Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Summary
William Lee, an addict narrator standing in for Burroughs himself, flees a United States he describes only in glimpses and surfaces in Interzone, a hallucinatory port city built out of Burroughs's years in Tangier. Rather than chapters that build toward an event, the book is assembled from freestanding units Burroughs called routines: Lee's dealings with the shadowy agency Islam Inc, his passage through the clinic of Doctor Benway, a control obsessed physician who treats patients as material rather than people, and set piece satires voiced by four warring political factions, the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Divisionists and the Factualists, each pitching a different totalitarian cure for the human body. The book refuses a plot in the ordinary sense and refuses an ending to match. Its final pages find Lee firing on police in one more routine among many, the prose dissolving into fragments rather than resolving into a scene a reader could summarize as a conclusion.
Reading it is closer to entering a hallucination than following a story. Burroughs himself said the routines could be shuffled and read in any order, and the book rewards that claim: it is grotesque, often deliberately disgusting in its violence and its drug use, and very funny in a cold way that catches readers off guard. It is genuinely difficult, more an experience to sit inside than a narrative to follow, and readers who come to it expecting the Beat road novels of Burroughs's friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg tend to find it a much harder, stranger book than anything either of them wrote.
Burroughs wrote most of the routines in Tangier and Paris in the 1950s while addicted to heroin himself, mailing loose typescript pages to Ginsberg and Kerouac, who helped shape the fragments into the book Olympia Press eventually printed. Burroughs took the title from Kerouac's suggestion, describing the naked lunch as the frozen moment when everyone sees exactly what is on the end of every fork.
Historical Context & Significance
Olympia Press published Naked Lunch in Paris in July 1959, and Grove Press brought out the American edition in November 1962. No literary prize existed to weigh a book built this way, and none considered it; the book instead spent 1965 and 1966 fighting for its legality. A Massachusetts court found it obscene in March 1965, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed that ruling in July 1966, a decision that followed testimony from Norman Mailer, who praised Burroughs's exquisite poetic sense, and from the poet John Ciardi, who compared the book's imagery to Dante and Bosch, along with Allen Ginsberg's own account of what its addiction scenes actually described.
Reviews split just as sharply. Mary McCarthy located it inside a real satirical tradition and J. G. Ballard later called it the first authentic mythology of the age of Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen, while the novelist John Wain dismissed it as trash and Time magazine read it as little more than an addict's diary. Neither side settled the argument. Time later placed it on its 2005 list of the hundred best English language novels since 1923, the band Steely Dan took its name from a device described in the book, and David Cronenberg's 1991 film adaptation, blending the routines with episodes from Burroughs's own biography, brought the book to an audience the Boston trial had once tried to keep it from reaching at all.