The Structure of Nothingness
William Burroughs' Naked Lunch
A
modern Socrates might very well think that self-knowledge had something to do
with endurance; so he might find something to respect in the relentless search
for knowledge that William Burroughs conducts in Naked Lunch; here his
prose moves us into an elastic, in-between realm of magic, instant power,
sudden death and incomprehensible events. Burroughs lives in
A
motto from Wittgenstein is cited by the author in the "Deposition"
that prefaces Naked Lunch: "If a proposition is NOT NECESSARY it is
MEANINGLESS and approaching MEANING ZERO." This will come to mean the
non-need of the non-junkie for the junkie; but by way of such
panoramic-panoptic concepts as "The Algebra of Need" and
"Pyramids of Control" we sooner or later have to admit (if for no
other reason that that our noses are constantly rubbed in that truth, tracked
down already in the 19th century by Coleridge, DeQuincey
and Baudelaire) that we are all junkies; in fact, it almost gets to seem
as if the out-and-out junkie is less of an addict that all the others,
who simply are not hip to their addiction. Here a certain type of addict has it
all over the "non-addict", one who knows he is enslaved and
controlled. The addict possesses what Marx called an essential prerequisite for
Revolution, that is "consciousness". Addicts
therefore can comprise an intellectual and esoteric brotherhood of "knowers". They "know", also in the refulgent
Hegelian sense of the MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC from the scriptural Phenomenology
of Mind of taking the risks of their life-styles, because they have paid
the price of their knowledge, and are ready to continue paying for it. Even if
a "straight" were to become aware of the pervasiveness of the methods
of social control, in no sense can this awareness be seen as knowledge, because
it was attained without suffering for it with lungs, veins, desperate need.
Today only blood is real, whether it is the slow blood of the dropper that
affords "the soft-sweet blow to the stomach", or Cocteau's
"Blood of the Poet", Artaud assassinated as
Marat in Gance's Napoleon:
"everlasting shame to Charlotte Corday", or
Lorca's blood seeping into an Andalusian
desert before a liquefactionist firing squad.
However
our Hegelian pie might come out of the ovens in an existential crust. Very
tempting to taste it in a sauce of Merleau Ponty's philosophy of lunacy from The Phenomenology of
Perception: What does the famed psychotic Schreber,
whose delirium so fascinated Freud, see when a nurse enters his room with tea
and cookies? Is it space invaded, a messenger from the Absolute...? Here is a
sense of man making himself that would have bothered even Sartre. Lunacy is
there to show us what a man sees when there is truly nothing to see, everything
to make up: "Why stop here, why stop anywhere?" our author will
wonder in The Ticket That Exploded. Lunacy, a Blanchot
might say, as he did about "the fragmentary", is the answer man gets
who has decided to put the universe radically into question. In the beginning
was nothing, and lunacy is there to remind us of this untidy, indigestible
little fact: man in a "state of nature" is a lunatic; his entire history,
as Heidegger's Being and Time made clear, is a flight from accepting his
empty condition, this Being of Nothing. Now a lunatic is precisely a man
without a condition to accept, someone too busy (being) to invent one (go into
business). Schizophrenia, as Deleuze and Guattari show in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, is
simply man's contemporary strategy of control and exploitation of the
primordial unnamable fluxes of lunacy: "The
sincerity of the beggar [read lunatic] stuns me" in the other words of
Rimbaud's "Bad Blood" from his Season in Hell!
For
hero, Vergil in this particular
"underworld" we'll just have to take the author. There doesn't seem
to be much competition for the job -- we need a life-hardened irrationalist to get us through this chaos, so we'll
play those tapes instead of listening to our culture's piped-in muzak-art reassuring us that everything is just fine, the
way it always was... And who exactly is our guide, well, he's
constantly changing, maybe change itself, the metamorphosis.
In the "Atrophied Preface" with which Grove Press closes its edition,
the author even introduces himself under the persona of William Seward, a
lonely man who is spreading his words like rushes before you to the temple of
his brain: "look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel
on"; but here, he-he, the tourist is still "in charge". If you
don't like the campus of Interzone University, with
the Professor and his "Mahriner" surrounded
by gage-smoking students, like monkeys with nothing better to do, then we drop
back into the gruesome world of such episodes as "Black Meat" and
"Coke Bugs", with the Sailor and his gang feeling for each other's
veins and worse; here at last we really understand our bodies are not our own.
Or worse still, we become the morethanwecaretobe
interested, "captive" audience for the underground stag films A.J.
shows at this Annual Party. Mary hangs John, for some of that onceinalifetime Deathgasm.
Straight out of Joyce, from the nightown scene, from
theory into practice, yours truly, A.J. Are we to think along with Ginsberg
that it's actually better to be a factualist-anarchist, à
la A.J., than a compulsive Sender like the Professor, Lieutenant or Party
Leader? Or was Ginsberg merely greasing, moralizing the passage Naked Lunch,
like Madame Bovary, Flowers of Evil, Lady Chatterley, the Tropics,
even Ulysses, had to make through court muster? Then as now and always
the sign you're saying something is when someone wants to shut you up; you know
you're doing your job for sure as a writer when you're on the other side of the
bar.
Here
perhaps a little political science is in order. Burroughs will assume, safely,
we belong to one of four parties: Liquefactionist, Divisionist, Sender, Factualist.
The Liquefactionists are the out-and-out fascist
pigs. They don't live, they liquefy. The Divisionists
are liberals. They live by creating replicas of themselves. Every so often
there is a general Schluppit when it is fair
game on all replicas; in such times it is more than likely that the liberals
divide even more rapidly than their destroyers are able to schlup
them up. Senders don't really form a party of their own, but simply transmit
information designed to control anything or anyone else. About the Sender,
Burroughs has this to say, in italics: "You see control can never be a
means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more
control...like junk..." Senders therefore, though they exist all
around us, don't really exist. Kafka's Keeper of the Gate of the Law could
assume dignity because he was at least close to the source of authority;
whereas Senders are merely transmitting messages whose origins don't even
matter. The Factualist party, to which the court assigns the author for want of
another label, maybe, is the one of anarchist free spirits who tolerate no form of social or institutional control.
Especially hateful to the Factualist is "one-way telepathy", whereby
the subject's dreams, planted without his knowledge or consent, ha!, become a matter of public record and display: "You mean
the green door, Carl?". Factualist freedom, like all other
illusions of escape, is vitiated, however, by its very urgency, and it seems to
me Burroughs makes that terribly clear: Mary Hangs John, Mark Hangs Mary, Mary
Begs Mark: "Please, can I hang yuh, huh,
huh?" Inescapable as a spoon of soup in the mouth is a recognition that no
one, by any conscious subscribing to causes (nor any somatic state either) can
be disassociated from malice: one can't join the party of good, in order to
oppose the party of evil, because all parties are evil. In numbers man is a
monster, but surely his solitary existence is evil enough, abandoned as he is
to the whims of a malign cosmos, at the core of which is lunacy, that is nothing
(for there is no reason why we are here, never was and never will be one --
reasons are only the lies told by what Heidegger called the "History of
Metaphysics"). But this is by no means to endorse cowardice, quiescence
and obedience; on the contrary nothing makes more sense than the action of resistance
(to what Nietzsche called "the herd instinct" for instance), as at
the end of Naked Lunch when the narrator resists arrest. Even checking
out on a ticket to the East is unthinkable. Witness the devastating put-way of
Buddha, tempting guru for a Beat Generation that was still looking for a way
out: "Buddha? A notorious Metabolic junky...
Makes his own you dig. In
It
is important that our narrator, our William Seward, or whatever you wish to
call him, spends a lot of time with Benway. He even
has lunch! with him, as he surveys from the
roof of the R.C.,
"'Where can you go, Carl?' The doctor's voice reached him from
a great distance. 'Out...Away...through the door'
'The Green Door, Carl?'"
Now
here is an example of the one-way telepathy that the factualists complain of . Carl has just hallucinated a
"green door" only a few moments presumably before Benway
asks him about it. He has not mentioned this to Benway.
The
greatness of Naked Lunch is hard to pin down, and perhaps it should be
this way for a text so determined to be elusive. I don't see that we have to
deal with any impressive and unified vision of the world, such as we get with
Joyce, D.H. Lawrence or even Henry James; perhaps we should see him as a "poète revolté", in the
tradition of the great French 'criminal poet' François Villon,
or that continued by the great Elizabethan immoralist
Christopher Marlowe; I sense an affinity in Burroughs also with the Baroque
sensibility, especially of the 17th century, in its aesthetics of discontinuity
and incongruity, for instance in the texts of John Donne, while his may be also
the temperament of a certain kind of 17th century Baroque believer, for
instance that of Richard Crashaw, for whom the
extravagant is only normal, he who described the teary eyes of Mary, watering
for her martyred son as "two walking bathtubs"! But for Burroughs
precursor in the "savage indignation" of a righteous cynicism born
out of experience I think the 18th century Swift, who himself became, as an old
man, an inmate of the insane asylum he founded in his youth, is the perfect
choice. Burroughs' work itself can be seen as one extended "Modest
Proposal", with its implied sad commentary on the rapacity of our race and
the inhumanity of our societies where such things can even be imagined. While,
in particular, Naked Lunch is indeed your junky's
Gulliver's Travels: in both texts there is a presumption of a return
from strange trips; and also both Burroughs and Swift are scatological in
spades. More germane perhaps is the seive of French
decadence. Burroughs calls repeatedly for his Gentle Reader, a version surely
of Baudelaire's "hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère", and moving up a
few lines to the passage that T.S. Eliot didn't quote:
"Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat"
Rimbaud
also works his way into the picture -- just the example of the terrific
impetuosity of the poet: the brilliant flashes across an abyss, the other side
of which is outside the law: "When I was still a child, I
admired the hardened criminal upon whom the jail door always slams shut!...He
is stronger than a saint, wiser than a seasoned traveler
-- and he has only himself...as a witness to his glory and his
righteousness."
So
Norman Mailer's assertion at Naked Lunch's trial that, had it not been
for the junk, Burroughs could have been our greatest writer,
was a little weird, to say the least. As for Rimbaud's exalting "Matinées d'Ivresse",
Baudelaire's stoned divagation on a chandelier or "chevelure",
Michaux' Miserable Miracle, the drug, which we
must see non-medically, is inseparable from the writer's practice and text. Art
hereby certainly recalls another order than longevity and health -- or a
different kind of life and health. The junk cannot be divided from Burrough's life and work; that is how he is able to carry
out what is more than just a symbolic copulation between the two...
Burroughs wrote while he was high, while he was coming down. Perhaps junk is
the price he pays for not being schizoid in a lunatic world. In The
Philosophy of Literary Form, Kenneth Burke talks about the
"derisory" and the "benign" phases as being complimentary
and characteristic of certain indubitably great but also very strange artists
-- like Dylan Thomas and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The latter's "Kubla Khan", a poem under and about "the
influence" that has been notoriously in the canon for almost 200 years, or
from the moment "it came to him", as the poet reported, in an opium
dream, is obviously thematic for Naked Lunch, as indeed is The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner, which may be regarded as the epic of withdrawal,
pendant to the addiction phase represented by "Kubla
Khan": "Stay away from Queen's Plaza, son... Evil spot haunted by
dicks scream for dope fiend lover..." The deranged "students"
yell "We want Lottie", but the professor
would rather talk on (as?) The Ancient Mariner: "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner by Coleridge the poet... I should like to call your attention to the
Ancient Mariner himself." By talking about the Mariner himself,
aren't you really talking about the poet himself, then aren't you talking about
William Burroughs, alias William Lee (name under which he published his first
book, simply Junky), alias William Gains, the last name by which his
friends knew him when he was still protecting his family name, if you can
swallow the grinning irony of Burroughs Typewriters Inc.!, from scandal. The
students' answer is more than germane, it is to the point -- aren't we
committing that cardinal sin, hey teach, life and art getting too chummy, no?: "Himself the man says...Thereby calls attention to
his own unappetizing person."
It
might be due to the machinations, hopes and dreams and whatever other unknown,
maybe unknowable quantities involved for the arrangers (I presume Kerouac,
Ginsberg, and maybe the editors of The Chicago Review, where
"extracts" of Naked Lunch first surfaced) of what Burroughs
called his unremembered notes that turned into this text he claims not to
recall writing (I think he was exaggerating a bit, maybe out of deference to
Coleridge, who did forget first -- or claimed to -- the invention of
"Kubla Khan"), but I feel a distinct upturn
toward a livable better at the end of this book...
The first line of Naked Lunch, as clarion a call as Ginsberg's first
line in Howl: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness", is "I can feel the heat closing in." The course of the
subsequent reaction is immediate and instinctive -- flight for survival, across
a mental inscape certainly, but also a real geographical one too of the U.S.A.,
maybe in a grisly parody of Huck Finn's not-so-innocent trip, and on down under
and into the dubious haven of Mexico. Following just this tiny bit of a trail
of story along through the novel we notice that all the Benway,
Interzone, Political Orgy business takes place after
the flight. Symbolically the novel represents a series of falls from a primally fled confrontation: after you have refused what
the day has to offer, you must take the dreams that the exile into night
inflicts. Or, alternatively, after you have refused, in a mysterious struggle
with night and the fear of personal extinction, to face your persecutors, then
the day is your inevitable fate. Such a day is Benway's
Freeland, where everything is permitted, because you have already signed away
sovereignty; and if you think mere laws, documents, rights are going to protect
you you deserve to have them written in the vanishing
ink the ID's are in fact in!
We
are perhaps here just one little step removed now from theories of
reincarnation. You have to live an important mistake, existential failure of
nerve, fall into inauthenticity, Hegelian denial of
risk of life, all over again and if you're lucky you may get the chance to meet
"the man" again. Maybe Burroughs' art, and
art in general describes just this luck and just this chance. Burroughs'
narrative does seem indeed to describe the arc of an immense circle (with many
bulges of course), because in the end he is right back where he was in the very
first line of the book. I am referring now to the "Hauser and
O'Brien" episode, which is the very last one of the book, if we discount
the "Atrophied Preface". The man comes in while he is tying up, but
this time there is not even a flicker of doubt in our narrator's mind. It is
the reader who doubts -- will he sell out...? Think of Sartre, of the
Resistance, when the Nazis would tear out your fingernails... think of Henri Alleg's La Question (a book than was banned in
France when Naked Lunch could only be read there) that tells the story
of the Legionnaires' torturing Algerian girls for information, and they didn't
talk... Now Burroughs is going to talk; but the doubt has all been in our
minds; he doesn't cop out, he shoots his way out, and he gets his shot too.
*
Also by Philip Beitchman: “A Neutron Bomb of the Mind”, a Digression on Bernard Stiegler
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