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Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

by

William S. Burroughs,

James Grauerholz (Editor)

Start date: June 1, 2022

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mark monday

Jun 19, 2007 mark monday rated it really liked it

Shelves: unstablenarratives, mind-the-gap, world-of-insects, rain-man-reviews

WARNING: nasty language ahead, including the use of some of my favorite phrases from the novel; these include such choice nuggets as mugwump jism and to turn a massacre into a sex orgy and a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell and the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. anyway,

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I’ll be honest, mugwump jism, it took me a while to get into Naked Lunch, to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. Three attempts, to be exact, a bubbly thick sta WARNING: nasty language ahead, including the use of some of my favorite phrases from the novel; these include such choice nuggets as mugwump jism and to turn a massacre into a sex orgy and a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell and the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. anyway,

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I’ll be honest, mugwump jism, it took me a while to get into Naked Lunch, to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. Three attempts, to be exact, a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. I don’t mind stream-of-conscious writing, I don’t mind the Beats, I don’t mind postmodernism, I don’t mind graphic sexual and violent imagery, I don’t mind experimental narratives, the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. But a work that combines all of those things in one fetid stew, in such an in-your-face way that could care less about creating any kind of empathy, and has such a complete disinterest in establishing easily-digestible form or meaning... well, it was off-putting mugwump jism. In a way it made me angry at Burroughs, to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. Who the fuck did he think he was, grinding my face in the muck and telling me that this foul nonsense was the new Now, a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell? I didn’t like how every fourth phrase seemed to be about shit or jism or asses or toothless mouths, the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. I thought the extreme homoeroticism was gruesome and not very erotic, and it actually made me feel rather homophobic – and this is coming from a bonafide cocksucker, mugwump jism.

But the third try worked like a charm to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. Maybe I just needed to grow into the novel, and not take its challenging ways so personally, a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. The writing became amazing to me – overindulgent (obviously) but also masterful, profound even, in its hair-raising descriptive passages, its deadpan dialogue, its drooling emphasis on bodily functions, decay, death, degradation, the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. Its paranoia was no longer oppressive – if anything, it was freeing, mugwump jism. Naked Lunch’s ability to convey not just the darkness but the strangeness and black humor at the heart of both addiction and the various possible and existing forms of societal control became fascinating, to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. The radical changes in perspective, the decentralized plot and oblique narrative, all the grotesque, taboo fantasias suddenly felt mordantly playful and, well, “naked” in their need to convey a state of mind, a world view, a way of looking at the systems of the world... all of that actually became inspirational, in both the challenge of its intent and the radical nature of its result; and so the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame.

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Kamakana

Jun 10, 2010 Kamakana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: experimental, all-five-star, comic-satire, historicity, masculinismlit, read-twice-or-more, literature, surrealism, aa-unitedstateslit, pomo

270119: read ???... 90s?: this is a later addition: nearing an arbitrarily large number of books read (2 000 fiction, 1 000 nonfiction) i have been trying to decide what strategy of reading i will now adopt, after all by this time there should be some sense of what is for me at least enjoyable, fruitful, worthy of reading. i have decided that perhaps rereading those i rated five stars is the plan (and maybe four stars?). but then, as far as nonfiction, particularly philosophy, i do not know if t 270119: read ???... 90s?: this is a later addition: nearing an arbitrarily large number of books read (2 000 fiction, 1 000 nonfiction) i have been trying to decide what strategy of reading i will now adopt, after all by this time there should be some sense of what is for me at least enjoyable, fruitful, worthy of reading. i have decided that perhaps rereading those i rated five stars is the plan (and maybe four stars?). but then, as far as nonfiction, particularly philosophy, i do not know if truly i will get more out of it without prof help, and despite the interest, i do not actually want to be a philosopher. but fiction? maybe it is worthwhile, maybe i agree when umberto eco says, the definition of a favorite book is one you are ‘re’-reading, so it is worth reading these again, such as this book, sometimes liking it even more, as this book...

220615: this is a book i have read the necessary three times to truly judge- 1) pleasure heightened by novelty, 2) pleasure decreased by memory unobtaining novelty, 3) pleasure modulated by both novelty and jadedness correctly placed (note: i have rated many books read only once, many only twice, as you may search on my read-twice-or-more bookshelf). this is also a book that reflects how i have aged, how many books read, life lived, something like wisdom born of regret, from all those years...

i do actually like this book now even more, sensing how it has persisted in my memory, seeing how it has affected all the literary and other artwork experienced, how it has informed, insinuated itself, through my artistic life over not years but decades...

first reading, i was young, too young, to follow the particular text(s) burroughs calls 'naked lunch', generally felt myself not up to the task of reading it, bothered also by the gay porn, the vicious misogyny, the obsessive drug life- none of which reflected my life, concerns, thoughts, interests... yet, so many people i admired in person or in work, really thought it was a postmodern masterpiece... i just felt out of the loop... so, maybe, i admired it but did not love it any more than say pynchon's 'gravity's rainbow', which at least seemed to deal with an encompassing, involving, world-historical subject- ww2 and so on rather than pathetic addict life- even if that book was encyclopedic, no easier to read, and also of previous generation...

second reading, about when i saw cronenberg's film version, i knew more of and had read some of the 'beats' at university. who seemed then to be just baby boomer nostalgia, seemed less than earth-shattering, and so i felt too young to celebrate or nominate 'naked lunch', as great, as seismic, as anything more than than generation-specific work for which, man, you really had to be there, man, for it to work... gay porn no longer bothered me, gay sex no more felt a threat, misogyny just seemed of its time and an outrageous attitude of gayness, but in all, the 'transgressive' aspect of the story seemed overplayed... so they had all kinda sex, so they did all kinda drugs, so they had this all kinda paranoid conspiracy that everything was based on addiction/junk...

third reading, years later (decades...), reading alone, i deliberately decided to read more, to educate myself, about burroughs and this 'naked lunch' in particular, seeing as according to one list i am approaching an arbitrarily large number of fiction read, life lived, so maybe i could judge it better. and yes, whereas i had once believed any work of art should make its case for genius, for classic, for canon, for status... in itself, by itself, not according to social impact or historical effect or all the ancillary writings on it: i find it helpful to read on burroughs, to immerse myself in jargon, in details, of the 'interzone' world of drugs, simply because i am less distracted by it and can follow better where the work goes, and this time i am sure, i am convinced, i willingly argue, that 'naked lunch' is a masterpiece...

not that now i am simply so jaded that the relevant shock effects, the transgressive imagery, no longer 'works'- to the extent it matters, what humans do to humans and to themselves, no longer surprises me but does still sometimes horrify and summon anger. yet reading it now the text is so much more than 'story' i had searched for. how the story is told is what the story is told. the text is all kinda poetry. why do i only see this now, how much of this idea comes from certain works recently read that alert to me i like poetry. why does this work, for example, make me think of ben okri's work 'the famished road'? because that too is a long work of narrative poetry. 'naked lunch' more remarkably, i discover- now that drugs and sex and 'burnin' nigras' etc are so much ever present horrific background noise- is screamingly blackly comic! this is not news, after all i had read it twice. but was this time much more open to hilarity than horror, laughing through snippets of dialogue and outrageous described acts with no queasy premonition that i will feel really bad about myself tomorrow...

that there is no central character, that scenes move rapidly and suddenly as film images- this is supposedly unfilmable but powerfully imagistic- cronenberg's film was more of his own riff on 'naked lunch', that those that pretend to be human are mostly stereotypes, right thinking, obsessed with individuality becoming controlled, becoming one way divisionists versus liquefactionists, senders who want to control your mind, kill rebellion, control your desires, before you can even think about it... that there is black meat so delicious and addictive and nauseous you will eat then throw up then eat then throw up... until you are exhausted, that there are centipede monsters in human shells, some addict who just absorbs drugs by sortof oozing into contact with junkies... that there is no particular order, no logic, to how to the text is given, this no longer bothers me- it is words, not colours, not music, so the sentences must be read left to right, well i guess the 'routines' must be read in some order too... there are so many great routines: benway, the market, the talking asshole, the county clerk, the examination, hauser and o'brien... this makes me rethink my reading of samuel beckett- maybe i need to read him as poetry, too... and of course, any book that inspires one to read another book is a great book to me... ...more

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Brian

Sep 04, 2011 Brian rated it really liked it

I wish that I had read this book earlier in my life. Often hilarious, always disturbing, Burroughs' narrative is amazing. Mark Leyner's first three books of short stories pick up where Naked Lunch leaves off... ...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Nate D

Dec 16, 2009 Nate D rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2009, 60s-re-de-construction

Surely among the most crazed of all crazed dystopian harangues to ever attain cultural currency. Flails wildly between a sort of poetry of the grotesque and erratic erotic effluence, or often both at the same time with a de Sade-like glee.

...

It's funny that I am reading this right after [book|Watt:]. Of that book, I wrote: "Frequently excruciating to read alone, but exactly the same passages are amazing and hilarious to read aloud." Though I have not read any of Naked Lunch aloud yet, I suspect ...more

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Catherine Mustread

Feb 24, 2011 Catherine Mustread rated it liked it

Shelves: lgbtq, 1950s, sex

The nightmare scenes of drug addiction and the sordid sexual scenes are off-putting, however this is worth reading as one of the classics of the Beat Generation. Read this as the March selection of the Cafe Libri group discussion.

The last third of the book is additional information about the publishing history, Burroughs connections with Kerouac and Ginsburg, his various revisions and editing changes and helps put the book into the context of the times. ...more

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Magdelanye

Jan 27, 2019 Magdelanye rated it did not like it

Shelves: culture-conflict, addictions, existential-crises, early-influences, for-the-bin, postmodern-fiction, alternate-reality, autobiographical-fiction

I was 18 and so excited to acquire a hard cover copy of this book i was so anticipating.
I started it before breakfast, read it over my oatmeal and through the rest of the day. I do not recall that i had any lunch.
Late afternoon i finished it. Feeling rather dazed i went into the bathroom and threw up.
That was it for me and Mr B until i heard his brilliant recording on the radio which i have never been able find a copy. It is brilliant.
But this novel remains for me as a benchmark for repugnant a ...more

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Brad

Mar 25, 2008 Brad rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: notorious

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Jul 12, 2009 Russell rated it really liked it

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Dec 10, 2009 Bill marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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Jul 09, 2010 Limey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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Jun 24, 2011 Stephen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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Mar 04, 2012 Kate Sherrod rated it really liked it

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Mar 28, 2012 Aloha rated it it was amazing

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Mar 13, 2013 Jonathan rated it liked it · review of another edition

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