Well, let us be thankful for the Restored Text version of this book, a little less than 200 pages of prose insanity and another hundred pages of outtakes and explanations, mainly from Burroughs himself. This book, one of the three staples of the Beat Generation (with Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road"), is drug meditation, one from an admitted long-time use of opium and its derivatives, written while in the midst of addiction with extreme and bothersome imagery and cautiounary tales woven in. On first read, it's difficult to completely take in, I was left wondering where it was all going, however, as you catch the pace and rhythm of the text it flows disturbing but vivid, so much to visualize and synthesize it will undoubtedly warrant future looks simply out of intrigue.
Here we get pictures of Mexico City, Tangier, and "Interzone", a fictional psychedelic Orwellian society of dire proportions. Within the vignettes (I'll call them for lack of better term) and using Burrough's famous "cut-up" style, he pieces together visions and warnings. The warnings jump right out at you as we see our protagonist, a head man of Islam, Inc., meeting the infamous Dr. Benway in Freeland Republic, where free love and bathing are what it's all about, and how stability is maintained is through prolonged mistreatment (sound familiar, hmm?). Elsewhere say, "AJ's Annual Party", we get the pornographic, anti-death penalty episode where a threesome of young'ns have vivid intercourse ("Mark and Johnny sit facing each other in a vibrating chair, Johnny impaled on Mark's cock") then hang one another ("Mark reaches up with one lithe movement and snaps Johnny's neck...sound like a stick broken in wet towels"). In the midst of these themes are the overriding theme, that of the horror and stillness of addiction as Burroughs experienced it, and extreme. The visions, visuals are so dense your eyes may run over them while your brain is phasing out and surely you miss something every time you sit to read (I know I did). One of the more memorable episodes on addiction comes in "The Black Meat", where we see some other creatures known as The Reptiles and Mugwumps, disgusting slithering brutish blood-curdling, The Reptiles sucking off the Mugwumps in bars, for they have, in their members, the juice to prolong Reptiles lives. Everything's manipulation, cold, cruel, obscene, the life of a junky. Other sections that seemingly split-off the narrative seem to always in with the elipsis, and give scatter shots of biting outer-reality, including the famous story of a man's asshole taking over for his mouth, and eventually his whole psyche (yet still a biting criticism on the state of bureaucracy).
Which brings us to the cultural effects of "Naked Lunch", but I won't spend much time with that. I simply find it fanscinating and unsurprising that someone like Frank Zappa was highly influenced, doing his own recording of that talking asshole episode. This book is psychedelic, fargone, gritty, it's not hard to see how it had its impact on the counter-culture of the 60. It embraces the unembraceable. It talks homosexuality, sexuality of youth, addiction to hard drugs, whatever may seem vulgar Burroughs made matter-of-fact at least in the world of Naked Lunch. The book is highly sexual, no matter how stomach churning it may be for those living under Heterosexual American Dream Fantasy rocks, vivid, and disturbing in how it treats some of the subject matter, and that's intentional, Burroughs even admits that it was bothersome to write. But it continues to have great effect as perhaps the most taboo and vivid of all the Beat writings (and that'd be saying something, indeed).
It is convenient to have read this the first time with the restored text including several additional writings from Burroughs and explanations of how this version was pieced together by editors James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, gentlemen with obvious affection toward "Naked Lunch". From this we can get Burroughs's own point of view on the story, definitely helpful in determining his purpose for writing the book so as to know it's not just random imagery and gross-out stuff, but of substance (not that you can't tell that with just the text alone if you are savy, but it does help clarify some, especially the brutality of some chapters as cries against the death penalty and other barbarism in 20th C. America). I may not have been able to figure much of the book out the way I had without these sections immediately, I probably would have set out on further research (though I probably need to do that anyhow). The cut scenes, or outtakes, are interesting, however, not exactly essential, but that's perhaps why they were CUT. Most illuminating is a medical article on addiction and a variety of drugs used in the underground and their effects, as well as the effects of various treatments, and second most illuminating being an afterward written by Burroughs describing the mindset behind "Naked Lunch" and clarifying some of its themes.
Initially, I found reading "Naked Lunch" to be completely frustrating, I couldn't wait to be done. But as I went through the extra text and connected it to what I was reading, beginning to understand the midstate of this junkie (though how I could truly understand, I know), I could see the purpose of the text, the images, the obscenity, and now it's not hard to see the fervor behind it. It's raw, impassioned, maniacal, intriguing...all right then I've got nothing more. Ah, "Naked Lunch".
"'Well, son, did you get a piece of ass?'
'Yeah. This gash comes to the door, and I say I want a piece of ass and lay the double sawski on her. We go to her tap, and she remove the dry goods. So I switch my blade and cut a big hunk off her ass, she raised a beef like I am reduce to pull off one show and beat her brains out. Then I hump her for kicks.'"
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