=THE UNOFFICIAL= WILLIAM B URROUGHS HOMEPAGE WILLIAM B URROUGHS REPORT

By David C.Parisi
dcp@vitinc.com

On Burroughs' Work, And Naked Lunch

The method must be purest meat
and no symbolic dressing,
actual visions & actual prisons
as seen then and now.

Prisons and visions presented
with rare descriptions
corresponding exactly to those
of Alcatraz and Rose.

A naked lunch is natural to us,
we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don't hide the madness!

Allen Ginsberg
1954

William S. Burroughs was born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Harvard University, and after he graduated he lived in New York City on an allowance from his wealthy parents. Around Christmas in 1943 he met Allen Ginsberg, who was a student at Columbia University at the time. A bit later he met Jack Kerouac, and the three became good friends. Being that he was much older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs became a sort of teacher for the two, and encouraged them in their attempts in writing fiction and poetry.

Burroughs' style of writing was called the "new vision." It was considered a literature of risk. He was turned down by publishers, who actually began calling him the outlaw writer. Searching for his identity, and since he was already called an outlaw, Burroughs sought a criminal lifestyle. This mostly included stealing and selling syringes of morphine, a heroine derivative to which he quickly became addicted. It has been said that William S. Burroughs occupies a strange cultural position as a major figure of contemporary avant-garde fiction, and has been called the Godfather of Punk. Not only did he live a life of hedonism and decadence, Burroughs bragged about this and exploited it even. Although he may not have been the most moral person, I think that that's the type of person that we can learn the most from. By reading his work, you experience, therefore learn from the mistakes that he's made, so you don't have to make them yourself.

Naked Lunch was one of the most important novels published during the 1960's. A landmark federal court case deemed Naked Lunch not obscene, and this broke the ground for other books, helping to eliminate censorship of the printed word in the US. Although it's seemingly immoral, Burroughs describes his intentions as being, "using the immoral in defense of the good." Author and critic, Mailer also explained in the obscenity trial of Naked Lunch, that the novel is a vision of a mankind which is totally divorced from eternity. In other words a society living without consequences.

As different mediums of art always do influence one another, Burroughs' style of writing was influenced not only by classical satirists, especially Jonathan Swift, but was also influenced by the visual art movement known as Dadaism. Dadaism, coined by the critic, Guillome Appolinere, was defined as the anti-art art movement. Naked Lunch is essentially anti-literature literature. It has absolutely no narrative continuity. It lacks a constant point of view, and the separate episodes in the novel do not interrelate in any way. The only element that does bring them together is the mind of the author. The episodes in the book are distributed as fragments in the book, rather than an organized structure. The book shows how to open your levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long dark hallway, as opposed to opening the door that is just at the beginning of the hallway. The title of the book comes from this idea, that there's a frozen moment when everyone sees what's on the end of every fork. The fragments in Naked Lunch produce just that. Short vignettes which are truthful, and hold back absolutely nothing. Everybody can see what's on the end of everybody else's forks.... figuratively speaking everyone and everything is naked.

The primary theme of Naked Lunch is that it's a satire of a society that is becoming consciousless. It shows the world, as a place where there are no consequences. It also has some less important themes such as identifying and learning from your mistakes.

Critic, John Wain said, "A book like Naked Lunch requires far less talent in the writer, and for that matter, even less intelligence of the reader than the humblest magazine story or circulating library novel. From a literary point of view, it is the merest trash, not worth a second glance." Superficially, it is a book about sex and drugs. If you can bring yourself to deal with that, then it becomes so much more. It was probably the deepest thing that I have ever read. The messages that it puts forth are shown in such a way that it actually takes much more of the reader to fully understand them. Once you get the idea that is being shown, it is so obvious throughout the rest of the book, and it then becomes a brilliant satire. Burroughs message couldn't have been told a better way. When you see truths that are probably too harsh for you to accept, the message is abundantly clear.

In my opinion Burroughs writing came way before a time that it would be substantially relevant to society. It is quite ironic that when this novel was written, the only sexually transmitted disease known to us was pregnancy, and drug addictions weren't a disease, but were actually considered a cure from many diseases. Like the seat belt commercial says, you can learn a lot from a dummy.

The best piece of writing that I see to compare Naked Lunch with is The poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg. The very first line of Howl shows the great relationship between the two. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix." Howl also shows a society which is hedonistically living without a conscience. It is also a series of brutally honest images which tell the reader how wrong a lifestyle of decadence is. By the way, Howl was also said to be obscene, but when studied, as in the case of Naked Lunch, it does not promote a life of sexual and chemical decadence, but actually teaches you the consequences.

In closing I'd just like to say that before anyone allows themselves to be audacious enough to call something obscene, they should reconsider, taking into account their own cultural ignorance, and also understand that if you do not know the purpose that something, (allegedly obscene,) was written for, then you shouldn't call it obscene, or immediately dismiss it just because you don't understand it, or because you don't agree with the ideas that you think it promotes.

To Contact David mail to dcp@vitinc.com