November 25, 1962

Instead of Love, the Fix

By HERBERT GOLD

NAKED LUNCH

By William S. Burroughs.



Elder statesman of the beat fad, friend and advisor to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, author of several novels as yet unavailable in this country, and pseudonymous author of a paperback novel about heroin addiction, William Burroughs has excellent credentials for producing the definitive hip book. He has followed the root of publication by the Olympia Press in Paris and by banned little magazines in the United States; extravagant international praise, with the usual admixture of gossip, has accumulated about his work and his person. Another convulsion of the true-believing bureaucrats of hipdom and the horrified censors, professors and policemen arrayed in mortal combat, now seems inevitable.

It happens that Burroughs possesses a special literary gift. "Naked Lunch" is less a novel than a series of essays, fantasies, prose poems, dramatic fragments, bitter arguments, jokes, puns, epigrams- all hovering about the explicit subject matter of making out on drugs while not making out in either work or love. The black humor of addiction- a religion as practiced by Burroughs- does not lend itself to that evolution of character and action within society which is traditional to the novel. No real people assist at the junkie's rituals: marks, suppliers, cops, but no friends or lovers.

In this book the single repetitive process of getting the fix replaces accumulating action or growth. There is a frozen dream of perfect isolation behind which Burroughs' intelligence retains its glitter. He sees the East River lined with gangsters in concrete blocks; he sees live monkeys sewn into the bodies of appendicitis victims by abstracted doctors. As in Swift's "A Modest Proposal," the satire proceeds from an apparent acceptance of the disposition of fate. Like Swift, Burroughs then drives through to an extreme of formal horror. He forms a college of American racial, commercial and social prejudices, placed upon a subject matter of perversion and nihilism. His business sells "adulterated shark repellant." We may start to smile but we stop.

Hero and villain of "Naked Lunch" are heroin. Burroughs makes it clear that addiction does not give pleasure- it is merely "something to do"- and he argues that the police collaborate with the addict, helping him to find his something-to-do by making it hard for him, keeping him busy. Within the dry, husking rustle of Burroughs' prose lies a moral judgment. "I got the fear!" he writes, and runs from the dream of nothingness, no contact, toward nothingness, no contact, toward his surreal fantasy. The world of men and women has let him down. The world of dream- no, of self-absorption- is the only alternative while he waits out his term on earth.

The literary technique will remind readers of Villon and Corbiere, the gasping, torrid Celine and the furious Swift, Alfred Jarry and Jean Genet. But in a most American way, Burroughs rejects their yearnings for a form in favor of a definition of the novel (read: Book) as receptacle. Repetitions of words, phrases, even episodes remain uncut. It is all there because it was there in his mind. He offers up a series of drug and sex transports, unseparated from the motion sickness of getting to the fantasy. He has the notion of suggesting heroin addiction as a treatment for schizophrenia. His logic: The schizophrenic loses contact with others; a heroin addict cannot ignore his need, therefore needs others, therefore needs efficient contact; therefore the addict will give up his madness in order to guarantee his supply.

Certainly a personal psychoanalysis is being wrought in this book. The climaxes are those of shock and the fix, and these are repeated obsessively, using a curious vocabulary which ranges from the pedantic to the childish. When the book flags, the attack is automatic and verbal, the mere play of an intelligent man diddling the language.

Many readers will turn from this book in disgust. Some literary snobs will use it as an occasion to cry masterpiece, forgiving its lack of shape and control; others will accuse it of being merely obscene, too stunned by the experience to admit its relevance to our time and to ride along with the driven, riven spirit that has gone into its making. The book is surely not pornographic. Sex is a target of immense disgust; the cruel language chills the reader, is an anaphrodisiac as heroin.

At its best, this book, which is not a novel but a booty brought back from nightmare, takes a coldly implacable look at the dark side of our nature. Civilization fails many; many fail civilization. William Burroughs has written the basic work for understanding that desperate symptom which is the beat style of life.

Mr. Gold's new novel, "Salt," will be published in the spring.