Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays

Random Insect Doom: The Pulp Science Fiction of Naked Lunch

223 Random Insect Doom: The Pulp Science Fiction of Naked Lunch timothy s. MURPHY Funny what you find in old pulp magazines. [ . . . ] Quite haunting actually . . . the middle-aged Tiresias moving from place to place with his unpopular thesis, spending his days in public libraries, eking out a living writing fiction for pulp magazines . . . good stories too . . . —Burroughs, “Wind die. You die. We die.” F rom the very first pages of Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs immerses his readers in the world of “old pulp magazines”: narrator William Lee is a junky on the run from “the heat closing in,” assisted in his escape by a “[y]oung, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit” whom Lee quickly recognizes as a “square [who] wants to come on hip” (3). The fruit, conventionally bourgeois down to his Brooks Brothers shirt, gets involved because he is a prurient “character collector” whose expectations of the junky are derived from “B production” movies and their literary correlative, pulp fiction (5). Lee plays into the fruit’s genre expectations and hipster aspirations by treating him as “one of our own” in order to set him up for a later con (4). The fruit is clearly a surrogate for the reader of Naked Lunch, whose familiarity with the means and ends of pulp fiction is the hook that draws him into the novel’s vast confidence game. Although the opening pages deploy the tropes of the hardboiled detective pulps, thereafter the genre markers begin to mutate as surreal, quasi-human H_M Ch26.indd 223 3/25/09 7:39:00 AM 224 timothy s. MURPHY characters like Willy the Disk and Bradley the Buyer appear. By the time we are introduced to the mad scientist Dr. Benway (19), the detective tropes have been infected and absorbed by science-fiction images and themes to form the hybrid generic framework that will govern the rest of Burroughs’ novel. The sources of this mutant framework should come as no surprise, since Burroughs was born in St. Louis in 1914 and graduated from Harvard in 1936; thus his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood coincided with the rise and spread of the much-maligned genres of pulp fiction, especially pulp science fiction, the origin of which is conventionally dated to either 1911 or 1926.1 Although other pulp genres, including the western and the “spicy” (erotic) adventure story as well as the hardboiled detective story, also influenced Burroughs’ style and technique of narrative construction, pulp science fiction suggested several of the most important elements that made Burroughs’ work so shocking to readers in the 1950s and 1960s. The Nova trilogy is perhaps Burroughs’ most systematic application of the tropes that he extracted from the science-fiction pulps, but he had deployed them discreetly and effectively in his earlier fiction, especially his masterpiece Naked Lunch. At the time Naked Lunch was published and for many years afterwards, the question of pulp influence on the book would have been irrelevant to most readers and critics—who would have cared how a crude and artistically negligible genre like pulp science fiction had influenced a chaotic and obscene curiosity like Naked Lunch? But on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Naked Lunch has secured a place in the canon of American experimental fiction, and at the same time the pulps have been reassessed and recognized as the staging ground for a reinvigoration of vernacular literature that was accomplished by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, H. P. Lovecraft, and other popular writers of the 1920s and 1930s. My modest intention here is to celebrate these welcome critical reversals by tracing some of Burroughs’ science-fiction tropes to likely sources in the pulps and then to complete the circle by noting Burroughs’ own influence on subsequent science fiction. Burroughs frankly admitted his interest in science fiction on numerous occasions. His early letters from 1953–54 contain references to science fiction and science-fiction writers, including H. G. Wells, whose works were often reprinted in the American pulps (Letters, 178, 181), and regular pulp contributor Ray Bradbury (202), and in his most substantial early interview, with Conrad Knickerbocker for the Paris Review in 1965, he includes “quite a bit of science fiction” among the sources for material in the working notebooks he called “coordinate books” (Lotringer, 69). That same year, he was interviewed for the pioneering critical journal S. F. Horizons, which was coedited by noted New Wave science-fiction novelist and historian Brian H_M Ch26.indd...