Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays

“Gentlemen I will slop a pearl”:The (Non)Meaning of Naked Lunch

188 “Gentlemen I will slop a pearl”: The (Non)Meaning of Naked Lunch davis SCHNEIDERMAN Unmaking the Meal P erhaps the strangest aspect of Naked Lunch’s slow tromp from the avant-garde margins remains the way that still, after fifty years, the book resists full co-option into the American literary mainstream. There are scant similar examples in the permeable realms of modern and postmodern literature that have become as popular as Naked Lunch and yet still remain as thoroughly unmanageable. The book, a self-aware contortionist , performs a series of “innaresting” positions that for many readers familiar with the jump-cut aesthetic of movies, video games, music, and television—but not for god’s sake literature—make as much “sense” as the mosaic juxtapositions marking the text. Naked Lunch is a deeply ambivalent book: it remains inconsistent in message, discordant in style, variable in method, and, as recently demonstrated by Oliver Harris, exaggerated in mythos. The situation is complicated by various attempts to make critical “sense” of the novel, which often, to contradictory effect, limit the possibilities for reading Naked Lunch and simultaneously assure its continued popularity. To the extent that almost every method of reading Naked Lunch promises to unlock its secrets—and so provide textual mastery—the novel gestures in return, at times suggesting H_M Ch22.indd 188 3/30/09 12:38:02 PM “Gentlemen I will slop a pearl” 189 a misleading synergy with the critical perspective, at times remaining more obviously hostile. The critical terrain mapped out by Jennie Skerl in her introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition remains almost unchanged twenty-five years later (with at least one major exception), and after she discusses her own insights, she cites the ways in which readers have attempted to understand Naked Lunch during its first quarter century. Significantly, there are academic/critical and popular perspectives: with the avant-garde modernist tradition (xvi); with French writers of “revolt,” including de Sade, Céline, Genet, and Camus; with Henry Miller as the link between the French and the American; and with the antiliterature of Beckett (xvii). There is the ubiquitous “Beat novel” pigeonhole (xvii) and an elision of Burroughs’ comedic voice in terms of his (a)moral positions (xiv). Skerl writes that critics of the 1970s and 1980s began to pay attention to Naked Lunch’s form, and she notes that two early studies, John Tytell’s Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation (1976) and Eric Mottram’s William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (1971), indeed follow the formal path, while still assuming “the same social and moral message that had been discussed in the 1960s” (xviii). Finally, suggesting a notion of Naked Lunch as a “radical text rather than a message,” Skerl makes her most striking point: “Naked Lunch has been placed in many theoretical contexts [ . . . ] psychoanalytic, archetypal, reader-response, phenomenological, and various definitions of postmodernist, structuralist and deconstructionist. But because critics have for the most part not responded to each other, no unified body of criticism has emerged” (xix). The exception: As part of the critical renaissance in motion since about the time of Burroughs’ death in 1997, Carol Loranger and Oliver Harris have provided a new direction in textual/genetic studies. Harris’ important William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (2003) locates the epistolary origins of the texts that would eventually become Naked Lunch, remarking, “Burroughs’ pieces do not fit together into a whole novel precisely because they are not fit pieces for a novel” (212). In critiquing Timothy S. Murphy’s failure to push through “Beat Legend” for genetic histories, Harris notes that “a false material base must in turn have material consequences for textual interpretation” (187). He ably details the elimination of almost all epistolary traces in Naked Lunch, and in doing so, we might slop a pearl: if the texts in Naked Lunch are not the texts of a “novel” in any sense of a form arrived at prior to its construction (and, rather, elements of letters), the treatment of the text-as-such results in a series of impossible readings, each attempting mastery foiled by the material methodological limits. H_M Ch22.indd 189 3/30/09 12:38:02 PM 190 davis SCHNEIDERMAN Here, Skerl’s closing comment assumes even greater import: “[Naked Lunch] is a masterful performance that refuses classification: a paradoxical masterpiece by a writer who eschews masterpieces” (xix). In...