“This Book Spill Off the Page in All Directions”: What Is the Text of Naked Lunch?
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
|
Carol Loranger
English Department
Wright State University
carol.loranger@wright.edu
William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch appears “by wide public agreement” whenever lists of postmodern texts in English are compiled (Connor 129). Its status as a work of art seems clear. But its textual status is less clear: as yet, no effort has been made to establish an edition of Naked Lunch which would either provide readers with a reliable critical or scholarly version or, by accounting for its protean materiality as a series of unstable historical-textual events, help make a reality “the fully open, scriptible, postmodernist edition of literature” envisioned by textual scholar D. C. Greetham half a decade ago (17). Given the novel’s shiftily enduring, if cult, status as a political and artistic touchstone in American letters, the absence of a reliable edition is lamentable. But given the peculiar circumstances of the novel’s evolution, establishing such an edition poses serious editorial problems. The textual history of Naked Lunch prophesies both Jerome McGann’s rejection (on specifically textual-historical grounds) of the ideology of authorial intention, central to modern textual scholarship since Fredson Bowers, and Peter L. Shillingsburg’s post-electronic affirmation of the radical non-equivalence of “the work of art” with “the linguistic text of it” (35).
What follows should be taken as a series of first steps toward a postmodern edition of Naked Lunch: an edition which, following the novel’s explicit and manifold rejections of such social (and editorial) values as “authority,” “intention,” “stability,” and “purity”–“the old cop bullshit” (NL 5)1–comes closest to capturing the mutability, aimlessness and contamination it offers in their stead–“Let go! Jump!” (NL 222). While it must account for the “work’s historical passage” (McGann 24), such an edition would not be a critical edition, in that the problem of identifying a copy text from which to identify variants may not be easily settled. The unavailability of the manuscript2 and the peculiar events surrounding the compilation of the first, Olympia Press, edition of Naked Lunch (see below) militate against deferring to Bowers’s theory of final intentions. Naked Lunch has undergone at least five significant changes in the three and a half decades since its first publication. The changes in each case have consisted of the addition or deletion of large, often self-contained portions of text. None of these changes can be considered accidental variants, since changes of this magnitude and these particular kinds were enacted by author or publisher in response to specific pressures. But neither can these changes be satisfactorily marked in each case as deliberate authorial revisions in the sense that, for example, passages in the 1909 “New York” edition of Daisy Miller can be clearly marked as the late James’s late-Jamesifying amplifications of the 1878 edition. Some of Burroughs’s additions pre-date Naked Lunch, others are mutually contradictory, and yet others were written or transcribed by third parties and were included in some editions but omitted from others, presumably with Burroughs’s blessing. Moreover, Burroughs’s history of abandoning the text to circumstance and necessity and his authorial claim to have “no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch” (NL xxxvii)–coupled with his subsequent experiments with the unauthored cut-up in the Nova books and his call for guerrilla assault on the idea of authorial ownership in The Third Mind–suggest very strongly that authorial intent is antithetical to the very spirit of Naked Lunch.
Perhaps most adequate to the special problem of Naked Lunch would be the “eclectic text” McGann proposes for another heavily revised text, Byron’s “Giaour”: based on the first edition but incorporating later additions to and revisions from subsequent editions. But the eclectic text McGann imagines generally addresses smaller scale revisions than those occurring in Naked Lunch. He warns that the resulting “Giaour” will be “marked throughout by ‘accidental’ distractions–variations in styles of punctuation and capitalization” (59), but he does not suggest that additions and revisions might radically alter the implicitly coherent, stable, recognizable boundaries of the text. The distractions caused by subsequent additions to and deletions from Naked Lunch, by contrast, call into question the very assumption of textual boundaries. Moreover, “accidental” distractions in punctuation and capitalization are central elements of even the most stable portions of Burroughs’s work: the elliptical and fragmentary narrative portion, for example, features random capitalization, inconsistent spellings of common slang and standard English words, and highly idiosyncratic and variable use of punctuation and italics. Even the ellipsis, necessitated by Burroughs’s preliminary experiments here with cut-up and fold-in composition,3 appears in three- and four-point variations on a single page and without reference to any internal or external editorial standards.
There are, as I’ve said, at least five distinct texts called Naked Lunch. In addition there are David Cronenberg’s 1992 film version, whose popularity on the midnight movie circuit makes it in some cases the younger reader’s primary, perhaps sole, experience of the work, and the notorious fragment “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch,” which led to the censorship of Big Table 1 in 1959 and established the as-yet unpublished work as an outlaw text. None of these versions contains all the textual material which is Naked Lunch, though all share one or more elements (see Table 1). This variety presents problems for both the reader and writer of this essay–since all are called by the same name, how to distinguish which is which?–and should, as I hope to demonstrate, be accounted for by the postmodernist edition. That four of the five versions are Grove Press publications complicates things further. For simplicity’s sake I will refer to the texts throughout this essay by the same combination of imprint and publication date used in Table 1.
A glance at the table of elements might suggest that the editorial problem is not as great as I have indicated. Each of the five editions has in common a narrative composed of twenty-three “routines”4; surely the other four elements are simply paratexts: those perhaps interesting, but nonetheless secondary, supplements which Gerard Genette has identified as attaching themselves with varying degrees of tenacity to texts. Moreover, that portion of Naked Lunch which I identify as “narrative,” beginning with the untitled routine “<I can feel the heat closing in>” through “Quick…”, has not, but for the addition of two words,5 changed since the Olympia Press publication, suggesting that this text alone is Naked Lunch. The Grove 25th Anniversary edition adopts this view by limiting the text to the Olympia Press narrative.6 But Burroughs’s fabled passivity during the production of the novel–which he insists upon throughout the introductory “Deposition” (added upon the first Grove publication in 1962) and again in the routine “Atrophied Preface: Wouldn’t You?”, theorizes in essays and interviews in The Job (1970) and The Third Mind (1978), and develops as a compositional practice in the cut-up novels forming the Nova trilogy (The Soft Machine [1961], The Ticket That Exploded [1962], and Nova Express [1964])–besides anticipating Roland Barthes’s notion of the death of the author, calls into question any assumption that, in the absence of intentional revision, the authentic text is limited to that which appears in the first printing.
The narrative portion of Naked Lunch consists of twenty-three routines, drawn, according to the mythology, from letters, sketches and a detective pot-boiler written by Burroughs during the Tangier period (1954-58).7 Pieces of the novel had circulated during these years among Burroughs’s circle. Some had been published in small presses as early as 1957.8 Varying reports have it that the manuscript was collated from “a mass of pages” by Burroughs with the assistance of Sinclair Beiles and Brion Gysin over a ten- to fourteen-day period in 1959 after Maurice Girodias offered to publish the novel as part of Olympia Press’s Traveller’s Companion Series. Sections of the novel were sent to the printer in the order they had been found, revised, and typed. The story goes that Burroughs had intended to organize the text from the galley proofs, but either Burroughs or Girodias decided that the accidental ordering of the routines worked best.
My aim in referring to the above account as part of the mythology of Naked Lunch is not to contest its truth-value, but to specify its function. The story of the novel’s production is so much a part of its initial reception and continuing apprehension that it forms part of the novel’s aura. The seeds of the mythology appear in the “Introduction/Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” added on the occasion of the first American and British editions (of which more later), and the essential elements, which I include in my account, belong to accounts given by nearly all the participants in the Olympia Press publication.9 Of course, given Burroughs’s career-long, semi-ironic self-identification as a huckster, one can never be certain what actually happened. This uncertainty, too, is part of the aura of Naked Lunch. The point I wish to make by recounting the mythology is that, even before its first publication, Burroughs may be seen relinquishing authority over the novel, allowing it to begin to form itself in response to accident and environmental pressure. Burroughs’s passivity at this point, however, is as yet only partial, as can be seen by considering the amount of revision he undertook between the novel-in-progress of Big Table and the Olympia Press publication later that year (see Tables 2 and 3).
A comparison of the relevant routines in Naked Lunch with their earlier “episodes” in Big Table shows Burroughs making significant changes in the text. Aside from what appear to be cosmetic changes–the numbered episodes in Big Table become unnumbered, titled routines in Naked Lunch–Burroughs makes extensive revisions of all but two episodes. These revisions most often consist of developing what were essentially brief scenes into longer routines, interpolating material from separate episodes with additional material to form longer routines, and, in one instance, dividing an episode across two longer routines. Episodes 2 and 5, with minimal revision and the addition of the “vigilante” incident (NL 8-9), are joined to become the novel’s untitled opening routine “<I can feel the heat closing in>.” Part of Episode 3 (BT 86-89) and all of Episode 4 appear with significant revision as the “Hospital” routine in Naked Lunch. The remainder of Episode 3 (BT 89-90), lacking one paragraph, appears as the closing sequence of the routine “Lazarus Go Home” (NL 73). Episodes 6 and 8 comprise much of “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” (NL 144-169), though the routine shows significant revision of these and contains an additional fourteen pages which describe the political parties at length. Episode 1 makes up only a small part of the “Atrophied Preface” (NL 229-231). Episode 9 is not text but a page of calligraphic markings suggestive of the jacket design for the Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch.10 Only Episodes 7 and 10 appear to have been essentially finished at the time of the Big Table publication. With minimal revision they become the second (“Benway”) and third (“Joselito”) routines respectively.
Despite the implication that there is a necessary narratological, or, at least, numerical, order to the episodes as they appear in Big Table, Burroughs’s revision changes that order significantly. Keeping the myth of the novel’s production in mind, it is possible to see the movement from active to passive authorship as it occurs. It is reasonable to assume that, as the first three routines of Naked Lunch (“<I can feel the heat closing in>,” “Benway,” and “Joselito”) are among those most complete at the time of the Big Table publication (Episodes 2, 5, 7 and 10), they were the first to go to Girodias. Episodes, which Burroughs revised more heavily, fall later in the Olympia Press narrative, depending on their time of completion. Episode 1, which would become the “Atrophied Preface,” for example, underwent the addition of some ten pages of text. Its placement near the end of the narrative portion of Naked Lunch is perhaps more indicative of the quantity of revision undergone than of any authorial decision to violate textual norms.
In Big Table, Episode 1 clearly serves an introductory purpose, introducing Burroughs as author of the whole (“Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word horde” [NL, 230, BT 80]), laying forth the early elements of Burroughs’s viral theory of language, and prophesying the novel’s future mutations: “The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book spill off the page in all directions” (NL 229, BT 79). Moved to the end of Naked Lunch and expanded theoretically, “Atrophied Preface” effectively postpones until the last moment the revelation of the theory of the novel and the arrival of the “novelist” who has produced the text and would direct our reading of it: “You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point…. I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous [….] Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse” (NL 224). After Burroughs’s revision, the narrative portion of Naked Lunch begins in media res, with a monologue routine (“<I can feel the heat closing in>”; Episode 2 in Big Table) by (Inspector) Bill Lee, huckster, con-man, junkie sizing up the marks–including by implication the reader and implying that what follows–part hard-boiled detective novel, part science fiction hallucination, part social and political satire, part scholarly treatise of underworld jargon–is simply more of Lee “giving the fruit[s their] B production” (NL 2, BT 81).
It is not my intention here to perform a detailed analysis of Burroughs’s revision of “Ten Scenes from Naked Lunch” into Naked Lunch, though I believe such a study would be an important addition to Burroughs scholarship. Rather, I simply want to specify the point at which Burroughs began to relinquish active control over the novel’s production to other forces, setting a precedent for future unauthored, though not unauthorized changes. The next series of textual mutations, circa 1963-84, would be authored by circumstance, even when actual words were written by Burroughs.
Grove Press had begun negotiations with Girodias for an American printing of Naked Lunch as early as November 1959 and continued despite interference by the United States Post Office and seizure of the Paris edition by U.S. Customs agents (Goodman 142). The edition which Grove finally printed in 1962 contained the significant additions of an introduction, Burroughs’s “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness”11 (NL xxxvii-xlviii), reprinted from an earlier essay in Evergreen Review 12; and an appendix consisting of Burroughs’s 1956 article “Letter From a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” (NL 237-55) reprinted from The British Journal of Addiction.13 Both appear to have been added at least in part to appease U.S. and British censors, but remained part of the textual package long after the threat of official prosecution ended, effectively becoming part of the narrative experience. “Letter From a Master Addict,” written and published during the Tangier period, not only predates the Grove/Olympia negotiations, but also precedes the Olympia Press publication by enough years to make it an unrelated text, drawn into the orbit of Naked Lunch by the threat of obscenity charges. “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” on the other hand, was written specifically to pave the way for U.S. publication of Naked Lunch.14 As apologia for Naked Lunch the two texts offer distinctly different, though not entirely contrary, defenses for the novel.
“Letter from a Master Addict” presents Burroughs as a scientist, coolly experimenting on himself and others and disinterestedly recording the results of his experiments for the public at large: “I once took two nembutal capsules (one and a half grain each) every night for four months and suffered no withdrawal symptoms. Barbiturate addiction […] is probably not a metabolic addiction like morphine, but a mechanical reaction from excessive front brain sedation” (NL 251). The fact of prior publication on drug addiction in a serious medical journal implied respectability; by adding it to the text Grove anticipated its (failed) contention in the 1965 Massachusetts Superior Court trial that, as an accurate, journalistic account of the culture of addiction, Naked Lunch was not obscene. The language of the article, together with Burroughs’s heavy use of passive constructions and medical jargon, careful attention to definition of terms, and (for botanicals) use of Latin species names, combines with its encyclopedic organization and tabulations of data to effectively imitate science writing of the day–an imitation Burroughs then undermines with odd anecdotes (“I once gave marijuana to a guest who was mildly anxious about something (‘On bum kicks’ as he put it). After smoking half a cigarette he suddenly leapt to his feet screaming ‘I got the fear!’ and rushed out of the house” [NL 250]) and irrelevant asides (“Pain could have no function for plants which are, for the most part, stationary” [NL 248]). “Letter from a Master Addict” is, arguably, one of Burroughs’s most subversive pieces of comic writing. The “scientific” language and deadpan asides both anticipate and replicate (because they are temporally prior, yet textually posterior, to) the “scientific” language and asides of much of the narrative of Naked Lunch, from the textual notes (“Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns” [NL 4]) peppered throughout the narrative to Bill Lee’s self-interrupted tall tales. The narrative voice in the narrative portion of Naked Lunch is, in places, indistinguishable from the reportorial voice in “Letter from a Master Addict,” even though the first identifies himself as Bill Lee and the second signs himself as William Burroughs.15
Signed by William S. Burroughs, “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” in part seconds the assertion that Naked Lunch is journalism: “Since Naked Lunch treats this health problem, it is necessarily brutal, obscene and disgusting. Sickness is often repulsive details not for weak stomachs” (NL xliv). But the “Deposition” compromises what respectability the “Letter” might attain with grotesque parody of its detached language and style: “TERMINAL addicts often go two months without a bowel move and the intestines make with sit-down-adhesions–Wouldn’t you?–requiring the intervention of an apple corer or its surgical equivalent” (NL xlvi). “Deposition” also offers the contradictory defense that the narrative is Swiftian satire, the position John Ciardi would take in his 1965 testimony for the defense: “Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic were written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal. These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is” (NL xliv). As if these defensive motions were not enough, the “Deposition” begins with the radical step of Burroughs denying all responsibility for the text and its title: “I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch. The title was suggested by Jack Kerouac” (NL xxxvii); and ends with the implication that Naked Lunch is an anti-drug tract: “So listen to Old Uncle Bill Burroughs [….] Look down LOOK DOWN along that junk road before you travel there and get in with the Wrong Mob…. A word to the wise guy” (NL xlviii). Like the “Letter,” the “Deposition” is signed by its author but its slangy, elliptical style approaches that of Bill Lee, the voice of the narrative portion of the text. Once the “Deposition” was added to Naked Lunch it became enough part of the text to be as often cited in critical studies as the narrative itself. It is the introduction which articulates Burroughs’s (or is it Lee’s?) clearest indictment of capitalism. This discussion of “The Algebra of Need” (NL xxxviii-xl) provided the title for at least one book-length treatment of Burroughs’s work,16 occupied part of the Massachusetts Superior Court obscenity proceedings, and is remembered by casual readers who may not manage to read the difficult narrative portion in its entirety. From 1962 onward, with the exception of the Grove 25th Anniversary edition in 1984, Burroughs’s introduction and appendix, and the resulting conflation of narrative identities, remained part of Naked Lunch and subject to critical, judicial, and interpretive responses by its readers. The “I” who begins Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs, ex-junkie not responsible for the text, mutates into Bill Lee, junkie-detective-huckster on the lam; mutates again to “I, William Seward,” pulling off the Bill Lee mask in the “Atrophied Preface”; and resolves itself as William Burroughs, Scientist–an avatar which actually predates any of the textually precedent selves.
Despite these attempts to head off obscenity charges, Naked Lunch was banned in Boston upon publication, and bookseller Theodore Mavrikos arrested for the sale of an obscene book in 1963.17 Grove stepped in immediately, as did the ACLU, urging an in rem procedure to determine the book’s obscenity rather than a criminal procedure against the bookseller. Naked Lunch was brought to trial before the Massachusetts Superior Court in January 1965 and found obscene. Defense witnesses for Naked Lunch included writers Norman Mailer, John Ciardi, and Allen Ginsberg, and sociologist Paul Hollander. Perhaps because he had adopted all possible defense postures in the introduction and appendix, Burroughs himself did not appear at the trial, leaving it to become a fifth part of the novel, one composed entirely by collaborators, among whom would number two lawyers and a bemused judge.18 Ciardi’s and Hollander’s testimony focused on the subject of the novel’s journalistic integrity–previously canvassed in the Big Table trial–but drew largely on the newly added textual material. Mailer’s and, with one exception, Ginsberg’s testimony ignored the introduction and appendix, focusing on the artistic merits of the narrative portion of Naked Lunch. Stating that “it appears that a substantial and intelligent group in the community believes the book to be of some literary significance” and therefore not “prurient […] to the exclusion of all other values” the Massachusetts Supreme Court overturned the Superior Court’s verdict on July 7, 1966 (NL viii-ix). Grove issued the first paperback edition of Naked Lunch in October. The Grove Black Cat edition, which would be the most commonly available paper edition until the 1992 Grove Weidenfeld trade edition released in conjunction with Cronenberg’s film, included thirty pages entitled “Naked Lunch on Trial” (NL vii-xxxvi). This addition reprinted the full text of the majority decision of the Supreme Court as well as excerpts from the Superior Court testimony of Ginsberg and Mailer.
Inclusion in the Black Cat edition of the Supreme Court decision may be considered at least partly a triumphant, allusive gesture on Grove’s part, reminiscent of Modern Library’s inclusion of Woolsey’s 1933 decision lifting the ban on Ulysses. Naked Lunch emerges from its obscenity trials part of a select group of works whose “prurience” is outweighed by their “literary significance” and “redeeming social importance” (NL viii). But the inclusion of testimony from the Superior Court action is another matter. None of the testimony excerpted in “Naked Lunch on Trial” provides compelling legal evidence for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Superior Court decision. The court was clearly nonplussed by the novel and its witnesses. Throughout the excerpted testimony, the question of the novel’s obscenity is confused with the novel’s critique of the American political and justice systems (which the court takes to be one and the same) and the very real problem of making meaning out of Burroughs’s more heightened passages. During Ginsberg’s testimony, for example, a line of questioning directed at Burroughs’s intention to be obscene quickly turns instead to a discussion of the meaning of the phrase “newspaper spoon” (NL xxii).
The Court then turns to the nature of political parties described in Naked Lunch, with the judge worrying that political parties in the future may be “concerned with sex.” In a series of questions the court asks Ginsberg “What political struggles are homosexuals involved in?”; “Do you think he is seriously suggesting that sometime in the future that a political party will be in some way concerned with sex?”; and “some time in the future will there be a political party, for instance, made up of homosexuals?” (NL xxviii-ix). Ginsberg’s answers are patient and mollifying, but not helpful. At the end of the exchange the court concludes “there may be homosexuals in every political party, but I don’t think they are predominant” (NL xxix). The excerpted portion of Ginsberg’s testimony ends with a reading of his poem “Reality Sandwiches,” which can hardly have clarified matters for the court.
Mailer’s testimony is similarly unhelpful. Under questioning he admits that he has “read the book, not completely, but I have read the book completely twice” (NL x) and engages in the following negotiation:
MAILER: …I have written a little bit about that [Naked Lunch‘s form] to bring in–Should I read that, if you wish?
Q: You have some notes I think?
THE COURT: You have some notes?
MAILER: I have some notes.
THE COURT: You may.
MAILER: Well, in these notes, I said–
THE COURT: Incidentally, when did you draw up these notes? (NL xvi)After these disjointed preliminaries, Mailer, reading from the notes, launches into a comparison of Burroughs’s work with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
Of the literary witnesses, only Mailer’s and Ginsberg’s testimonies are included in “Naked Lunch on Trial.” A reading of Ciardi’s testimony from the court records suggests why he was omitted. Ciardi’s testimony, like Hollander’s, restricted itself to more conventional questions of the novel’s literary and social value. Excluding this testimony, which focuses almost solely on the novel as a journalistic recounting of the addict’s experience and its value as such a document, has the effect of negating Burroughs’s introduction, which follows it, and the appendix, which imply that Naked Lunch is journalistic or scientific. The excerpts which make up “Naked Lunch on Trial” seem rather to have been selected for their comic similarity to passages in the narrative portion of Naked Lunch and edited with an eye toward retaining every hesitation, interruption, and confused utterance of the court. The typography of “Naked Lunch on Trial” replicates that of dramatic dialogues in the routines “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” and “Ordinary Men and Women” that also concern themselves with party demographics, the American judicial system, and interrogation. The reader of the Black Cat edition of Naked Lunch, then, who begins at the beginning and continues to the end of the text encounters a series of self-canceling, self-replicating routines–a hyper- or meta-reality sandwich–which foregrounds intertextuality as not just a condition of texts but as a semi-independent creator of texts.
The interpretive questions raised by the testimony, especially Ginsberg’s, place in relief those routines of the narrative which explicitly comment on the nature of American legal and bureaucratic systems, in particular, the routines “Hauser and O’Brien,” “The Examination,” and “The County Clerk”–none of which appeared in “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch“–and sections of “Benway” and “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” added after the Big Table publication. Where Burroughs’s introduction and appendix limited the novel’s “social relevance” to its critique of drug addiction (and, by implication, capitalism), the selective transcript in “Naked Lunch on Trial” effectively expands its range of reference to all forms of addiction (sex, drugs, power, language, order) and implicates the most fundamental institutions of American culture in those addictions. The curious effect of the mutation engendered by the Superior Court action, then, was to rewrite Naked Lunch as a more pointed piece of political satire than it originally was.
Almost one-fourth of the matter included in the Black Cat edition was produced in response to external pressures on a completed narrative whose production has been documented by Burroughs and others as itself partly accidental. Only half of this new matter was written by Burroughs, and that includes a direct statement of non-responsibility for the major, narrative portion of text. The remaining half, actual testimony from the obscenity trial, both imitates significant portions of the narrative, in form, content, and typography, and foregrounds portions of the narrative which would lead a reader to an interpretation of the narrative at variance with that offered by its putative author. The reader, moving in a (spatially) linear fashion through the text, from Supreme Court decision to appendix, is not only confronted immediately and prior to the narrative with an example of Burroughs’s themes in action but is also supplied with a quantity of contradictory interpretive matter which effectively and successively rewrites the narrative that follows. Even a chronologically, rather than spatially, linear reading of the elements of the Black Cat edition results in similar, though more programmatic, textual self-subversion. In either case, the seemingly forthright (and, from the perspective of the 1990s, quaint) binary structures written into the 1950s narrative–hip/square, outlawry/authority, investigation/addiction, etc.–unfold and overlap themselves into less certain, more recursive, more postmodern structures. Given, too, that the non-narrative material takes the form of traditional literary or scholarly apparatus which Naked Lunch incorporates into its very substance (as the narrative with its “scholarly” footnotes anticipates), one might argue that Naked Lunch implicates present and future notions of textuality and authorship in its catalogue of addictions, and academic culture in its satire of authoritarian institutions. Even the textual scholar’s desire for a stable artifact identifiable as Naked Lunch is implicated.
While the 1992 Grove Weidenfeld Naked Lunch unfortunately (to my mind) omits “Naked Lunch on Trial,” it does include yet another new text. Burroughs’s “Afterthoughts on a Deposition” appears directly following his introductory “Deposition” and directly contradicts it. In “Afterthoughts” Burroughs claims that Naked Lunch is not (or is no longer) about addiction/drug abuse but rather about the current U.S. War on Drugs:
When I say 'the junk virus is public health problem number one in the world today,' I refer not just to the actual ill effects of opiates upon the individual's health (which, in cases of controlled dosage may be minimal) but also to the hysteria that drug use often occasions in populaces who are prepared by the media and narcotics officials for a hysterical reaction. The junk problem, in its present form, began with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 in the United States. Anti-drug hysteria is now worldwide, and it poses a deadly threat to personal freedoms and due-process protections of the law everywhere. (Grove 1992 xviii)
The war on drugs, according to the new Naked Lunch, exists so that the government can extend its repression of individuals to convincing them that their ideas of freedom are dangerous to themselves and society. The logic of this passage reiterates the satire of the narrative routine “The Examination,” particularly, but also hearkens the reader to those routines previously highlighted by “Naked Lunchon Trial,” which appear now, given Burroughs’s “Afterthoughts,” to have always specifically addressed repressive governmental institutions.
In the preceding pages I have limited myself to the problem of the textual boundaries of Naked Lunch, which extend beyond the limits of the narrative. Other editorial problems, such as determining the best text when there are multiple fragmentary versions available, are implied in Table 2, but would extend to comparison of all elements of Naked Lunch with prior published versions and correspondence from the Tangier period. But what then? Both Burroughs and his publishers have frequently been cavalier with the texts. Grove’s 1980 release Three Novels: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Wild Boys, for example, omits an entire page from The Soft Machine at the end of the routine “I Sekuin,” despite having been printed from the same plates as the 1966 edition of The Soft Machine. Though the resulting routine ends abruptly even for a cut-up, nobody seems to have noticed. To attempt to stabilize the text of Naked Lunch by regularizing its typography and stylistics, removing “errors,” and relegating to a textual apparatus material deemed to be variant or external to the text proper would be a grave editorial sin. To do so would not only violate the spirit of the text and, insofar as one can guess them from Burroughs’s own statements about authors and authority in Naked Lunch and elsewhere, “the author’s original (or final) intentions” (McGann 15, 33-5), it would also have far-reaching implications in terms of how readers read, approach, and comprehend this and other literary works. Naked Lunch‘s enduring appeal arises in large part from its instability, its openness to multiple and alternative readings, and its protean ability to seem always to be addressing the addictions and oppressions of today. Despite its having a history as a text, it is not simply an historical artifact. In fact, its history has helped write it. These qualities would be lost in an edition consisting of a slimmed down narrative trailing a bulky, probably forbidding, apparatus. Popular readers, choosing the 1992 Grove Weidenfeld trade edition off the bookstore shelves, lose “Naked Lunch on Trial,” which is so central to the text’s historical self and, as I’ve argued, offers a gloss on part of the narrative. It also bears witness that the courts are often part of the “social nexus” of textual production, wherein textual authority “takes place within the conventions and enabling limits that are accepted by the prevailing institutions of literary production” (McGann 48), a view of authority the narrative portion of the novel seems to second.
With Burroughs’s death in 1997, it does not seem likely that Naked Lunch will undergo any further substantial additions. However, the pattern since 1984 has been one of the publisher inconsistently deleting whole sections of non-narrative text. Clearly some effort to stabilize the whole text would ensure reliability. Shillingsburg has argued forcefully that “a work of art… is made more accessible in each of its versions by having alternative versions presented in conjunction with it” (35). That has already been the case during the forty-year history of Naked Lunch, and a reliable edition would capture, in particular, that quality of “spill[ing] off the page in all directions.” Given its author’s career-long interest in applying state-of-the-art technology to his writing, a “fully open, scriptible, postmodernist edition” of Naked Lunch would necessarily be a hypertext edition. Such an edition would initially allow the reader to move among the five existing textual elements, the Big Table and other individually published fragments, and, perhaps, the pen and ink calligraphic drawings Burroughs submitted to Grove to illustrate the U.S. edition (among other things) “in any order […] back and forth, in and out fore and aft.” But the temptation to limit that edition to the materials I have outlined here, for example in CD-ROM format, should be resisted for two reasons. First, even the most cursory reading of other Burroughs texts–most notably the Nova trilogy (1964-1967) and The Yage Letters (1963)–shows Burroughs consistently reworking material from the narrative portion of Naked Lunch. Lynch’s film begs its audience to consider Exterminator! (1973) and Burroughs’s biography as the narrative context for Naked Lunch‘s largely unrelated routines. Audio recordings of Burroughs and others reading portions of Naked Lunch and Lunch-related materials abound and are largely uncatalogued; these readings may well represent other variants. Burroughs’s oeuvre has not yet received the level of consistent textual, as opposed to interpretive, scrutiny to account completely for his rather casual approach to recycled text. Second, as the above history suggests, the text of Naked Lunch evolved in direct response to various of its readers’ and transcribers’ over-writings. Reader response is central to its being as a work of art. A truly reliable edition of the work would have to permit ongoing revision by readers, even at the risk of overwhelming the archival texts, i.e. by courting unreliability. The postmodern editor’s monumental task is to enable the “innaresting” arrangement promised by Burroughs in 1959 and fulfilled by the text for forty years. Only a fully interactive, continually augmented, electronic edition can realize this task.
Notes
1. Unless otherwise noted, all citations to Naked Lunch refer to the 1966 First Black Cat edition. When both Naked Lunch and Big Table are cited, wording, punctuation and spelling follow the Black Cat version. I retain Burroughs’s use of italics throughout. Unbracketed ellipses appear in the text. Bracketed ellipses mark my deletion of material from quoted matter.
2. According to Maurice Girodias, the manuscript was seized by the French government in the 1960s. The whereabouts of the William S. Burroughs Archive, which might have included manuscript material for Naked Lunch, are not known. Goodman and Coley report that the archive, formerly housed in Lichtenstein, was sold to a private collector and possibly broken up for resale sometime during the late 1970s. See Goodman and Coley 189, 211.
3. For Burroughs’s theory of the cut-up see Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind (1978). Cut-up is produced by literally cutting passages of typed script into vertical strips, then rearranging these strips with other cut-ups or inserting individual strips into uncut passages. The fold-in consists of folding a page at random, inserting the visible portion into a second page and transcribing the result as a third page of text. In both cases the resulting passage(s) receive a minimal editing for contingent sense: dismembered bits of words are joined and reconstituted as homophones, and punctuation is distributed around what can be recognized as phrases.
4. “Routine” is Burroughs’s term for the individual sections of the narrative portion of Naked Lunch. The term implies their comedic and sketchy character and suggests their provenance as part of an elaborate con game played on the “Rubes,” “flatfoots,” and “advertising Fruits.”
5. The words are “see Appendix” (NL 30), referring readers of the narrative to elements added for the Grove 1962 edition.
6. Oddly, this edition retains the words “see Appendix,” even though the appendix has been omitted.
7. Dating roughly from the death of Joan Burroughs until Burroughs’s first apomorphine cure.
8. See “from Naked Lunch,” Chicago Review 12 (Spring 1958): 23-30; “from Naked Lunch,” Black Mountain Review 7 (Autumn 1957): 144-48; and “from Naked Lunch,” Chicago Review 12 (Autumn 1958): 3-12.
9. And recounted in the standard biographies. See, for example, William S. Burroughs, “My Purpose Is to Write for the Space Age,” New York Times Book Review (19 February 1984): 9-10, and Morgan 313.
10. This contributes to breaking down the textual barrier which conventionally determines our idea of text: contemplation of the jacket becomes part of the reading experience. Burroughs will later incorporate calligraphy into the text of The Ticket that Exploded.
11. The table of contents gives the title as “Deposition: A Testimony Concerning a Sickness” (my italics), while the introduction itself leaves out the first indefinite article.
12. Evergreen Review 4 (January-February 1960): 15-23. Evergreen Review was a bimonthly literary and arts publication of Grove Press.
13. The British Journal of Addiction 53.2 (1956): 119-131.
14. See Joe Maynard and Barry Miles, William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953-73 (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1978): 113.
15. This conflation of identities merely continues that begun with Burroughs’ earlier, more naturalistic “journalistic” account of drug addiction, Junky (1953), authored by “William Lee.”
16. Eric Mottram’s William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (Buffalo: Intrepid Pr., 1971).
17. Details which follow are drawn from Michael Barry Goodman’s account of the trial in Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1981).
18. A portion of a letter from Burroughs to defense lawyer Edward de Grazia was read into the record and is included in “Naked Lunch on Trial.” It addressed the relationship between literature and scientific investigation.
Notes to Tables
a. The narrative portions of Grove 1962, Grove Black Cat, and Grove 25th appear to have been printed off the same plates and bear identical pagination; likewise, the appendices of Grove 1962 and Grove Black Cat. Since Grove Black Cat contains the most additional text, all citations are to that edition, unless otherwise noted.
b. The 25th Anniversary edition was a limited edition reproduction of the 1959 Olympia Press edition with an introduction by Jennie Skerl.
c. Subsequent printings of this trade edition have restored “Naked Lunch on Trial.”
d. Big Table 1 (Spring 1959): 79-137.
e. Revision limited to corrected spelling, individual words changed, altered punctuation.
f. Reprinted from Evergreen Review Autumn 1958.
g. Despite omitting the Appendix, the 25th Anniversary edition retains Bill Lee’s recommendation that we “See Appendix” (30).
h. This forms part of a larger discussion of the political parties of the Interzone, which was of so much interest during the obscenity trial (162-9). Additional material includes a statement of Burroughs’s viral theory of language in nascent form (163-4).
Works Cited
- Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. NY: Grove, 1966.
- —. Naked Lunch. NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992.
- —. “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch.” Big Table 1 (Spring 1959): 79-137.
- — and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind. NY: Viking, 1978.
- Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997.
- Goodman, Michael Barry. Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1981.
- — with Lemuel B. Coley. William S. Burroughs: A Reference Guide. NY: Garland, 1990.
- Greetham, D. C. “Editorial and Critical Theory: From Modernism to Postmodernism.” Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993: 9- 28.
- McGann, Jerome. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
- Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. NY: Holt, 1988.
- Shillingsburg, Peter L. “Polymorphic, Polysemic, Protean, Reliable, Electronic Texts.” Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993: 29- 43.