By: Michael Scott Monje, Jr.
(Editorial Note: This was originally going to be the script for the first episode of a podcast called "Cognitive Access". Due to other professional demands, Michael will not be able to pursue that project in the short-term, so NeuroQueer is publishing the script as an essay.)
(Editorial Note: This was originally going to be the script for the first episode of a podcast called "Cognitive Access". Due to other professional demands, Michael will not be able to pursue that project in the short-term, so NeuroQueer is publishing the script as an essay.)
Before
we start, I want to just say that the reason I chose this book is
because it was so influential to me during the years immediately
preceding the publication of my first novel. There are a lot of
things that this book could be said to be about, but one thing that
Burroughs makes sure we never lose sight of is that this book is
about observation. It's also about degradation, control, compulsion,
addiction, abuse, colonialism, sadism, sexual diversity, and a lot of
other topics, but Burroughs makes sure that we know what he wants us
to do with the book in the Atrophied Preface, when he says: “Naked
Lunch demands
silence from the reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse.”
This
quote comes at the end of a couple of paragraphs that also tell us
that Burroughs viewed this book as “a blueprint, a How-To Book...”
and that also say “How-To extend levels of experience by opening
the door at the end of a long hall... Doors that open only in
Silence.”
Coming as the Atrophied Preface does at the end of the book, this is
highly instructive, because it serves as a way to tie together the
various plot lines in the book that might otherwise seem to be
unrelated to each other. We are told here that they are steps in a
process, that's what it means to say one is writing a “how-to”
book after all. The command to silence is also important—it tells
us that this book was not designed to be a back-and-forth
conversation with the reader in the same ways that other books often
are. Instead, it is something to be observed, something that the
reader might be able to construct meaning from in recollection, but
that demands attention and silence during its exhibition.
This
is not necessarily an unfamiliar critical demand, it's just uncommon
for writers to
take it. Silent observation, meditation with the piece, and a
mind-clearing attempt at observation that takes in its parts and then
assembles them into a whole is actually fairly common when we are
appreciating visual art. That is why art museums and galleries have
headphones for their talking tours. It's why they have benches in
front of the pieces, too.
Naked
Lunch is
not a novel. It's an art gallery inside a book cover. In many of the
various introductions and outtakes at the end of the 50th
anniversary edition of the book Burroughs hints at this, and in some
of the editorial material here we learn that the book's title itself
came from an intensely visual concept that Jack Kerouac first
described when reading early pages of the manuscript—according to
the received wisdom in the back of the text, Kerouac chose that title
because it invoked the idea of a moment of frozen time, an absolute
clear moment when point of view drops away and the contents of
everyone's meal is suddenly visible, glistening, at the end of their
forks.
This
imagery is important not only because it helps to support the idea
that the text is about creating imagery and composing with the
elements of visual art, but also because it helps to clarify the
philosophical ideas behind many of the more blatant, vulgar, and
downright ugly sections of the text. If the goal is to drop away the
pretense of “the meal” and to instead show the dripping gore that
is about to be shoveled from the end of a weapon into a mammal's
gaping maw, then we should not expect that Naked
Lunch
follows the same social niceties as a... shall we say narratively
clothed lunch. Or a breakfast. Say, at Tiffany's.
Still,
the comparison is worth making, if only to point out that the book
itself, in its rejection of those euphemisms and common narratives
that are usually deployed around madness, addiction, sexual
diversity, and authoritarianism, is the opposite of what literature
usually purports to be. It is not attempting to tell us the story of
anything,
nor is it attempting to make us capable of empathizing with a
point-of-view that is unfamiliar. It's not about creating an
understanding of a time and a place and the people who live there.
What
it is,
is a series of studies in the same emotional landscape, and that
landscape is compulsion. Whether it is the compulsion of addiction,
where the mind and body both become dependent for their basic
metabolism on a substance or the compulsion of authoritarianism,
where the policies and programs of those in power are threatened by
those with needs that their programs can not meet, we are shown how
these compulsions work.
I'm not using compulsion in a purely psychological sense, either, but
as in its most basic form as an irresistible impulse.
In
the end, this is the only way Naked
Lunch has
power. If we assumed that the kind of compulsion being described here
was purely pathological, then the Benway mindset, the idea that we
could tame it and use it through some program of depersonalization
and reprogramming, would be the “protagonist” mindset for the
book. Instead, Benway is shown to be every bit as corrupt, cruel, and
unconcerned with the pain he causes as the sexually sadistic couple
whose entire relationship is based on killing the third person in
their bisexual trysts.
Instead,
Naked Lunch
is a study in the ways that power dynamics create irresistible
impulses that people follow, regardless of their assumed level of
sanity or authority, and how those power dynamics create human
suffering. From the junkie whose body is slowly decaying into a mass
of dying and/or dead fluids, slowly losing cohesion through neglect
and secondary infection, to the intentional provocation of madness as
a stage in studying the drugs used to control it, the book introduces
us to case study after case study in suffering. They are unrelated as
elements of story, but they are as related to each other as any two
paintings in a themed gallery exhibition, and if that attitude is
brought to bear on them, then they immediately become clear in their
juxtaposition against the more plainspoken essays used to introduce
and close the book and in their juxtaposition against each other.
I'm not saying that the book isn't difficult. It is an intensely
difficult book. What I am saying is that the points of intersection
work as alternative starting points to the book in the same way that
one might experience a wing of an art museum according to any pattern
of observation that one wishes. There might be a suggested path, but
in the end the exhibits are in a hall, and the observer is invited to
choose their own path through that hall. Deviating from the suggested
pattern might create new meanings in the relationship between
exhibitions in the observer's mind, but this does not mean that those
new meanings are unanticipated by the artist. It was, after all, the
artist who designed the layout of the exhibitions in the hall in the
first place, and that artist made clear the intent to accommodate
various approaches to the text.
This flexibility in the text creates an interesting side-effect too:
By making it possible to adapt the book to one's own cognitive
process or style, Burroughs winds up designing a book that balks
against the linear expectations of most other books. In its
documentation of the ways that rules and normative expectations can
be used as weapons, it does not settle for confinement to the
expectations of the medium it is working in.
In between this queering of the expectations of the novel and the
queering of the general expectations of the physical artifacts of
books themselves, the reader is repeatedly invited to maintain their
silence, in order to contemplate what these things mean. And in that
tradition, I will do no more than point these things out, to ensure
that future readers take the time to observe them. My goal as an
essayist is, after all, about making texts accessible, not dictating
their meaning.
Returning to the idea of the “How-To Book”, though, we do have to
ask ourselves: What is this a “blueprint” for? If the goal is to
force us outside of the confinement of a point-of-view and to render,
naked, the pure sensory detail of the moment, then from whence does
our interpretation come? The very concept of the frozen moment
wherein the full detail of the world can be perceived in all of its
abject intensity seems to demand the lack of a point-of-view. It is
intellectually dishonest, though, for us to pretend that this is
truly possible.
Its one instruction, the core element that makes the relationship
between vignettes tangible to the reader, is the appreciation not of
the text, but of the nonverbal, subtextual relationships between the
texts. The only way that this becomes visible is through a nonverbal
mental process, the process of simply observing, without comment, and
allowing the text to permeate your sense of yourself.
Naked
Lunch is
an exercise in the loosening of control, and it must be so, because
(as it makes clear in various sections throughout the book) the
fixation on maintaining control, on having an objective other than to
perceive things as they are, creates an agenda for the reading that
necessarily leads the reader to accept some aspects of the text while
ignoring others. It is impossible to read any
book
from a particular critical point-of-view and not to do these things,
but Naked Lunch
demands that
we not do them.
Why?
I can only speak for myself, but to me, the point of this book was to
call our attention to the fact that the true meanings of books are
not in their texts, but in their relationship to the culture they
emerged from. Like paintings. Like sculptures.
If
Naked Lunch
taught me anything, it taught me that to write literature, that is,
to write work which not only tells stories but which is also a case
study in the cultural forces of its time, requires a loosening of
agendas and points of view. In order to properly render the full
context of the societies we react to, writers must necessarily lay
aside their own roles in that society and advocate for each character
on their own, with the idea that all the other characters are allies
or enemies, but that they are not necessarily pulling toward the same
goal.
Only
by loosening the bounds of the individual point-of-view and seeing
each moment as it
actually is,
without the context of an objective, can the writer achieve the
objective of rendering something in a multi-dimensional way. To me,
that is the point of the book and that is also the point where it is
easy to get lost in the book.
It would be easy to view this lesson as being a statement against
point-of-view, but Burroughs himself does not seem to take that view,
as he advocates for the text as a rhetorical device when he talks
about using it to document the shortcomings of addiction treatment
programs. This is important, because this is the point at which the
observer disentangles from the art:
The
point is not to create a new genre or to exalt this book's invitation
to nonlinear, non-verbal thought. The point is that in order to
compose in this medium with a fully realized artistic control, one
must understand what exerting artistic control does to the work. In
order to understand that, we must have at least one example of how
control works
alongside our examples of “great books” that we wish to one day
aspire to equaling in quality, power, and emotional potential.
At least, that's what the book taught me.
I
had studied the writing process, the pedagogy of writing instruction,
story structure, and hundreds of examples of literary works in each of
the major genres across the entire period of history that the English
language existed in. It wasn't until I read this one, though, that I
understood how to use
that
knowledge.
Maybe that's not the book. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I spent my time
with it taking my own pulse.
But
maybe that's ultimately what it's for.
Michael Scott Monje Jr. writes
the web serial Shaping
Clay. They have also published
two
novels and a
novelette.
