Naked Lunch

by William S. Burroughs



WARNING: nasty language ahead, including the use of some of my favorite phrases from the novel; these include such choice nuggets as mugwump jism and to turn a massacre into a sex orgy and a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell and the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. anyway,



I’ll be honest, mugwump jism, it took me a while to get into Naked Lunch, to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. Three attempts, to be exact, a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. I don’t mind stream-of-conscious writing, I don’t mind the Beats, I don’t mind postmodernism, I don’t mind graphic sexual and violent imagery, I don’t mind experimental narratives, the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. But a work that combines all of those things in one fetid stew, in such an in-your-face way that could care less about creating any kind of empathy, and has such a complete disinterest in establishing easily-digestible form or meaning... well, it was off-putting mugwump jism. In a way it made me angry at Burroughs, to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. Who the fuck did he think he was, grinding my face in the muck and telling me that this foul nonsense was the new Now, a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell? I didn’t like how every fourth phrase seemed to be about shit or jism or asses or toothless mouths, the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. I thought the extreme homoeroticism was gruesome and not very erotic, and it actually made me feel rather homophobic – and this is coming from a bonafide cocksucker, mugwump jism.

But the third try worked like a charm to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. Maybe I just needed to grow into the novel, and not take its challenging ways so personally, a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. The writing became amazing to me – overindulgent (obviously) but also masterful, profound even, in its hair-raising descriptive passages, its deadpan dialogue, its drooling emphasis on bodily functions, decay, death, degradation, the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. Its paranoia was no longer oppressive – if anything, it was freeing, mugwump jism. Naked Lunch’s ability to convey not just the darkness but the strangeness and black humor at the heart of both addiction and the various possible and existing forms of societal control became fascinating, to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. The radical changes in perspective, the decentralized plot and oblique narrative, all the grotesque, taboo fantasias suddenly felt mordantly playful and, well, “naked” in their need to convey a state of mind, a world view, a way of looking at the systems of the world... all of that actually became inspirational, in both the challenge of its intent and the radical nature of its result; and so the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame.