Giving Away the Basic American Rottenness

Giving Away the Basic American Rottenness 1/37

“Giving Away the Basic American Rottenness”

William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch as an Historical Document

by A. D. Parkinson

This extended essay was written for my BA in History at Bristol University. I hope to remodel and extend it

into a PhD thesis on Naked Lunch, and so any comments or criticisms would be very valuable, and can be

emailed to me at [email protected]. Thank you for taking the time to read my work.

01 Introduction

02 Consumption and Control

03 Science and Reason

04 Normality and Homosexuality

05 Concluding Remarks

06 Bibliography

This study will show that William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, published in 1959, should be

considered as an important historical document and a piece of critical documentation of postwar

America. The novel will be shown to document the reality of the time: it will be demonstrated

that much of the surreal literary hallucinations within the novel correspond to elements of

postwar society. The way in which the novel acts as a powerful social critique, depicting what

Burroughs calls the “basic American rottenness”, will also be demonstrated through looking at

how Burroughs’ thoughts and ideas expressed in the text bear many parallels with those of a

variety of political and social philosophers of the twentieth century. Essentially, the aim of this

study is to establish Naked Lunch as a valuable historical source, the study of which can only

increase our understanding of 1950s American politics and society.1

*

Burroughs wrote the bulk of Naked Lunch living as an exile in Tangier in the mid 1950s. He left

America in late 1949, jumping bail in Texas on a drugs charge, and lived in Mexico for a short

while, before his accidental shooting of his wife set him on his way again, and after a few South

American excursions, he settled in Tangier. Interzone, the setting for much of Naked Lunch, was

originally based on the international zone of Tangier, but quickly metamorphosed into a

transcendental city where Burroughs could reveal his fears about Western society. His regular

correspondences with fellow Beat Generation characters Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and

his extensive reading, demonstrate that even when in exile, he was well aware the state of affairs

in contemporary America. To an extent, his exile provided him with a heightened clarity for his

social and political critiques, giving him the outsider’s perspective which highlighted the many

absurdities and contradictions of American life.


The novel was written at a crucial point in American history. The nature of capitalist organisation

was changing after the Second World War. Consumer culture became one of the dominant forces

in American life, the post-war appetite for consumption was seemingly insatiable, and masses of

new goods flooded the market. The methods used to try and sell these goods penetrated deeper

into the home with the advent of the new mass media methods; TV ownership increased

massively in the period. The Cold War precipitated an increasingly close relationship between

foreign policy, science and business in the form of the “military industrial complex”. Contrived

conceptions of what was socially and sexually “normal” dictated a moral code to the population.

On the cusp of this we find William Burroughs. An intellectual, an outcast and an exile, he saw the

emergent new order in terms of the rationality and control mechanisms underpinning it. Naked

Lunch is an often surreal book, but it is constantly underpinned by an acute understanding of the

way in which post-war society functions.

*

Critical reception to Burroughs has been varied. Herbert Gold, in an early assessment of Naked

Lunch, wrote “many will be disgusted, snobs will says it’s a masterpiece, but they miss the

relevance to our times.”2 This concisely sums up many of the problems associated with the critical

reception and studies of Naked Lunch since — and even before — its publication, and also points

towards the aims of this study: to establish the relevance of Naked Lunch. Early objections focused

on the obscenities, and the graphic sexual descriptions within the book, and the publication of the

book in America prompted an obscenity trial in 1965.3 One of the most famous hostile responses

to Naked Lunch was the review which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1983.

Entitled “UGH…” it captured the disgust with which many greeted the work, and the reluctance

to look beyond this initial first impression with impeded its reception. Some have attacked it

because they find the character of William Burroughs himself difficult to come to terms with:

being addicted to heroin for most of his life, never conforming to any normal codes of sexual

conduct and the fact that he shot his common law wife perhaps make it difficult for many to

consider him as a social philosopher. He is seen as representative of decadence, and therefore not

an appropriate character to criticise Western society.

There has also been much positive response to Burroughs’ work. Naked Lunch was soon

recognised as a work of literary value, and was defended by the likes of Norman Mailer, Mary

McCarthy and John Calder. William Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and

Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. This study, however, is not concerned with the relative

literary merits of the novel. As the critic Marshall McLuhan wrote, to approach Burroughs from an

entirely literary perspective “is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations

of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our


home.”4 Much modern literary criticism adopts the models of sociology in its consideration of the

meaning of texts, and this tendency has produced, amongst a myriad of journal articles, three

notable critical studies, by Robin Lydenberg, Eric Mottram and Timothy S. Murphy.

Many studies of Burroughs categorise him as part of the Beat Generation. Although William

Burroughs was closely affiliated with the Beat Generation, to absorb him into this context as

another drug-using outsider, sexual deviant, essentially, a hedonist, overlooks the true significance

of his work. He acted as a mentor to a young Kerouac and Ginsberg, as well as being something of

a psychoanalyst, but he was never part of the Beat Community. Significantly, when Beat figures

such as Kerouac and Gary Snyder immersed themselves in Buddhism, Burroughs was never

involved with it. He claimed that he had studied Buddhism, but did not see it at as relevant to

contemporary society in the same way that Kerouac did. Nor did Burroughs seek salvation in the

myth of America like Kerouac, instead he demanded action and fundamental change. Although

Kerouac may have been a social rebel, he was of a sort that was quite easily contained within the

existing order of things: the same cannot be said of William Burroughs.

The legend of Burroughs as a Beat icon of counterculture rebellion often distracts from the actual

content of his work. People have an opinion about Burroughs without even having read his work.

His name, and references to his work, crops up constantly amongst much popular music and film

since the 1960s, and this has served to reinforce an iconic image of the man. Before he is

entombed forever as an eccentric, avant-garde celebrity figure (and therefore, fundamentally

harmless), he should be recognised as an important social and political thinker who recorded the

structures of control behind modern living in post-war America, before most had even realised

their arrival. This study will assess Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in these terms, whilst grounding it

firmly in the historical realities of post-war America.

*

Of the published primary sources, Naked Lunch will, of course, be the central text used in this

thesis. Naked Lunch originated as a series of “Routines”, the seeds and early versions of which can

often be found in Burroughs’ letters in the 1940s and 50s, written mainly to Allen Ginsberg from

Tangier, and now published in Viking Penguin. This is an invaluable source in clarifying and

contextualising many of the ideas put forward in Naked Lunch. Some of Burroughs’ previously

unpublished “Routines” from the Naked Lunch period can be found in the Interzone collection,

which is also of use. Excerpts from Burroughs’ body of work, some previously unpublished, are

collected in Word Virus: the William Burroughs Reader, which contains perceptive essays by Ann

Douglas and James Grauerholz.

Critical responses from various debates around Burroughs’ work are collected in William S.

Burroughs at the Front, edited by Robin Lydenberg and Jennie Skerl. Although a large portion of


the essays are not dealing with Naked Lunch, it still proves to be useful in assessing the shifting

critical and analytical climate that has surrounded Burroughs and his work. There have been

valuable studies which approach Burroughs from the perspective of literary criticism, but are not

unaware of the wider implications of his work. The first of these was William Burroughs: The

Algebra of Need by Eric Mottram, which contains an analysis of the socio-political content of

Naked Lunch. Robin Lydenberg’s Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S.

Burroughs’ Fiction is a literary analysis of Burroughs’ work, which considers how he attempts to

“reverse and explode the kind of assumptions about truth, empiricism, and moral norms which

form the basis of literary humanism.”5

Wising up the Marks: the Amodern William Burroughs by Timothy Murphy is to date the most

thorough analysis of William Burroughs’ work. Murphy approaches Burroughs from a mainly

sociological perspective, and analyses the theories implicit and explicit within Burroughs’ work.

Murphy presents a case for Burroughs being what he calls “amodern”, and he defines

“amodernism” as an essentially politically variant to postmodernism. The fundamental pessimism

of postmodernism is accepted by amodernists, but the “endless squabbling over terminology” is

replaced with a sense of resistance.6 The postmodernist rejection of mass politics is seen as

insufficient, for it is only complacent with capital. Murphy’s essay on Naked Lunch in Wising up the

Marks seeks to clarify the sociological criticisms within the book, and place them in the context of

social theorists.

Primary documents relating to the military industrial complex are collected in Merrit Roe Smith

and Gregory Clancey, Major Problems in the History of American Technology: Documents and

Essays. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite is an insightful contemporary look at the relationship

between government and business. Kathy Peiss’s Major Problems in the History of American

Sexuality: Documents and Essays provides an introduction to the texts of Kinsey and Wertham.

Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954, is a psychological survey which

considers the influence popular culture upon the sexuality of the young, and as such is an excellent

insight into attitudes towards sexuality in postwar America. Donald Webster Cory’s The

Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach is another contemporary text of value which will

be used, as will Alfred Kinsey’s seminal 1948 work, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. The one

internet source that has been used in this study is George Painter’s history of laws relating to

homosexuality in America, which is unique in its content and thorough in its analysis.

The sociological and philosophical works which will be considered for their relationship with

Naked Lunch include Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison and

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. From the Frankfurt School

of Social Research, I will be considering primarily Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, his work with


Adorno entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Also of use is

Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and essays by Gilles Deleuze in the October periodical

and his book Negotiations.

A variety of more general secondary works are also used. Biographical information about William

Burroughs’ life up to and including the writing of Naked Lunch can be gleamed from his Letters

and his first two novels, Junky and Queer. The best general introduction to Burroughs’ life in the

period relevant to this study is Oliver Harris’s introduction to the Letters, but also of use are

Barry Miles’ William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible and James Campbell’s This is the Beat

Generation: New York – San Franciso – Paris. Richard Butsch’s The Making of American

Audiences: From Stage to Television is an excellent study of the rise of television, and Victor

Navasky’s Naming Names provides good coverage of the effects of McCarthyism. Leuchtenburg’s

Troubled Feast, Carl Degler’s, Affluence and Anxiety: America Since 1945, Howard Zinn’s A

People’s History of the United States, and Chafe and Sitkoff’s A History of Our Time: Readings on

Postwar America provide good general histories on the period.

*

The first chapter of this study, “Consumption and Control”, will examine the way in which Naked

Lunch is a description of and critique of postwar consumer culture, and the control mechanisms

which it employs. The way in which Burroughs portrays consumer culture as being inherently

degrading to man, and depicts a Spenglerian divide between city and country is described. The

second chapter of this study, “Science and Reason”, will seek to explicitly define the relationship

between Naked Lunch and the work of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. The distinct

language of reason underpinning capitalist society is criticised by Burroughs and the Frankfurt

School, and both Burroughs and the thinkers Frankfurt School have a critical view of the

manifestations of “progress” in the postwar period: both see science and technology as being an

active part of the political and economic environment in which they exist, and this will be shown.

The third chapter is entitled “Normality and Homosexuality”. William Burroughs is one of the

most insightful and intelligent writers on sexuality, yet he is overlooked or rejected by many. This

may be in part due to his overt hostility to “gay culture”. This chapter will therefore attempt to fill

this void of research, and investigate the way in which Naked Lunch critically dissects the language

of normality and homosexuality in postwar America. Before Foucault, Burroughs was using

distinctly Foucauldian reasoning in this assessment of the status of homosexuals in America and so

this chapter is an attempt to elaborate upon these important parallels.

1. In this study, the terms “postwar” and “1950s” will be used interchangeably to describe the

period in American history from the end of the Second World War until the publication of Naked

Paradox


Lunch in 1959.

2. Skerl and Lydenberg (Eds.), William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989,

(Illinois, 1991), p. 6

3. Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, (London, 2002), p. 112

4. Marshall McLuhan, “Notes on Burroughs”, William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception,

1959-1989, Skerl and Lydenberg (Eds.), (Illinois, 1991), p. 73

5. Robin Lydenberg, Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction,

(Illinois, 1987), p. 8

6. Timothy S. Murphy, Wising up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs, (Berkeley, 1997), p. 2



by A. D. Parkinson

01 Introduction





06 Bibliography

Naked Lunch contains a very powerful critique of consumer society in postwar America. Postwar

capitalist society is presented by Burroughs as being essentially anti-humanistic and degrading to

human life, with unethical characteristics which are inseparable from the whole. Naked Lunch

portrays a “control society”, an idea elaborated by Gilles Deleuze, and the mechanisms which

accompany this, primarily a manipulative mass media. Burroughs depicts a society where man uses

material goods and technology to escape from his inner self, where man is reduced to a state of

undignified savagery and where man’s environment serves to numb and suffocate him. Burroughs

portrays a Spenglerian divide between city and country, and in the countryside we see manifest

the racism and injustice inherent within society. Those who profit from this society do so through

continuous misrepresentation, dishonesty and exploitation, and any distinction between “crime”

and “business” becomes almost illusory.

*

Naked Lunch is a vicious attack on a society that hides barbaric, oppressive rituals beneath a

façade of rationality and a reality that is perpetually misrepresented in the media:

Paradox


If civilised countries want to return to Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred Grove or to drink blood

with the Aztecs and feed their Gods with the blood of human sacrifice, let them see what they

actually eat and drink. Let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon.1

Burroughs is comparing capital punishment in America to the “Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred

Grove”: the one, central to America’s “modern”, rational penal system; the other representative

of the irrational, the mystical. Suggesting that civilised countries “feed their Gods with the blood of

human sacrifice” is implying that those things for which men are sent off to die in the modern

world are no more reasonable causes to die for than sacrifices to mythical Gods. The “long

newspaper spoon” illustrates the way in which the mass media is used to “spoon-feed” people

information and facts, whilst really informing them: people are essentially detached from reality by

this newspaper spoon. This idea of the newspaper spoon, the way in which the media bends reality

so that people don’t see capital punishment and other practices of contemporary America as cruel

and barbaric, is at the crux of Naked Lunch. Mass media in Naked Lunch represents attempts to

bend and shape people’s perceptions of reality, and ultimately to control people.

The mass media is very distinct to the economic context in which it operates. The labour force

was changing markedly in the postwar period. By 1956, half of the American labour force was

employed in services, trade or government.2 People had more money to spend; the income of the

average American in 1956 was 50 percent greater than during the “high plateau” of 1929.3 During

the 1950s, the American economy became a major importer of consumer goods, surpassing Great

Britain’s import levels.4 In this, Gilles Deleuze identifies the economic setting for the rise of

control societies, a development from Foucault’s disciplinary societies:

This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or

marketed. Thus it is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation.5

Corporate concern shifts from enforcing efficient production to securing effective consumption, a

consumer society is born, and the mass media creates the environment for this. In Naked Lunch,

the “Senders”, one of the parties of Interzone, are representative of this mass media. The greatest

danger of the Senders is that they at first appear to be just another neutral element, with

technologies that could be used for good or evil.6 However, ultimately they aspire to control, and

“Control can never be a means to any practical end… It can never be a means to anything but

more control… Like junk…”7 In his depiction of the coercive forces present in the seemingly

innocuous elements of society, Burroughs presupposes the methods of Michel Foucault’s writings

on control in societies, which consider apparently neutral organisations such as hospitals and

schools, and in these institutions find a concentration of political forces.8 When the Senders

assemble at the National Electronic Conference in Chicago, the speaker talks of “biocontrol…

control of physical movement, mental processes, emotional reactions and apparent sensory

Paradox

Paradox


impressions by means of bioelectric signals injected into the nervous system of the subject.” This

reads like a blueprint for the mechanisms of postwar control society; physical movement

controlled through constant supervision, mental processes instrumentalized so that thought

becomes but a tool for the processes of capital,9 the sensory impressions coming from the mass

media, chiefly television. The way in which the mass media presents reality is crucial to the

functioning of consumer society, something particularly visible in 1950s America. The number of

families with televisions rose from a mere 8,000 in 1946 to 46 million in 1960 — approximately 90

percent of households, and families spent an average of 5 hours a day watching television.10

Television was a product for consumption, and a method for encouraging more consumption. It

affected the way people communicated with each other, and the way they spent their leisure time.

Children associated with each other less, watching television shows alone, whilst family televisions

were shown to reduce conversation and socialising. Attendance to cinemas dropped dramatically,

as perhaps one would expect, though more importantly, “going out” decreased in general.11

Historian Dr. Lawrence Wittner sees television in 1950s America as central in shaping people’s

perceptions of the world around them:

On news programs events were reported anecdotally, individually, amusingly. Institutional

problems were ignored, controversial problems left unspoken, and the day’s events viewed as a

hopeless jumble, interesting but purposeless, by a cheery, fatherly commentator; implicitly, the

viewer was assured that the nation was in good hands.

Furthermore, he writes the “escapist tales of violence and exploitative sex… channelled the

interests of weary viewer into an unreal world where he could act out fantasies of personal power

and freedom.” The job of the mass media was to create the optimum environment for

consumerism. Television thus served to maintain the status quo, and perpetuated the process of

consumption. It shaped people to be docile, unquestioning, and primed for purchasing:

commercials filled 20 percent of the airtime.12 Adverts by the American Television Dealers and

Manufacturers Association in 1950 suggested that children without televisions were social

outcasts, and quoted a psychologist saying, “Children need home television for their morals as

they need sunshine and fresh air for their health.” The adverts were highly criticized, and one can

certainly see a somewhat elitist middle class rejection of television as a “dumbing down” of

culture. However, these adverts do clearly illustrate the fact that there was a profit-motivated

drive to present television as something essential to the normal functioning of the individual, that

to be without television was to be incomplete.13 Far from simply being a neutral force, specific

interests were directing television. The Defence Department’s director of research told a senate

committee in 1961 “We cannot consider our communications system solely as civil activities… we

must consider them as essential instruments of national policy.”14

Paradox

Paradox

Paradox

Paradox


The Hollywood movie industry was another major feature of postwar consumer society, as both

an element of mass media and a product for consumption, and the content of Hollywood movies

is viciously parodied in Naked Lunch. In the “Ordinary Men and Women” section, there is a

sketch about an homosexual relationship, presented in an overtly Hollywood style which is as

Murphy describes it, “a dead on parody of Hollywood romance clichés,” the irony being that the

moral content of the production is in sharp contrast to anything that Hollywood would permit in

the 1950s.15 In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno of the Frankfurt School of

Social Research consider the commercial movie as something which “forces its victims to equate it

directly with reality.”16 Burroughs’ homosexual love story subverts this, for its moral content is

completely incompatible with the moral codes of fifties America. It mocks the attempts of the film

industry to enforce a moral code upon American society, and it is clear from looking at the

actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s that there were

attempts to control the moral content of Hollywood productions. Those who had been

blacklisted for suspected involvement with the Communist Party — a sign of moral weakness —

were unable to get work, unless they went through the purging rituals of naming names. Freelance

blacklisting organisations also emerged, such as the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of

American Ideals and the American Legion.17

*

In the consumer society of the fifties, man’s attention was focused on trivialities such as gadgets as

a source of fulfilment in life. In Naked Lunch, Dr Benway tells us “Western man is externalising

himself in the form of gadgets.”18 Benway’s voice is echoed by Herbert Marcuse, of the Frankfurt

School, who asserts that “People recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in

their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”19 Consumer culture thus alienates

man from his true identity. In Naked Lunch, “an American Housewife” complains that her kitchen

gadgets are malfunctioning and attempting to get “physical” with her. The housewife seems

confused and disorientated, whilst the gadgets are a dark and sinister force: far from creating a

situation of domestic bliss and happiness, the kitchen gadgetry has left the woman isolated,

detached from reality, and threatened by hideous physical attacks. We are also introduced to K.E.,

“the hottest idea man in the gadget industry”:

“Think of it!” he snaps. “A cream separator in your own kitchen!”

“K.E., my brain reels at the thought.”

“It’s five, maybe twenty, yes, maybe twenty years away… But it’s coming.”

“I”ll wait, K.E. No matter how long it is, I’ll wait. When the priority numbers are called up yonder

I’ll be there.”

Paradox


Like the adverts sitting between the news reports on a television broadcast, we have amongst the

depravities of the novel people discussing a cream separator gadget as if it is something of deep

significance, of life changing importance and true benefit to the human race. Burroughs clearly

highlights the absurdity of postwar America’s preoccupation with consumer goods with this

contrast.2

One much quoted and analysed routine in Naked Lunch is that of the talking asshole, appearing in

the “ordinary men and women” section. Dr. Benway tells us,

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move

up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.

The man becomes something of a vaudeville carnival performer, doing some novelty ventriloquist

act,

After a while the ass started talking on its own…. [it] would ad-lib and toss his gags back at him…

Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up.

Eventually, the man’s mouth is sealed over, and only the eyes remain:

nerve connections blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any

more…For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then

finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out…

The man is reduced to an “all-purpose blob”, fit only for consumption and basic metabolic

processes. In the “talking asshole”, there is a metaphor for modern man’s slavery to the processes

of service and consumption, and man is objectified as little more than a series of biological

processes. The sealing over of the mouth is the result of the subsuming of the very essence of man

to the formalised reason of his economic environment, as attempts are made to increase his

efficiency.21

Burroughs invites us to examine the savage inhumanity of modern man. Talking of the rational

viciousness of the baboon — “Baboons always attack the weakest party in an altercation” —

Benway reminds us that “We must never forget our glorious simian heritage.” We see Burroughs’

belief that the various routines of everyday existence in 1950s society reduce man to a state of

animal barbarity. The disorder of the “simopath” is mentioned:

A simopath — the technical name for this disorder escapes me — is a citizen convinced that he is

an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it.

Burroughs also introduces us to the “Latah”:

Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every motion once their attention is attracted by

snapping the fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive involuntary hypnosis. They sometimes

injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once.22


Eric Mottram considers Burroughs’ Latah to be a parody of “modern mass man under modern

conditioning programmes of advertising and public induced morality”, and he is not unlike

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, who is in a state of slavery and servitude but is unaware of it, or

Rousseau’s modern man, lacking independence and everywhere in chains.23 Other victims in

Naked Lunch are the INDs — those with “Irreversible Neural Damage” — the unfortunate

products of Benway’s control experiments, who beg to consume, without dignity or self-

respect.We also encounter “Fats” Terminal, the ultimate consumer. He is a grotesque figure; “a

translucent-grey foetal monkey, suckers on his little soft, purple-grey hands, and a lamprey disk

mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow black erectile teeth,” as his whole body is geared

towards consumption. Through this surreal carnival of the grotesque, Burroughs is warning the

reader that he believes the consumer culture of 1950s America reduces man to these various

undignified, horrific states, whereby all true independence of action is lost.24

*

Man’s environment and the way in which man lives in this consumer society is presented as

essentially degrading, almost inhospitable. Burroughs introduces us to his terrifying vision of

suburban America in the first chapter:

Into the interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof

houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring

anything in, and they are not young very long.

The sky, embodying mankind’s ambition and higher potentials, is rendered meaningless as people

remain in insular units with television sets. Burroughs attacks the anti-humanistic architecture of

suburbia, calling the houses “lifeproof”. The young still have a spirit and soul, and are not so

absorbed by the routines and processes of consumption, but “they are not young very long”, for

the mass media and “the real world” will soon shape their values, attitudes and aspirations to suit

the needs and requirements of capitalist organisation. 25

When Burroughs describes life in the Freeland Republic, he tells us “The citizens rushed from one

bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines.” Dr Benway has a machine

called “the Switchboard” — “Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against

the subject’s teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain

connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights.” The drills punish mistakes, and the

bells and lights speed up, until the reaction times of the subject are surpassed, and “the subject

breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine.” The impossible demands of the switchboard

are resonant of the impossible deadlines and pressures placed upon modern man. As corporations

replaced factories as units of capitalist industry in America, an ideology of competition became

dominant, and this is one of the key manifestations of Gilles Deleuze’s control society: 26


The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who

surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the

corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent

motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing

each within.27

In Naked Lunch, when Lee leaves the city and heads out into the rural districts, a true picture of

the decadence inherent in society emerges. As affluence was concentrated in the suburbs, so was

poverty in the inner cities and in rural districts. The Republican, reactionary Eightieth Congress at

times seemed to attack rural America, cutting funds for rural electrification and crop storage.28

We come into contact with rural life and the lower levels of state bureaucracies in “The County

Clerk” section of Naked Lunch. In the rural town of “Pigeon Hole”, which is hated by the

“Urbanites”, is the Old Court House, which Lee has to visit. Oliver Harris but briefly alludes to an

influence of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West on William Burroughs: in “The County

Clerk” this influence is manifest in Burroughs’ description of the difference between city and

country. Spengler writes that in a Civilization, a society on the point of decline:

the great intellectual decisions take place, not as in the days… where not a hamlet is too small to

be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that have absorbed into themselves the whole

content of History, while the old wide landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, serves

only to feed the cities with what remains of its higher mankind… In place of a world, there is a

city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up.29

This division is particularly visible, as Lee leaves the urban zone of the vast metropolis of Interzone

and enters the rural district: “The inhabitants of this town and the surrounding area of swamps

and heavy timber are people of such great stupidity and barbarous practices that the

Administration has seen fit to quarantine them in a reservation surrounded by a radioactive wall of

iron bricks.”3 We see the “Administration” is attempting to spatially control the inhabitants.

Spengler further describes the “parasitical city dweller” as being “deeply contemptuous of the

countryman”31, as is seen when Burroughs leaves the Zone and the Urbanite customs inspector

waves him through the frontier, saying “I hope you”ve got an atom bomb in that suitcase.”32

Here, the society is defined by its racism. The County Clerk himself regales Lee with an extensive

anecdote, within which a black is burnt by some “city fellers” for allegedly looking at a girl in a

nasty manner. Those responsible for burning leave without paying for the gasoline. Timothy

Murphy analyses the scenario; “As befits an official of the judicial system, the Clerk’s anecdote is

concerned with justice, but it is justice for the white entrepreneur and not for the black victim,

whose innocence is so obvious that the tale becomes absurd.”33 Furthermore, Lee is only able to

get served when he joins in with the racist sentiments of the Clerk himself:

Paradox


The face of the state, or at least of the bureaucracy which is the state’s most tangible avatar, is the

face of appalling racist violence presented in the guise of folksy humour. The very language of this

bureaucracy is a racist and anti-Semitic code, and only those with the right credentials (and, it goes

without saying, appearance) can negotiate its convolutions.34

Horkheimer and Adorno see racism as an inherent element in the capitalist system. They have

written of anti-Semitism as partially a result of the displacement of the anger of an exploited work

force. By this logic it is thus inseparable from capitalist development and the status quo; “The

persecution of the Jews, like any other form of persecution, is inseparable from that system of

order.”35 The rural area which Burroughs describes is still part of the state, it is in fact central to

the justice system, suggesting that the racism too is central to the functioning of the state.

*

In his Letters, Burroughs describes an ethical crisis manifesting itself in business; “The line between

legitimate and criminal activity has broken down since the war… My ethical position, now that I

am a respectable farmer, is probably shakier than when I was pushing junk.”36 Murphy sees

Burroughs as expressing a “collaboration between business, organized crime, and the state upon

which capitalist rationality is based.”37 Certainly, this emerges when we look in Naked Lunch at the

character of Salvador Hassan O’Leary. Hassan amiably claims “Shucks, boys… I’m just a blooming

old cancer and I gotta proliferate.” He sports cowboy attire and a “disarming grin”, the friendly

face of capitalism. As a businessman, not only does Hassan have subsidiary companies, he has

subsidiary personalities: there is a constant need for misrepresentation and dishonesty to succeed

in this society. Essentially, he is a cancer, and a parasite on society, making his money through

exploitation, taking from society rather than contributing to it. His commercial activities are wide

reaching:

He prospered and proliferated, flooding the world with cut medicines and cheap counterfeit goods

of every variety. Adulterated shark repellent, cut antibiotics, condemned parachutes, stale

antivenin, inactive serums and vaccines, leaking lifeboats.

He sells nothing of any real value and the goods he trades are somewhat detrimental to the health

of those who purchase them.38

Hassan is demonstrative of the increasingly dominating effect of business in governmental affairs;

“He looks sinister and enigmatic — his gestures and mannerisms are not yet comprehensible —

like the secret police of a larval state.” The suggestion is that people have not yet recognised the

power and influence represented by Hassan, his sort is not yet understood, but like “the secret

police of a larval state” his power will grow. Through co-operation and collaboration with the

police he is able to avoid charges for all of his illegal doings. Burroughs makes the association

between capitalist enterprise, in the form of international finance, and shady, immoral activities,

Paradox


writing, “Salvador emits a thick screen of international finance to cloak, at least from the rank and

file, his Liquefactionist activities.” The line between criminal and legitimate business is blurred, and

the implication is that behind the legitimate legalities of international finance something sinister is

at work, and it is being hidden from the population.39

In his 1956 book The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills drew attention to the way in which corporate

interests dominated political affairs. For instance, the three top policy-making positions in the

country (secretary of state, treasury and defence) were occupied by a representative of the

country’s leading law firm which did international business for Morgan and Rockefeller, a mid-west

corporation executive who was director of over thirty corporations, and the former president of

one of the very largest corporations and producers of military equipment in America.40 A myriad

of important government posts and jobs within the governmental institution were held by the

corporate elite, or those involved with them. In the postwar period, governmental and presidential

action was beginning to be increasingly dominated by business concerns. President Eisenhower, in

his farewell address of 1961, warned of the potentially dominating effect of the military-industrial

complex. Howard Zinn considers business and government worked together in foreign affairs in

morally dubious circumstances: when the legally elected President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala

was overthrown by CIA trained mercenaries, his main crime may have been to appropriate

234,000 acres of land from United Fruit. Arbenz’s replacement gave the land back to United Fruit

and established favourable taxes for foreign businesses, whilst simultaneously removing the secret

ballot and offending against human rights.41

*

Naked Lunch functions as an acutely aimed attack on consumer society in postwar America. The

sinister mechanisms of the mass media, manifest in television, distort people’s perception of

reality. Man is reduced to a state of servitude, and becomes detached from his true self, whilst the

environment stifles human potential and imposes control mechanisms. Burroughs, like various

historians and social-political theorists, sees that inherent within this system is racism and injustice,

and those who benefit materially from it do so through constant misrepresentation and deceit.

There are increasingly blurred lines between government, the legitimate businessman and the

criminal. Gilles Delueze considered that Burroughs was one of the first people to recognise

changes in the organisation of capital in the postwar period, writing, “We”re moving towards

control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and

instant communication. Burroughs was the first person to address this.”42 There is certainly a

compelling body of evidence which suggests that when Burroughs is discussing media and

consumer goods in Naked Lunch,he is reflecting the reality of 1950s America, and the critique

which he articulates in Naked Lunch certainly captures elements of an era.

Paradox


1. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: the Restored Text, James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (eds.),

(New York, 2001), p. 205. In repetitions within chapters of reference to texts by Burroughs, they

will be referred to simply by an abbreviated title, with the Burroughs’ name not mentioned, eg

Naked Lunch, Letters etc.

2. Carl Degler, Affluence and Anxiety: America Since 1945, (Illinois, 1975), p. 174

3. Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast, (Boston, 1973), p. 4

4. Degler, Affluence and Anxiety, p.165

5. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, in OCTOBER 59, (Winter 1992), p. 6

6. Timothy S. Murphy, Wising up the Marks: the Amodern William Burroughs, (Berkeley, 1997), p. 88

7. Naked Lunch, p. 137

8. For a striking example of this see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (London, 1991)

9. A point discussed in more depth in chapter II, “Science and Reason”

10. Lawrence Wittner, “The Rulers and the Ruled: American Society, 1945-60″, in A History of Our

Time: Readings on Postwar America, Chafe and Sitkoff (eds.), (New York, 1983) p.85

11. Richard Dutsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, (Cambridge, 2000),

pp. 242-6

12. Wittner, “The Rulers and the Ruled”, p. 85

13. Dutsch, The Making of American Audiences, p. 257

14. Wittner, “The Rulers and the Ruled”, p. 85

15. Murphy, Wising up the Marks, p. 90

16. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (London, 1997), p. 126

17. Victor Navasky, Naming Names, (London, 1982), pp. 84-5


19. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, (London, 2002), p. 11


21. Naked Lunch, pp. 110-12

22. Naked Lunch, pp.26, 32, 25

23. Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: the Algebra of Need, (London, 1977) p. 50

24. Naked Lunch, pp. 28, 172



27. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, pp. 4-5

28. Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast, p.15

29. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, (London, 1926), p. 32



31. Spengler, The Decline of the West, p. 32



34. Ibid., p. 95

35. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 170

36. William Burroughs, The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959, Oliver Harris (ed.), (London,

1993), p. 25


38. Naked Lunch, pp. 130, 122, 132

39. Naked Lunch, pp. 131, 135

40. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (New York, 1956), p. 232

41 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: From 1492 to the Present, (London, 1996),

pp. 430-31

42 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, (New York, 1995), p. 174



by A. D. Parkinson

01 Introduction





06 Bibliography

In Wising up the Marks: the Amodern William Burroughs, Timothy Murphy does an excellent job

of placing William Burroughs’ work alongside the variants of Marxism presented by the Frankfurt

School of Social Research:

by the time he assembled Naked Lunch… his position had begun to take a form that resembled in

several important ways the generalized critique of Anglo-European culture undertaken by the

similarly exiled members of the Frankfurt School of Social Research [which] sought to expose the

novel constraints on and forms of exploitation of the populace that had arisen in both fascist


dictatorships (like Nazi Germany) and mass republics (like the U.S.) as a result of their common

reliance on the rationalist heritage of the Enlightenment.

Both the Frankfurt School and Burroughs perceive an “ethical crisis” in western societies which

was particularly manifest by the time of the Second World War. Both also see failings and

weaknesses inherent in post-enlightenment republics and both reject the resurrection of old

philosophical or religious traits as a solution to either of these problems. Central to the critique of

the Frankfurt School is the reduction of human thought to the status of a mere “tool”. Thought is

instrumentalized — “subordinated like a tool to whatever end it is expected to serve” — and the

“ends” of thought are not questioned. The manifestations of this in fields of science are shown in

Naked Lunch: science in Naked Lunch is always shown as something dominated by other forces

and other interests, and scientific thought and practice is increasingly instrumentalized.1

*

Writing as an exile in New York in 1946, Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt Schoolmakes a

distinction between objective and subjective reason. Subjective reason “is essentially concerned

with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for

granted… It attaches little importance to whether the purposes as such are reasonable.”

Subjective reason dissolves all moral structures, the “reasonableness” of an action is judged in so

far as how well it promotes the subject’s well-being within the status quo, without considering the

“reasonableness” of the status quo itself. Horkheimer considers that subjective reason has

replaced objective reason as the dominant mode of thought, as around the time of the

Enlightenment, objective reason became incompatible with the prevailing rationality. Objective or

classical reason, of the virtuous republics, operates within a larger moral framework, where

concepts such as “good” and “evil” exist; “It aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or

hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims. The degree of reasonableness of a man’s life

could be determined according to its harmony with this totality.” In a classical sense, a reasonable

action was a virtuous one which furthered the common good, but in modern society, any greater

sense of right or wrong is little more than “unconscious memories”, and nothing beyond self

interest can govern a rational man’s actions:

Since ends are no longer determined in the light or reason, it is also impossible to say that one

economic or political system, no matter how cruel and despotic, is less reasonable than another…

no rational agency would endorse a verdict against dictatorship if its sponsors were likely to profit

from it.

In Horkheimer’s semantics, thought is “instrumentalized” as it is dominated by subjective reason.2

Similarities between the views of Horkheimer and Burroughs emerge when we consider

Horkheimer’s critique next to Burroughs’ considerations of ethics in his Letters:

Paradox


There are 2 bases for any ethical system. (1) Aristocratic code (2) Religion. Liberals reject both which

leaves them with exactly nothing… A man without code or religion has no other reason other

than mere preference to consider any interests other than his own. Why should “he think in time”

beyond his own life [or] hesitate to expoit anyone?

Like Horkheimer, Burroughs perceives an absence of an objective moral structure which used to

exist in the reason which underpins society. Essentially, liberalism without any objective moral

code or religious rules can not have anything other than Horkheimer’s subjective reason as the

basis for actions: the subject cannot be expected to do anything beyond considering his own well

being and self preservation within given circumstances.3

The work of the Frankfurt School in the forties and fifties is certainly a product of their coming to

terms with the National Socialist rise to power in Germany, the consequences of which they

escaped only through emigration and exile. Horkheimer views Hitler’s regime as evidence of a

failure in democracy, a failure which he seeks to explain through considering how democracy has

been deprived of the rational foundations of ancient republicanism, it being something that will

only work in certain conditions. Burroughs, too, saw the Nazi rise to power in the context of the

malfunctioning of democracy and highlighted the importance of remembering “Hitler was voted in

by a majority.” Burroughs saw also the weaknesses of democracy in America, writing to Allen

Ginsberg, “Liberals have always been suckers for Communist or Fascist undercover moves.”

Although this in Burroughs’ mockingly reactionary tone; his Texas drawl which is part parody of

the conservative South, it certainly points towards a real concern that a liberal democracy was

vulnerable to being dominated by more sinister forces of control.4

The Frankfurt School and William Burroughs both rejected attempts to resurrect old systems of

thought as solutions to present day problems. This certainly separated Burroughs ideologically

from the Beat authors such as Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. Burroughs rejected the Buddhism

that Kerouac was immersing himself in, saying that “my conclusion was that Buddhism is only for

the West to study as history… it is not, for the west, An Answer,”5 In a distinctly Spenglerian

manner, Burroughs sees Buddhism as relevant for a certain time, a certain place, something which

functioned as a part of certain distinct social and ethical structures which were absent from

postwar America. In a similar manner, Horkheimer writes of the revival of “cheap brands of past

philosophies such as Yoga, Buddhism,” which are not “solutions”, they are simply “filling a gap…

they transform the surviving remnants of mythological thought into workable devices for mass

culture.”6 When old philosophies and their accompanying moral structures are adopted in the

West, they become mere commodities that provide escape from reality. Burroughs wrote to

Kerouac,

Paradox


the California Buddhists are trying to sit on the sidelines and there are no sidelines. Whether you

like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavour.7

In a similar vein, Horkheimer sees the “streamlining [of] old ideologies” as a “compromise with

existing evil,”8 and Herbert Marcuse, in his One-Dimensional Man, asserts that “Zen,

existentialism, and beat ways of life… are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer

negative” and in fact they “are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.”9

*

The subjective reason of capitalist society dominates scientific thought, practice and research.

Horkheimer and Adorno wrote of the “self-oblivious instrumentalization of science,” as it

unquestioningly integrates itself into the economic system, responding to the demands of capitalist

society and its moral values and attitudes.10 As Horkheimer writes, “science… is above all an

auxiliary means of production, one element amongst many in the social process.”11 Marcuse warns

us that “the traditional notion of the “neutrality” of technology can no longer be maintained”: it

must be viewed within society’s political and economic framework.12 In Naked Lunch, Burroughs

demonstrates science as an area in which subjective reason is the dominant mode of thought.

Science and technology in Naked Lunch are always recognised as powerful tools, often in the

wrong hands, whilst scientists are often working away regardless, dedicated to the research

process. Burroughs is always aware of the wider economic context in which science operates, and

the wider implications of technologies.

In one scene of the novel, the doctors Shafer and Benway embody scientific research underpinned

by subjective reason:

SCHAFER: “I tell you I can’t escape a feeling… well, of evil about this.”

BENWAY: “Balderdash, my boy… We”re scientists… Pure scientists. Disinterested research and

damned be him who cries ‘Hold, too much!‘”13

Shafer is suggesting that their investigation is not completely detached from moral decisions, and

that they have a responsibility, but Benway dismisses this by saying that they are “pure scientists”

ñ as though they were engaged on some pure, selfless quest. The very idea of disinterested

research is somewhat ironic; all that Benway is disinterested in is the way in which the research is

used. When Benway is describing the humiliating methods of control which he implements, he

remarks:

Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big

beautiful garden. I was just scratching that lovely surface when I am purged by Party Poops…14

Benway is in love with the scientific process, and the possibilities it opens up, uttering phrases like

“Cancer, my first love…”15 He is not concerned about who will be in possession of these control

systems, he is concerned solely with the challenge of their erection. He is symbolic of science and


the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, supposedly detached from any consequences, and a

fetishisation of the medical practices and procedures. However, this is not the case, and Benway’s

antics constantly have implications for the unfortunate humans involved. As Murphy writes,

“[Benway"s] work is constantly focused on the technology, the means, of control without

apparent regard for the ends his work serves.”16 This is the epitome of Horkheimer’s subjective

reason.

Medical doctors are seen as being just as vulnerable to this formalisation of reason. Horkheimer

and Adorno write of the way in which “Doctors have so much professional contact with dying

people that they become hardened.”17 The “ends” or intentions of the doctor need not fall outside

his own self preservation, in terms of his career. The very body of the patient is objectified by the

doctor, and becomes a mere amalgamation of scientific processes and little more than a focal

point for the doctor’s skills. This is reflected in Naked Lunch, with the ubiquitous Benway

appearing in the guise of a medical doctor:

“They have no feelings,” said Doctor Benway, slashing his patient to shreds. “Just reflexes.”

Doctor Benway is thus emotionally detached from his work:

NURSE: “I think she’s gone, doctor.”

DR. BENWAY: “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.”

The human body becomes merely an object where scientific curiosities may be observed, as

Benway ponders:

What would be the result of administering curare plus iron lung during acute mania? Possibly the

subject, unable to discharge his tensions in motor activity, would succumb on the spot like a jungle

rat. Interesting cause of death, what?

The iron lung and the curare are two tools of modern surgery, but they are not being used by

Doctor Benway for any objective good. The idea of the surgical process dominated by subjective

reason is extrapolated to its logical extreme, when the idea of the surgeon as an artist emerges:

“Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that…

You see it has absolutely no medical value… I think it was a pure artistic creation from the

beginning.”

Here the surgical process is practised devoid of any concerns to cure a patient, the surgeon is

simply revelling in the immense skill and talent required for his job. Surgery becomes a means

devoid of ends.18

Scientific knowledge is constantly instrumentalized by capitalism, particularly so in the post war

period. Vannevar Bush, attentive doctor to the problems of twentieth century capitalism,

presented a report entitled “Science — The Endless Frontier” to President Truman in 1945 which

shrouded calls for increased funding for scientific research in the optimism-soaked language of


“progress”, “new frontiers” and “our hope for the future”. Scientific research was intrinsically

bound up with economic and military concerns, as the President was informed that “Modern war

requires the most advanced scientific techniques” and warned that failure in research would result

in a nation that was “slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade”. In

raising these expectations, Bush was setting targets and objectives for scientific research. It would

be expected that science would aid industrial progress and develop modern weapons, and the

desirability of these ends is never questioned. Bush stated that “Basic research is performed

without thought of practical ends”, capturing the subjective rationality at the heart of scientific

progress as he envisaged.19

*

Naked Lunch makes us consider what it means to be a scientist, when science operates within the

terms dictated to by the capitalism. Doctor Benway is in parts presented as another addict,

addicted to the practising of surgery. When he lost his certificate, he resorted to desperate

measures:

I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets. I even descended

to hustling pregnant women in the public streets. It was positively unethical.

Burroughs conjures up an image of a doctor driven to try and force his practices onto pregnant

women in the street, essentially trying to prostitute his abilities, regardless of any ethical

considerations, because it is his “habit” and he is dependent upon being able to practise. The

metaphor of addiction is used frequently by Burroughs throughout the book: “addiction” explains

how an individual’s actions can be determined by absolute need and a dependency on exterior

forces, not unlike classical corruption or Rousseau’s perception of the servitude of eighteenth

century man. Burroughs writes in the atrophied preface, “Because there are many forms of

addiction I think they will all obey basic laws.” The drug addict will “do anything to satisfy total

need…. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.” The addict of any sort “has sacrificed all control,

and is as dependent as an unborn child.” Science in postwar America sacrificed “control”, as it

became a tool for other forces. The scientist has a habit insofar as the skills that he has learnt as a

scientist are the skills by which he must make his living and he is dependent upon being able to

practice medicine in order to stay alive and make a living within capitalist society.2

There is ample evidence that the direction of scientific research in postwar America was not

controlled by the scientists, but by military and corporate interests, rendering the scientists

“helpless addicts” in Burroughs’ terminology. It was revealed by President Eisenhower in 1960 that

around one third of America’s scientists and engineers were engaged in military work. A massive

amount of the GNP went to research and development, half of which came from the Government,

the rest from private businesses and foundations.21 Furthermore, half of America’s research and


development funds were going into military projects. It was not an option for any scientist wishing

to retain a livelihood to dispute the morals of the arms race. Oppenheimer opposed the

development of even more powerful hydrogen bombs, but it was still approved by President

Truman. Oppenheimer was soon removed from a position of power and influence after

“communist” allegations were made against him: at the heart of these allegations was a fear that he

was not of the correct moral make up for his job, for he had questioned the ends of his research.

In 1954, Albert Einstein criticised the position of scientists in America, saying were he young again

he “would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher [and] would rather choose to be a

plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under

present circumstances.”22

*

One must not overlook the presence of the Cold War when investigating the themes within

Naked Lunch. It was certainly an issue upon Burroughs’ mind; Ann Douglas considers the nuclear

age to be the central theme of his work.23 Much scientific research was dedicated to developing a

product which could potentially eradicate life on the planet. Burroughs wrote of the aboveground

nuclear testing in the early 1950s,

Really, it is exasperating to sit helpless like in a nightmare while these life-hating character

armadillos jeopardize the very ground under our feet and the air we breathe. Thirty more

explosions and we”ve had it, and nobody shows any indication of curtailing their precious

experiments.

Burroughs is bitterly scathing of all those involved: the scientific research continues with apparent

disregard for the potential consequences.24

One of the earliest ideas for a “plot” for the novel that became Naked Lunch was expressed in

Burroughs’ fabricated blurb:

Suppose you knew the power to start an atomic war lay in the hands of a few scientists who were

bent on destroying the world? [...] This book is a must for anyone who would understand the sick

soul, sick unto death, of the atomic age.25

Burroughs is aware of the nuclear scientist as something new, a symptom of a new age. Michel

Foucault sees the birth of the atomic scientist as a seminal event in the politicisation of scientific

fields, for the atomic bomb was at once a specific field of research requiring highly specialised

scientific knowledge, and a social issue, a matter of life and death for the whole world; “since the

nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world, [the atomic scientist"s]

discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the universal.”26 One of the endings which

Burroughs considered for Naked Lunch involved the detonation of an atomic bomb which

destroyed the world.27 In “islam incorporated and the parties of interzone” in Naked Lunch, we


read “an anal technician mixes a bicarbonate of soda and pulls the switch that reduces the earth to

cosmic dust.”28 It is crucial that the power is seen to lie in the hands of the scientists and

technicians, not just of politicians and generals: “The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are

rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot

understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.”29

The scientist is at the mercy of the economic processes to determine what he can research, yet if

he does not question this, he may be in possession of a great power. Dr Benway embodies this

contradiction as both the helpless addict with his “habit”, and the mastermind enslaving Freeland.

Although science may be directed by economic forces, it’s grand potentials for changing human life

for the better and its exclusive nature transform it into an area of reverence. Benway is well

aware of his social status and the reverence he can command; in “The Examination”, we are told,

“[Benway] jerks a head towards his glowering superego who is always referred to in the third

person as ‘The Man’ or ‘The Lieutenant.’”30 This echoes Horkheimer and Adorno’s warning that

“often [the doctor] is tempted to appear as the controller of life and death.”31 The Party Leader of

the Nationalist Party in Interzone tries to start a rumour that Benway is a black magician,

illustrating the way in which science is revered by those who do not comprehend it, and how the

modern scientist’s social position is therefore not unlike that of the witchdoctor. In some

Spenglerian cycle, we see both parties as being honoured within the social hierarchy on account of

their access to power unavailable to others, whether that be in God or science. Throughout

Naked Lunch, scientific jargon is adopted often incorrectly amongst the general population and

becomes little more than veiled superstition.32 The authoritative position that science and the

scientist has in the modern world is placed by Burroughs within the context of the authority that

the witch doctor or the Catholic Church had in other times and societies.

*

As has been shown, William Burroughs’ thought bears many similarities with that of the Frankfurt

School, in particular the works of Horkheimer and Adorno. There is a shared perception of a

crisis in the ethical and rational foundations of capitalist society, and the post-enlightenment,

capitalist use of republicanism. Both the Frankfurt School and William Burroughs see this crisis in

reason manifest itself when considering science and technology in the postwar period. Science

made new demands off humanity, it required new sacrifices, and it was not always working

towards or used in the best interests of humanity. The scientist in postwar America may have had

as little control as the heroin addict, his skills and talents nothing more than tools for commercial

and military interests, yet at the same time he was invested with a great and exclusive power.


1. Timothy S. Murphy, Wising up the Marks: the Amodern William Burroughs, (Berkeley, 1997), pp.

76, 80

2. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, (London, 2004), pp. 3-4, 22


1993), p. 67

4. Letters, p. 67

5. Letters, p. 226

6. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, pp. 42-3

7. Letters, p. 227

8. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 45

9. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, (London, 2002), p. 16

10. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (London, 1997), p. xii

11. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 41

12. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. xlvi

13. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: the Restored Text, James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (eds.),

(New York, 2001), p. 110




17. Appears in “Contradictions”, an appendix in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of

Enlightenment, p. 238, as part of a fictional conversation between two young people, to

demonstrate the absurd pressure upon philosophers to provide universal moral systems in

response to those they criticize.

18. Naked Lunch pp. 118, 51, 110, 52

19. Merrit Roe Smith and Gregory Clancey (Eds.), Major Problems in the History of American

Technology: Documents and Essays, (Boston, 1998), p. 431

20. Naked Lunch, pp. 27, 205, 201, 57

21. Carl Degler, Affluence and Anxiety: America Since 1945, (Illinois, 1975), p. 169

22. Lawrence Wittner, “The Rulers and the Ruled: American Society, 1945-60″, in A History of Our

Time: Readings on Postwar America, Chafe and Sitkoff (eds.), (New York, 1983), p 89

23. Ann Douglas, “‘Punching a hole in the big lie’: the achievement of William S. Burroughs” in

Word Virus: the William Burroughs Reader, James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (eds.), (London,

1999), p. xvi

24. Letters, p. 254

25. Letters, p. 255


26. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin

Gordon (ed.), (Brighton, 1980), p. 128

27. Letters, p. 329


29. William S. Burroughs, Interzone, (New York, 1990), p. 71


31. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 238

32. Mary McCarthy, “Burroughs” Naked Lunch“, in William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical

Reception, 1959-1989, Skerl and Lydenberg (Eds.), (Illinois, 1991), p. 36



by A. D. Parkinson

01 Introduction





06 Bibliography

In Naked Lunch, William Burroughs unmasks deeply held assumptions about sexual normality, and

the economic and social function of normality, which can be productively examined in conjunction

with the work of Michel Foucault. Within Naked Lunch, we can see a fictionalised account of what

Foucault identifies as a “normalising” process, which was at work in America in the 1950s. Punitive

measures for those who engaged in sodomy were being replaced by a more “progressive”, liberal

approach, but one which was equally judgemental, and Naked Lunch reveals them as such. The

very language used to describe sexual practice in the postwar period is disciplinary in that the

binary distinctions it carries with it cause the internalisation of ideas of “normality”. It will further

be illustrated that Burroughs’ depiction of the manner in which the normalising process functions,

pivoted on the routine of the examination, corresponds to many elements of Foucault’s

descriptions of the process.

*

In 1950s America, there was a co-existence of different attitudes towards homosexuality. In the

early fifties, there were trends of relaxation on sodomy laws. The states of Georgia, Arkansas,

Nevada, New Jersey and New York lowered the maximum or minimum penalties for sodomy. In


New York, for instance, less than 5 percent of those convicted of sodomy in 1949 received prison

sentences. With the publication of the Kinsey Reports in 1948 and 1953, and the American Law

Institute’s Model Penal Code, there were definitely more liberal attitudes co-existing with the

traditional harsh punishments.1 “The Homosexual” became less the focus of attempts to punish

through imprisonment, fines and sterilisation, and became instead the focus of attempts to

correct, “cure”, normalise. A discourse about homosexuality was adopted which can be traced

back to Krafft-Ebbing’s 1894 work Psychopathia Sexualis, which sees the homosexual as the

pathologically diseased, his sexuality a symptom of some social maladjustment or mental illness. In

Naked Lunch Burroughs shows this “progressive” attitude to be just as steeped in judgemental

moralising as the previous methods: it is merely an evolution of methods of control.

Burroughs’ clarity on these issues of “normality” is due in no small part to his “abnormality”: on

account of his sexual orientation and his use of drugs, he was constantly brought into conflict with

forces that attempted to prevent or correct his behaviour. When the text is read in the light of

Burroughs’ experiences with these forces of psychoanalysis and “normality”, the sociological

content appears with an increased vividity.

*

In Naked Lunch, Burroughs often considers the US comparatively. Through juxtaposing what may

be seen as traditional and acceptable (or conversely, new and unacceptable) behaviour in America,

with the traditions, customs and social norms of other countries, Burroughs is able to illustrate

many of the absurdities in postwar America’s conceptions of normality. Burroughs uses the

Freeland Republic, a parody of Scandinavian Welfare States, to articulate his fears of the “welfare

state” mentality which he saw developing in America. Writing to Allen Ginsberg, he speaks of the

“Welfare Gov.” of America, and the injustices he feels that it perpetuates through its intervention

in the immigrant labour economy in Texas, and goes on to assert that “The Welfare State is on

the way to be a Communist State, and that means a bureaucratic police state.“2 Burroughs’

reactionary tone is in part fuelled by his anger at Ginsberg’s pseudo-socialist and somewhat

naÃ¯ve criticisms of his business, and should not therefore be taken too seriously. It does

however articulate that Burroughs feared that America was becoming what was termed a Welfare

State, and that this would mean decreased liberties and freedoms and an unprecedented level of

state intervention in the lives of individuals. Through the routines involving the Freeland Republic,

which will be examined here, Burroughs articulates his fears with regards a process which he sees

occurring in 1950s America, whereby Freeland is a Scandinavia of the mind, and an extrapolation

of trends in contemporary America.

In the Letters, we can see Burroughs’ experience with the concept of “normality” and his

awareness of how it was used for other ends. Burroughs is very cynical of the approach that


psychiatrists take to homosexuality and we can see this when he writes to Ginsberg, “The fact is

that no one at present understands this condition, though, of course, psychiatrists will claim to

understand anything.” Ginsberg was committed to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute

for around nine months, after pleading insanity when arrested after an incident involving a stolen

car full of stolen clothes, driven by a criminal associate of his. He left the institute believing that

the analysts had “cured” him of his homosexuality, and this theme occupies a portion of the

discourse between himself and Burroughs. Burroughs recognized the potential of analysis, and the

power of psychiatry,

I don’t doubt that a change from queer to hetero-sex is possible. Successful analysis should bring

about a complete sexual reorientation. 3

He himself had undergone pscyhoanalysis, and claimed that the process “removed inhibitions and

anxiety so that I could live the way I wanted to live.” However, he indicated that there was a

tension, that the powerful process of analysis could be directed and used for certain ends, writing,

“Much of my progress in analysis was accomplished in spite of my analyst who did not like my

“orientation,” as he called it.”4

Ann Douglas writes “Burroughs never considered himself anything but homosexual.”3 Certainly by

the 1950s, Burroughs completely accepted his sexual preferences:

I see as clear as I see physical objects my location as regards sex orientation. I am no going

anywhere from where I am, couldn’t go anywhere and don’t want to.

He did not concern himself with the normality or abnormality of his sexuality, and nor did he see

his homosexuality as in any way wrong or immoral, rather he saw that as being a social judgement.

He wrote, “It seems to me, Allen, that the problems and difficulties you complain of in queer

relationships are social rather than inherent — resulting from the social environment (to my mind

one of the worst in Space-Time) of middle class USA” Burroughs was made increasingly aware of

the nature of the constraints upon his person in America by the different social climate of Mexico.

Of his relationship with Marker in Mexico (documented in Queer, with Marker appearing as

Allerton), he said,

It isn’t that they are “tolerant” of the relation between Marker and myself. It simply would not

occur to them that the matter is any concern of theirs… (Needless to say everyone who knows

me or of me knows I am an invert and a junkie.) Like I say, there is no pressure… We don’t have

“problems” down here.

The very culture of “toleration” still implicitly condemns homosexual relations, implying putting up

with something that one disapproves of.6

*


In various passages in Naked Lunch, Burroughs reveals the new seemingly progressive, humane

attitudes towards homosexuality as being essentially moralising and part of a process of

normalisation. Foucault identifies “normalising judgement” arising in post-Enlightenment society, in

the areas that the laws leave empty, where there is an attempt to repress certain types of

behaviour by bringing people to internalise conceptions of reasonable and unreasonable behaviour:

The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penalty of time (lateness,

absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behaviour

(impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (”incorrect” attitudes,

irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency). At the same time, by way

of punishment, a whole series of subtle procedures was used, from light physical punishment to

minor deprivations and petty humiliations. It was a question both of making the slightest

departures from correct behaviour subject to punishment, and of giving a punitive function to the

apparently indifferent elements of the disciplinary approaches.

Normality is thus a point of coercion, and as perceptions of normality and correct behaviour are

absorbed into peoples” world-views, society itself takes upon the disciplinary function.7

The function of psychoanalysis in this process is crucial. Foucault, like Burroughs, presents

psychoanalysis as being invested with other interests as “Certain of its activities have effects which

fall within the function of control and normalisation.”8 Central to the psychological normalising

process is the routine of the examination, and many of the normalising forces of society manifest

themselves in “The Examination” chapter of Naked Lunch, which features Doctor Benway, here

appearing as a psychoanalyst, interviewing and testing a young man named Carl, whom he clearly

suspects of homosexuality.9

In “The Examination”, Benway speaks to Carl, “take the matter of uh sexual deviation… We regard

it as a misfortune… a sickness… certainly nothing to be censured or uh sanctioned any more

than, say, tuberculosis.” Although the tone is one of understanding and sympathy, the fact of the

matter is that Benway is equating a mere sexual preference with a life threatening disease. The

moralising here is occurring below the surface, with an offhand implication that wishing to have

intercourse with those of the same sex is a malfunction on par with having granular tumours and

nodules pertaining to a destruction of the flesh. Benway goes on to say that “any illness imposes

certain, should we say, obligations, certain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authorities

concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum of

inconvenience and hardship to the unfortunate individual who has, through no fault of his own,

become uh infected…” Again, beneath the sympathetic tone which refers to Carl as an

“unfortunate individual”, who is “infected”, lurk sinister forces. Carl is being asked to recognise his


own abnormality and through supporting the corrective process and recognising an “obligation”

for the state to “cure” him, he is condemning it as wrong and immoral.10

“The Examination” is highly ritualised, each stage shrouded in impenetrable terminology,

[Benway:] “Your uh test… the Robinson-Kleiberg flocculation test…”

“I thought it was a Blomberg-Stanislouski test.”

The doctor tittered. “Oh dear no… You are getting ahead of me young man. You might have

misunderstood. The Blomberg-Stanislouski, weeell… that’s a different sort of test altogether. I do

hope… not necessary…”

This terminology serves to increase the gulf between the patient and the doctor, as a whole

language separates Carl from Dr Benway, who is elevated to a status above Carl because of his

access to this field of knowledge. From this comes an increased objectification of the patient, Carl.

Benway even describes the whole process as “our little obstacle course”, as though he is toying

with Carl as part of some private, secret game, the purposes of which are never revealed.11

Foucault describes the examination as a ritual of objectification, which “manifests the subjection of

those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected” and

Burroughs clearly presents “The Examination” in this context.12

A tremendous amount of information about the individual is acquired through the examination.

Foucault explains “The examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates

them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix

them.”13 At one point, Doctor Benway shows Carl pictures of pinup girls, some of which are boys

in drag, asking him which one he would most like to “make”. Of course, the Doctor already has in

his file a picture of the girl he knows Carl will pick, illustrating the sheer mass and depth of

information that they know about Carl, and the extent of the surveillance that has been

conducted. We read, “Carl noticed that the file was six inches thick. In fact it seemed to have

thickened since he entered the room.”14 As Foucault sees the documents capturing the patient in

an almost spiritual sense, Carl is brought face to face with this eerily expanding mass of

information being recorded about him. It thickens in his presence, implying that every second of

his existence is being captured in this web of letters.

*

America in the fifties saw certain “progressive” strands of thought and approaches like Benway’s

which rather than condemning homosexuality out-and-out as immoral and wrong, and punishable

through prison, presented an equally judgemental and moralistic view which was shrouded in

sympathetic language and scientific terminology. There was a strong current of opinion that

homosexuality could and should be “treated”, because it was considered to be “abnormal” — an

explicit attempt at normalisation. In Seduction of the Innocent (1953) psychiatrist Fredric


Wertham discussed the dangerous effects of the homoeroticism inherent in comics such as

Batman and Robin: “the Batman type of story helps to fixate homoerotic tendencies”, through

exploiting the sexual confusion common in adolescent boys, which he believed could create

homosexuals:

We found that the arousal of homosexual fantasies, the translation of fantasies into fact and the

transition from episodic homosexual experiences to a confirmed fixation of the pattern may be

due to all sorts of accidental factors. The Batman type of story may stimulate children to

homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they may be unconscious. In adolescents who realize

it they may be given added stimulation and reinforcement.

He speaks of “overt homosexuals treated at the [Quaker Emergency Service] Readjustment

Center”, and “homosexual cases”, implying through his rhetoric that homosexuality was a medical

condition to be cured.15 As Benway has his Reconditioning Centre, Wertham had his

Readjustment Centre. Wertham’s language is intimidating like that of Benway; we are told that

“Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and of the psychopathology of sex can

fail to realise a subtle atmosphere of homoerotism.”16

Dr. Wertham served as a senior psychologist for the Department of Hospitals in New York City

between 1935 and 1952, was responsible for the mental hygiene clinics at Bellevue Hospital and

Queens Hospital Center and was responsible for General Sessions Psychiatrist Clinic. He was also

responsible for advice in many court cases for over twenty-five years.17 He was a figure of great

influence upon debates involving sexuality and morality. There are debates as to Wertham’s

homophobia, but certain facts can be established. His survey is based upon an acceptance of

homosexual stereotypes and a desire to establish a homosexual/ heterosexual duality. With

chapter titles including “Design for Delinquency” and “The Devil’s Allies”, the description of

homosexuality in the book is set within the context of sadomasochism, degeneracy and crime he

sees at large in society, the connotation being that homosexuality is another ill which he is

condemning. Wertham and his book are inseparable from the sensationalism surrounding them, as

parts of it were released in the Ladies” Home Journal under the title of “What Parents Don’t Know

About Comic Books.” Dr Wertham represents serious psychoanalytical discourse inseparably

intertwined with personal perceptions of “normality” and “abnormality”, and of homosexuality as

an adverse condition. He sees comic books as being responsible for shaping the minds of young

people, and essentially creating homosexuals, and in blaming comic books for homosexuality and

crime, and pushing for regulation of comic books, he was employing a “preventative” remedy for

the perceived “social ill” of homosexuality. Like Dr Benway, Fredric Wertham is acting as a

normalising force, with psychiatry as a tool being used for a particular end.


The very process of “The Examination” in Naked Lunch should appear as absurd — the

tremendous pressure heaped upon Carl and the issue of his sexuality by Dr Benway, and Benway’s

almost perverse desire to know about Carl is uncanny. It does however, reflect the reality of

1950s America. The state was concerned about the sexuality of the people; committees were set

up to investigate whether civil servants or teachers were homosexual, because they were

considered to be something of a security risk. Alfred Kinsey, in his groundbreaking study, Sexual

Behaviour in the Human Male, published in 1948, considers the way in which ideas of “normality”

and “abnormality” were used by scientists, and writes “the ready acceptance of those distinctions

among scientific men may provide the basis for one of the severest criticisms which subsequent

generations can make of the scientific quality of nineteenth and early twentieth century scientists.”

He criticises science which, for all its aloofness, is operating within this morality. In his survey, he

revealed that “perhaps the major portion of the male population,” had at least some homosexual

experience between adolescence and old age, and that the very idea of characterizing someone as

a homosexual or heterosexual was absurd- a social term, not a scientific term, for such terms

“may be better used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations,”18 In our first encounter

with Benway in the novel, he tells us “I noticed that all my homosexual patients manifested strong

unconscious heterosex trends and all my hetero patients unconscious homosexual trends.”19 The

unconscious trends manifesting in the patients reflect the failed attempts of the patients to force

their sexual orientation into semantic terms which do not necessarily reflect the reality of the

human psyche. Burroughs rejects gender identities considering them to be social categories more

than anything.

Published in 1951, Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach

argued for the rights of homosexuals as a group, but in doing so was still enforcing the

homosexual/ heterosexual dichotomy, and trying to build up a “gay culture” from this position.20

He did not make any effort to dispute the “sickness” theories, and in fact reacted strongly to

rejections of the sickness theory in the 1960s. Burroughs read the book, and commented

Enough to turn a man’s gut. This citizen says a queer learns humility, learns to turn the other

cheek… Let him take that sort of thing if he wants to. I never swallowed the other cheek routine,

and I hate the stupid bastards who won’t mind their own business.21

Burroughs appears to reject this “gay identity” that one could see developing in the 1950s,

because it was essentially couched in the semantics of the opposition. Instead, Burroughs is angry

at the very fact that people may concern themselves with his sexual preferences. Essentially,

Burroughs rejects “gay culture” as it was represented in the 1950s because he rejects any attempt

to define an individual through their sexual orientation.


Burroughs questions the success and desirability of this normalisation. In one scene in Naked

Lunch, “Dr Berger’s Mental Health Hour”, there appears to be some attempt to film a toothpaste

advert, whereby an individual smiles and endorses the product. The subjects that they have for

filming are three “cured” cases — a criminal psychopath, a homosexual and a writer. All three are

supposedly “cured”, that is, normalised, and so able to play a productive role providing a service

within consumer society. However, it doesn’t work. The artistic advisor complains of the

homosexual’s performance, “It lacks something. To be specific, it lacks health.”22 The doctor is

taken aside and questioned “how can you expect a body to be healthy with its brains washed out?”

Ironically, the results of the attempts to turn these “abnormal” individuals into healthy, productive

units turns them into something unhealthy and unappealing. Burroughs again brings us to question

these attempts at homogenisation through psychiatric means in “meeting of international

conference of technological psychiatry”, when Dr Shafer presents us with the Complete All

American Deanxietized Man, which subsequently turns into a giant centipede, the hideous

metamorphism inducing terror, and making us question the desirability of Shafer’s creation.

*

In Naked Lunch, we see how around the construct of normality, a whole system of morality is

established. In the modern age, what is right is what is normal, and serves to preserve and

perpetuate the status quo. Burroughs writes, “The black wind sock of death undulates over the

land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under

a vast probability curve…” conjuring up an image of coercive forces seeking out those who do not

conform to social norms.23 The homosexual in 1950s America was subjected to these forces,

which were presented as the most sympathetic, understanding approach to the “problem”.

Burroughs reveals these forces for what they were, and in describing how they work he portrays

coercive disciplinary forces which function in a manner strikingly similar to that later described by

Michel Foucault. Burroughs’ awareness that these “neutral” institutions were in fact endowed with

coercive powers can only be described as “Foucauldian”.

1. George Painter, “The Sensibilities of Our Forefathers: The History of Sodomy Laws in the

United States“, January 2005


1993), p. 67

3. Letters, pp. 69, 86

4. William Burroughs, Junky, (London, 1999), p.xiv


5. Ann Douglas, “‘Punching a hole in the big lie’: the achievement of William S. Burroughs” in Word

Virus: the William Burroughs Reader, James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (eds.), (London, 1999), p.

xvi

6. Letters, pp. 86, 97-8

7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, (London, 1991), p. 178

8. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin

Gordon (ed.), (Brighton, 1980), p. 61

9. For clarity, the examination of Carl by Dr Benway in Naked Lunch will be described as “The

Examination”

10. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: the Restored Text, James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (eds),

(New York, 2001), p. 157


12. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 184

13. Ibid., p. 189


15. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, (New York, 1954), pp. 190-191

16. Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, p. 379

17. Publisher’s note in Seduction of the Innocent

18. Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, (Philadelphia, 1948), pp. 7, 610, 617


20. Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A subjective approach, (Manchester NH,

1975)

21. Letters, p. 106





by A. D. Parkinson

01 Introduction






06 Bibliography

This study has been an attempt to establish the importance of Naked Lunch as an historical

document, an accurate and intelligent critique of postwar America, through a thorough

demonstration of its relationship with both the reality of postwar America and other social-

political critiques. As has been illustrated, the surreal scenery of the novel is in many senses but a

thinly guised vision of postwar American society. William Burroughs’ ideas on society and politics

which he articulates in the novel can be expressed within a web of social critiques, which

encompasses works of the Frankfurt School, the writings of Michel Foucault, some of the theories

of Gilles Deleuze and elements of Oswald Spengler, and Naked Lunch can be best understood in

the context of these texts. This is not to say that Naked Lunch or William Burroughs’ thought is

always entirely correct or even thoroughly consistent, but through studying Naked Lunch, we still

can increase our knowledge of postwar America.

This study has attempted to demonstrate specifically the relationship between Burroughs’ surreal

images and the realities of 1950s society. It has been shown that in Naked Lunch, Burroughs

portrays what he considers to be that “basic American rottenness”: he dissects the control

mechanisms of the consumer society that emerged in America in the postwar period and reflects a

deep discontent with consumer society presenting it as being fundamentally degrading to mankind.

Burroughs shares many of the criticisms of the reason underpinning capitalist society which are

articulated by the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Burroughs

perceives a shift in the meaning of a reasonable action, connected to the Enlightenment and the

rise of liberalism, which has enormous social and political repercussions. We can also see that

before Michel Foucault was a recognised scholar, Burroughs was taking a distinctly Foucauldian

approach to sexuality and normality. Naked Lunch shows the way in which innocuous, humane,

“progressive” approaches to and opinions of sexuality in 1950s America were in fact judgemental

and moralising.

In a wider sense, this study has been an attempt to win back ground lost to sociological studies in

considerations of postwar American politics and society. It is an attempt to place the various

social-political models and theories which we find within the works of Foucault, the Frankfurt

School and William Burroughs within the context of history and historical studies. There is much

valuable insight to be learnt from these models, but it is important to ground the theories in

concrete facts and historical realities. This study has constantly maintained an effort to establish a

tangible relationship between theory and reality.

Modern literary criticism, with its increasing fluency in sociology, is making important new readings

of texts. An increased awareness of the social and political circumstances which produce a novel,


and the social and political values we can deduce from the novel, means that literary works can

serve as increasingly important documents of eras. William Burroughs’ body of work deserves

further critical analysis, with an increased awareness and attention to the context of the work.

There is a whole myriad of postwar authors whose books display an acute awareness of the

changing social and political environment and the subtle shifts in the organisation of capital and

global politics, and these authors are often more alert to their socio-political surroundings then

many more scholarly commentators. Responding to criticisms that their two part work Capitalism

and Schizophrenia was too “literary”, Deleuze and Guattarri asked “Is it our fault that Lawrence,

Miller, Kerouac, Burroughs, Artaud, and Beckett know more about schizophrenia than

psychiatrists and psychoanalysts?”1 I would suggest that anyone wishing to perform a historical

investigation into identity and the “theory of alienation” identified in Marx in the postwar world

might want to read the works of Paul Bowles and Albert Camus, and anyone writing a social

history of technology would be wise to study the works of Philip K. Dick. The towering

importance of the thought of J. G. Ballard should manifest itself in any social history of the

twentieth century. Different eras have different writers who in their novels, possessed by the

shifting tectonics of historical forces, capture the essence of the period and it is important that

historians recognise the importance of the literary work as a historical document.

1. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, (New York, 1995), p. 23



by A. D. Parkinson

01 Introduction





06 Bibliography

Primary Material:

Burroughs, William S., Interzone, (New York, 1990)


– The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959, Oliver Harris (ed.), (London, 1993)

– Junky, (London, 1999)

– Word Virus: the William Burroughs Reader, Grauerholz and Silverberg (eds.), (London, 1999)

– Naked Lunch: the Restored Text, Grauerholz and Miles (eds.), (New York, 2001)

Cory, Donald Webster, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach, (Mancheser NH,

1975)

Kinsey, Alfred, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, (Philadelphia, 1948)

Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite, (New York, 1956)

Peiss, Kathy, Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality: Documents and Essays

Smith, Merrit Roe and Clancey, Gregory (eds.), Major Problems in the History of American

Technology: Documents and Essays, (Boston, 1998)

Wertham, Fredric, Seduction of the Innocent, (New York, 1954)

Secondary Material:

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (London, 1997)

Butsch, Richard, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, (Cambridge, 2000)

Campbell, James, This is the Beat Generation: New York – San Franciso – Paris, (London, 1999)

Chafe and Sitkoff (eds.), A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar America, (New York, 1983)

Degler, Carl, Affluence and Anxiety: America Since 1945, (Illinois, 1975)

Deleuze, Gilles, “Postscript on the Societies of Control“, in OCTOBER 59, (Winter 1992)

– Negotiations, (New York, 1995)

Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by

Colin Gordon, (Brighton, 1980)

– Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, (London, 1991)

Horkheimer, Max, Eclipse of Reason, (London, 2004)

Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast, (Boston, 1973)

Lydenberg, Robin, Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction,

(Illinois, 1987)

Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man, (London, 2002)

Miles, Barry, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, (London, 2002)

Mottram, Eric, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need, (London, 1977)

Murphy, Timothy S., Wising up the Marks: the Amodern William Burroughs, (Berkeley, 1997)

Navasky, Victor, Naming Names, (London, 1982)

Painter, George, “The Sensibilities of Our Forefathers: The History of Sodomy Laws in the United

States“, January 2005


Skerl, Jennie and Lydenberg, Robin (eds.), William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception,

1959-1989, (Illinois, 1991)

Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, (London, 1926)

Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States: From 1492 to the Present, (London, 1996)