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Page 20 American Book Review opium), particularly the lynching, the parodied racism , the grotesque versions of Southern mob justice. Johnson alleviates a certain Eurocentric bias in this collection which reminds me that interest in Burroughs ’s work has always been more international than provincial. I also liked bothAllen Hibbard’s and Kurt Hemmer ’s essays on the impact of a Tangiers emerging from colonialism in the mid 1950s while Burroughs was working on Naked Lunch, distorting the nationalist riots in the Arab quarter into some of the hysterical pandemonium of the novel. I responded as well to Andrew Hussey’s essay on the revolutionary praxis of Paris when Burroughs was living there in 1958–59, in the wake of theAlgerian War and avantgarde critical theory; R. B. Morris’s lively version of some of the cultural consequences of Naked Lunch (affecting, in his view, even Bob Dylan’s lyrics); and Davis Schneiderman’s piece on the ways in which Naked Lunch resists co-option into the American literary mainstream. I’ve exposed several thousand undergraduate and graduate students to Naked Lunch, and they still respond to the explosive violence of its bizarre fantasies, sometimes to its morbid burlesque, often queasy with its rapacious sexuality. If I show them some of Howard Brookner’s documentary, they usually chuckle when Mortimer, Burroughs’s older brother, testifies (in short pants) that the novel repels him, that the objectionable language and depiction exists just to shock. My own report from the Bunker is that Naked Lunch continues to offend most of its readers which I take as a sign of its continuing vitality. In another fifty years, scholars will still be talking about it. John Tytell’s Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation is now published by Ivan Dee. His Passionate Lives just appeared in a South Korean incarnation, published by Ahchimyisul. Elliptical Fiction John Tytell Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays Edited by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen Southern Illinois University Press http://www.siupress.com 312 pages; cloth, $34.95; paper, $22.95 For students of the perplexing dynamic of William Seward Burroughs’s imagination, the nature of postmodernism or postcolonial theory, Naked Lunch @ 50 is an essential work, comparable in importance to the annotated Howl or the Viking Press publication of the scroll version of On the Road. I knew Naked Lunch (1959) was a classic when I read it, sometime in the early 1960s—hilariously fantastic relief from a surfeit of so sobering Henry James. I had already read Ulysses so I had some experience with an encoded text with a dense texture— but even with James Joyce, I had the advantage of explications by Gilbert Stuart and Harry Levin to help me limp along. Naked Lunch is the most arcane, allusive, elusively elliptical fiction since Ulysses, and this compendium is now the best source available for deciphering its spectacular hieroglyphics, for mapping it intricately fantastical geography and discovering the roots of its landscape of nightmare in East Texas, Tangiers, or Paris. As a cultural resource of the first order, Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen have provided, with their interstitial commentaries and the scholarly essays they have chosen to include, the most revealing and penetrating analyses of Burroughs’s masterwork, enabling its future readers to appreciate it on a more profound contextual level. At the same time, the reader is systematically informed by exact textual observation, by a clinical evaluation of linguistic variables, by probing the compulsive terms of Burroughs’s drug and sexual underworld, by considering the parodic implications of song lyrics , film noir, and pulp fiction, and by exploring the biographical and myth projecting potentialities of any great literary work. Take, for instance, MacFadyen’s assertion that “Burroughs’geographical references contain secret, hip connotations,” complicating the embroidery of the novel in the manner of T.S. Eliot’s allusions in The Waste Land, or in the way Joyce’s use of Greek myth adds a meaningful dimension to Ulysses. Early in Naked Lunch Burroughs’s junkie protagonist flees towards Mexico City on the Pan-American Highway with a companion. They stop for a fix: “Thomas and Charlie” I said. “What?” “That’s the name of...

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