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 Mexico, Sweden, Paris, Tangiers, New York City. He's up the Amazon River. He's high on Yage, Amphetamine, stoned flat on Heroin, going through six-week miracle cures on newly synthesized miracle drugs at a British clinic. He turns up in Chicago; he's run out by "the man" in New Orleans: he knows a druggist in Austin, Texas. He's on the Malmo ferry headed for Yossarian's paradise, the gracious land of Sweden; he's depressed, because that's the way the clean hygienic Swedes make him feel, but he suddenly knows that "there's no drag like the U.S. drag." As if all this weren't enough, Burroughs is also straight. He's informed, articulate, well-educated. Over the years he's been a kindly father-figure, "just-folks" to a generation of crazy poets, mystical scribblers, punkers, pundits and even performance artists (Laurie Anderson), for instance in his "Beat Hotel days" in Paris, when I met the great man myself, recalled in The Western Lands: "It was a hectic, portentous time in Paris in 1959, at the Beat Hotel, No. 9, rue Gît-le-Coeur. We all thought we were interplanetary agents involved in a deadly struggle...battles...codes...ambushes...We were getting messages, making contacts. Everything had meaning..." Here truly is the writer who lives upstairs that Holden Caulfield wishes he could read in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye! There was no problem getting to see Burroughs, maybe only in having something to say to him.

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 India, where they got no sense of time, The Man is often a month late...all them junkies sitting around in the lotus posture spitting on the ground and waiting on The Man...So Buddha says: 'I don't hafta take this sound. I'll by God metabolize my own junk'". Instead of Buddha it's Benway-Faustus-Freud that will have to do as sign for modern Jonahs.

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., Reconditioning Center, the bedlam of Freeland. In the episodes "Joselito" and "The Examination" Benway conducts sessions with Carl, a Freelander whose medical problems Benway is using as an excuse to probe for latent homosexuality. He finished the first seance in nutty style, switching suddenly into Cockney to confuse Carl, subject become object, then back into the crazy German to conclude: "I will write for you a letter." The sadism here is potential and cynical, rather than open and absolutely depraved. "For example...for example...take the matter of uh sexual deviation." Carl is the fly in the spider's web; but Benway is far worse than the simple innocent spider awaiting patiently his prey, in the sense he's out to demean the victim:

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.

*

To Play Beat avec Brion Gysin

Or to the