Naked Lunch, seminal novel by American experimental writer William S. Burroughs. Excerpts from Naked Lunch first appeared in the magazine Chicago Review in 1958. When an issue of the magazine containing further excerpts was withdrawn from publication in 1959, a new literary magazine, Big Table, published the contents of that issue. The novel was then published in English in Paris, under the title The Naked Lunch, by Olympia Press in 1959. Grove Press, in the U.S., published Naked Lunch in 1962; this edition included material from the “Interzone” section that was omitted from the first publication as well as Burroughs’s “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs.”
The novel consists of a nonlinear series of vignettes, which Burroughs calls “routines.” It is narrated by a drug addict named William Lee, who flees New York City and travels to Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, and New Orleans in the United States. He then goes to Mexico and later to the imaginary Freeland and to Interzone, based on the Tangier International Zone, and finally back to New York City.
Burroughs has often been hailed as a celebrator of drug indulgence and sexual excess, but his best works, among which Naked Lunch is preeminent, provide a far deeper and more complex account of Western culture. The novel’s central argument is that drugs are not an accidental problem; the whole notion of addiction is deeply engrained in a society that fetishizes commodity and consumption. Furthermore, the line between so-called prescription drugs and illegal drugs is a narrow one, which can be manipulated by those in power to serve their need for ever-increasing profits.
The first edition of Naked Lunch was published by the Olympia Press in Paris, a publisher that released several books, like Burroughs’s, that were thought too obscene for British and American readers.
More important than this argument, however, is the tremendous energy and vividness that Burroughs brings to his scenes of violence and mayhem. He presents us with a cast of characters who are constantly tearing at the walls of the prisons their lives have become; they see something of the truth of “the system” but are too paralyzed by dependence to escape. Further, Burroughs invents his own style, here and in other novels, based on what he called the “cut-up technique,” which serves to render the reader equally unable to make full sense of the surroundings. Narratives begin, interweave, become lost, and are found again; scenarios are glimpsed, then vanish from sight.
There are plenty of postmodern texts that use unreliable narrators. Burroughs goes further than this, producing a world that seems to have no recognizable coordinates at all. Lost in the world of the junkie, we are sometimes painfully aware that the paranoid visions of the drug world may be more accurate about the systems of corporate and state power than the consoling fictions we tell ourselves in asserting the freedom of the individual will.