Where do you start with Naked Lunch? Whilst not as incomprehensible as Finnegans Wake, sitting down to the midday meal with Burroughs and then afterwards trying to discuss what actually happened isn’t a million miles away from attempting to explicate Joyce’s final opus. Nevertheless, this ostensibly tricky and horrifying ‘novel’ is actually a text of completely accessible humour, insight, and pathos once one begins to understand its author and genesis. As in fellow beat Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Burroughs fuses life and art to dazzling effect in Naked Lunch, following his own maxim that “there is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.”
In front of Burroughs’ senses during the moment–or, to be more precise, the years 1954-59–in which he was writing the material that would become Naked Lunch was the then internationally controlled city of Tangier, Morocco. His already isolated and miserable self-imposed exile there in 1954 (where his penchant for junk and boys would at least be socially tolerated) was made unbearable by Allen Ginsberg’s initial unwillingness for regular correspondence. This instigated the subsequent “shitting out [of] my educated Middle-western background once and for all,” in both epistolary and more general literary form. For Burroughs this catharsis resulted in a symbiosis between the book and its author. Ironically, whilst he revelled in his identity among ‘the Spanish boys’ as ‘El Hombre Invisible’, his sneering, satirical tone and distinctively baroque take on hard-boiled American pulp consistently asserts his identity throughout the text. This is not to suggest that Naked Lunch is a work of style over substance, but as the text renders irrelevant any conventional sense of narrative, Burroughs’ mediation on the “frozen moment[s] when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork,” is vitally important to maintaining continuity. From the paranoid and claustrophobic stream-of-consciousness in the novel’s endless opening sentence; to the eerily tranquil nostalgia in the middle of A.J.’s Annual Party where “the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh [sic]”; to displays of horribly crude black humour–as in this delightful anecdote, resembling something Voltaire might have written had he shot up enough smack:

“On one occasion he ran down a pregnant woman in from the mountains with a load of charcoal on her back, and she miscarriaged a bloody, dead baby in the street, and Keif got out and sat on the curb stirring the blood with a stick while the police questioned Aracknid and finally arrested the woman for a violation of the Sanitary Code.”

–the turn of phrase always remains Burroughsian while adapting perfectly to the scene it portrays. Like a demented saxophonist ripping up everything from “Billy’s Bounce” to Schubert’s Liebesbotschaft on a broken horn, Burroughs holds this yarn together using a small range of what he referred to as “routines”, articulating the whole as more than the sum of its parts.
The repetition of a range of assertions–such as “the C yen is of the brain alone, a need without body and without feeling,” (while the “pleasure of morphine is in the viscera”)–and throwaway phrases like “wouldn’t you?” is to be expected in a text culled from a deluge of spontaneous and miscellaneous writing over a period of five years. However, in the final edited form its use illustrates the aforementioned neurotic, self-centred riffing. The idea that Burroughs lies at the heart of his book is even echoed in his depictions of its most prominent characters. In contrast to Kerouac’s fictional representation of real individuals in On the Road, it is perhaps not totally insignificant that the first character Burroughs portrays in detail–the urbane and psychotic Dr. Benway–discusses schizophrenia during his early appearances. While Benway, A.J., The Sailor, Andrew Keif et al. are not manifestations of the author, they are all players on his cock-eyed stage, and he certainly recognises elements of himself in them. And what is the distinction between William Lee and William Seward? (Lee was his mother’s maiden name; Seward his own middle.) The latter’s last-minute soliloquy in the Atrophied Preface adds yet more complexity to Burroughs’ already splintered psyche; are there now two or three of him? Which is the real man? Is the distinction purely one of name? Paraphrasing Burroughs himself, the answer to these questions is that most of the characters in Naked Lunch are ultimately ‘the same person,’ namely “the junky naked in sunlight…”.
A better question than ‘where do you start with Naked Lunch?’ might be ‘why bother?’, given its palpable self-obsessive ugliness. The simple answer is that it was among the first works of fiction to address the psychological effects of drug addiction after WWII and it addressed them in a way which strongly influenced post-war popular culture–not just by providing the moniker of the band responsible for “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” (Steely Dan) either. In his subjectivity and his use of the jive vernacular, for example, Burroughs prefigures Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo” pessimism and drug-induced paranoia–statements like “there is no drag like U.S. drag,” and ellipse-punctuated rhetoric such as “I don’t check these citizens…Dope peddlers from Aleppo?…Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Illegal diamond buyers from Johannesburg?…” being among the more obvious antecedents.
Interestingly though, it’s the tangibly self-centred and wallowing quality of Burroughs’ dystopian nihilism, rather than his less obvious desire to escape it, which has most coloured the popular consciousness. As with Voltaire’s Candide, Burroughs’ brutally graphic subject matter should attack complacent thinking, not promote defeatism. He observes in Naked Lunch that

“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.”

Burroughs insists that “the building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit [is] the road to follow”: proof of his strong desire for something better. Sure enough, this opinion is put into Benway’s mouth, as if Burroughs knew his utopian dreams could never be realised. It is sad, nonetheless, that despite the quality of his literary work, the enduring legacy of a man whose last words were both humanitarian and progressive seems to be, as Will Self has observed, ‘tee shirt slogans’, ‘attitudinising’ and the faint whiff of lobotomy.