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

107 I Am No Doctor r. b. MORRIS I am no doctor, no PhD, no master of this or that, no scientist or journalist , no veteran of any particular front, no literary scholar. I am a poet well outside the academic world of letters with only a few books to show, a songwriter, and occasional recording artist. Thanks to the unparalleled referencing of the Internet, I can be located in obscure recesses, but otherwise you haven’t heard of me. But, then, the world of recording artists is a wasteland, and a book of poetry perhaps the most ineffectual art form in the culture. So, what would it matter if I was more renowned or notably qualified ? If the subject is William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and how it fares in fifty years of the world, why would we trust a doctor or scientist, a scholar or artist of any make in today’s society to offer any particular insight into him or this fifty-year-old work that is most often referred to as a novel? I can only lay it out as a layman. Half a century is a long time in the mercurial world we have become. Things get lost. Heroes come and go, eras come and go. Generations die off. Centuries pass. Millennia pass, and new ages begin. All in the span of these few years. William Burroughs is dead. All the Beat writers are dead, except Ferlinghetti, who’ll be ninety the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Naked Lunch. Burroughs (1914–1997) lived for thirty-eight of those fifty years since Naked Lunch first saw publication. He continued to write books that still live on shelves of literature. There were celebrated CDs of recorded readings with musical accompaniment. A H_M Ch13.indd 107 3/25/09 7:34:08 AM 108 r. b. MORRIS loose composite of Naked Lunch was made into a feature film bearing the book’s title. Burroughs himself had small roles in a number of films. There were conferences and articles and documentaries, a few biographies. Like Henry Miller, he also became a painter of some renown. There were always sightings, a cameo in a Laurie Anderson video, a half-sung track on a Tom Waits record, even a voice-over at the beginning of the first episode in the last season of HBO’s smash hit Sopranos. Ever a shadowy icon, Burroughs remained reclusively at large and a sometime-inspiration to subsequent generations. But on the whole as with everything and everyone else, he fades more and more from public knowledge. Naked Lunch, the dark masterpiece , and William Seward Burroughs, the always astute and well-attired enigmatic figure, slip a little further into the footnotes of history. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Naked Lunch was surely the most controversial, most rumored, and most buzzed-up book to be released in the United States since James Joyce’s Ulysses. From the first excerpts published in American magazines in 1957 through its various obscenity trials and eventual U.S. publication in 1966, it had a book launch that lasted nearly a decade. Bootleg copies were widely circulated in the States after it was published in Paris in 1959. Its cult popularity and illegal status combined to give it tremendous notoriety. The success of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road paved the way for it, all riding shotgun on an exciting countercultural expedition that promised new brilliance and new truth. Naked Lunch made good on that promise. It was brutal genius. A merciless story regarding a merciless subject told in merciless terms. Like the author, the work had international savvy and human import beyond borders. In fact, Naked Lunch made a mockery of all borders, physical, social, and psychic. It created a parallel civilization both real and unreal, current as well as futuristic and prophetic. It revealed a truer nature of human nature, of civilization, of ruling classes and slave classes and the driving need that rules them all. Wouldn’t you? Burroughs had the Joycean ability to create written language in ways previously unheard. It was language at once shocking and masterful, not only immediate and point blank but hidden and coded. It was a new poetry as much as novel or biography. It was a new literary form really, Burroughs’ routines. It allowed for all the narrative and dialogue of drama and prose while paced like a series of interconnected short stories with...

Share