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TONY TANNER
pletely fluid sense of place and lives in his own special "junk-time."
"When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he
can do
is
hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie
has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait."
And the torments of deprivation are portrayed by the image of "the
orgasm of a hanged man when the neck snaps" which becomes a
veritable obsession in
Naked Lunch.
More important are the visions
or hallucinations incident to his life as an addict. One of these fore–
shadows much of his later work: "When I closed my eyes I saw an
Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten away by disease. The disease
spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes
floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the
eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final
place where the human road ends, where the human form can no
longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it." Junk
can induce an utter indifference to reality, an inertia, a flatness; at
the same time it gave Burroughs horrific visions of apocalypse, chaos
and unspeakable human metamorphoses.
If
Burroughs' books drift with little sense of continuity this is a
reflection of his own compulsive, seemingly purposeless traveling.
Yet not quite purposeless. There was always the element of flight
and evasion, the feeling of having to get out of the way of some
gathering threat (the first words of
Naked Lunch-"I
can feel the
heat closing in"-tell us a great deal about the whole book). And
there was also the sort of inverted Holy Grail search for "the final
fix." The last words of
Junkie
show Lee heading into South Amer–
ica in search of Yage. "Yage may be the final fix."
If
we next look
at the
Yage Letters
written to Allen Ginsberg, we can see once again
how the necessity of moving through strange alien territories in search
of a new "fix" affected Burroughs' imagination. For one thing, it
is
inevitable that someone traveling with rather dubious motives through
remote places in South America will run into a lot of trouble with
all sorts of hostile bureaucracy. From these letters, it would seem that
Burroughs often found himself suddenly confronted by the unpleasant
powers of what he calls "cancerous control" (another metaphor he
was to develop later). This fugitive, paranoid sense of being at the
mercy of malevolent powers becomes part of the vision of his later
books. And in tum it induces what he calls a "nightmare fear of
