566
TONY TANNER
Show your cards all players. Pay it all pay it all pay it
all
back." He
means us to resist and expose all the lies the human mind is being
subjected to by the hostile powers and all the "collaborators with
Insect People with Vegetable People." Addiction-every kind-is
again the method of the enemy, who promise that these various forms
of addiction lead to "The Garden of Delights": but, says Inspector
Lee, "their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer-I have been at
some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so-called por–
nographic sections of
Naked Lunch
and
Soft Machine .
...
Stay out
of the Garden of Delights-It is a man-eating trap that ends in green
goo." The message could not be more clearly stated.
((Peoples of the
earth, you have all been poisoned.
Convert all available stocks of
morphine to apomorphine. . . . Apomorphine is the only agent that
can disintoxicate you can cut the enemy beam off your line. Apo–
morphine and silence. . . . The purpose of my writing is to expose
and arrest Nova Criminals. In
Naked Lunch, Sott Machine
and
Nova
Express,
I show who they are and what they will do if they are not
arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs,
flesh
shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to
come out.
With your help we can occupy the Reality Studio and retake their
universe of Fear Death and Monopoly." He offers us no delights as
a reward, only "total austerity and total resistance." It is the voice of
a man who has kicked a fatal addiction and now urges a general move
toward cure. At one point he says the criminals and police are invisi–
ble, but he identifies one of the major criminals as morphine, and the
police as apomorphine. The cosmic drama is an extended allegory
based on drugs that cause addiction and drugs that cure it. This
is
important. It means that both the threat and the salvation are ex–
ternal. There is bad control but also good control. Black magic can
be countered by white magic. I would call this demonology-even
if
it
is a demonology based on some pretty extensive study of recent de–
velopments in science.
One of the difficulties is that some very recognizable satire on
social ailments merges into a sort of interplanetary melodrama. For
instance, the activities of the "subliminal kid" will come as no sur–
prise to anyone who has read books like
The Hidden Persuaders.
And
when Burroughs issues a demand to the "Boards Syndicates Govern–
ments of the earth" to "Pay back the
Color
you stole" we can recog-
