634 The American Century: Literature since 1945of being freed from all conditioning forces is The Naked Lunch. An intense rendering,
not only of the horrors of addiction, but also of the cultural illusions for which
addiction functions as a metaphor, the book has no narrative continuity and no
sustained point of view. Its separate episodes are not interrelated; they simply
coexist in a particular field of force, brought together by the mind of William
Burroughs, which then abandons them. And its title means just what it says: “a frozen
moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” To produce such
frozen moments, when we can see the ugly object inside the egg, the worm inside a
piece of fruit – both of which are images for the corruption inside civilization – is
the project of the narrative. This Burroughs pursues creating a series of waste lands,
dark cities, and barren landscapes that hover somewhere between cartoon and
nightmare, the surreal and science fiction. They are populated by such strange
creatures as Dr. Benway, “a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems,”
Dr. Shafer, the Lobotomy Kid who produces “The Complete All American
De-anxietized man,” and various victims whose consciousness and humanity are
gradually canceled – “finally the brain must have died,” we are told of one of them,
“because the eyes went out.” “Which ride are you on?” the reader is asked at one
point, “Fro-Zen Hydrolic? Or do you want to take a look around with Honest Bill?”
The reference to Fro-Zen Hydrolic is part of an image series which compares the
spine of the junkie to a frozen hydraulic jack when his metabolism has nearly
reached zero. Most people, the narrative intimates, collude with or surrender to a
system, a power that reduces them to a similar state of inertia, a comparable deathly
coldness. What that narrative offers as an alternative to this is a chance to “look
around with Honest Bill:” to become alert, not only to the ways human identity is
devoured and dissolved in the modern world, but to the possibility of resistance,
even release. The reader, Burroughs insisted, could cut into The Naked Lunch at any
point, so to enjoy the spontaneity and independence of constituting his or her own
system. It offers it too through a play of different language habits. No verbal code,
no code or construction of reality prevails, as Burroughs moves toward what he was
eventually to call his goal: “the writing of silence.”
That phrase suggests the predicament Burroughs faced, with increasing intensity.
If he started his work out of a sense of vulnerability to drug addiction and social
stigmatization – two powerful ways in which the alien can enter and take over the
body – his emphasis gradually shifted to word-addiction, language as an ultimate
form of control. “They are rebuilding The City ... in Four Letter Words ... Vibrating
Air Hammers The Code Write,” is an entry in Burroughs’s next work after The Naked
Lunch, The Exterminator (1960), written with Brion Gysin (1916–1986). “Rub out
the word forever” is the call in a later novel, Nova Express (1964). Both remarks
register the tension at the heart of his work: he is using language against itself. Intent
on liberating the consciousness from all forms of control, the weapon he has at his
disposal for this purpose was, as he saw it, the original and ultimate controlling
agent. “WHAT SCARED YOU INTO TIME?” Burroughs wrote once to Allen
Ginsberg, “I WILL TELL YOU, THE WORD.” Burroughs’s response to this dilemma,
this question of how to achieve “the writing of silence” and so liberate the self fromGGray_c05.indd 634ray_c 05 .indd 634 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM