Contents and Contributors
The line-up and structure of Naked Lunch@50 evolved and emerged exactly as we would have wished — that is to say, more despite than because of our attempts to plan it out and control everything. To start with, for example, we had the entirely predictable idea to feature 23 essays — but it was only by chance and mishap, a result of unexpected entrances and exits and several spins of the roulette wheel that Burroughs’ magic number came up. Either this was a Sign or simple proof that a collection of this sort necessarily creates its own form, finds whatever shape and order it has on its own terms, and as editors you can only learn to take it as it comes.
That’s how Naked Lunch@50 happens to begin with a perfectly serendipitous contribution, “In Defense of Perversity,” from the great filmmaker and archivist of the American avant-garde, Jonas Mekas. On reflection, there could be no better way to introduce a collection of original, retrospective essays, than with this previously unpublished journal entry from an artist primed to get it, written as an immediate reaction to the first fragments of Naked Lunch circulated in magazine form even before the book’s full appearance in 1959. Mekas’ historically alert storm of words ideally sets up the twenty-two essays written from the vantage-point of fifty years later that follow, organized into six sections, and the six dossiers by co-editor Ian MacFadyen that punctuate them.
Inevitably, the essays connect and intersect, often echo and sometimes contradict one another — “back and forth in and out fore and aft” — rather than keeping their places under neatly contrived categories and headings. The guiding principles fit loosely, flexibly, giving the individual essays space to breathe not an agenda to follow.
The first section begins, literally, with beginnings, starting with co-editor Oliver Harris‘ essay that focuses on the origins of the very title “Naked Lunch,” to make the point that we know far less than we think we do about the genesis of Burroughs’ book; indeed, almost everything we know turns out to be wrong. This scholarly approach to the mystery of the text is then complemented by an essay from Rob Holton, Professor of English at Carleton University, longtime Kerouac specialist and co-editor of What’s Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (2008). He reads closely the introduction that in most editions precedes the narrative of Naked Lunch, and contextualizes this beginning to the text as a characteristically ambivalent and ambiguous invitation to the reader.
The five essays grouped together in the next section all approach Burroughs from a geographical perspective and follow a rough chronology through the writing of Naked Lunch, starting with Rob Johnson’s journey into the heart of East Texas. Johnson, Professor of English at the University of Texas-Pan American, established his reputation with The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: The South Texas Beats (2006), and his essay here again draws on original research in the field to show Burroughs’ complex debts to Southern culture, especially in regard to race. From the Texas of the late 1940s, the next two essays follow Burroughs to Tangier in the mid-1950s. These paired studies from Allen Hibbard, Director of the Middle East Center at Middle Tennessee State University and author of two books about Paul Bowles as well as the editor of Conversations with William S. Burroughs (2000), and from Kurt Hemmer, Associate Professor of English at Harper College and editor of the Encyclopedia of Beat Literature (2007) bring a fresh perspective to the association between the North African city and the fantasy space of Interzone. Each places a special emphasis on the inconsistency and ambiguity of Burroughs’ politics inside and outside the text of Naked Lunch. This attention to the environments in which Burroughs lived and wrote shifts, finally, to Paris, where Burroughs himself moved in 1958. The first essay, by Andrew Hussey, author of books about Situationism, Guy Debord, and Georges Bataille in addition to Paris: The Secret History (2006), thinks through Burroughs’ relocation from Morocco to France in terms of colonialism, and then goes on to consider the new, avant-garde context that existed around the Beat Hotel. The essay by writer and artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, who was a close friend of Burroughs in Paris at the time he completed Naked Lunch, develops that exploration into the Parisian context by arguing strongly for how the cut-up project fulfilled Naked Lunch by taking further Burroughs’ all-out assault on literature and language. Lebel’s contribution is also a fascinating personal memoir of Burroughs and the Paris milieu at the time of Naked Lunch.
While the five essays in the second section track the writing of Naked Lunch as its author traveled from one continent to another, section three brings together five essays focused on the global reception of Burroughs’ novel after publication. The first two, by Eric Andersen and RB Morris — singers, musicians and writers — are impassioned responses to both the book and Burroughs’ iconic life. Andersen examines Burroughs’ privileged, paternalistic heritage in regard to his outlaw lifestyle and the anarchic humour of the book, while Morris situates his response in the current American climate of economic and media conditioning, coercion and manipulation. The following three essays each focus more specifically on the experience of the book’s reception in the writers’ native countries, beginning with the London scene of the 1960s evocatively described by Barry Miles, a close associate of Burroughs from those days onwards and a long-established authority in the field of Beat scholarship and biography. Jurgen Ploog, co-author of Burroughs: Eine Bild-Biographie (1994), describes the scene in postwar Germany and explains how the changing translation history of Naked Lunch there charts broader cultural changes. He also explains how the experience of reading Burroughs inspired him to combine his career as a commercial airline pilot with that of an experimental writer, committed to the cutting up of the word. And finally, the truly international dimension of Naked Lunch’s influence is affirmed by the South African writer Shaun de Waal. Narrating his coming of age in the 1980s under the repressive Apartheid regime, with its uncanny parallels to the conformist 1950s America that Burroughs had blasted, he celebrates the liberating impact of Naked Lunch and its power to literally reach around the world.
The fourth section features a pair of essays that consider Naked Lunch less as a text than as a physical object with a changing material history. Jed Birmingham, the contributing editor of RealityStudio.org and a specialist in Burroughs’ little magazine history, concentrates on the first Olympia edition of 1959 and on its special meaning for him as a collectible object. Polina Mackay, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nicosia who has published on Burroughs, the Beats, Kathy Acker and women’s poetry, limits her attention to the book’s jacket design while tracing its changing appearance over the past fifty years through English and foreign-language editions. The interpretation of Naked Lunch, these essays show, has a physical and visual as well as textual dimension. For those reasons, we were delighted by the visual contributions to Naked Lunch@50 of artists Philip Taaffe and Keith Albarn. One of the greatest of contemporary painters, who collaborated with Burroughs on his visual work, Philip Taaffe’s beautiful endpapers are brilliant, psychedelic mandalas, entirely appropriate homages to the Burroughsian psyche. Keith Albarn’s geometric motifs, which run throughout the book, provide a permutated visual discourse, a tantalizing language of unfolding signs. At the centre of the book there is also a special Gallery section, which includes rare photographs and manuscripts. Presented in collage form, these glimpses and fragments document Naked Lunch in a form that suggests the temporal and material vagaries of both literary history and the life as it was lived.
The four essays that follow take, in different ways, the critical response to Burroughs’ novel as their subject, starting with a journey through the past decade of scholarship conducted by Jennie Skerl, a senior figure in the Beat academic field and author of one the first critical studies of Burroughs (in 1985). Skerl’s survey identifies the new developments that are transforming Burroughs criticism, including the attention given to Cronenberg’s film adaptation and its impact on how we now read Naked Lunch. Loren Glass, Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, whose most recent book is Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (2004), places academic approaches within a specific cultural history. He addresses the central topic of censorship, charting the shift from modernism to postmodernism through a reading of how Burroughs’ work been censored. The problem with academic criticism itself is the subject of Davis Schneiderman’s essay. An Associate Professor of English at Lake Forest College and co-editor of Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (2004), Schneiderman approaches Naked Lunch as a text that invites critical approaches all the better to sabotage them. In contrast, Théophile Aries, who maintains the leading Burroughs website in France and is the translator of The Yage Letters Redux (2008), acclaims Naked Lunch as a work of visionary power; for him, the book is simultaneously a source of inspirational creativity and an envisioning of our future.
The sixth and last section of essays draws attention to the very different ways that Naked Lunch exists within cultural histories of science. Gail-Nina Anderson, a specialist in the Gothic who has written introductions to editions of Dracula and Frankenstein, speculates how the author of Naked Lunch responded to the cinema of horror and identifies recurrent tropes, such as that of the mad scientist, as they appear in the text. Timothy S. Murphy, Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and author of Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (1997), focuses not on screen monsters but on those that emerged from the world of pulp fiction and genre magazines. As he shows, Burroughs both drew from the world of science fiction and went on to influence it. DJ Spooky, musician and multi-media conceptual artist, focuses directly on the science of technology; for him, the world of Naked Lunch inaugurates the ever-accelerating image-saturated digital environment and offers creative ways out and through. Richard Doyle, Professor of Rhetoric and Science Studies at Pennsylvania State and author of books including Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (2003), also invokes the creativity of Burroughs’ scientific vision, while placing Naked Lunch historically within paradigm shifts in how science understands life itself.
The six Dossiers by co-editor Ian MacFadyen, an independent scholar and writer, comprise over a hundred separate sections which intersect and connect in innumerable ways, and which are intentionally open to extension and recombination. Approaching the text and history of Naked Lunch from many angles, and referencing a disparate range of disciplines, genres and sources, the Dossiers seek not to be exhaustive but through fragmentation and ellipsis to open up the area of critical research.
We hope that the variety of approaches taken by our range of contributors reveals the richness of the still far-from-charted terrain of Naked Lunch. We have tried to make a book which is both informative and provocative, a resource for scholars but also an accessible and exciting read. Collectively we have engaged with the history and language and sources of Burroughs’ text in close-up while providing challenging cultural perspectives and individual, imaginative readings and projections. Naked Lunch@50 is a critical homage which does not seek to be definitive, but to set the scene. It is the opening of many doors — step right up…
