Joselito
“And Joselito…” (39). From various pieces of circumstantial evidence, we know that Burroughs wrote this section in late 1957, and it seems to have an ambiguous position in relation to the rest of Naked Lunch, most of which was written earlier. Joselito himself appears nowhere else in the text and the character of Carl only appears here and in one other section, “The Examination,” interrogated by Dr Benway. Then again, a number of specific phrases do link it to other sections; the reference to anopheles mosquitos returns in “Hassan’s Rumpus Room,” the phrase “earthbound ghost” appears both before (in “The Rube,” twice) and after (in “Hospital”), and so on.
Nevertheless, the “And” with which “Joselito” opens assumes a continuity and a connection that isn’t borne out, as if the material here had been cut off from or out of a larger whole — which it probably had. For in November 1957 Burroughs referred to having written “a long South American section — of which I have completed about sixty pages” (Letters 377). “Joselito” seems to be all that was left in the final cut, and the rest, most likely, fed into the South American material featuring Carl and the Commandante that ended up in The Soft Machine. Indeed, the final line of “Joselito” makes a clear link to the first text in Burroughs’ cut-up trilogy, with the resonant phrasing that introduces the name Burroughs would give the monstrous business world of monopoly and control: “The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast, and bursts into blue flame” (43). Here, in Naked Lunch, the Trak reference is too passing, too opaque, to make sense, but this is absolutely typical of Burroughs’ text, with its dense and elliptical allusions, its rapid-fire throwaway ideas that might germinate like seeds in other contexts or remain tantalisingly obscure and lost (”like objects abandoned in a hotel drawer”) — a defining feature of its poetics of fragmentation and incompleteness, always open to potential new connections and beginnings. And Joselito…
Also in 1957, another Joselito was in the news — Joselito Jiménez a child star of the movies in Franco’s Spain, known as the Little Nightingale for his voice. In Naked Lunch, we hear very little from Joselito himself, and Burroughs leaves us with the haunting echo not of his voice but of his name, sung out as the first in a series of “plaintive boy cries”: “Joselito! . . . Paco! . . . Pepe! . . . Enrique! . . .”
(Text: Oliver Harris)
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