanation is a sign of the reader’s inability to perceive

the text in the terms of Eco’s critical Model Reader, because the discourse presents to

the reader a vast number of possible readings without actually commenting on

reliability of these readings. Naturally, many different texts use similar strategy;

however, only very few of them use the strategy on so many fronts and in such direct

way as Naked Lunch does. Umberto Eco claims that an agreement about a text’s

interpretation can be reached, “if not about the meanings that a text encourages, at least

about those that a text discourages” (45). Since more often than not the various

interpretations of Naked Lunch are vastly different and even conflicting, Eco’s

assumption on a text’s interpretation might not be entirely without dents.

Simply put, Naked Lunch is a difficult text to tackle. It is a text that resists

interpretation and analysis—which are the reasons it is noteworthy to analyze such text.

As Franz Stanzel noted in 1979, Burroughs—together with authors like John Barth or

Thomas Pynchon—managed to deviate from literary conventions and norms as much as

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possible (17); furthermore, Stanzel notes that some of these authors’ experiments cannot

be definitely interpreted or classified in terms of the critic’s narrative theory. While he

was probably pointing out Burroughs’ work with the cut-up method, my analysis shows

that even Naked Lunch resists interpretation, and not only of its narrative voice. In other

words, it is a text that resists and defies literary conventions. Burroughs in a way truly is

the Exterminator and through writing Naked Lunch he set forth to exterminate the

molds—that is the conventions of writing.

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 IV. The Interpretations of Naked Lunch

IV.A Introduction

Because more than 50 years passed since the work has been published, a large

number of critical approaches and interpretation exists. However, although drawing a

lot of media attention, the Beats were initially marginalized by scholars. Thomas

Parkinson recalls the following event illustrating the initial approach to Burroughs and

the Beats in general:

When I was being considered for a promotion my then chairman asked

for a description of recent publications and current research, and after I
handed him a bibliography, I remarked that I was compiling an anthology
on the Beat writers. He replied that it would be wiser not to mention it
because there might be somebody on the Budget Committee who lacked
a sense of humor. [. . .] That was the first critical approach to the Beat
writers—ignore them, don’t take them seriously, they are a bunch of
clowns.

Naturally, the reception of the Beats changed greatly since the moment described above.

However, it was Burroughs that received the greatest amount of backlash from the

critics and the society alike. After all, the publication of Naked Lunch in the United

States lead to the famous obscenity trial; 52 it’s verdict—Naked Lunch is not obscene—

marked an end in a period of literary censorship (Glass 178). Furthermore, the initial

reaction of the press was not always favorable. While some praised the work,53 others

outwardly condemned it, the most famous disapproval coming from John Willet’s

review titled “Ugh:” “Glug glug. It tastes disgusting” (qtd. in Baker 141).54

52
Baker notes that, among other things, “[t]he prosecutor wanted to know why the book had so many
baboons” (141).
53
Herbert Gold for the New York Times wrote: “At its best, this book, which is not a novel but a
booty brought back from a nightmare, takes a coldly implacable look at the dark side of our nature” (qtd.
in Miles 110). Interestingly, the American press was much more favorable to the work than the British
counterpart. For a summary of the work’s reception, see Miles 109-113.
54
The review provoked the longest correspondence in the paper’s history: after some initial attacks,
defenses by Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgees—as well as Burroughs reaction to the review—
were printed as responses to the review (Baker 141).

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 It was probably not until Frank D. McConnell’s critical essay “William

Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction” published in 1967—eight years after the

work’s publication by the Olympia Press—that a critical and in-depth analysis of Naked

Lunch was attempted. Throughout the years, as Burroughs released more work that

further explored the themes present in Naked Lunch and as literary criticism evolved,

Burroughs became more accepted by the academia and a small, but dedicated

Burroughs scholarship emerged. Naturally, the critical perception of the author’s

work—and of Naked Lunch in particular—has been changing constantly. However,

since Naked Lunch is a highly indeterminate text, its interpretations vary greatly from

one another.

I have separated the critical reception of Naked Lunch into four categories which

correspond with the names of the chapters that follow: “Naked Lunch as a Humorous

Work,” “Naked Lunch as a Moral Metaphor,” “Naked Lunch and Literal Meaning,” and

“Naked Lunch as an Indeterminate Work.”55 It must be noted that while these categories

and their ordering roughly correspond to the way Burroughs criticism has evolved over

time, the categorization should not be interpreted as chronological. Instead, I have

separated the various approaches according to rather different criteria. Eco proposes, as

I have already mentioned several pages earlier, that an agreement on interpretation can

be reached: “I shall claim that a theory of interpretation—even when it assumes that

texts are open to multiple readings—must also assume that it is possible to reach an

agreement, if not about the meaning that a text encourages, at least about those that a

text discourages” (45). As it is clear, Naked Lunch is a highly indeterminate text and

since the critics discussed use the source text—for the most part—duly and in a

55
Davis Schneiderman also separates Naked Lunch criticism into four categories; however, he
chooses rather different categories than I did, basing them on the way they handle the drug element of the
work instead on the number of discourse elements a given interpretation takes into account. Therefore, he
distinguishes the interpretations into metaphorical, ironical, simple, and mythopoetical categories; see
Schneiderman 191-93.

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comprehensive way, the interpretations I will mention are not necessarily “wrong” or

“bad.” In other words, the discourse of Naked Lunch, while perhaps not necessarily

dismissing Eco’s claim as invalid, certainly places the critic’s argument on a shaky

ground. Therefore, I have categorized Naked Lunch criticism in terms of the number of

discourse elements—such as narrative voices, treatment of time and place, or the

unstable characters—they take into account. I will start with criticism that tends to

highlight only a limited number of these elements and finish with critical approaches

that discuss the work in the most comprehensive way, i.e. consider the highest number

of the discourse elements. Put differently, the more developed a critical interpretation is,

the more keys will it discuss.

In other words, I will conduct a quantitative analysis of critical approaches.

However, it should be noted that the interpretations mentioning fewer discourse

elements are not necessarily inferior to those with a larger number of these elements.

After all, quantity does not necessarily correlate with quality and a more focused

approach can often lead to interesting conclusions: in the case of Naked Lunch, such

highlighting can lead to discovering elements of the discourse that would be otherwise

lost in a more general discussion. On the other hand, the criticisms discussed below that

take into account a higher number of discourse elements show a more fundamental

understanding of the work than the interpretations favoring a more focused approach.

Furthermore, a critical Model Reader should be able to understand a given text in the

most comprehensive way possible, which again adds more weight to the critical

approaches taking into account a larger number of textual elements. As I will argue, the

comprehensive approach is especially important when discussing a complicated text

such as Naked Lunch. While the previous part of the thesis has shown that there are

numerous elements leading to the text’s high indeterminacy, the following part will

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show that the difference in interpretations of Naked Lunch lies precisely in the number

of discourse elements taken into consideration by the various critics: the more elements

are discussed, the more indeterminate the work is in the eyes of the specific critic. More

importantly, after the overview of Naked Lunch criticism is complete, I will claim that

the indeterminacy of Naked Lunch is its greatest achievement. Such indeterminate text,

as a handful of critics have concluded, has a great interpretative potential. I will further

develop the idea of interpretative potential, showing that the text manages to evade the

logic of dualism, the need to choose between one or the other, through insisting on the

importance of each element of the discourse. Therefore, Naked Lunch often produces

conflicting messages simultaneously, therefore constituting a radical discourse that

directly challenges the reader’s ability to interpret a literary text.

IV.B Naked Lunch as a Humorous Work

The first category is rather small: only a handful of critics mention the humor of

Naked Lunch and even fewer critics consider it actually important. It must be noted that

the categorization of humor as the first category does not mean that humor is not vital to

the work. On the contrary, I will later claim it is often Burroughs’ sense of humor that

greatly contributes to the work’s indeterminacy and criticism of the logic of dualism.

However, insistence on humor as the only important thing of the discourse not only

leaves many discourse elements unnoticed, but also diminishes Naked Lunch to a

“mere” humorous work, no matter how hilarious one might consider it to be. That is

perhaps the reason such interpretation is unpopular among critics—it ignores most

aspects of the work, thus reducing its potential almost to zero.

The staunchest advocate of interpreting Naked Lunch as a humorous work is

definitely Thomas Parkinson. In his essay “Critical Approaches to William Burroughs,

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or How to Admit an Admiration for a Good Book,” written in 1980, he offers a

straightforward interpretation of the work: “[W]e read Naked Lunch because it is

outrageously funny.” Parkinson makes his point clear on only two excerpts from the

work, the “Deposition” introductory section and the Benway part of the “Hospital”

section. He comments on the latter that it is a humorous representation of real-life

situations such as the reader’s unconscious fear of doctors and the doctor’s reliance and

pride in their skill; however, he insists that the passage is certainly not “an argument for

socialized medicine.”56 Parkinson further explains his interpretation of the work as a

whole:

The appeal of Naked Lunch resides in the fact that it expresses the plight
of a decadent capitalist culture in which the audience does not believe.
The conventional and civilized values that it flouts are accepted
superficially by the audience, and they delight in seeing them reduced to
sexual and violent horror. (emphasis added)

Interestingly, although he mentions “a decadent capitalist culture” and “conventional

and civilized values,” he insists that the work is not satirical; in his own words,

“Burroughs and his readers are just having a good time.” The argument above is closely

connected to Parkinson’s comment on the “Deposition” section, namely on the

following part that comments on the graphic imagery of “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” and

“A.J.’s Annual Party:”

Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic were
written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan
Swift’s Modest Proposal. These sections are intended to reveal capital
punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it
is. As always the lunch is naked. (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 205)

As I have already mentioned earlier, Parkinson calls Burroughs claim “hogwash,”

saying that the graphic imagery in the two sections is a fundamental indictment of

56
I have already mentioned the discussed part in the thesis. For the sake of brevity, I will not quote
the passage again; see page 81 for a short excerpt.

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humanity rather than an attack on capital punishment.57 The critic closes the discussion

of the two sections by stating that Burroughs is not a satirist but “a nihilist intent on

wiping out all conventional and civilized human values.”

After a closer look, it should be apparent that Parkinson’s argument is flawed.

First of all, although he claims that Burroughs’ prose is targeting “all conventional and

civilized human values,” he still insists that the highest achievement of Naked Lunch is

its humor. More importantly, such interpretation ignores numerous discourse elements

and even whole sections. For example, “The Examination” section does not contain

anything that might be regarded as humorous or funny and the same goes for the

“Hauser and O’Brien” section. Furthermore, Parkinson’s approach seems rather

superficial, because it ignores the way the discourse achieves its indeterminacy.

Unreliable narrative voices, the atemporal nature of the text, the way the work is

structured—all is meaningless to the critic. In effect, Parkinson is similar to the “real

asshole” from the first section of the work in his shallow approach to reading: while the

“real asshole” reads The News just for Little Abner comic strips, the critic reads Naked

Lunch only for the laughs.

However, one should give credit where it is due and Parkinson makes a couple

of interesting points. First of all, he points out that the humor of William Burroughs is a

special one, therefore unknowingly hinting at the way how Burroughs’ humor and its

understanding can lead to different interpretations. Furthermore, he explains that a

serious Burroughs criticism is needed, among it, interestingly, a “good Marxist

critique.” Most importantly, his conviction that Naked Lunch should be appreciated

mostly for its humor is based on the fact other critics often tend to interpret the work as

a moral allegory to the detriment of the humor present in the text. As Parkinson

57
See page 85 of the thesis for longer Parkinson’s commentary on the section in question.

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explains, since the appreciation of the humor “means that we share low motives and are

capable of being moved by gleefully unrestricted obscenity, we try to convince

ourselves that we are reading a noble tract against Capital Punishment or the AMA or

the judicial system.” In other words, while Parkinson ignores the more serious passages,

other critics often leave out the humorous parts in their interpretations. Therefore, both

approaches show an incomplete grasp of the text, resulting only in partial interpretations

that further highlight the indecisive nature of Naked Lunch.

It must be noted that Parkinson has a point when saying that readers and critics

should not be wary of appreciating Naked Lunch for laughs; however, as it is clear,

appreciating it only for the laughs diminishes the potential power of the discourse. Only

a handful of other critics beside Parkinson have commented on the role of humor in the

discourse and none of them have done so in such a detailed manner as Parksinson did.

For example, Frank McConnell notes that the sections “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” and

“A.J.’s Annual Party” are both “brilliantly managed and uproariously funny subversions

of two of our most cherished myths of escape, ‘party time’ and promiscuity.” George

Gessert in Burroughs’ obituary also mentions the importance of humor, stating that

“Naked Lunch may be one of the most horrifying novels ever written, but is also one of

the funniest, and anyone who can read it without laughing again and again has missed

the point” (239). Later in the obituary, Gessert touches on the specific nature of

Burroughs’ humor by stating the following: “Self-ridicule [. . .] is precarious: it leaves

ample room for irony and extreme violence, but no room at all for self pity or other

false notes” (emphasis added). Gessert’s comment is a valuable one, since it highlights

the unreliable—and almost dangerous—nature of Burroughs’ humor: it is often difficult

to decide when the author is joking and when not. More often than not, Burroughs’

critics forget to mention the humor present in Naked Lunch and when they do, they

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usually do not realize that it is often precisely the humor and its style that often support

two different—and sometimes even conflicting—interpretations at the same time.

To sum up, humor is certainly one of the central features of Naked Lunch. As I

will explain later in my thesis, it is Burroughs’ “precarious” sense of humor that often

achieves sending entirely conflicting messages to the reader. However, basing one’s

interpretation of the work solely on its humor is not a viable solution, since such reading

ignores numerous discourse elements. On the other hand, most of the critical receptions

of Naked Lunch often ignore the importance of humor, in effect showing that both

approaches tend to leave out some aspects of the work.

IV.C Naked Lunch as a Moral Metaphor

While the critical approaches stressing the role of humor in Naked Lunch are

scarce, the opposite is true for criticism aiming towards metaphorical, allegorical or

satirical interpretations. Ron Loewinsohn, William L. Stull, Edward J. Ahearn, Timothy

S. Murphy, Frank McConnell (the classification of the last two into this group is not

without problems), and many others understand the work in moral and metaphorical

terms. Their interpretations vary greatly: for example, while Ahearn considers

Burroughs a visionary writer, Stull is looking for cosmology and myth in Burroughs’

work. Nevertheless, all the critics have something in common: they think of the various

discourse elements in terms of metaphors and symbols, and they all share an unshakable

belief in the sincerity and importance of the “Deposition” and “Atrophied Preface”

sections for the understanding of the work.

Edward J. Ahearn places Naked Lunch within the tradition of apocalyptic

writing that includes many visionary (Blake, Coleridge) as well as surrealist writers. He

achieves such classification by stressing the three following discourse elements of

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“fundamental import:” graphic language, exalted experience, and the frequent reference

to drugs. Ahearn connects Burroughs’ use of language with a tradition of “sordid”

writing rooted in the work of Baudelaire, Nerval, or Zola; the “sordid” writing “puts the

reader in uncomfortable contact with all that is squalid in life: people, the body, the

world around us, language.” The category of exalted experience—which can include

any account of hallucination, dream, or prophetic inspiration—is represented by Blake

or Breton. However, these exalted experiences are changed through the use of drugs,

therefore connecting Burroughs also with Coleridge, De Quincy or Huxley. As Ahearn

notes, “there is a tradition of drug experimentation, ‘direct’ accounts of visions, and

explanatory, even scientific and moralizing, analysis,” and Burroughs is another

segment of the tradition.

The critic supports his argument by saying that several other kinds of writing

surrounding the main body of the text—in this case “Deposition,” “Atrophied Preface”

or “Master Addict” section—is perfectly in the vein of visionary writing. In addition, he

mentions that the central part of Naked Lunch often refers to the appendix, thus further

highlighting the importance of the “other kinds of writing.” As it is already apparent,

Ahearn greatly relies on the “Deposition” or “Atrophied Preface” sections to provide

explanations of the indeterminate discourse. For example, he quotes the following

passage from the latter section: “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what

is in front of his senses at the moment of writing . . . I am a recording instrument . . . I do

not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity’” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 184).

Ahearn explains the passage by saying it is a well-known claim in which “Burroughs

generalizes from drugs to all sensuous experience.” Naturally, reliance on the above-

mentioned part greatly changes the work’s interpretation. For instance, the “Hospital”

section with its inserted parts (such as “disintoxication notes” or “habit notes”)

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“corresponds most directly to the convention of direct note-taking.” In other words, he

interprets these notes as coming directly from Burroughs and not from a character

present in the discourse.58 Naturally, such approach may be faced with problems when

dealing with the multiple narrative voices. However, the critic manages to sidestep any

potential difficulties by fusing Lee, Carl, and the narrative voice “I” into one persona,

using “Atrophied Preface” as an argument supporting his conclusion: “Lee the Agent [. .

.] is taking the junk cure . . . space-time trip portentously familiar as junk meet corners

to the addict . . . cures past and future shuttle pictures through his spectral substance

vibrating in silent winds of accelerated Time” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 182). He

explains the part above as a warning about “dissolutions of body and person,” therefore

not only reinforcing his argument that Burroughs is present in all the major characters

and/or narrative voices, but also further stressing his reading of Naked Lunch as a

visionary work. To make his point even clearer, he describes the introductory

“Deposition” as “severe in its moral condemnation of drug use.”

Ahearn’s insistence on a rather metaphorical reading is also visible in the critic’s

comment on the following line from “Deposition:” “The junk virus is public health

problem number one of the world today” (205). Although the critic says that it is

Burroughs’ most compelling claim, he insists on a reading that fits the discourse

elements he chose for his interpretation: “Combining several metaphors, [Burroughs]

calls [junk] not only a virus, but a pyramid, a monopoly, an industry” (emphasis added).

As the critics belonging to the next category claim, these and other descriptions

connected to drugs are definitely not metaphors; on the contrary, they are meant literally

(Lydenberg 11). Ahearn’s reliance on his visionary interpretation as well as his inability

58
As it was already said, Burroughs’ first-hand experiences often inform his work (Bolton 70). The
“Hospital” section is no exception, being based on a cure Burroughs undergone in a Tangier hospital in
the fall of 1955. However, there is no direct statement in the discourse itself that would clearly state the
notes are truly Burroughs’. For Burroughs’ account of the treatment, see Letters 282-99.

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to deal with any discourse elements that refuse the explanation he has chosen can be

seen later in his essay. He mentions that there are “myriad features” of Naked Lunch

that cannot be rationalized; however, he promptly ascribes these features as belonging

to the tradition of visionary writers. In other words, Ahearn, faced with an immensely

varied discourse, chose elements that help support his argument and quickly dismisses

the rest.

William L. Stull uses a similar approach as Ahearn, but he instead interprets the

discourse in terms of mythology and its creation. The critic considers the discourse to be

linear and focused on Lee, thus promoting him to the main hero of the work, a hero on a

quest in the medieval romance tradition. He sees the following parts from the

“Deposition” section as the central pieces of the discourse:

Junk yields a basic formula of “evil” virus: The Algebra of Need.

The face of “evil” is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man
in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely
no limit or control.
[. . .]
I have almost completed a sequel to Naked Lunch. A mathematical
extension of the Algebra of Need beyond the junk virus. Because there
are many forms of addiction I think that they all obey basic laws. In the
words of Heisenberg: “This may not be the best of all possible universes
but it may well prove to be one of the simplest.” If man can see.
(Burroughs, Naked Lunch 201, 205)

Stull explains the above-mentioned excerpt is the “great vision” of the hero that happens

simultaneously with “the ultimate boon” that can revive the waste land, i.e. Burroughs’

landscape of Naked Lunch (228). As the critic elaborates, the quest in mythology

follows a tight pattern constituted by several parts, the most important being “The Call

to Adventure,” “The Road of Trials,” “The Ultimate Boon,” and “The Return,” the

ultimate boon being symbolized by the Holy Grail in medieval romance (226-27). In

other words, Stull interprets the work as a quest towards individualism and freedom to

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live and at the same time employs drug addiction as a metaphor of restriction and

control.

Naturally, a mythical quest needs a common enemy and a way of defeating it.

The enemy, in Stull’s reading, is provided by metaphorical reading of junk—as there

are “many forms of addiction,” they are represented by heroin itself, control, sex,

bureaucracy, technology, and even time (228). As the critic strives for a linear reading

of Naked Lunch, the way of freeing from the constraints is described throughout the

discourse. In other words, the plot of the work starts in the section “And Start West,” in

which Lee runs away from the narcotics agent in pursuit. Stull explains that the running

away element further complements Lee’s striving for the Holy Grail—for the cure from

the Algebra of Need: “Any quest for something is also a flight—with varying degrees of

urgency—from something. Since Burroughs early grasped ‘the junk equation,’ a strong

element of persecution and pursuit suffuses his work” (232). To show at least some

examples of how Stull views the text: After successfully evading the “fuzz,” Lee flees

to Mexico and subsequently encounters Benway. Although he is “a manipulator and

coordinator of symbol systems” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 19), he nevertheless offers

insight into the junk equation: “The naked need of the control addicts must be decently

covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his

enemy direct.” The critic summarizes the second half of the discourse as follows:

Lee again proves himself by supporting the Factualists in opposition to

the Liquifactionists [sic], Divisionists, and Senders, who threaten man’s
individuality. If by the time he reaches the end of the “long hall” the hero
is still not fully aware of what his quest for freedom finally involves, he
is at least able to take decisive action and break the stasis that held him
prisoner in [Burrough’s] earlier works. Isolation of "the human virus"
promises that treatment through direct attack can begin, and it is
significant that from this point on Lee is in the full sense of the word an
“agent” rather than a victim. In “The County Clerk” he outwits the
bureaucrats hampering his mission. His increased strength contrasts with
Carl Peterson’s weakness in the face of Benway’s psychological warfare,

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 the conventional hero being no match for the evil powers in Burroughs’
junk universe. (236-37)

The discourse ends, in Stull’s interpretation, by Lee finally reaching the end of his quest

and at least tentatively cracking the junk equation (241): “The Heat was off me from

here on out . . . relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past [. . .] Far

side of the world’s mirror” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 181).

A comparison of Stull’s and Ahearn’s reading is quite interesting. While both

rely on almost the same elements—the “additional” sections surrounding the main part

of the discourse, and the drug element—they come to very different conclusions.

Ahearn interprets Naked Lunch as a visionary work, in which the main characters merge

with the author, therefore making Burroughs himself the central character of the work.

He thus explains all the “unfitting” parts as hallucinations—visions—of the author,

images that are able to see into the future. On the other hand, Stull sees the drug element

in a more metaphorical way. He thinks of the discourse in mythological terms—in terms

of a quest for “Holy Grail”—a reading which enables him to impose linear plot and a

main character into the fragmentary discourse. Naturally, such reading ignores

numerous elements of the discourse, a fact that Stull indirectly acknowledges: “[A]

cluster of images associated with the quest and the waste land give Naked Lunch a unity

beneath its fragmented panorama of the gone world” (234-35). While some elements of

the discourse, such as the frequent shifts in setting or the “meaningless” parts, can be

included in Stull’s explanation above, several others—such as the work’s atemporal

nature—are simply unaccounted for in the critic’s interpretation.

It must be noted that Stull’s search for mythology is not entirely invalid. Not

only do several other critics such as Gregory Stephenson or Jennie Skerl explain

Burroughs’ works as mythological, but also Burroughs himself mentioned that his work

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is the mythology for the Space Age (Baker 140).59,60 However, it is the cut-up trilogy

written after Naked Lunch that actually devises Burroughs’ mythology and not the work

in question. In other words, one can trace the elements of the mythology in Naked

Lunch but certainly cannot claim that the work is purely mythological, both in its scope

and aim. Such interpretation is merely a backtracking of ideas, not serious interpretation

of a given work. To further comment on Stull’s interpretation, it is true that Burroughs

employs the junk formula of addiction on a number of controlling agents, including

language; however, the discourse of NL is definitely more intricate than the

straightforward reading Stull offers. Furthermore, as I will later argue, it is mainly

through the way the discourse is shaped that Burroughs fights the “Algebra of Need”—

the atemporal nature of the text, obscuring causality, often unidentifiable narrative

voices are Burroughs’ literary (and literal) weapons against the “Control Machine” of

conventional thinking and interpretation. Therefore, reducing the text to a

straightforward and linear narrative diminishes its potential effect as well as completely

obliterates the fact it is the very nature of the discourse that is of vital importance.

To provide one more example of a metaphorical or allegorical reading: Ron

Loewinsohn claims that although Naked Lunch contains a “postmodern babel of voices,

formats, and overlapping structures,” it in fact follows the path of classic didactic

literate or “how-to books of moral instruction that teach, by example more than by

precept, about the world’s double-dealing, how the world presents a deceptive

59
See “A Mythology for the Space Age” by Skerl and “The Gnostic Vision of William S.
Burroughs” by Stephenson for more information on the mythology present in Burroughs’ works.
60
Burroughs used such description on many occasions, for example during the International Literary
Conference at the Edinburgh Festival in 1962. Burroughs had stolen the conference and taken it “into
orbit” (Baker 140-41). As Burroughs himself said during the conference: “In my writing I am acting as a
map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, [. . .] as a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in
exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed [. . .]. If writers are to travel in space time and
explore areas opened by the space age, I think they must develop techniques quite as new and definite as
the techniques of physical space travel” (Burroughs, Word Virus 272). For the complete speech given by
Burroughs, see Word Virus 272-73.

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appearance, behind which lurks or indwells a very different reality” (563).61 The critic

bases his reading on the following oft-quoted part from “Atrophied Preface:” “Naked

Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book [. . .]. How-To extend levels of experience by

opening the door at the end of a long hall . . . Doors that only open in Silence . . . Naked

Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse . . .”

(187). By relying on the above-mentioned key, Loewinsohn explain the discourse by the

following:

In order to accomplish his educational mission of wising up the mark,62

Burroughs has to take the mark along with him on his horrific journey
through the inferno of addiction and withdrawal, since the true “wising
up” consists mostly of demonstrating to the mark that this bizarre,
inconceivably remote, unearthly world to which he has been shanghaied
is in fact his own familiar world, the reality behind its appearances
revealed only now in the carnival mirrors of allegory. (563-64)

To summarize the critic’s reading, Burroughs, who “experienced addiction as a descent

into hell where he was menaced by everything, including his own body” (563), is

exactly like the Ancient Mariner forced to tell his story to the reader, a story of a cure

that can “wise up the marks” (577, 567).63 Loewinsohn uses a large number of

biographical data—Burroughs’ letters, interviews, etc.—to support his argument of

Naked Lunch as a book allegorically symbolizing the “menacing hell” of addiction and,

in effect, of the world itself. Interestingly, he touches upon the indeterminacy of the text

and its vast interpretation possibilities at least twice in his criticism, yet he fails to draw

any conclusions from such parts. For example, when he discusses on the imagery

61
The works Loewinsohn claims Naked Lunch follows are Dante’s Inferno, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travel (Loewinsohn 563).
62
The word “mark” is explained in the Glossary section of Junky as “[s]omeone easy to rob, like a
drunk with a roll of money” (131).
63
As I have already mentioned elsewhere (see p. 70-71), there are several mentions of the Ancient
Mariner in the text: “Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient
Mariner” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 34).

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Burroughs uses to describe the parties of Interzone, he explains them through the

writer’s biography instead actually inspecting the use behind such images:

Although [the] sci-fi comic book imagery may tend to trivialize the
Senders, Burroughs—a gay man, an intellectual, an artist, and a drug
addict in the paranoid, cold war world of the conformist 1950s—was
painfully aware of the seriousness of the threat to individuality [. . .] that
Sending obviously represents. (575)

A more evident example of Loewinsohn’s misunderstanding of the discourse is seen

when the critic discusses the “talking asshole” part, namely its discussion of co-

operatives and centralized control included in one of the anecdotes constituting the

routine. As he puts it, “[w]hat isn’t clear is Burroughs’s position on these questions. [. .

.] From [the] second anecdote one could just as easily derive a defense of colonialism as

a plea for anarchy and cooperatives” (582). Simply put, the critic—as did his colleagues

mentioned above—settled on some of the discourse’s keys and elements as bearing the

meaning of Naked Lunch; however, such approach not only reduces the highly variable

text to a “mere” allegory, but furthermore Loewinsohn’s reading cannot account for

numerous parts of the work which his chosen interpretation is not able to handle.

To provide some support for the critic, Burroughs often talks about his effort to

instill change into the readers of his works. For example, the phrase “wise up the

marks” comes directly from the author. When asked whether Mary McCarthy’s

description of him as a “soured utopian” is accurate, Burroughs answered: “I do

definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to make people aware of the true

criminality of our times, to wise up the marks” (“William Burroughs, An Interview”

49). It must be noted, however, that at the time of the interview Burroughs has already

finished the cut-up trilogy which is certainly more articulate about its message—with its

Nova Mob and Nova Police—than Naked Lunch. More importantly, the interpretation

Loewinsohn offers only diminishes the actual potential of the work.

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 It is rather simple to point out the shared characteristics of criticism interpreting

Naked Lunch in terms of metaphor or allegory. All three critics discussed above rely

greatly on “Deposition” and “Atrophied Preface” in explaining the work. Furthermore,

they often stress certain keys, usually the ones connected to drugs and drug addiction.

Such approach enables these critics to describe the plot as rather linear and focused on

Lee. In addition, stressing the drug element leads to explanation of numerous parts of

the work as either hallucinatory or allegorical but always caused by the effect of drugs.

Put simply, such approach explains the complicated and indeterminate work Naked

Lunch certainly is as a rather linear and simple text. Naturally, the approaches chosen

by the critics ignore a large number of important discourse elements such as the

atemporal nature of the work or its frequent shifts in tone and language. When such

elements are mentioned by the critics, either an effort is made to explain them in terms

of the chosen interpretation or they are simply stated to be indescribable. However, such

statement is, I believe, an indirect way of showing that one’s interpretation does not

interpret the work as a whole but only its certain parts so that they fit into the particular

view of the work chosen by the critic.

As I have pointed out earlier, the classification of Murphy and McConnell as

“moral allegorizers” is not without difficulties. For example, consider the following

Murphy’s criticism of moral approach to Burroughs: “[M]ost criticism of Burroughs to

date, from both inside and outside the academy, has been moral criticism directed at his

referents in ‘real life,’ rather than analytical criticism directed at his work as writing”

(Wising 8). Murphy further claims that Burroughs is an amodernist; as he subsequently

explains, amodernism “shares the modernist and postmodernist suspicion of

representational art and politics, but rejects both the constitutive asymmetries of

modernist myth-mongering and the postmodern abandonment of the critique in the face

110
of the procession of simulacra” (29). Put differently, Burroughs uses post-modern

techniques in order to act as a social critic in a more modernist fashion (74).64 However,

while critical of moral approach to Burroughs’ work, Murphy still relies on

“Deposition” or “Atrophied Preface” sections to provide an explanation: “The

polemical introduction to Naked Lunch, ‘Testimony Concerning a Sickness,’ proposes

the medical metaphor that recurs throughout the book.” Furthermore, in “Intersection

Points: Teaching William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch” Murphy claims that Burroughs in

“Atrophied Preface” “offers a straightforward, practical pedagogy of his writing” and

that the numerous “meaningless,” imaginative parts “can best be grasped as a series of

drug- and withdrawal-induced hallucinations that pass through Lee’s mind.” Although

Murphy insists on the reliability of the discourse and the keys presented, he closes

“Intersection” by the following part that actually suggests the opposite:

Naked Lunch doesn’t offer a single coherent linear reading but an

irreducible multiplicity of lines that “spill off the page in all directions,
kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot
yips and the slamming steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and
pathos and screams plain pathic.” It is up to the determined reader to
decide which of those lines and directions to follow from the text out into
the world.65 (emphasis added)

McConnell separates himself from the “allegorizers” to a greater extent than

Murphy, in effect being perhaps closer to the soon-to-be discussed “anti-metaphor”

critics. For instance, he claims that Burroughs is a stern critic of allegory and metaphor:

“[Burroughs] has made a commitment to language which involves not less than

everything. In a poetic system of this austerity, allegory is a capitulation, metaphor a

final temptation to not-will.” Furthermore, since he dismisses metaphorical or

64
In Murphy’s own words: “Burroughs’ work, including Naked Lunch, constitutes an exacting
critique both of the social organization of late capital and of the logic of representation or textuality that
abets it” (Wising 74).
65
The Naked Lunch excerpt used by Murphy is from the “Atrophied Preface” section, p. 191 of the
restored edition.

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allegorical readings of Naked Lunch, McConnell claims that understanding the work as

a moral book or claiming it uses drug addiction as a symbol for social criticism is an

injustice to the textual strategies used. However, the critic still relies on the “additional”

parts of the text as providing meaning to the rest of the discourse. As he claims, the

work is a “religious confession,” which “without either Introduction or Appendix would

be immeasurably crippled, dull and ‘unpoetic’ as those sections may be in themselves.”

Although differing substantially from the critics discussed previously, both

Murphy and McConnell share with them certain characteristic. On the one hand, the

both try to distance themselves from a purely metaphorical or allegorical reading.

Furthermore, they also criticize moral approaches to both Burroughs and Naked Lunch.

On the other hand, Murphy and McConnell rely greatly in their interpretations on the

same key sections as the “allegorizers.” Such obvious usage of certain parts in order to

explain a greatly heterogeneous text not only restricts possible interpretations, but also

often ignores elements of the discourse not in line with the chosen perception. The

critics’ reliance on the mentioned key sections is also the reason why I have classified

them into the “allegorizers” camp; however, as I have already said, such classification is

not entirely without problems.

IV.D Naked Lunch and Literal Meaning

While interpreting the drug and addiction elements of Naked Lunch in

metaphorical or allegorical terms became widespread since the work’s publication, it

was not until the late 1980s that a vastly different reading emerged. In 1987 Robin

Lydenberg published Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S.

Burroughs’ Fiction, a book-length work mainly exploring Naked Lunch and the cut-up

trilogy. The critic argues that many of the key parts of the discourse previously used for

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interpreting the work as a whole are often unreliable. Furthermore, she also claims that

Burroughs favors literal meaning of the text instead of a reading that relies on a moral

or metaphorical approach.66 Oliver Harris, the editor of many Burroughs’ texts, is

another important critic that approaches Naked Lunch in terms of literal meaning (as

opposed to metaphorical interpretations) and distrust towards the self-explanatory key

parts. In other words, these critics constitute a rather different approach to Naked Lunch

than their colleagues discussed above.

As it was already said, both critics reject the self-explanatory key parts, namely

“Deposition” and “Atrophied Preface,” as unreliable. Harris explains that Timothy

Murphy’s failure in interpreting Naked Lunch lies in his unsuspecting belief in the Beat

legend of the work’s creation (Harris, Secret 187).67 More importantly, Harris further

explains that Murphy’s reliance on the genesis of Naked Lunch is reflected in his

reliance on the key parts present in the text:

Murphy’s failure [to understand the actual development of Naked Lunch]

is particularly instructive because it goes together with his insistence that
in the “Atrophied Preface” that concludes Naked Lunch, as in the
“Deposition” which begins it, Burroughs is not being ironic in his
accounts of its method [. . .]. In fact, the question of credibility is subject
to a systematic deconstruction in the “Deposition,” which mimics and

66
As it is apparent, Lydenberg shares many points with McConnell whose “William Burroughs and
the Literature of Addiction” was published in 1967, twenty years before Lydenberg’s publication.
However, it is not until the late 80s—perhaps because of post-modern critique—that a reading stressing
literal interpretation instead of an allegorical one gained significant attention from the other critics.
67
To further comment on the issue, it is the following Murphy’s comment on the work’s structure
that caused Harris’ rather harsh reaction: “[T]he mosaic structure of Naked Lunch [. . .] was created,
according to Beat legend, when the routines were simply sent to the printer in the order that they were
typed up by Kerouac and Ginsberg” (“Intersection”). Harris makes the genesis of the work clear:
“Burroughs had already established a mosaic structure in October 1955; he never referred to the text’s
separate sections as ‘routines;’ Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Alan Ansen typed up a manuscript in early 1957
that was absolutely distinct from the final text; it was Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Sinclair Beiles who
prepared the material for Olympia Press in July 1959; and Burroughs subsequently relocated at least one
major section of text” (Secret 187). It must be also noted that the key parts in question—“Deposition” and
“Atrophied Preface”—further inflate the Beat legend of the work’s creation, as Burroughs writes the
following in the former: “I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published
under the title Naked Lunch” (199). Burroughs himself admitted the imprecise nature of the “Deposition”
claim in “Afterthoughts on a Deposition,” an appendix appearing in the restored text: “When I say I have
no memory of writing Naked Lunch, this is of course an exaggeration, and it is to be kept in mind that
there are various areas of memory” (211).

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 belongs to that Romantic tradition of false prefaces perfected by
Coleridge.

In other words, the key sections and the explanations of the discourse they contain are

not to be trusted, since they are not meant seriously. Lydenberg further comments on

the issue of keys by explaining that Burroughs’ claim in the “Deposition” section—that

some of the work’s parts were intended as a tract against Capital Punishment in the

manner of Modest Proposal—is to be understood in a slightly different way. As the

critic explains, Burroughs is “‘talking to the machine’ in its own language, responding

to accusations that parts of Naked Lunch are merely pornographic—lacking in artistic

merit because they are lacking in moral purpose” (7-8).

It is the reception of Naked Lunch as a moral text that truly bothers both critics.

As I have already shown, there are numerous readings that interpret the work in terms

of morality; for example, Loewinsohn interprets it as how-to book of moral instruction

(Loewinsohn 563). However, it is precisely such interpretation Lydenberg attacks: as

the critic states, “[i]n conventional humanistic criticism interpretation often takes this

form of a ‘justification’ of the text by positioning a moral intention behind it” (7). After

all, the “Ugh” review by John Willet provides a perfect example of how moral approach

changes one’s perception of a given work. In the review Willet writes that the various

explicit and “pornographic” scenes are “too uncritically presented, and because the

author gives no flicker of disapproval the reader easily takes the ‘moral message’ the

other way” (qtd. in Johnson, “Good Ol’ Boy” 50-51). The writer David Lodge also had

a similar stance towards Naked Lunch, saying that the discourse “suspends rather than

activates the reader’s moral sense” (qtd. in Lydenberg 8).68 In other words, numerous

68
Lydenberg also quotes Lodge’s later reexamination of Naked Lunch. Lodge claims that the work’s
“elimination of a realistic frame” and absence of norms “by which its nauseating grotesquerie can be
measured and interpreted” makes it impossible to the reader to apply the depicted scenes “to the real
world and draw an instructive moral” (8).

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critics tend to either dismiss the work as immoral or—by choosing the appropriate

keys—interpret the work in terms of metaphor. Naked Lunch is thus considered a

metaphorical representation of drug addiction and withdrawal, an allegory of the world

seen through the hallucinatory mind of a junkie, or a hero’s quest for freedom and from

addiction; no matter what concrete metaphorical reading is chosen, most places, people

and events described by the discourse are unreal. Harris further explains the results of

metaphorical interpretation:

What’s wrong with this reading is clear: if from Washington Square

subway station to the Hotel Lamprey off Broadway, Lee never actually
leaves New York City, then Interzone becomes no more than a nightmare
version of the Land of Oz, an unreal and strictly allegorical space. (Secret
235)

In other words, moral reading of Naked Lunch relies on the explanatory key parts and

the fact they are able to provide enough evidence for such interpretation. Furthermore,

numerous passages are more easily explained as “hallucinatory” than insisting on their

literal meaning. Unlike their predecessors, Harris and Lydenberg refuse to interpret

Naked Lunch in such way. Lydenberg points out that there are numerous intrusions

present in the text that often have a scientific or technical voice (8). The critic continues

that not only do these intrusions enter abruptly into the main discourse, but also they are

“made concrete in their own right by Burroughs’ use of parentheses which represent

visually the splicing in of a different voice in the text.” She quotes the following

passage from Naked Lunch to make her point clear:

“But you wouldn’t believe it, certain disgruntled elements chased us

right down to our launch.”
“Handicapped somewhat by lack of legs.”
“And a condition in the head.”
(Ergot is a fungus disease grows on bad wheat. During the Middle
Ages Europe was periodically decimated by outbreaks of ergotism,
which was called St. Anthony’s Fire. Gangrene frequently supervenes,
the legs turn black and drop off.) (134)

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Put differently, the discourse, Lydenberg argues, strives for literalness of its images—

one should not interpret the above-quoted passage in a metaphorical way. Another part

of the work makes the discourse’s demand for literal interpretation even clearer: “silent

portentous smell of uremia seeping under the door, suburban lawns to sound of the

water sprinkler, in calm jungle night under the silent wings of the Anopheles mosquito.

(Note: This is not a figure. Anopheles mosquitoes are silent.)” (39). These and other

similar examples located in the text, Lydenberg claims, are among the ways

metaphorical or allegorical explanations of Naked Lunch are challenged: “Burroughs

does not justify the unpleasant content of his text, as some critics would do, by pointing

to a personal idealism underlying a fierce social satire, but rather by insisting, however

spuriously, on the scientific and historical objectivity, on the literalness of his images”

(14). Oliver Harris agrees with Lydenberg on Burroughs’ refusal of metaphors. The

critic claims that the frequent reading of the drug and drug addiction elements as

metaphorical or allegorical “scores as abstract all Burroughs’ models of control and

disease,” thus having “catastrophic” impact (Secret 36).

Put differently, numerous passages that the previously discussed critics

interpreted in terms of the “menacing hell” of the drug addict’s mind are meant to be

literally—there is no symbolization whatsoever contained in such passages. However,

Lydenberg goes in her claim even further. She explains that Naked Lunch not only

refuses metaphorical or moral interpretation, but—through its literalness—actually

portrays such interpretations as restricting and controlling: “The literalness—

mathematical, scientific, naturalistic, supernaturalistic—which pervades Burroughs’

prose style is part of his campaign to free literature from morality and symbolic rhetoric,

to seize for it the independence of the sciences” (Lydenberg 13). Burroughs’ amoralness

is commented upon by other critics as well. Kurt Hemmer explains that the scene in

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which Clem and Jody confront an Arab Nationalist caricatures both sides of the conflict

(“The Natives Are Getting Uppity” 70): “The police are morally corrupt, but so are the

rioters. What we are left with is a statement about brutality in general, not politics

specifically” (71).69 Simply put, Lodge’s and Willet’s argument that Naked Lunch is not

moral enough is, in a way, entirely valid. However, as Lydenberg argues, morality is not

the work’s aim; on the contrary, the discourse is entirely amoral because morality is

only one of the many possible control systems; the discourse only “shows” but does not

“tell.” It is through language that readers create moral assumptions of a given work and

that is the reason Burroughs employs and insists on the literalness of his images as well

as uses several other literary techniques such as the constant shifts of the narrative

voices or the numerous “meaningless” parts. Lydenberg further emphasizes the

discourse’s connection between morality and language: “The negative mosaics of

Naked Lunch in which Burroughs juxtaposes scattered fragments, remnants, the detritus

of the world, are motivated by this desire to defy and exhaust meaning, to starve out the

language parasite and leave no symbolic residue” (18). Simply put, the previously

discussed critics preferred a moral approach because an interpretation based on drug

addiction allegory/metaphor gives unity and structure to the disjointed, disconnected

and indeterminate discourse; the text’s numerous graphic and violent images are

suddenly “justified” because there is a moral intention behind them (21). However, this

is exactly the kind of thinking that Burroughs attacks through the very structure and

language of Naked Lunch.

In other words, Naked Lunch is for Lydenberg an attack on language,

interpretation and moral thinking, and both critics stress the importance of numerous

references in the work connected to language. Among these parts—which for example

69
See page 50 of the thesis for the discussed part.

117
include the section on the parties of Interzone—is the “talking asshole” certainly the

most prominent. According to Lydenberg, the routine “dramatizes the problematic

relationship of body and mind, and the role of language in that relationship; the arbitrary

violence of language as a system of naming and representation; and the possibility of an

ontology and an aesthetics based on negativity and absence” (19).70 The story thus

reflects the literalness of Burroughs’ images and the language’s effort to force a

metaphorical reading that could account for the often violent nature of the text: “[T]he

individual is perhaps most taken in and taken over by language when he thinks he is

manipulating it for his own purposes—he is never so much the dummy as when he

plays the ventriloquist” (41). Although Harris does not entirely share Lydenberg’s

conclusions, he does agree on the importance of the “talking asshole” routine; however,

since he is concerned about the routine’s creation and original context, his evaluation of

the routine is rather different:

[The routine] is at once a parable and an instance of Burroughs’

economic situation as a writer, both within a broader cultural history and
within his epistolary-based routine practice. [. . .] Burroughs’ account
actively invites us [. . .] to read the routine in terms of its compositional
circumstance and the carny man in relation to the writer. (Secret 238-39)

However, no matter what specific interpretation the critics have chosen for the

“talking asshole” part, they both make the same mistake: although they dismiss the keys

chosen by the previous critics as suspect, they rely on other keys present in the discourse

for explanation. In other words, while some relied on the “Deposition” to support their

allegorical reading of Naked Lunch, Lydenberg and Harris rely on the “talking asshole”

to explain the discourse, which, in effect, is the same reductive approach that both

critics condemn. Their refusal to believe the honesty of the “Deposition” and

“Atrophied Preface” sections enabled them to view Naked Lunch from a new, wider
70
As it is apparent, Lydenberg’s argument is a complicated (and sophisticated) one. For more
information, see Lydenberg 19-43.

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angle; however, the reading again highlights some of the numerous discourse elements

but ignores others, thus lowering the interpretative potential of the work. The failure to

see the shortcomings of one’s critique is especially visible Harris’ case: although the

critic explains that the “talking asshole” routine has became for many readers and critics

a summation of the whole discourse and thus is among the key parts he himself calls

“the most suspect” (216), he then spends more than twenty pages exploring the history

and events surrounding the genesis of the part and its relation to Naked Lunch as a

whole.

Furthermore, while Lydenberg condemns certain parts of “Deposition” and

“Atrophied Preface” as rather unreliable and suspect in their readiness to explain the

discourse, she gladly uses other parts of these sections to support her interpretation. For

example, the critic uses the following passage from “Deposition” to stress her argument

on the literalness of the discourse: “If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of

numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to

annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom [. . .] the Addict [. . .] the one

irreplaceable factor in the junk equation” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 202). In other

words, while Lydenberg tries to point out that Burroughs’ style highlights the literalness

of the work’s images, she relies on other parts of the sections that are at the same time

dismissed as unreliable because they intentionally mimic the moral rhetoric of the

conventional society in order to subvert them. In addition, both critics rely greatly on

external evidence to support their arguments: Lydenberg on Burroughs’ interviews and

explanations of his literary style and approach, and Harris on the writer’s letters and

events surrounding and eventually leading to the creation of Naked Lunch. The former

critic is especially fond of citing The Job, a series of interviews interlaced with several

short pieces and articles, since the book contains numerous clarifications and statements

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made by Burroughs on anything from literature to the world youth. However, the

interviews were conducted between 1968 and 1970, roughly ten years after the

publication of Naked Lunch (Baker 163). During these ten years Burroughs managed to

finish his cut-up trilogy, which marked a significant shift in Burroughs’ style that the

writer in The Job frequently comments upon. Harris, on the other hand, investigates the

past in order to explain Naked Lunch. He goes through original letters (mostly

addressed to Ginsberg), manuscripts, and the various events surrounding the writing of

Naked Lunch, concluding the following:

Naked Lunch supports entirely contrary readings because of the fertile

but finally unresolved conflict between opposed writing hands. This is
why a material genetic history is so valuable: it shows over time the pull
of antagonistic forces—aesthetic but also economic, cultural, and
political—at their point of emergence, and this is significant above all in
the case of the letter routine. (Secret 222)

After a careful observation the gaps in Harris’ argument should be visible. I do not want

to argue with his statement that the discourse of Naked Lunch is able to support

contradictory interpretations at the same time;71 it is his reliance on external documents

and “proofs” to interpret the work that, in my opinion, is problematic. These “externals”

are, in effect, only additional keys the critics need to explain the work: faced with an

indeterminate and highly variable discourse that resists traditional analysis and

interpretation, both critics need some guidelines according to which they should read

the work. While their predecessors favored keys present within the discourse, Harris and

Lydenberg dismiss (for the most part) such keys only to find themselves lost and in dire

need of another set of keys.

The above being said, one should realize the importance of the critics’

contributions to Burroughs scholarship. Lydenberg is very skillful and convincing in

71
On the other hand, his claim about the genetic history and its value might be challenged; as my
thesis shows, a careful and focused discourse analysis can lead to the same conclusions.

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explaining the techniques and potential of the cut-up technique as well as in connecting

Burroughs with numerous post-modern critics such as Roland Barthes or Jacques

Derrida. As she shows, Burroughs’ cut-up method is not another obscure “experimental

literature,” as many works are tagged and subsequently abandoned, but a radical attack

on Western thinking, literary tradition and language itself. However, while Burroughs’

experimentation with words is rather clear in the cut-up trilogy (“Photo Falling—Word

Falling—Break through in Grey Room—Towers, open fire” [Burroughs, The Ticket

That Exploded 110], interpreting Naked Lunch as posing the same direct challenge to

language is simply forcing the reading too far.72 They same is true for Harris whose

meticulous study of Naked Lunch, its genesis and its relationship to the preceding

works—Junky, Queer and The Yage Letters—is certainly valuable.73 More importantly,

both critics stress the importance of the indeterminacy and unreliability of the discourse.

On the other hand, Lydenberg and Harris still rely on a different set of keys, on sources

outside the discourse that help them in their chosen approach. However, by relying on

the selected “evidence” they try to force their chosen interpretation into a discourse that

actively resists being interpreted. Furthermore, both approaches chosen by the critics

still tend to leave a number of discourse elements unaccounted for. For example,

although Lydenberg’s insistence on the literalness of the language causes the

“meaningless” parts of the discourse to be attacks on conventional interpretations

instead of being mere hallucinations, other elements of the discourse such as the often

hinted humor that can lead to two different interpretations of a given part are

72
I do not want to say that Naked Lunch does not constitute a challenge to literary conventions and
the usage of language; after all, these are one of the key points of my thesis. However, Naked Lunch does
so in not so obvious manner and it is precisely the indeterminacy of the discourse—as opposed to the
visibility of cut-ups marked by the use of dashes—that is of utmost importance.
73
Furthermore, Harris’ approach has brought into light several facts about Naked Lunch—such as its
epistolary nature originating from the letters sent to Allen Ginsberg—that might be often overlooked.
Interpreting the work based on its genesis and its relationship and references to the preceding works is,
however, an entirely different—and I might add rather questionable—matter.

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unaccounted for. However, in terms of number of discourse elements discussed, both

approaches are certainly a step forward.

IV.E Naked Lunch as an Indeterminate Work

To sum up so far, the vast number of Burroughs scholarship can be classified

into several groups according to the number of discourse elements they discuss. Harris

and especially Lydenberg are not only renowned Burroughs scholars but also their

criticism marks the shift of focus from metaphorical interpretations to literal

interpretations, that is to readings aimed at uncovering how precisely does the discourse

work in terms of language. However, while both stress the unreliable nature of some of

the oft-quoted keys, they still rely on certain discourse elements to provide answers to

the many questions posed by the indeterminate discourse. In the recent years, however,

a rather different approach has been frequented by some critics. Instead of trying to find

some keys in order to explain the indeterminate discourse, these critics base their

readings precisely on the complex discourse itself. Davis Schneiderman and Michael

Sean Bolton both stress the importance of the discourse and state that it defies

traditional interpretations or contextual anchoring.

Both critics both understand the indeterminate nature of the text. Schneiderman

observes that Naked Lunch has avant-garde roots which complicate its full acceptance

into the American literary mainstream (188). As the critic continues, “[t]here are scant

similar examples in the permeable realms of modern and postmodern literature that

have become as popular as Naked Lunch and yet still remain as thoroughly

unmanageable.” The work’s resistance to classification is clear from the various

pigeonholes it has been associated with. Jennie Skerl enumerates the various literary

groups Naked Lunch has been categorized as belonging to: the avant-garde modernist

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tradition, French writers of “revolt,” Henry Miller as the link between the French and

the American, the antiliterature of Beckett, the ubiquitous “Beat novel” pigeonhole, and

the (a)moral position (qtd. in Schneiderman 189).74 In addition, the number of various

theoretical contexts used for interpretation of the work further illustrates its evasive

nature. The difficulties of classifying Naked Lunch lie in the interpreter’s need to grasp

the discourse using “familiar contexts in historical or cultural ideology” (Bolton 54).

Such procedure, Bolton argues, is inevitably bound to fail because the work resists

strong connections to particular contexts:

[Burroughs’] contexts are not material, derived from contexts external to

the narratives, but are associative and drawn from the associations and
juxtapositions of various unstable temporal and physical dispositions
within the narratives. [. . .] By disintegrating material contexts,
Burroughs seeks both to remove ideological positions from his narratives
and to problematize ideological approaches to their readings. (54-55)

In other words, Bolton’s argument is similar Lydenberg’s but with one significant

detail: while Lydenberg stresses the literalness of language and its resistance to moral

interpretations, Bolton takes her formal analysis one step further by arguing the

discourse resists all ideological interpretation. Schneiderman agrees: “Naked Lunch

rejects traditional narrative analysis and, accordingly, traditional structures of novelistic

meaning” (190). Such rejection is rooted in the work’s genesis from Burroughs’ specific

epistolary form, the so-called “routine.” As Harris skillfully shows in William

Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, Allen Ginsberg played a major role in the

development of the routines by acting as their receiver during the six-year

correspondence between Burroughs and Ginsberg and the epistolary form of the routine

determines the textual strategies of Naked Lunch (197). Timothy Murphy clarifies that

74
One might also add the classifications mentioned in the previous chapters. Furthermore, Lydenberg
classifies Burroughs as a post-modern writer and Hussey draws parallels between Burroughs and
Letterism and Situationism, “two avant-garde groups with whom Burroughs came in direct contact” while
he stayed in Paris (Hussey 75).

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“[t]he routine is a form of micronarrative that operates by multiplication and

juxtaposition, but no set of these proliferating routines can be combined to form a

unified macronarrative similar to a traditional short story or a novel” (Wising 61). Lee,

the main character of the semi-autobiographical Queer, also helps in further explaining

the particular form of the routine: after finishing a rather vicious routine, he refuses the

objections of Allerton (his love interest) by saying it was just “a routine for [his]

amusement, containing a modicum of truth” (92). In other words, Naked Lunch is

basically a series of semi-related routines and the specific routine form plays a crucial

part in making possible the discourse’s indeterminate nature and unreliability.

Therefore, it is mainly the routine form that is responsible for the discourse’s resistance

to traditional literary analysis. Schneiderman argues that approaching the work as a

novel can result only in partial and unsatisfactory results:

If the texts in Naked Lunch are not the texts of a “novel” in any sense of a
form arrived at prior to its construction (and, rather, elements of letters),
the treatment of the text-as-such results in a series of impossible readings,
each attempting mastery foiled by the material methodological limits.
(189)

Simply put, the work’s routine basis—as opposed to traditional novelistic treatment—

greatly affects the effectiveness of traditional novelistic interpretations; as Harris

explains, the pieces constituting Naked Lunch “are not fit pieces for a novel” (Secret

212). More importantly, both Schneiderman and Bolton understand the fact that Naked

Lunch is an indeterminate work; however, unlike their predecessors, they further

develop this understanding by discussing the impact of the work’s form on critical

interpretations.

In other words, Naked Lunch resists traditional literary analysis and trying to

shape the discourse according to a preselected reading is a simplistic approach that

favors the readerly instead of the writerly. Furthermore, my discourse analysis has

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shown that the work is not only indeterminate, but often contradictory, thus possibly

providing conflicting arguments to any reading relying on only some of its keys and

discourse elements. In the words of Schneiderman: “Naked Lunch is coded with its own

interpretative counterarguments, and to subscribe to a particular narrative interpretation

is to fall into its metanarrative traps” (190). Both critics realize the implicit

consequences resulting from such observation: textual interpretation has its limits and

Naked Lunch lies beyond the boundaries. Furthermore, since claiming that it is not

possible to interpret a given work of art is a statement of serious consequences, both

critics suggest possible steps for solving the issue. Bolton explains that “[t]he challenge

for readers and critics of Burroughs is to cease relying on external frames through

which to contextualize his narratives and, instead, to create contexts spontaneously

during the act of reading” (54). The critic provides further clarification:

The contexts of Burroughs’ novels are determined, then, by readers

during reading and according to their own experiences of the “network of
differences” created as the narrative juxtaposes and transmutes its
temporal and topographic markers. Consequently, context can only be
determined during each act of reading as the time and place of the reader,
the author, and the narrative engage and merge with one another. (56)

Naturally, such statement is daring and far-reaching in both its statement about the

nature of the discourse as well as the impact on literary criticism. Schneiderman offers a

solution to the problem of interpreting Naked Lunch that is, at first sight, more inviting

than Bolton’s. He claims that the work contains several meta-fictive passages that deal

with the problem of interpretation, one of them being the section “Campus of Interzone

University” (195). The Professor’s lecture on the Ancient Mariner and the relationship

between the Professor and the students is therefore reflected in Burroughs’ Naked

Lunch and the relationship between the author and the reader. However, since the

Professor concludes the Ancient Mariner shows that “nothing can ever be accomplished

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on the verbal level” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 74), he himself becomes in

Schneiderman’s reading a proof that there are barriers in language and that a literary

work—in this case Naked Lunch—cannot be fully explained.75 Therefore, the critic is in

the end lead to a similar conclusion as Bolton: “We want to master Naked Lunch, to

stop Naked Lunch from mastering us. To accomplish this, it would take a complete

redefinition of ‘reading’” (196). The text is indeterminate and impossible to interpret

because critical interpretation is one of the many things it challenges. The critic

continues:

This impossibility of fully explaining Naked Lunch’s excesses invokes

more horrifying possibility: Narrative-based explanations, no matter how
comforting, are simply not comprehensive enough to explain a text that
continually announces the impossibility of explanation.76 (197)

It is important to add that it is possible to at least explain how exactly Naked

Lunch operates against concrete interpretations. As my discourse analysis shows, it is

through indeterminacy, unreliability and contradiction that a precise interpretation of the

work is challenged. However, Schneiderman’s argument deals with the issue of

interpretation and not analysis and as it is apparent, no matter what specific

interpretation one chooses, there will be always some parts of the discourse that the

chosen reading cannot explain. Harris agrees with my conclusion:

For every part of Naked Lunch that refers to some reality beyond the text
and invites pointed interpretation, there are always others that we can’t
explain away. Its redundant doublings and frequent hermetic passages
speak an opaque language, a meaningless materiality that cannot be
absorbed into the reassuring realms of representation or expression.
(Secret 221-22)

75
Schneiderman’s argument is a complicated one and trying to explain it in only a couple of lines
would make his intricate claim unintelligible; for more information see Schneiderman p. 193-95.
76
This statement touches upon an issue of utmost importance for the next part of the thesis; however,
it is now sufficient to state that the critics agree that Naked Lunch cannot be satisfyingly interpreted.

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The above being said, it is necessary to note that the readings that do not understand the

mechanics of the discourse and try to impose a certain interpretation on the work are not

necessarily wrong. Such readings are surely legitimate, since they are based on certain

keys and discourse elements. Nevertheless, such readings are also incomplete as they do

not take into account the discourse as a whole—these readings are victories of readerly

over writerly, of interpretation that “has to make sense” instead of a reading that has the

capacity to enjoy the limitless potential of such text. Fortunately, Bolton offers a

reading that accepts the challenge presented by the discourse:

Burroughs’s carnival/circus world releases all participants from

geographically and culturally imposed context and creates a site of
“constant possibility.” The freedom of form that describes this landscape
reflects a freedom of consciousness in not only the novel’s characters and
narratives, but also in readers who are never bound by the narratives to
particular cultural references or ideologies.77 (72)

Put differently, it is pointless to try and shape the discourse according to a certain

preconceived notion of how to read a literary text. Roland Barthes explains that a

classic—i.e. readerly—text is limited by two concepts: truth and empiricism (S/Z 30).

As Naked Lunch avoids these concepts, readings based on them are inherently flawed.

Instead, as both Schneiderman and Bolton argue, one should understand the

indeterminacy of the discourse—and the resulting indeterminacy of interpretation—not

as a flaw, but as a limitless potentiality waiting to be explored. Therefore, the discourse

belongs only to the reader who is able to write the text in a previously unprecedented

way.

77
Bolton compares Burroughs’ often carnival voice—“Step right up, Marquesses and Marks, and
bring the little Marks too. Good for young and old, man and beast” (Naked Lunch 95)—to the notion of
carnival world by M. M. Bakhtin. He is not the only critic who has made such parallel, see for example
Pounds.

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IV.F Wising Up the Marks: A Commentary on the Discourse

Burroughs has certainly nothing good to say about written text. He perceives it

as a controlling device, a restrictive force similar to a police state or bureaucracy, and as

such he aims at deconstructing the word in most of his work: “The word is of course

one of the most powerful instruments of control as exercised by the newspapers and

images as well” (Job 33). Burroughs is not the only one to have such opinion; as M. M.

Bakhtin demonstrates, the word and language are not neutral but colored by other

people’s intentions:

[T]he word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not,
afer all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it
exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other
people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and
make it one’s own. [. . .] Language is not a neutral medium that passes
freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is
populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others. Expropriating
it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult
and complicated process. (294)

To put it differently, not only is it difficult to master the word, but also the word can

master its user as the user relies on its correct usage and interpretation which are often

covered in an impenetrable mist of associations and allusions. While one of the many

keys of Naked Lunch—“There are no independents any more” (130)—refers to A.J.’s

nature as an agent, it might be also understood as a reference to the reader’s (and

critic’s) need for a precise interpretation of a narrative: the reader is dependent on

language to explain the discourse and the work must be explained in satisfactory and

precise terms.

However, the discourse of Naked Lunch is shaped in a way that conventional

readings and interpretations have no chance to grasp the full scale of the discourse’s

potential. Importantly, the discourse of the work touches upon a more serious issue: it

comments on the ability to precisely interpret a work that defies interpretations and on

128
human capability and limits of interpretation as expressed through language. The poet

Gregory Corso objected to Burroughs’ cut-up works as “uninspired machine-poetry,”

lamenting that his “soul poetry” is “destroyed” by the experimental writing (Murphy,

Wising 104). While Naked Lunch does not employ the cut-up technique, its discourse is

not dissimilar to the later cut-up works in its resistance to conventional methods of

interpretation. Ultimately, Naked Lunch comments on critical interpretations and,

perhaps, on the necessity one feels to interpret a text—as Roland Barthes writes, when

the text is explained, the critic is victorious (Image 147). Although Barthes’s remark

deals with the reliance on the author in one’s criticism, his conclusion can be made

about interpretation in general: one simply needs an exact interpretation of a text and

the history of Burroughs’ criticism is an undeniable proof of such statement. The

approach requiring a concrete reading can be fruitful when dealing with a more

conventional work; however, Naked Lunch certainly is not a conventional work and

therefore such criticism can produce only partial results as it relies on a rather narrow

selection of discourse elements and passages and ignores the remaining, and often

conflicting, parts of the work. That is not to say that everything one claims about the

work is immediately overthrown as false—for example, the theme of addiction and

control is certainly present in the discourse. However, insisting on a given reading as

the correct one leads to the same trap that numerous critics have waded into—although

the text is finally “explained,” it is stripped down of most of its interpretative potential

and is simplified beyond measure.

In other words, conventional modes of explanation rely on one specific—and

hopefully “correct”—reading and it is precisely such attitude towards text that Naked

Lunch avoids. That is nothing new as my discourse analysis as well as several of the

discussed critics have arrived at the same conclusion. However, there is more at stake

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than the “simple” statement about the work’s indeterminate nature. The crux of the

matter is the issue hinted at by Schneiderman several pages earlier: “Narrative-based

explanations, no matter how comforting, are simply not comprehensive enough to

explain a text that continually announces the impossibility of explanation” (197).

However, before I can fully explain my argument that further develops the statement

above, I must provide some additional information.

Burroughs dismisses the Aristotelian “either/or” as “one of the great errors of

Western thinking” (Job 48-49). He is especially critical of the verb “be” and the definite

article:

The IS of Identity. You are an animal. You are a body. Now

whatever you may be you are not an “animal,” you are not a “body,”
because these are verbal labels. The IS of identity always carries the
implication of that and nothing else, and it also carries the assignment of
permanent condition. To stay that way. [. . .]
The definite article THE. THE contains the implication of one and
only: THE God, THE universe, THE way, THE right, THE wrong. (200)

Put differently, while one often relies on a specific interpretation, such approach may

not be without flaws when dealing with indeterminate works since the interpretation

depends on language that is not perfect in its grasp of indeterminate concepts. Roland

Barthes, when discussing a particularly ambiguous passage of Balzac’s “Sarrasine,”

asks rhetorically: “[I]f we want to ‘explicate’ the sentence (and consequently the

narrative), must we decide on one code or the other?” (S/Z 77). As he further comments

on the ambiguous passage, “to choose, to decide on a hierarchy of codes, on a

predetermination of messages, as in secondary-school explications, is impertinent.” In

other words, one should not require an explanation for an indeterminate passage as that

would most probably highlight only some of the all possible meanings. If that is taken

into consideration, then whose claim about the nature of “Atrophied Preface” is correct,

Murphy’s or the one by Harris? The former explains that “Atrophied Preface” is not

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ironic because Burroughs is a satirist and social critic who frequently comments on

various social or political issues in his interviews and journalistic pieces

(“Intersection”). Therefore, the critic continues, reading “Atrophied Preface” as an

ironic text would lead “to the impoverishment of both his work and the reader’s

experience of it.” On the contrary, Harris claims that the writer is ironic in both

“Atrophied Preface” and “Deposition” (Secret 187). One might find support for both

arguments in Burroughs’ interviews as well as in the text itself. There are numerous

passages in Naked Lunch supporting the former claim, for example as the parts on

bureaucracy or police. Furthermore, Burroughs is often very vocal in his opinions:

“Young people in the West have been lied to, sold out, and betrayed. Best thing they

can do is take the place apart before they are destroyed in a nuclear war” (Job 81). On

the other hand, “Atrophied Preface” is subtitled “Wouldn’t You?” and not only the

phrase reappears several times throughout the text, but it is taken from a letter

supposedly written by Jack the Ripper (MacFayden, “Dossier Three” 93). The original

letter addressed to the press reads: “The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off and

send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you” (qtd. in MacFayden, “Dossier

Three” 93) (emphasis mine). In other words, one might also read “Atrophied Preface”—

and perhaps the whole work—as written just for “jolly good laughter,” as a hilarious but

uncritical piece of fiction. Therefore, according to conventional criticism (which relies

on the conventional use of language), the reader has to decide whether Naked Lunch is a

vicious social/political critique or a humorous work without any moralizing intent.

Similar statement can be made about Burroughs criticism in general: Naked Lunch is

either a visionary account or an addict’s confession or a literal text criticizing moral

interpretations.

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 The work, as Schneiderman agrees (197), shows that many critical readings

cannot take into account its complicated nature and thus resign to simplifying the

discourse. In addition, the text claims that any interpretation relying on a “hierarchy of

codes,” on a choice between A or B, is not only ineffective for such a discourse but also

obsolete: such interpretation cannot hope to comprehend the work’s discourse in its

entirety and complexity. As Burroughs writes in “Atrophied Preface:” “Your knowledge

of what is going on can only be superficial and relative” (184). The work’s resistance to

either/or thinking is in my opinion the largest success of Naked Lunch, as the text

invites the reader to see the discourse through several possible interpretations and none

of them is necessarily wrong. Furthermore, I argue that the interpretations should be

attempted simultaneously. In other words, instead of simply dismissing all

interpretations as Schneiderman argues, the text actually invites the reader to take the

multiple readings into account at the same time; after all, all the readings suggested by

the critics are based on some parts of the discourse and thus are not wrong per se. The

atemporal nature of the discourse as well as the numerous repetitions throughout the

text only further invites such reading: they express simultaneity on the written page and

help in showing the possible multifaceted readings of the work. Therefore, the text

represents a critique of either/or thinking and a rather radical attack on the logic of

Western thought and the need to choose a specific reading, ideally the right one—

however, there is no right reading of Naked Lunch. The above being said, “Atrophied

Preface” is not a humorous and parodying text or a serious account of Burroughs’

motivations and explanations, but both. In this respect, the work truly is “a blueprint, a

How-To Book” (187); its goal is, as Burroughs confessed to Knickerbocker, to “wise up

the marks” (49), the “marks” being ordinary people relying on concrete language and

either/or thinking.

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 On a seemingly different note, Jean-François Lyotard defines the term

“postmodern” as “incredulity towards metanarratives” (xxiv). Some critics argue that

such definition is self-refuting;78 as these critics claim, Lyotard’s statement is in itself

also a metanarrative because Lyotard states that postmodernity defies universal rules yet

his definition of postmodernity is in effect one of the universal rules he criticizes.

However, one cannot apply similar critique to Naked Lunch and its status of a work

challenging conventional interpretation. To provide further clarification, one cannot

object to the work being interpreted as a text resisting conventional reading and

interpretation because Naked Lunch is actually written in a language that resists such

perception. The content of the text does not directly claim it cannot be precisely

interpreted; on the contrary, it instead shows through its style that such interpretation is

impossible.

Importantly, the consequence of the work’s style is twofold. Firstly, because the

work refuses specific interpretations, one might also object to my reading of the work as

an indeterminate and interpretation-resisting text; after all, I have used several keys from

the discourse in the last couple of pages to support my argument. In other words, I have

proceeded in exactly the same way as most of the discussed critics: I have chosen

several parts of the text and dismissed the rest. Nevertheless, I claim that the objection

above some might raise is actually a confirmation of the work’s resistance to

interpretation and not the other way round. Thus, the work is paradoxical in nature—

any argument that aims at dismissing some of the evidence I presented in the preceding

paragraphs in fact strengthens my claim that Naked Lunch resists specific interpretation.

Secondly, one might try to challenge my argument by interpreting the work in a more

specific way some of the already mentioned critics prefer, for example by claiming it is

For a criticism of postmodernity see for example “Modernity versus Postmodernity” by Jürgen
78

Habermas. New German Critique: 22 (1981): 3-14. JSTOR. <http://www.jstor.org/search>.

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an account of Lee’s withdrawal hallucinations. However, such procedure would be

merely backtracking from the inevitable since it would try to ignore the evidence

presented in the first part of my thesis, evidence based on precise and meticulous

discourse analysis rather than interpretation. Simply put, Naked Lunch is a text that even

more than fifty years after its inception provides a challenge for critics and readers

alike. Harris sums it up by claiming that one of the work’s major cultural functions is

the following: to torment the reader by presenting an experience he or she cannot master

(Secret 217).

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V. Conclusion

The Beat Generation flourished during the highly restricting fifties which soon

lead to the extremely volatile sixties and the Beats were certainly to some extent

responsible for the sudden change in the climate. While William S. Burroughs belongs

together with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg among the most famous Beats, his

allegiance with the movement was through shared opinions rather than literary style. He

is the author of a vast number of works—written, spoken, or painted—and has

collaborated with numerous artists, especially musicians. However, one particular work

gained the author fame (and infamy) and that work is Naked Lunch.

The discourse analysis I performed shows that Naked Lunch is rather unstable—

and perhaps even chaotic—at first sight. The narrative voices are unreliable and change

abruptly, the setting of time and place is unstable and bound to shift from passage to

passage, the structure of the work avoids organizing into consecutive passages, and

there is no visible plot present in the discourse. However, the specific mechanics behind

the text and their effects are clearly seen after a closer inspection. The above-mentioned

features are not present in the discourse due to a rather shabby performance by the

writer but, on the contrary, they serve one specific purpose: to destabilize the discourse

as much as possible. Indeterminacy, uncertainty and contradiction are employed

frequently throughout the work and often to such degree that the reader has problems to

decide on a specific interpretation of a give passage. As if to offer help to the reader

confused by such heterogeneous text, the discourse contains numerous keys or passages

seemingly containing a solution to certain sections or even the work as a whole.

However, not only are these passages often unreliable, but furthermore they actually

narrow the possible interpretations instead of revealing the text’s true potential because

these keys can support only a few of the discourse elements rather than the text as a

135
whole. In effect, the nature of the text and the keys present in it achieve the following:

the more the text claims a specific reading or information is correct, the more is it later

contradicted. Therefore, the reader has two choices—either to decide on a reading that

is able to explain the indeterminate discourse for the price of simplification, or to accept

the nature of the text for what it is and try to develop a theory that takes into account the

discourse as a whole.

As it is apparent, I have chosen the latter; nevertheless, many critics have

decided for the former approach instead. My overview of Naked Lunch criticism shows

the shift in the work’s interpretation that occurred throughout the years; however, it

should be noted that the categorization is only roughly chronological as some

interpretations are more favorite with the readers and critics alike and thus are not easily

abandoned. Initially, critics favored a reading that would explain the numerous

indeterminate and contradictory passages as visions, illusions or hallucinations. The

interpretations belonging to this category relied heavily on several key passages, namely

those present in “Deposition” and “Atrophied Preface,” since these passages further

supported the chosen reading. Such criticism also adopted a moral interpretation of the

more graphic and violent parts in order to “justify” their presence in the text. Although

such reading is not inherently wrong, it tends to ignore most parts of the text since these

parts do not correlate with the overall interpretation. Nevertheless, as emerging critical

theories started to influence literary theories, new readings began to flourish. Instead of

searching for a way the controversial passages could be somehow explained, several

critics started to argue that Burroughs aims at literal interpretation of such parts, in

effect criticizing the need for a moral approach that serves only to justify the

“unredeemable” parts. Furthermore, the trustworthiness of several key passages was

questioned. However, critics still relied on several keys in their interpretations and

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numerous statements presented in the discourse remained unchallenged. Only recently

have a couple of critics emerged and distanced themselves from their predecessors by

claiming the discourse is highly indeterminate. According to these critics, the

indeterminacy of the work lies beyond mere classification of “Deposition” as a sincere

or parodying text; on the contrary, they claim that Naked Lunch is a highly

indeterminate work and therefore trying to settle on an exact interpretation is actually

counterproductive as it diminishes the potential of the work. In addition, both discussed

critics—Bolton and Schneiderman—argue that one should abandon the traditional need

for exact interpretation since such approach can never do the work justice. It should be

also stressed that a small number of critics stresses the importance of humor in the

discourse; the role of humor in Naked Lunch should not be overlooked because it is

often through the unconventional humor that the discourse’s indeterminacy is achieved.

I have made several important points following the overview of Naked Lunch

criticism. The work truly resists conventional modes of interpretation and reading—its

structure, language and often contradictory nature are simply too much for an ordinary

reader (and often critic) to handle appropriately. As such, the discourse comments not

only on the necessity to choose a specific interpretation, but also on the limitations of

interpretation and language in general. The work shows that the generally accepted

mode of interpretation is sometimes insufficient when dealing with a highly

indeterminate text such as Naked Lunch—there is simply no correct interpretation of the

discourse. More importantly, the text comments on the need to choose only one reading

as the most precise one. As there is no inherently wrong reading, it is only the logic of

either/or thinking that restricts the reader from employing two or more readings

simultaneously. In other words, Naked Lunch shows that several ambiguous passages

and, in effect, several entirely different interpretations can be—and should be—

137
attempted simultaneously. Reader’s and critic’s interpretations are based on language

and it is the infallibility of the explanations provided by language that Burroughs

attacks. Human understanding and perception is limited by language and as the work

shows, it is not perfect. Therefore, the discourse argues, one needs to devise a new way

of understanding in order to comprehend the often unidentifiable and contradictory

aspects of human lives. The Professor during the lecture at the Interzone University

argues that the Ancient Mariner shows “at some length that nothing can ever be

accomplished on the verbal level” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch 74). That is the lesson the

work serves in front of the reader; the lunch is on the dish naked and only waiting to be

eaten.

138
 VI. Bibliography

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 VII. Résumé/Resumé

VII.A Résumé

This thesis deals with the work Naked Lunch by the writer William S.

Burroughs. The thesis has two main objectives: first, to analyze the discourse of the

work; second, to comment on the work’s critical interpretations.

The discourse analysis is separated into several parts according to the various

textual elements analyzed. The discourse elements analyzed are: narrative voices,

structure, time and setting, characters, and language. The analysis is conducted through

various critical approaches to best accommodate the commentary on the discourse.

Some of the approaches used for this part are those of Franz Stanzel, Roland Barthes,

Umberto Eco, and Lubomír Doležel. The discourse analysis shows that the work

employs various techniques to manifest its indeterminate nature, namely techniques

such as unreliable narrative voices, indeterminate chronology of events, non-existent

time advancement, or contradictory descriptions of events or places.

The second main part of the thesis deals with critical approaches to the work.

These approaches are separated according to the number of discourse elements they

take into account. The first categories greatly relies on a small number of the discourse

elements in order to interpret the indeterminate work; on the contrary, later critics take

into account the indeterminate nature of the work and therefore are wary of any specific

interpretations, claiming that Naked Lunch resists conventional reading. Therefore, I

claim, based on the discourse analysis as well as on the overview of the critical

approaches to the text, that the work challenges regular approaches to interpretation and

thinking and that one must use unconventional methods of interpretation in order to

fully understand—and also appreciate—the textual strategies of the work.

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VII.B Resumé

Tato diplomová práce se zabývá dílem Nahý oběd od spisovatele Williama S.

Burroughse. Práce si vytyčila za cíl následující dva body: zaprvé provést analýzu

diskursu Nahého obědu a zadruhé komentovat vybrané kritické interpretace tohoto díla.

Analýza diskursu je rozdělena do několika částí, a to podle různých textových

elementů daného díla. Analýza diskursu využívá různých kritických náhledů za účelem

co nejlepšího uchopení a popsání Nahého oběda. Z mnoha možných přístupů k analýze

textu byla vybrána díla od Franze Stanzela, Rolanda Bartha, Umberta Eca či Lubomíra

Doležela. Analýza diskursu ukazuje, že dané dílo využívá množství literárních technik

k docílení své textové nestability, a to například: nespolehlivé narativní hlasy, neurčitá

chronologie děje, neexistující běh času, nebo protichůdné popisy událostí či míst.

Druhá hlavní část diplomové práce se zabývá kritickými interpretacemi Nahého

oběda. Tyto interpretace jsou rozděleny do několika kategorií, a to podle množství

elementů diskursu které při své interpretaci berou v potaz. Zatímco interpretace v

prvních kategoriích vysvětlují tento nestabilní text pouze pomocí několika málo

elementů, pozdější kritici si jsou vědomi neurčité povahy textu a jeho vzdoru

konkrétním interpretacím. Tito kritici vysvětlují Nahý oběd jako dílo, které se vzpírá

běžnému čtení a interpretaci. Analýza diskursu i následný přehled kritických

interpretací ukazují, že Nahý oběd je nekonvenční dílo, které nejen že se vzpírá běžným

snahám vysvětlit literární text, ale také pro jeho kompletní uchopení je třeba přijít

s novým, nekonvenčním náhledem na interpretaci psaného text.

146