552
TONY TANNER
was at this point at the end of the line that everything that had
been gathering in his memory and imagination throughout his fifteen
years of addiction discharged itself into
Naked Lunch.
I think it
is
better to put it that way, suggesting the passivity and inertia of the
author: Burroughs himself said that "I have no precise memory of
writing the notes which have now been published under the title
of
Naked Lunch."
Burroughs' realization that his long roving search
for junk was ultimately a death quest or "death route"
-"If
all
pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole
life process"-lends an extra dimension to his use of addiction as a
general metaphor for the various diseases of civilization. The in–
credible panorama of his book reflects a world to a large extent ad–
dicted to death. Death is the final fix.
Despite its nonsequential confusion,
Naked Lunch
can be ap–
proached once certain customary expectations have been laid aside.
There is no chronological sequence, nor
is
there any coherent discrim–
ination of geography and location. This timelessness and placelessness
are attributes, not only of Burroughs' sick state of mind, but of the
life he had lived. "You can cut into
Naked Lunch
at any intersec–
tion point," as Burroughs has said, and to an age which has read
Proust, Joyce, Musil and others, there should
be
little difficulty in
comprehending the hallucinations and nightmares which tumble
around and explode in the consciousness of William Lee, a conscious–
ness in the process of moving from sickness to cure. It is a book, as
Burroughs said, to be read in Silence (an increasingly important
commodity to him), the silence which prevails on the "Far side of
the world's mirror" where Lee finally finds himself, having "killed"
the cops who finally comer him. "The Heat was off me from here
on out." And having made good his escape from our Time, Lee
hints that he can catch a glimpse of the future: "a not-yet of Tele–
pathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid
Addicts." The nightmare yields a prophecy.
As
though having
slipped out of the reality of the fifties, he suddenly saw 1984.
Whether it was necessary to employ such a degree of randomness to
convey his warning to the "dying universe" is another matter.
Moving through, or cutting into, the world of the book, what
are the memorable features? For if the episodes do not reveal a plot,
they congregate in the memory in such a way as to project a world.
