Naked Lunch: Imagination and Reflection in the Art of Burroughs and Cronenberg - Book Report/Review Example

 Naked Lunch: Imagination and Reflection in the Art of Burroughs and Cronenberg William S. Burroughs, along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, are considered the leading writers in the American Beat movement that formed in the early 1950’s in the U.S. and inspired the growth of a larger counter-culture in the 1960’s through the ideas and lifestyle promoted in their literature. In this context, Burroughs was a senior figure in the Beat Movement, older than both Kerouac and Ginsberg, and in many ways their mentor and philosophical guide in life. Burroughs came from a wealthy family in the U.S. that owned the famous, eponymous typewriter company, and thus enjoyed a manner of wealth and support from his family over time that allowed him to pursue literature as a career as well as to travel. However, it was Burroughs’ “street-wise” sense and knowledge of the subculture of junkies, addicts, pimps, prostitutes, petty thieves, and drug dealers that impressed the other Beats in addition to his mind. Burroughs’ first works before ‘Naked Lunch,’ entitled ‘Junky’ (1953) and ‘Queer’ (written at the same time but published in 1985) , told the story of this sordid underworld with a dry, realistic style from the perspective of a heroin addict, also including seeds of science fiction themes he would return to in later works. Burroughs life is in many ways determined by his homosexuality, and the relationship with his family that entailed in his youth. Homosexuality was repressed and an object of hate crime in America frequently during his time in Missouri, and homosexuals were discriminated upon in ways by society that fueled Burroughs’ identity as an outsider. Nevertheless, his earlier work is written in a style that is traditional and not revolutionary as in ‘Naked Lunch’ and later cut-up novels. When Ginsberg refused Burroughs’ advances sexually in the mid-fifties, Burroughs went into a type of depression that also fueled his drug addiction to new levels. Burroughs and Ginsberg had experimented with the Amazonian entheogen Yage, or Ayahuasca, as well as other psychedelics like mushrooms, acid, & peyote, as well as street drugs like pot, heroin, amphetamines, speed, and cocaine. (Burroughs & Ginsberg, 2001) The drugged state of massive hallucinations is a theme that drives the majority of Burroughs’ work, as he seeks to express in “Naked Lunch” and other books a theory of mind and an expanded sense of self that he experienced himself in altered states of consciousness as well as the desperate and self-loathing states of despair. “There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol,'” Burroughs wrote. “Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.” (Burroughs, 1997) When Burroughs travels to Morocco in 1954 in depression, he travels to Tangier and checks into a hotel going on a drug binge similar to those described by Hunter Thompson in Gonzo journalism. Burroughs was a lifelong heroin addict, and needed to constantly have a supply. There is no evidence that he ever quit the daily use of heroin even until his death. In Tangier, Burroughs had found what he wanted – an unlimited supply of cheap hashish, heroin, and other drugs through which he could explore the nature of his own mind in isolation. Stanislav Grof, the founder of Transpersonal Psychology, has compared LSD to a microscope in the way it can be used to examine one’s own mind, and it is in this manner that Burroughs undertook his inquiry into consciousness in Morocco. Keeping his typewriter in his room, Burroughs would enter drugged states and then follow the stream of consciousness of his own mind, typing the results into page after page of text that he kept in unorganized in piles in his room. We see these scenes depicted in David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of “Naked Lunch” which follows the biographical pattern of his life. Cronenberg uses the fantastic imagery of a world of hallucination filled with biomechanical centipedes, morphing typewriters, paranoid intelligence agents, syringes, semen, alien parasites, sex viruses, and Arab eroticism fusing to give expression to the mind as projected by Burroughs from his altered states. William S. Burroughs spent nearly four years living in Morocco and writing in this way. In 1958, Allen Ginsberg visited him and began assisting him in the editing of the texts. “In late 1953, William S. Burroughs arrived in Tangier, a city he would later dub 'Interzone' in his novel Naked Lunch. Paul Bowles saw Bill Burroughs regularly during the two-year period from 1955 to 1956. In 1957, Jack Kerouac arrived in Tangier to visit with Burroughs and help him type various manuscripts, staying only one month. Kerouac was soon followed by Allen Ginsberg, accompanied by his friend Peter Orlovsky (Ginsberg was snubbed by Jane Bowles) and finally Alan Ansen." (Bowles, 2010) In 1958, Burroughs left Morocco and moved to Paris to work on the publication of ‘Naked Lunch,’ which he first published there through Olympia Press in 1959. Again living in Paris, Burroughs would meet many of the influential Dadaists and Surrealists living in the city at the time, as well as Byron Gysin who introduced him to the cut up method. This inspired Burroughs completely and he went on to publish three novels in the next three years based on this method: ‘The Soft Machine’ (1961), ‘The Ticket That Exploded’ (1962), and ‘Nova Express’ (1963). Living in Paris, he had difficulty publishing ‘Naked Lunch’ in America due to existing laws against obscenity. “Naked Lunch” – Obscenity or Dystopia: JUNKY: "So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup." PROFESSOR: "Coprophilia... gentlemen... might be termed the hurumph... redundant vice...." "Twenty years an artist in the blue movies and I never sink so low as fake an orgasm." "No good junky cunt hang up her unborn child.... Women are no good, kid." "I mean this dead level conscious sex,... Might as well take your old clothes to the Laundromat...." "And right in the heat of passion he says, 'Do you have an extra shoetree?' " "She tell me how forty Arabs drag her into a mosque and rape her presumably in sequence.... Though they're bad to push -- all right, end of the line, Ali. Really, my pets, most distasteful routine I ever listen to. I was after being raped myself by a pride of rampant bores." A group of sour Nationalists sits in front of the Sargasso sneering at the queens and jabbering in Arabic....Clem and Jody sweep in dressed like The Capitalist in a communist mural… The traveling queer Christmas tree burns bright on the rubbish heaps of home where boys jack off in the school toilet -- how many young spasms on that old oaken seat worn smooth as gold....” (Burroughs, 1959) This quote from ‘Naked Lunch’ is typical of the style and language of the text, and illustrates the reasons Americans had such a difficult time with the work when it was finally published there in the mid-1960’s. After the publication of “Naked Lunch,” it was declared to be obscene and public trials were undertaken charging people with distributing obscene literature in the mail. During this trial, the famous American author Norman Mailer took to the stand and gave this defense of Burroughs: “William Burroughs is in my opinion — whatever his conscious intention may be — a religious writer. There is a sense in NAKED LUNCH of the destruction of soul, which is more intense than any I have encountered in any other modern novel. It is a vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity... Just as Hieronymus Bosch set down the most diabolical and blood-curdling details with a delicacy of line and a Puckish humor which left one with a sense of the mansions of horror attendant upon Hell, so, too, does Burroughs leave you with an intimate, detailed vision of what Hell might be like, a Hell which may be waiting as the culmination, the final product, of the scientific revolution.” (Mailer, 1965) Rather than an example of obscenity, “Naked Lunch” represents a dystopian vision of modern society and the mind of the repressed individual within in it looking for enlightenment. The Interzone of ‘Naked Lunch’ is state of chaos under repression – that is Burroughs own mind as he struggles with outsider status as a queer, as a junky, as a murderer who had shot his wife, as a public intellectual, anti-role model, and anti-hero. ‘Naked Lunch’ portrays the chaotic state of the subconscious under repression by social ideas and power structures it could resist intellectually, but not escape in society. Thus drug addiction is the perpetual solution to freedom and escape for Burroughs, and the mind he escapes into is the imaginary world of Interzone as depicted by Cronenberg in the film adaptation of ‘Naked Lunch’. For Burroughs, the entire book is about drug addiction, the terrors of the subconscious, and he even invokes this in his own deposition in defense against obscenity when on trial. Yet, Burroughs’ own means of expression and words, sarcastic and loathing, filled with self-hatred and irony, are difficult to express literally in film as they represent the stream of consciousness in Burroughs’ mind. “When David Cronenberg adapted William Burroughs's (1924–1997) Naked Lunch (1959) for the screen in 1991, the result was a film self-consciously exploring its own status as an adaptation. Cronenberg himself calls it “an exercise in analyzing the difference between the two media … writing and cinema,” a programmatic statement considering the film's interest in authors and their writing machines, the competition and collaboration among authors, and the origins of creativity in addiction, sexuality, personal and historical trauma, and insanity.” (Hantke, 2007) Cronenberg chooses to model his film not on the actual text, but a biographical portrait of a writer modeled on Burroughs who writes hallucinatory science fiction. Where Burroughs sought to explain a model of consciousness by expressing the actual data within its frequencies as processed by the personality, Cronenberg shows this through the narrative of the extended scene. A film adaptation of ‘Naked Lunch’ that expresses artistically the actual subject matter of the book literally was not taken, being un-filmable in Cronenberg’s view. However, cinema may be awaiting the same type of revolution in methodology and tone that Burroughs introduced into fiction, but Cronenberg does not take that route as he is building a main-stream film with an “R” rating, and Burroughs imagery would still be considered pornographic in some instances, worse morally offensive and repugnant in depicting homosexual sex with boys. The paranoid schizophrenic nature of Burroughs work is given prominence by Cronenberg in his film biography, and sets the tone of the film as it did in Burroughs own life. Cronenberg uses the techniques of surrealism and dada to depict the hallucinatory reality of Burroughs through his own lens and symbols – forms and themes that appear in other Cronenberg films. Ultimately Cronenberg’s film fails because it presents a censored version of William S. Burroughs life, whereas in reality he was living and fighting censorship and societal values through ‘Naked Lunch’. In removing offensive aspects of Burroughs character from his depiction, Cronenberg consents to the very values of repression that Burroughs is opposing in his work, and creates a fictional Burroughs that appears to be faithful to the original but misses this fundamental point. Perhaps Burroughs and Cronenberg were both attempting to further their own personal careers as artists in their respective literary and cinematic framing of ‘Naked Lunch,’ but Burroughs creates his work as the ultimate outsider in Morocco in isolation and Cronenberg creates his work as the ultimate studio insider and with a multi-million dollar corporate budget. So despite appearing to cover the same subject matter and events, Cronenberg’s fiction is in many ways more queer than ‘Naked Lunch’ as written by Burroughs. “’Letter from a Master Addict’ presents Burroughs as a scientist, coolly experimenting on himself and others and disinterestedly recording the results of his experiments for the public at large: ‘I once took two nembutal capsules (one and a half grain each) every night for four months and suffered no withdrawal symptoms. Barbiturate addiction [...] is probably not a metabolic addiction like morphine, but a mechanical reaction from excessive front brain sedation" (NL 251). The fact of prior publication on drug addiction in a serious medical journal implied respectability; by adding it to the text Grove anticipated its (failed) contention in the 1965 Massachusetts Superior Court trial that, as an accurate, journalistic account of the culture of addiction, Naked Lunch was not obscene.” (Loranger, 1999) Thus Burroughs is fusing the use of drugs in ‘Naked Lunch’ as a means of self-inquiry into the nature of his own mind and personality, with the scientific method of clinical practice in psychiatry as an example. What the book represents is a pattern of sub-conscious thoughts of an outsider individual repeating, interweaving, and unifying to form themes, substance, and narrative. Burroughs continues to imagine an entire universe, Interzone, and he imagines his own self appearing and acting in different situations in that fantasy world literarily in a form of eroticism. Yet Burroughs’ dream is not a naïve fiction, or merely a tale of scatological nightmares, for through the explosions of subconscious ideas the deeper levels of consciousness, the religious aspects of nature, cosmology and the afterlife all appear repeatedly, mixed in with pornographic images and offensive language. Sex and its ugly, exploitative nature as practiced by Burroughs intersects with the life of drug addiction to produce and imagery in ‘Naked Lunch’ that is shocking to nearly any reader, and blasphemous to most, in the way that it mixes religious imagery with sex, violence, and twisted humor. Burroughs paints a dystopian vision of modern society an draws a portrait of the mind of a suffering artist within it, just as romantics, cubists, or impressionists had. However, it is best to view Burroughs’ literature as an example of Abstract Expressionism, as contemporaneous with its creation were the works of Jackson Pollock to which ‘Naked Lunch’ bears the most striking emotional similarities. Just as Pollock painted with raw emotions and primal energy upon the patterns of projected subconscious thoughts into the world with his Abstract Expressionist paintings, so too does Burroughs use the same methods to express mind through literature in art in ‘Naked Lunch’. In comparison to this, Cronenberg’s cinematic adaptation of ‘Naked Lunch’ lacks the same artistic force behind its expression, and the values of the movie reflect a limiting censorship of the original. Bibliography: Burroughs, William S (2001). Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S & Ginsberg, Allen (1977). Junky: Originally Published as Junkie Under the Pen Name of William Lee. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Penguin Books. Burroughs, William S (1985). Queer: A Novel. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Thus edition. Burroughs, William S. (2004) Naked Lunch, the restored text edition, edited by James Grauerholtz and Barry Miles. New York, Grove Press, 2004. Burroughs, William S & Ginsberg, Allen (2001). The Yage Letters. City Lights Publishers; First Edition. Bowles, Paul. (2010). Paul Bowles: Literary Friends, Part Three. The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site. Date accessed Dec. 10th, 2010: Hantke , Steffen. (2007) Genre and authorship in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch . Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen. Date accessed Dec. 10th, 2010: Loranger, Carol (1999). "This Book Spill Off the Page in All Directions": What Is the Text of Naked Lunch? Wright State University. Date accessed Dec. 10th, 2010: Mailer, Norman. (1965). The Boston Trial of Naked Lunch. Reality Studio. Date accessed Dec. 10th, 2010: Read More