Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays

dossier FOUR

160 dossier FOUR ian MACFADYEN Files Comprising: Money And How It Got That Way, The Big Con, Weaponry, Hang On To A Dream, Solitary, Mugwumps, Untouchable, Agent Provocateur, Insectoid, Bang-utot And The Pure Quill, Showtime , Head West, The County Clerk And Sam Hose, Signs Following, Satire, Progenitor, The Terminal Reprise. Money And How It Got That Way A rich man flips a coin to the cold-kicking monstrous addict rolling in filth, like a George Grosz caricature or a Brechtian critique of capitalism—“Mr. Rich-and-Vulgar chews his Havana lewd and nasty” (67). It’s always business as usual in Naked Lunch, whatever other shit is going down. Welcome to the black market place where you can get death at cost, wholesale slaughter at wholesale. Also available for money is money itself, the perfect Dalinian fashion statement, a suit of bank notes to keep you warm while you wait for the little baby notes to hatch into mature, negotiable currency. The Big Con David Maurer in his study of the confidence man describes “the great number of marks which are roped on trains” (99). But when Lee comes on to the advertising-exec-type fruit on the uptown A train, captivating him with his criminal lingo, he is also blowing his cover—as Maurer points out, to speak the argot in public to the uninitiated is crazy, H_M Ch19.indd 160 3/25/09 7:36:15 AM dossier FOUR 161 it’s just not done. So why does Lee reveal himself in this way? Because Lee is actually addressing the reader (as the parenthetical, editorial asides indicate). Lee’s account of catnipping the mark is in fact the initiation of the reader into Burroughs’ underworld and constitutes a hipster’s linguistic primer. “‘Thanks, kid [ . . . ] I can see you’re one of our own’” (4). But the product being pushed in this case, the book Naked Lunch itself, is not fugazzy for some patsy, it’s the real deal, and a steal at the price. Weaponry Naked Lunch’s arsenal is filled with every conceivable and unimaginable weapon of torture, maiming, mutilation, and killing—an old rusty six-shooter, voodoo dolls, a stock probe, hanging nooses, teeth, smother mattresses, flamethrowers, a hot shot, electric drills, barbed wire and fire, psychic jiu-jitsu, scalpels, hara-kiri knives, stones, iron claws, clubs, razor, acids, axes, bicycle pumps, a two-man surgical saw, sting rays and sharks and electric eels thrown in a swimming pool, a toilet plunger, a crystal skull, a cutlass, curare, well-lubricated short arms, a pitchfork, shotgun, burning gasoline, switchblade, an old bullfighter’s sword, machineguns, grenades, a red velvet curtain cord, meat cleavers, hog castrators . . . And then the atomic bomb, the virus, and the very words which Burroughs has written. Hang On To A Dream In 1917, Edith Wharton could still praise the beauty of Tangier’s Arab streets while cursing the tourists—she excepted herself, naturally—who were destroying the perfect picture of place. Adventure and mystery lay off the map, in the desert wastes and the roadless passes of the Atlas. Wharton mourned “the romantic and ruinous Morocco of yesterday” and predicted that soon “even the mysterious autochthonesof the Atlas will have folded their tents and silently stolen away” (11). Ten years later, she admitted that her memoir of Morocco had been superseded by Ricard’s Blue Guide, by new roads opening up the land for tourists —while paradoxically closing it down—and by the protectorate’s Ce qu’il faut savoir du Maroc with its “full statistics on the economic resources of the country” (15). And, yet, paradoxically, she maintained that these European conveniences and intrusions could not spoil the wonder of a country which she compared to an illuminated manuscript, as if she could not give up the dream of exoticism and purity despite her recognition of the signs—the magic carpet replaced by a military transport. Burroughs, Gysin, and Bowles all bought into this dream, H_M Ch19.indd 161 3/25/09 7:36:15 AM 162 ian MACFADYEN and like Wharton felt elegiac for what they had missed. The place was eternal, but the time was already and always terminally gone. Now the Med Harbor container port has opened 30 km east of Tangier, “with a roll-on-roll-off ferry terminal for five million passengers, a million cars and half a million trucks a year. [ . . . ] That old...