Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays

dossier THREE

91 dossier THREE ian MACFADYEN Files Comprising: Extreme Cuisine, Vomitorium, A Mess of Eels, Merde, Just For Jolly, Laissez-Faire, Atrophied, South American, BoyCries , The Candy Butcher, Raise, Jargon City, Zones Of Influence, Always A Body To Trade, Schizoid, Factualist, Visionary, Gone To Persia, Roller-Coaster, Greenback Readers, The Entire Serpent. Extreme Cuisine “Tarantulas, deep-fried with salt and pepper, are a speciality of the small town of Skuom, about two-hours drive north of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. Villagers collect the arachnids from their burrows , taking care to avoid the poisonous fangs (which are trimmed with scissors before cooking begins). The spiders are properly cooked when the legs are crispy but the thorax still retains its moist, gooey, interior texture. The experience of eating bears some resemblance to that of a plate of soft-shell crab” (Hopkins, 192). Vomitorium In Naked Lunch, what is consumed is regurgitated, appetite becomes sensual greed fed by procured sickness, the feast requires an emetic, repletion is bypassed in favor of endless consumption. It’s the culture of the Black Meat eaters who eat the nauseating stuff “and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted” (47). In Petronius’ description of Trimalchio’s dinner party, Encolpius breaks open a pastry egg and H_M Ch11.indd 91 3/30/09 12:36:37 PM 92 ian MACFADYEN thinks he sees a repulsive embryo inside—but it’s a figpecker (a garden warbler) in egg yolk and pepper. Yummy. This is reminiscent of The Sailor’s “pink scrotal egg [ . . . ] Black fur boiled inside translucent flesh of the egg” (171) and the huge, “unspeakably toothsome” (50) worm in a little yellow-brown egg, a gourmet delicacy which hatches in the human body, the kidney an eggshell host for the worm. . . . We are informed that this is “so-called lunch” (50), and like Encolpius’ fantastic creation, the “food” here is perverse, repugnant, and possibly delicious. It’s true defilement, and really, you haven’t lived until you’ve swallowed that, my dear—and swallow it you must. A Mess Of Eels Whatisfinallyeliminatedisnothingless,nothingmore,thanourselves, used up, the literal end product, lunch for worms. It is the idea of devourment which gives the book its title—we are Naked/Meat Lunch/ Eaters, consuming and rejecting ourselves endlessly unto death. Betty Fussell: “I can turn murder into blessing by symbolic salt, but excrement into sacrament is a harder trick to turn. God owes me there. My guts are serpentine as a mess of eels, but the inward darkness of Genesis shakes out as farce. Farce is my exodus. I know that after a lifetime’s wandering through a wilderness of snakes and swine, no amount of murdering, no amount of laundering, will change my promised end as meat and gravy for rutabagas, pudding for worms” (225). Merde “Flaubert [ . . . ] conscious of the role of anality in the emergence of narcissism, promoted excrement as a symbol of the ‘I’” (Corbin, 219)—and in Burroughs’ writing, shit is an expression of unfettered personal license, a refusal of politeness and delicacy of feeling, an insistence upon his own linguistic liberty as well as a way of “privileging the anus” and shamelessness. Burroughs would have known Verlaine and Rimbaud’s infamous, collaborative sonnet, “Sonnet du trou du cul,” the “Arsehole Sonnet,” although as late as 1962, it was absent from the Pleiade Oeuvres complètes of Verlaine because it was considered obscene. “’Tis the swooning conch, the fondling flute, / The tube from which the heavenly praline drops, / A female Canaan cocooned in muggy air” (qtd. in Robb, 142). Like Rimbaud, Burroughs attacks the “decent” canons of literature and ridicules conventional notions of beauty through the affirmation of the functioning biological body, even though his sense of physical abnegation and his desire to escape the doomed, mortal flesh is everywhere evident. H_M Ch11.indd 92 3/30/09 12:36:37 PM dossier THREE 93 Just For Jolly In 1944, Kerouac wrote the word blood in his own blood on a manuscript , smearing it throughout a section of Vanity of Duluoz. Burroughs is not so literal, but he cites a definitively bloody source. The “Atrophied Preface” is subtitled “Wouldn’t You?” and the phrase is taken from “a letter to The Press” (Rumbelow, 177), supposedly written by Jack the Ripper and (mis)quoted by Burroughs, the original letter running as follows: “The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears...