In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

56 Tangier and the Making of Naked Lunch allen HIBBARD Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister. —Allen Ginsberg, “America” T here would be no Naked Lunch, at least not in the form we know it, without Burroughs’ sojourn in Tangier from 1954 to 1958. The historical/geographical context of the novel’s making has itself been a key, but often problematic, aspect of the text’s creation and its reception. This juncture, half a century after the novel’s original publication, offers a new horizon from which we might profitably take a fresh look at the critical connection between Tangier and Naked Lunch. What I suggest at the outset is that the very nature of changing conditions in Tangier as it moved from international-zone status toward integration within a newly independent Morocco, is registered in both the novel’s making and its final form. Moreover, just as this time was a critical turning point in Moroccan history, it was also a pivotal turning point in Burroughs’ own work, an important transitional phase between the early, linear narrative style of Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters and the subsequent disjunctive, nonlinear , antirepresentational style of the cut-up phase (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) influenced by Brion Gysin, whom he first met in Tangier. H_M Ch7.indd 56 3/25/09 7:32:46 AM Tangier and the Making of Naked Lunch 57 Various stories and accounts of the time Burroughs spent in Tangier while he was composing and assembling Naked Lunch have circulated widely in biographies, collections of letters, and books devoted to expatriate life in the city. Indeed, strands of the story have been woven together to create a durable and familiar pattern with legendary, even mythic, qualities. Burroughs left Latin America in August of 1953, disinclined to settle in the United States. His decision to make Tangier his destination may in part at least be attributed to his acquaintance with Paul Bowles’ novels The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down as well as the kind of carefree expatriate lifestyle associated with Tangier at the time. During his first year in Tangier, however, Bowles seemed aloof. Lonely, depressed, and heavily addicted, Burroughs speculated that the well-established, genteel writer might not have wanted anything to do with him because of his associations with unsavory characters and contraband substances. Bowles was also gone off and on during the mid-1950s, traveling by ship to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and other places. Still, the city on the northwest tip of Africa had enough to hold Burroughs. After all, he had a habit to feed, and drugs were readily available. So, too, were boys. Burroughs’ letters from the period, especially those to Allen Ginsberg, contain evidence of these fluctuations of mood, descriptions of interactions with local characters (including his Spanish-speaking lover Kiki), and shifting responses to the city, along with accounts of the novel’s development and early versions of routines that wound their way into the novel. As early as 1955, Burroughs had begun coaxing Ginsberg to visit him in Tangier, often extending the promise of boys and including in his letters chunks of the manuscript he then referred to as “Interzone.” By late 1956 and early 1957, Burroughs stepped up his campaign. Besides his keen interest in seeing Ginsberg, he needed help compiling the novel. The visit of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, and Alan Ansen to Tangier in 1957 is a key aspect of the legend. Ted Morgan, describing the scene of Burroughs and his friends working on the novel there in Tangier as a “writer’s equivalent of a quilting bee,” notes, “Over a period of two months working steadily, they integrated and edited and typed the material which was an incredible mosaic of Bill’s fantasies over the past three years, until they had about 200 pages of finished manuscript typed in duplicate” (265). Burroughs continued to generate material for the novel after his friends left and handed over the job of peddling the novel to Ginsberg. By the time he left Tangier in January 1958 to join Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso in Paris at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur (famously known as the Beat Hotel), the city had left its indelible mark on the writer and the novel he wrote there. H_M Ch7.indd 57 3/25/09 7:32:46 AM [18.218.70.93] Project MUSE (2024-04...

Share