The State University of New York At Potsdam APOCALYPTIC ADDICTION: WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS'S NAKED LUNCH By Kayla Riley A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of English and Communication In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of M.A. in English and Communication Potsdam, New York December, 2006 2 This thesis entitled APOCALYPTIC ADDICTION: WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS'S NAKED LUNCH By Kayla Riley Has been approved for the Department of English and Communication ______________________________________________ Dr. Christine Doran, Assistant Professor ___________ Date _____________________________________________ Dr. Donald J. McNutt, Assistant Professor ___________ Date _____________________________________________ Dr. Alan L. Steinberg, Professor ___________ Date The final copy of the above mentioned thesis has been examined by the signatories and found to meet the acceptable standards for scholarly work in the discipline in both form and content. 3 PERMISSION TO COPY I grant The State University of New York College at Potsdam the non-exclusive right to use this work for the University’s own purposes and to make single copies of the work available to the public on a not-for-profit basis if copies are not otherwise available. ____________________________________ KAYLA RILEY _______________ Date 4 Abstract Burroughs created a new type of apocalyptic novel with Naked Lunch. In Naked Lunch the apocalypse is systemic, and takes place over a span of time, rather than being caused by one cataclysmic event. Burroughs shows that all human beings participate in an unintentional conspiracy to destroy humanity, that no one person is safe, and no one person is outside of the system, so no one can stop the apocalypse from occurring. We are all addicts. We all have an insatiable need that we are at the mercy of, and we all live within a system where power and control are not used to serve and protect humanity, but rather are addictive substances as deadly as junk. Within this system, Otherness is incredibly dangerous to control addicts. An Other cannot be controlled, and therefore poses a tremendous threat to the addict. Otherness must be removed. It is in that removal of Otherness by invading the body, and using technology, that the apocalypse is allowed to occur. Burroughs views the source of humanity as the ability to be an individually thinking and feeling human being, and the removal of Otherness turns human beings into insect-like monsters who cannot think or feel or act. By removing Otherness, humanity is destroyed. In Naked Lunch there is no hope for humanity. Burroughs creates this dismal image to sound a warning. If the political systems in the modern world continue to go unchecked, and continue to be ruled by men who care more about their own power than the populations they are supposed to be protecting and serving, humanity will, no doubt, over time, come to an end. 5 Section I: Introduction Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs is an apocalyptic novel that satirizes the post-World War Two era in American politics and culture. Burroughs’s primary concern is wide-spread addiction, most specifically addiction to power and control; for Burroughs, addiction to power and control will ultimately birth the apocalypse. Burroughs presents the apocalypse as systemic rather than attached to one specific event. In this way, Burroughs presents the apocalypse differently from most apocalyptic writers, specifically of the post-war era. Apocalyptic novels tend to show one all encompassing cataclysmic event that brings the demise of humanity, be it through a bomb or an angry God. While there was tremendous threat in the postwar era of a humanity-ending bomb, Burroughs shows the apocalypse as systemic and that very real bomb was definitely a product of the system. There is a pyramid effect in Naked Lunch of control addicts on top feeding off of those below them and around them, and those below feed off the people below them and around them. When the lower levels are destroyed, the next level up is destroyed, and so on until two men would be left in combat. The one man1 who survives will self destruct because, by the nature of addiction, the addict cannot survive without the substance. This apocalyptic approach criticizes the post-war era because Burroughs shows that, hydrogen bomb or not, the state of humanity is one that will inevitably self-destruct. No one is spared. No one is free of addiction. And no one can stop the apocalypse. There is an unintentional conspiracy in which every human being 1 I use the term “men” to mean men, not human kind because women in this novel are either not represented, or are represented as a dangerous evil. Certainly no women hold any kind of power. 6 brought into life participates. No one is forced into addiction. No drug dealer is forced into selling drugs. However, addiction to control and power is rampant, and it is that addiction that will kill off human kind. In the world Burroughs creates humanity destroys itself with addiction gradually, over time. In Naked Lunch no human is outside of the system of power addiction that destroys humanity from the inside. There is not one leader conducting a mass of minions in this conspiracy to destroy humanity. There is not one God who smites humanity. And while some men in Naked Lunch hold more power and maintain more control over other human beings, no man is in charge, no man is safe, and all will be destroyed. As Ihab Hassan wrote in his essay “The Subtracting Machine,” Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is a “satire [that] defines the author’s contempt. The range is wide. It includes authority, conformity, colonialism, commerce, capital punishment, cafe society, patriotism, political parties; it focuses on doctors, policemen, profiteers, gourmets, hipsters, racists, academics, women, and even junkies” (Hassan 60). I would say the range of issues Burroughs satirizes in Naked Lunch is even more vast than Hassan suggests. This project focuses on political control addicts, the fear and hatred of Otherness that drives humanity to its demise, and the use of the body and technology by control addicts in Naked Lunch. This project will demonstrate that Burroughs’s novel is significantly more than the erratic ramblings and hallucinations of a heroin addict, but rather a very significant social and political commentary. It is an important satire of the post-war era, and a warning that, if we humans don’t make significant changes, we will systemically self-destruct. 7 Burroughs is concerned with a fear and hatred of Otherness in Naked Lunch. Control addicts select their subjects by determining Otherness because an individual thinker is more difficult to control than a mass of non-thinking homogeneous persons. Any element of any person that is different from that of the control addict, be it sexual preference, lifestyle, gender, and most importantly, the ability to have independent thought, is grounds for annihilation. Those Others pose a threat to the control addict in two ways: the first is that they could potentially take a position of leadership and power of their own and eliminate the control addict. The second is that the Other could remain always outside of the scope of control for the addict, and like an addict of anything, more is needed to survive, and by being unable to control those Others, the addict would perish. Burroughs comments on the fear of Otherness he saw as rampant in the postwar era. The fear of the communist Other that sparked the fear of Otherness in any shape, and the conformity culture represented through the growth of the suburbs, Burroughs saw as critical elements to the apocalypse. In Naked Lunch, it is the ability to be an individual, to be an Other, to have independent thought that are the elements of humanity. When those elements are removed from a body, the humanity is removed, and the body becomes insect-like. By removing the Otherness, and homogenizing humankind, humanity itself is being destroyed. When every human body is homogenized and turned into a non-thinking insect, humanity will no longer exist, and the apocalypse will be complete. There are a number of ways control addicts maintain and assert their control, but the two I am most interested in are the use of the body and technology. The way 8 the control addict gains, asserts, and maintains power is through the elimination of Otherness, and the way to eliminate Otherness is through the body. There are intricate and complicated bureaucracies in operation in Naked Lunch, and among the most crucial players within those bureaucracies are doctors. Political figures commission mad-scientist-like doctors to invade the bodies of the Other and “fix” them. Doctors are hired to “cure” certain elements of individuality such as homosexuality. A body is cured by being homogenized, which essentially means degraded to the point of emptiness. The patient is reduced to sub-human form. The ability to think, feel, and act on free will is eliminated and the body becomes void of humanity, operating on instinct like an insect. Sometimes the human physically becomes an insect. Burroughs uses the physical degradation of the body to show the effects control addicts and hatred of Otherness have on humanity and to represent the apocalypse. The use of technology to eliminate individuality and Otherness is also critical in Naked Lunch. Technologies are developed by disinterested scientists for the control addict’s benefit. Different ways to invade the body and change the body are created, and bodies are experimented on to develop technology. Technologies are even developed that would eliminate the need for scientists, making it possible to leave the world void of all thinking individuals. Addiction is an important theme for Burroughs. As an addict to heroin for a significant portion of his life, Burroughs was intimately aware of the significance of addiction, and was able to view the world as a cesspool of wretched addicts. It is important that the world Burroughs creates in Naked Lunch is populated by people 9 who are addicted to control and power. Power can be used to protect and serve human kind, but when power becomes an addictive substance it becomes something the control addict needs for his own survival. Burroughs uses heroin addiction to represent addictions of all kinds because, for Burroughs, all addictions follow the same principles. As Burroughs writes in the introduction to Naked Lunch, “the more junk you use the less you have and the more you have the more you use” (Burroughs xxxvii). The substance of addiction becomes sustenance. Without it, the addict will die. For the control addict, the more bodies he destroys, the less bodies are under his control, and thus, the more he needs and the more he will use. There will always be an Other to destroy because there will always be a need for a body; as long as there is a need there will be a grounds for determining Otherness. It is this “quantitative and accurately measurable” (Burroughs xxxvii) principle of addiction that will bring the end of humanity. Burroughs uses the addiction to junk, or heroin, as a metaphor for the addiction to control. And just as a junk pusher invades the body of the junky and degrades, even destroys the body of that junky, the control addict too invades the body, degrades and destroys. Burroughs also uses heroin addiction to show that, as much as the junky is addicted to heroin, the pusher is addicted to the control and power he has over the junky. The relationship between the junky and pusher is a mutual relationship of need and destruction. Neither can survive without the other, and neither can survive because of the other. Burroughs also equates addiction to a virus in such a way that the terms become interchangeable (a control addict is an addict, but he is also a virus). He writes “the junk virus is public health problem number one of the world today” 10 (Burroughs xli). What is important in Naked Lunch is that the control addicts themselves operate as a virus. They invade bodies and degrade them, and when the host body is destroyed, the virus needs a new body to survive; a virus cannot exist without a host body. Jennie Skerl writes, “The virus lives upon the human host, satisfying its own needs...through demonic possession, which dehumanizes the being by making him subservient to a physical or psychological need. When addicted/possessed, the human being becomes identical with the virus and regresses to a lower form of life” (Skerl 38-39). Because the body possessed by the virus (the control addict) becomes degraded and subservient, and ultimately regresses to a lower life form, we see so many bodies in Naked Lunch turn into insects or, while maintaining their human shape, behave like insects. It is important to contextualize the novel, to read it as an artifact of, and comment upon the post World-War Two era in America. Therefore I have outlined a number of historical happenings that Burroughs seems to comment directly upon in Naked Lunch. I use David Halberstam’s book The Fifties in my study because it is an extensive account of the post-war culture in America. I have used the chapter “Docile Bodies” from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish for his model of how the body is used, manipulated and degraded. I have also used a chapter from Tim Armstrong’s book Modernism, Technology and the Body in my discussion of technological advancements and their uses of the body. While Burroughs is not necessarily considered a modernist (nor a post-modernist, but something in between), the Armstrong chapter is useful in understanding the powers of technology over the body, two critical elements in my analysis of this novel. 11 Section II: The Junk Metaphor and Virus Metaphor Burroughs uses heroin, or junk, as a metaphor for the addiction to control that is so critical in Naked Lunch. Burroughs uses junk addiction as a metaphor because as he states in the introduction to Naked Lunch “there are many forms of addiction I think that they all obey basic laws” (Burroughs xlii); addiction to power and addiction to heroin are so similar in the ways they operate socially and their relationship to the human body that junk serves as an appropriate metaphor for control addiction. Burroughs shows the mutually destructive relationship between junky and pusher, and how neither party stands a chance at survival, and as we read, we discover that this same relationship is at play between control addict and subject, and even control addict and partner, and essentially every person in the novel. Because Burroughs so clearly paints the world of junk addiction early on in the novel, and connects it so carefully to control addiction, it becomes clear that addiction to power is the source of the systemic apocalypse Burroughs presents. Burroughs sets up the junk metaphor in the introduction and the first group of routines2 in Naked Lunch. As Jennie Skerl writes, “‘addiction’ and ‘junk’...are...metaphors for the human condition...[Burroughs] perceives that all of 2 Routine is the term Burroughs has coined to describe the genre of writing he is working in. Essentially a routine is much like a vignette. Naked Lunch is a compilation of routines. 12 humanity is victimized by some form of addiction” (Skerl 36-37). He shows how the pusher is able to use the body to assert control over the junky. But he also shows the need the pusher has for the junky. Burroughs shows how the “the addict’s experience has led to the realization that the body is a biological trap and society is run by ‘control addicts’ who use the needs of the body to satisfy their obsession with power” (Skerl 36-37). In these first sections of the novel, Burroughs first discusses junk addiction and his relationship with it, and then in the first group of routines sets up the metaphor by showing, for one of the only times in the novel, the junk world representing the junk world. The pusher, who represents the control addict, is able to change and degrade the body of the junky (who represents the common man), and the effects of the invasion on the body The true addict in Naked Lunch is not the junky, but the pusher, the man in charge who has all the power. Burroughs never mentions money as the reason for selling heroin, and as he demonstrates throughout the novel, it is the rush of power that keeps The Man doing what he is doing. The pusher is addicted to control. He is a virus. The junky is merely a sick body invaded by the virus. The ability of the pusher to assert his control over the junky is blatantly obvious. He has something the junky needs, just as the control addict can offer security and safety and provide the subjects, on the surface, with everything they need. The pusher however is not there to serve the junky; he controls price, when he sells, where he sells, and to whom he sells, but most important, the pusher has to invade the body of the junky and change him from the inside out to gain that control. 13 “The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy....The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. [...] He degrades and simplifies the client” (Burroughs xxxvii, ellipses in original). This line in the introduction is critical because Burroughs is explicating that it is not the drug that degrades and simplifies the junky, it is the pusher who degrades and simplifies the junky. Throughout the novel we see control addicts invading the body of those whom they control, changing and degrading and manipulating the body of those who they are controlling as an assertion of power, and a means to maintain that power. Once the body has been invaded by an outside source, a virus, the body no longer belongs to the person whose body it is, but to the person who has invaded it. The pusher is not there to serve the customer; the customer is there to serve him. Likewise, political figures do not exist in Naked Lunch, or as Burroughs probably would have asserted, in the global communities of the 1950s, to serve and protect the populations, but the populations exist for the benefit of the political figures. The pusher, and therefore the control addict, owns the junky, and he has gained complete control because he has taken control of the body, degrading it to sub-human. The pusher not only has the power to keep a junky alive, but he has the power to kill him. In a number of instances in Naked Lunch, some of which I will discuss in further detail, the control addict essentially destroys the humanity that exists inside of the body; the control addict kills the human spirit, and thus kills the human. In the following example, Burroughs demonstrates how the pusher has the power to determine who lives and who dies, and life or death occurs to his advantage. 14 “Grassed on me he did...And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle. I can tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot.” (Note: This is a cap of poison junk sold to addict for liquidation purposes. Often given to informers...) “Ever see a hot shot kid? I saw Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm...Kid, it was tasty.” (Burroughs 4) The junky to the pusher is a puppet, an object to be toyed with, pull one string he walks, pull another he begs; even killing the junky is a spectator event for the pusher, another way to assert his control and power. Again it is the body that the pusher is concerned with because if he can control the body, he can control all else. He has the power to keep the body alive and on the brink of human form, and he has the power to kill the body. In Naked Lunch, if a body cannot be assimilated into the flock of homogenized empty persons, the body is degraded to subhuman, and often destroyed. The pusher, the control addict, has the ability to instill fear in other junkies and pushers with the threat of destroying them too. Fear, as I will show, is a critical element in maintaining control in Naked Lunch. In American politics of the post-war era, scare tactics were used, witch hunts were held to find communist spies, an issue which Burroughs comments on with Naked Lunch; throughout the novel, fear is a major weapon used against people in the quest for power. The “red-baiting” was very public, and the fear of domestic communists was palpable in post-war America. Redbaiting was not only a way for republicans to attack democrats, but to scare people to their side; the threat that anyone could be targeted next was frightening enough that hiding Otherness was a necessity to avoid becoming a target. Burroughs 15 demonstrates the power of scare tactics in Naked Lunch; hatred out of fear of Otherness, and the fear that at any second, anyone could be targeted as an Other is an effective way for control addicts to gain and maintain their power, while simultaneously bringing humanity to its demise. Before the victim is killed in this routine he is put behind a whorehouse mirror, again drawing attention to the body. He is not a human being but an empty vessel of flesh and blood that is there to serve and entertain. Like a prostitute his body has been given up to the control of another man. The image of the needle still in the junky’s arm when he died again draws the eye to the body, the flesh and blood, of the addict. While the junky is at the mercy of the pusher for survival because his body is at the mercy of junk, the pusher too is at the mercy of the junky. The pusher, like a virus, needs for the junky to exist in order to exist himself. A virus invades the body and feeds off of it, which is exactly what the pusher and the control addict do. But when the host body dies, so does the virus, unless the virus can move to another body. If there are no bodies to transfer the virus to, the virus will cease to exist. This codependent, mutually destructive relationship exists between the junky and pusher, and on a larger level, the control addict and the controlled. And this mutually destructive relationship is exactly why the apocalypse is inevitable; when there are no more bodies left to control because they all have been destroyed, the last remaining control addict too will die. While setting up the junk metaphor, Burroughs provides an example of bodily degradation to show what becomes of what was once a person when he has been 16 invaded by the control addict virus and has become a victim to power structures. Again, it is important to equate the pusher with the control addict, and regard the junky as a body that has been invaded and degraded so that he can be kept under control. The most obvious example of the degradation of the body imposed by the pusher in the junk metaphor opening routine is Willy the Disk. Willy the Disk is a character whom the police use as a drug dog, feeling junkies and pushers on frequencies. Burroughs describes him as a blind pigeon known as Willy the Disk. Willy has a round, disk mouth lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs. He is blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass of scar tissue hard and dry as wood. He can only eat the shit now with that mouth, sometimes sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm, feeling for the silent frequency of junk....Willy goes all out of control, and his mouth eats a hole right through the door. If the cops weren’t there to restrain him with a stock probe, he would suck the juice right out of every junky he ran down. (Burroughs 8) Willy the Disk is more of an insect than a human, and the form of his body is a creation of the junk dealers who own him. He has been degraded and his body changed so that he needs junk to stay alive; he needs to serve the pusher to stay alive. His desperate need makes him a valuable tool to the powerful; he can help the police, and thus members of the political bureaucracies, find more bodies. Willy the Disc is kept alive, though barely, to service the controllers. The moment he stops serving the powerful he will be dispensable, and destroyed. 17 Burroughs never implies that Willy is human, though he does imply that he used to be. His blind eyes and his disk mouth used to be normal human features until he was invaded and degraded. His blindness and mouth of erectile hairs that can “sway out on a long tube of ectoplasm,” his ability to sense junk, his life force, by frequency are all features of an insect, a creature with no intelligent thought or emotion that survives only on instinct. Insects do not think. They cannot help but act in accordance with their primal needs. An insect cannot have individual thought or threaten political systems. Degrading human bodies to insects is in the greatest interest of control addicts, especially insect-like bodies like Willy the Disc. Not only does Willy not threaten the control addicts, but he can serve them and help them to gain more power. In the introduction to Naked Lunch, Burroughs describes heroin addiction, its effects, causes, and possible cures. He details the effect junk addiction has on the body. Burroughs describes the appearance of the junky as having “borrowed flesh” (Burroughs xxxv); his body is not his own, it has the appearance of belonging to someone else because it does belong to someone else. His “junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse” (Burroughs xxxvii). The junky does not control his body parts, they are under possession, they move on instinct, straight toward the pusher, like a moth to a light bulb. The body is an empty vessel controlled by an invading source, in this case the virus is the heroin dealer. Again, it is important to note that junk addiction is a sickness caused by the pusher-virus. This relationship metaphorically represents the human individual invaded by the control addict-virus. As Theodore Solotaroff wrote in his essay “The 18 Algebra of Need,” “The basis of Burroughs’ fiction from Naked Lunch forward has been his depiction of the endemic lusts of body and mind which prey on men, hook them, and turn them into beasts: the pushers as well as the pushed. His model of this condition is, of course, drug addiction” (Solotaroff 85). Powerful control addicts, hatred of Otherness, the virus-like invasion and use of the body, and the technological developments combine to create the apocalyptic environment in Naked Lunch. The world Burroughs creates in Naked Lunch is all encompassing; there is no one outside of the system to swoop in and save the world from its demise; as Marshall McLuhan articulates, “Burroughs’...world is a paradigm of a future in which there can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides of all men” (McLuhan 71). While Burroughs never shows the end of the world, as we read we get the sense of impending doom, and can see the four horsemen of the apocalypse on the horizon. There is no hope for survival in this world, and what is worse, for those inside, they seem to be unaware, or apathetic to the fact that the end is near. It is critical to note that Burroughs wrote during a time where it seemed Armageddon could happen at any time, and he comments directly on that era. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in the post-World War Two world when fear of Otherness was rampant and politicians seemed intent on destroying all individuality and Otherness, both overseas and domestic. New technologies were developed during the era that would make the destruction of Otherness not only possible, but easy, and the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war that would bring the demise of all humanity. Naked Lunch is not only a cautionary tale about how the world will 19 end when those interested more in power than the goodness of humanity are in control, but it is a political satire of the postwar era. John Tytell writes in his essay “Broken Circuit,” Nowhere was the fear of institutional power more pronounced than in the nightmarish collage of Naked Lunch. Burroughs pictured a future possibility far more dismal and terrifying than Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopia where technology strangles all vestiges of freedom, a police state where the human attributes of love and community are stripped away and defiled. Naked Lunch is a hallucinatory vision of the very worst expectations of the fifties. (Tytell 155) Tytell certainly makes strong points in his essay, though I will go further and show how Naked Lunch is not merely a dystopia, but a novel about a world on the brink of apocalypse. Section III: Fear of Otherness Section III A- American Politics and Fear of Otherness Burroughs was acutely aware of the fear and hatred of Otherness that was rampant in the post-war era. Burroughs saw the ability to be a thinking individual as the source of humanity, and he disdainfully regarded the fear and hatred of Otherness, and the conformity culture of the era as a primary cause to the inevitable apocalypse. An Other is impossible to control, so it becomes essential to remove Otherness to 20 gain and maintain power. But by removing Otherness, humanity is removed, and when humanity has been eliminated, the apocalypse will be complete. The primary concern in the postwar era in America was communism, but the fear of Otherness and paranoia struck the home front as well. Political parties distrusted each other, the republicans blamed the democrats for the rise of communism, and the need for a scapegoat for the global unrest commenced with the search within our own political systems for spies and communists. The Second World War had recently ended and American politics were filled with fear of Otherness. To a democratic nation, the Other was communist nations; it was believed that communism was a direct threat to democracy. With America filling a “difficult new role of international leadership” (Halberstam 18) it was the responsibility of America to protect the global democracies from the Soviet Union, communist nations, and communist expansion. Yalta became a major issue and became politically synonymous with betrayal (Halberstam 17). The agreement at Yalta was controversial because it was believed by many people that too many concessions were made to the Communist Soviet Union (cnn.com). At the end of the 1940s, Yalta became a means for the fear of Otherness to move internally to the domestic front lines. “Republicans claimed the agreement was the work of a tough and treacherous Stalin, who duped an exhausted and desperately ill Roosevelt, and that it was filled with secret accords and that we had sold out a free Poland” (Halberstam 16-17). Joseph McCarthy had said “we know that at Yalta we were betrayed. We know that since Yalta, the leaders of this Government, by design or ignorance, have continued to betray us...We also know that 21 the same men who betrayed America are still leading America. The traitors must no longer lead the betrayed” (qtd. in Halberstam 17). While we now recognize that McCarthy was biased, thus preventing him from being regarded as a reliable source, at the time he was certainly voicing the concerns of many and of the post-war era (wikipedia). The enemy to a free and democratic America was not just the Soviet Union and communism, but it was the party that allowed communism to rise, the Democrats. The threat of Otherness was not only across the ocean, but sitting on Capitol Hill. The Democratic Party had gained tremendous support and power with Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Second World War (Halberstam 3). The Roosevelt years had a dramatic effect on the Republican Party. The republicans were counting on Dewey to be “the good administrator who cleaned out the mess in Washington after sixteen years of democratic rule” (Halberstam 8), but the defeat of Dewey by Truman “seemed to promise the Roosevelt coalition would go on ad infinitium” (Halberstam 4). For the republicans, the democrats were the dangerous Other and their ability to maintain control over Washington was dangerous to America and the rest of the non-communist world. But for the democrats, the republicans were “the party of cold, uncaring bankers” (Halberstam 4), the dangerous Other from whom they had to hold political power. But the internal divisions and paranoia did not end with the timeless republican-democrat power struggle. Each party was itself divided. “The Democratic Party was divided...between the liberal Northern urban coalition and the Southern conservative Jim Crow wing. But for all their differences, the democrats had 22 a certain glue: They won, and in victory there was patronage and power, a combination that transcended ideology” (Halberstam 4). If victory was a strong enough adhesive to unite two poles of the same party, defeat was enough to deepen the rift between the two poles of the other. “The Republican Party was traumatized and bitterly divided...They had been out of office since 1932. The shadow of the Depression still hung over them” (Halberstam 4). There were a number of divisions within the Republican Party, but the most obvious was based on history and geography. “On one side were the lawyers and bankers of Wall Street and State Street, their colleagues through the great Eastern industrial cities, and those in the powerful national media, based in New York” (Halberstam 5). On the other side of the rift were the “heartland republicans.” They were essentially unchanged by the great events that had overtaken them; they were resentful of World War Two and suspicious of how Roosevelt had gotten them into it....Instinctively Anglophobic, they were wary of our growing involvement in Western Europe and our close alliance with the British....They were anxious to go back to the simple, comfortable world of the twenties, before the New Deal had empowered labor unions, before air travel had shrunk the Atlantic Ocean into a pond, and before scientists had ever thought about developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. (Halberstam 5) The heartland republicans began to view the republicans in Washington, not as the “guardians of their values” (Halberstam 5), but as the enemy. They even witnessed in their own small towns the rise of “arrogant, impertinent labor unions... [and they] seemed to have lost control of their own party” (Halberstam 5). 23 Because the heartland republicans believed they represented true republicanism and true patriotism, they were battling the eastern republicans before they were able to battle the democrats. The division within the Republican Party did not even end with a victory with the election of Eisenhower (Halberstam 311). Fear of the communist Other did not remain a fear of only Otherness in a far off land across the ocean. Instead, fear of the communist Other became a domestic issue. Republicans blamed the democrats for the power the Soviet Union had in Europe, and as an effective way to wage political warfare on the home front it did not take long before domestic communism became a major political issue. In post-war America it became popular politics, particularly with the republicans, to red-bait (Halberstam 7). In other words, political figures used the idea of communists infiltrating the American government as part of their political strategies and agendas. The belief that communists had infiltrated American government and were working as spies was largely blamed on the democrats by the republicans, similar to the blame the republicans placed on the democrats for the rise of overseas communism. There were accusations that World War Two, “an unwanted war had not brought a true peace...the democrats had won the war but lost the peace” (Halberstam 9). Roosevelt got us into the war, Roosevelt had been a key player at Yalta, and the outcome was “a peace that permitted Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe [which was] unacceptable to many Americans. There had to be an answer; there had to be a scapegoat: These things could not merely have happened, not in a fair and just world” (Halberstam 9). So the nation was ready to find that scapegoat, and the republicans took up the front lines of the witch hunts. 24 The Republican Party had been without power for a long time “and their postwar political rhetoric had a basic purpose and tone: it was about getting even...a great many speeches were given...throughout America about the need to get back to Americanism, returning to the American way, and the domestic dangers of communism and socialism. Included under the label of socialism...was almost any part of the New Deal” (Halberstam 9). By attacking the New Deal the republicans could indirectly attack the democrats who currently held power. In 1946, Tennessee congressman and chairman of the Republican National Committee, B. Carroll Reece stated that the election would be a choice, not between democrats and republicans, but between “communism and republicanism” (qtd. in Halberstam 9-10), and George Murphy, a politician, stated at a republican fund-raiser “Party labels don’t mean anything anymore. You can draw a line right down the middle. On one side are the Americans, on the other are the communists and socialists” (qtd. in Halberstam 10). The republicans seemed to believe that if they could use scare tactics on the American public and convince the public that the democrats were to blame for the rise and infiltration of evil communism, the public would hand power over to the Republican Party. The republicans couldn’t very well go after Truman. He was an unpretentious small town Midwesterner, similar to the conservative republicans and well liked, so they targeted a number of lower ranking political figures such as Dean Acheson, secretary of state, “the very embodiment of the Eastern establishment” (Halberstam 10). There were a number of trials and convictions during the great communist witch-hunts in the post-war era. These trials were publicized and were “proof” that 25 communists were invading American politics. The republicans appeared the hero for finding them and weeding them out of the system. In 1948, Dewey, despite pressure from the conservative republicans, refused to do any red-baiting in his campaign (Halberstam 7), though in 1950, Joseph McCarthy, republican Senator from Wisconsin, stepped up to the task as “the accidental demagogue” (Halberstam 49). In February of 1950 McCarthy gave a speech in West Virginia as part of a Lincoln day celebration, and in his speech, almost casually, he said While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the communist party and members of a spy ring I have here in my hand a list of 20 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department. (qtd. in Halberstam 49-50) McCarthy spent four years accusing people of being communist spies, and it “[touched] something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness, and boozing ended his career in shame” (Halberstam 52). He “crystallized and politicized the anxieties of a nation living in a dangerous new era. He took people who were at worst guilty of political naiveté and accused them of treason” (Halberstam 52). If the world was in a situation America did not like then it was because something conspiratorial had happened (Halberstam 53). McCarthy’s message to the American people was that the democrats were soft on communism, and therefore 26 communism was attacking America from within (Halberstam 53). McCarthy’s charges took paranoia to a new level of hysteria (Halberstam 56). Democrats had to move to the defensive against the republicans; they were being accused of not only being soft on the issue that had America in a frenzy, but they were often times accused of actually being communists. For many, it was believed that the communist issue was a way for republicans to seek revenge on the democrats who had portrayed their domestic policies as “cold and heartless” (Halberstam 57). But even if it was just dirty politics, America had become obsessed with the Cold War and communism domestic and abroad. The paranoia of communism was deeply rooted in American politics, and the fear that those same communists were infiltrating American government drove a wedge deep between the democrats and republicans. Rather than coming together to defend their nation against the impending threat of a new war, they were tearing themselves apart out of paranoia and hatred of the Other. Section III B- Burroughs Comments on American Politics and Fear of Otherness in Naked Lunch By creating four political parties that battle with each other for absolute political power in Naked Lunch, Burroughs comments directly on the contemporary fear of Otherness that was occurring. This reflects the ways the republicans and democrats battled each other and they both battled the communists. Those four parties of Interzone also have internal conflict, fighting amongst their own members 27 for absolute political control. Burroughs viewed the political occurrences in America in the post-war era as the doings of control addicts looking out for their own power and always seeking to gain more power and control for the sake of power and control, not for the sake of the public. Those political control addicts sought to seek and destroy all people who were Other because Otherness is impossible to control. In Naked Lunch Burroughs creates political parties that satirize this view of American politics. Naked Lunch is an apocalyptic novel in which the rampant fear of Otherness is the driving force to the end of the world. During the post-war era, it seemed that the world was always on the brink of Armageddon, and Burroughs creates that apocalyptic vision in Naked Lunch, directly connecting it, not to the evils of communism as American politics would have the people believe, but to the rampant fear and hatred of Otherness, and the need to destroy Otherness. Jennie Skerl writes, “A secret few conspire to manipulate and control the many. The political parties of Interzone seek to rule the world through total physical and mental control of the human race; they are all ‘control addicts’ who oppose individuality and nonconformity” (Skerl 38). These four parties are central to the novel. However, I will show that it is not merely a secret few who conspire to rule the many, but that it is the quest for absolute power at the expense of Otherness that will bring the demise of humanity. Interzone is the chief setting of Naked Lunch, and Skerl describes it as “an imaginary dystopia described as the ‘Composite City.’...Interzone is the modern city as Waste Land, in which all the cities, peoples, and governments of the world are 28 combined into one huge bee hive of commerce, sex, addiction, political manipulation, and rivalry” (Skerl 37). There are other “places” within Naked Lunch, though they all seem to be subdivisions of the larger Interzone. According to John Calder, [Burroughs] creates Freeland, Interzone, Annexia and the other locales that we recognize as our own societies whether we live in the United States, in Russia, or in Britain. Not the least of Burroughs’ accomplishments is to make us realize that the same malaise underlies all existing societies, the communist and the capitalist, the democratic, the paternalist, and the despotic. (Calder 46) Burroughs never draws a map or creates boundaries of these places because for Burroughs, as Calder wrote, all places are essentially the same in their rottenness. Throughout I refer to the “global communities of Naked Lunch.” It is not important to distinguish between republics and zones in this novel because in essence there is one community on the brink of self destruction. There are four political parties in Naked Lunch that are central to the novel: the Liquifactionists, the Divisionists, the Senders, and the Factualists. By recognizing how each party operates to destroy all of humanity the apocalyptic vision of Naked Lunch is illuminated. When a control addict is in power, invading humanity with his virus, killing off individuality and differences, eventually there will be no more bodies to invade, no more human beings to control, and humanity will be annihilated. Only the strongest control addict will remain, but he too will soon die because a virus without a body to feed off of cannot survive. The policies and practices of these parties create a clear map of how humanity will come to its demise. 29 The four parties of Interzone are all in combat with each other in the fight for political monopoly; anyone who is considered an Other is considered a direct threat and therefore must be assimilated or eliminated. But like the political parties in America in the postwar era, the parties in Naked Lunch too go after their own kind. The parties of Interzone are all headed by control addicts. Political power is not a position to advance human kind and protect and serve the population; political power is self-serving for the high members of the parties. Like junk addiction, control addiction operates as a pyramid: “one level eating the level below...right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world” (Burroughs xxxvi). The political figures feed off of the people below them, from their right hand man, all the way down to the nameless members under their jurisdiction. The control addict operates like a virus, invading the body, using it up and discarding it. But the nature of addiction is that there is a constant need for more, so despite the number of destroyed bodies that pile up, if there are more who are able bodied, the control addict will invade and destroy them too. The control addicts in charge in Naked Lunch, much like those in the post-war era, target the obvious Other first. Since it is the threat of Otherness that potentially threatens the position of the man in charge, it is critical that the Other be eliminated. The catch is that there will always be an Other. Beginning with the most radical differences is obvious; Liquifactionists attacking Divisionists, republicans attacking democrats, democracies attacking communist nations, but the essence of humanity is that no two people are the same. It is the attack on individuality that will ultimately 30 bring the apocalypse both in Naked Lunch, and as Burroughs shows with his novel, in the post-war world as well. Each party of Interzone has its own individual method of gaining and maintaining control, but “the parties are not in practice separate but blend in all combinations” (Burroughs 151). It is key to note that the parties have blurred lines between them because the battle for power is not a battle of parties but a battle of men, all looking to be the last man standing; a Divisionist will go after other Divisionists if he believes it will help him achieve the status of last man standing. Power struggles do not serve the public, they serve the addict. Each party is in combat with the others, and each party has internal conflict as well. Ultimately Interzone is filled with man to man combat, rather than party to party combat, each person vying for the position of last man standing. The parties are simply groups of people who use different means of bodily control to defeat their opponents, working on the outside as well as the inside. The Liquifactionists attempt to control all of humanity by liquidating and absorbing all those who are of a different kind. “Liquifaction involves protein cleavage and reduction to liquid which is absorbed into someone else’s protoplasmic being” (Burroughs 75). They are a totalitarian party who intend to eliminate all nonLiquifactionists first, and then begin liquidation within the party. The Liquifactionists are lead by one man, and the rest of the party is “entirely composed of dupes” (Burroughs 147), yet no party member knows he is a dupe until the “final absorption” (Burroughs 147) when all are absorbed by the leader, leaving only one man. The Liquifactionists are not ignorant people. On the contrary, they are 31 generally aware people who know what they are practicing. They do not know, however, that they are dupes on the brink of absorption. The principles of the Liquifactionists make it impossible for more than one man to exist. Once one group of people is liquidated, they will move on to another group, and another, until everyone who is different from the leader is absorbed, ultimately leaving just him. However, like the virus that needs the human host to survive, the Liquifactionist needs bodies to absorb to survive. Once all of humanity has been absorbed and the one man who was able to survive is left, he will quickly die off for lack of bodies to liquidate. Human kind will be annihilated because of the insatiable need to liquidate the Other. The Divisionists are the moderate party of Interzone. They intend to control the world by amassing a huge number of replicas of the self. The Divisionists, like the Liquifactionists, are misogynists, and replicas are created through asexual reproduction. They pass on the myth that “if you go with a woman your replicas won’t grow” (Burroughs 151). The Divisionists are associated with homosexuality, latent or overt, and the hatred of women. Women are an Other that is very easy to recognize, but for men with different bodies and different brains, it would be impossible for women to be controlled. The opinion that women are an incredibly dangerous and threatening Other is prevalent in Naked Lunch. Replicas must “periodically recharge with the Mother Cell” (Burroughs 149), the person who created it. Ironically, the Divisionists are misogynists, but their method of gaining and maintaining power is to become a “Mother Cell,” a giver of life to another being, taking on a feminine role. Like a virus invading the body of 32 humanity, the replicas cannot exist without the mother cell; they must feed off of it in order to survive. And just as the pusher creates the junky and needs the junky to survive, the Divisionist creates the replica and needs the replicas to survive. As a control addict, the Divisionist needs bodies to control. By creating more replicas there are more bodies that need him to survive. The more replicas one man has, the more power he potentially holds, and the greater chance he has of being the one man to survive. The process of replication will eventually leave the world populated by “one replica of one sex...that is one person in the world with millions of separate bodies” (Burroughs 149). Ultimately this would mean that, like the Liquifactionists, there would be one person left because the nature of replicas is that they are not independent individual persons. The Divisionists are aware of the potential of “the eventual monopoly of one replica” (Burroughs 149), but they are addicted to the power and control they have with replicas; there are bodies in the world who cannot exist without them. The Divisionists fight amongst themselves, hexing others’ replica cultures, massacring all identifiable replicas, and controlling the replication of “Undesirables” (Burroughs 149). Though it is inevitable that “every replica but your own is eventually an ‘Undesirable’” (Burroughs 149), and so eventually every replica will have to be killed off by one or another control addict vying for that position of last man standing. Not only are the Divisionists in competition with the other three parties of Interzone, but they are in competition within the party, just as the post-war American parties, and like the American parties, they fight for power, not for the 33 protection and well being of the population, but for the sake of holding more power. The battle for power in Interzone is not a political battle, but an individual battle to become the most powerful, and eventually only man alive. Divisionists, like the postwar era American parties, namely the republicans, are associated with racism based on paranoia. The republicans hated Others because they believed Otherness would pose a direct threat to their own power. The Divisionists too are paranoid and therefore hate all Otherness. There is no way to identify a replica who has been disguised, and so if any person expresses a liberal idea or behaves in a way that sparks paranoia, that person will be accused of being “some stinking Nigger’s bleached-out replica” (Burroughs 150); the “fear of Negro replicas...has depopulated whole regions” (Burroughs 150). Negro replicas may in fact be “blond and blue-eyed” (Burroughs 150), the perfect Aryan, but the fear that they are an Undesirable replica is strong enough to spark murderous rampages. A body may look one way but represent something else internally so the bodies must be manipulated and even destroyed at the slightest suspicion that they are undesirable. A communist in America could look like any other American and may even represent the Democratic Party, externally. But if there was the slightest indication that someone was a little off or a little different, it was enough to attack him for being a spy. The Senders are considered the most dangerous and most evil group of people. They also are a totalitarian party who use one-way telepathy to control the masses. Unlike the Liquifactionists, they are unaware of their political practices. That is because it is only the few men who are the top Senders who know what they are 34 doing, it is only the top Senders who have any independent thought and emotion. The rest of the population are not in fact Senders, but receivers of the telepathic messages. The people are unable to think, feel, or act on their own accord. “There can only be one Sender at one place-time” (Burroughs 148); if there is more than one Sender, multiple thoughts would be transmitted simultaneously and if “someone else has feelings of his own [it] could louse up his continuity” (Burroughs 148). Ultimately one person is in control of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the gross population. The top Sender is constantly being replaced. One cannot truly feel if he is alone and the Sender is completely and utterly alone. Eventually “he’s got no feelings to send” (148) and a new Sender is elected “by consensus of the general will” (Burroughs 148); although the political group known as the Senders are naive to the act of sending, they concede to elect a new Sender. Unable to think or feel on their own, the new Sender most likely selects himself. Unlike the Liquifactionists and Divisionists, the Senders are not primarily concerned with eliminating people. Rather they are concerned with creating empty bodies that move about like insects responding automatically to orders sent to control centers in the brain. Again, like the virus, the Senders need bodies they can invade to maintain control and power, and without the Senders, the bodies would cease to function because they are incapable of organic thought. While the Senders degrade the bodies of the human population, they too are degraded from the lack of human contact. Since the human population is being destroyed by turning the bodies into empty vessels, and since the Senders are constantly being degraded to sub-human form and 35 needing to be replaced, like the other parties, Sending can only lead to the annihilation of humanity. The fourth party of Interzone is the Factualist party. They are considered by some critics of Burroughs’s works to be the “good” party in the war between “good” and “evil.” One critic in particular, Jenny Skerl, writes that the Factualist party is “the only force fighting these [other three] evil parties” (Skerl 41). Skerl wrote “the Factualists are a radical group that represents anarchic individualism” (Skerl 41). However, they are not unlike the other three parties of Interzone. Just as the Liquifactionists, Divisionists, and Senders cannot exist without a population to control, the Factualists cannot exist without the three other parties. The policies of the Factualists are “Anti-Liquifactionist, Anti-Divisionist, and above all Anti-Sender” (Burroughs 151). There are no policies independent of the other three parties. The Factualists survive by their hatred and destruction of the other three parties because the other three parties are Other, no different from those very parties they hate. Factualists see no benefit whatsoever with division. They do not believe a desirable replica could ever exist; to the Factualists, replicas would prevent and stagnate change and progress and “even the most intelligent and genetically perfect replicas would in all probability constitute an unspeakable menace to life on this planet” (Burroughs 152). But the “anti” policies of the Factualists seem an attempt to produce replicas of their own. They attempt to fight off the other three parties until everyone is the same. The Factualists consider their Own to be the Good, and the Others to be Evil, but in essence, they are all attempting to homogenize and reduce until humanity no longer exists. 36 As for Liquifaction, the Factualists acknowledge and assert that humanity must be aware of “our protoplasmic core” (Burroughs 152) without succumbing to the impediment upon humanity that is liquifaction. But again, like the Liquifactionists, the Factualists intend to eliminate all who are not Factualists, essentially liquidating populations, leaving only their own kind. And like the Liquifactionists, there will always be an Other and there will always be a need for bodies to survive, and so like the Liquifactionists, the Factualists will liquidate humanity until there is no more. The Factualists are “above all Anti-Sender,” but they “emphatically do not oppose telepathic research” (Burroughs 152). Telepathy could be highly beneficial to humanity if used properly; it could be “the ultimate defense against any form of organized coercion or tyranny on the part of pressure groups or individual control addicts” (Burroughs 152). The Factualists believe that in the right hands telepathy could be used for good, protecting humanity from the control addicts like the Liquifactionists, Divisionists, and Senders, and according to the Factualists, the “right hands” would be those of their own party and no one else. The Factualists would like to hold a monopoly of telepathic research, just as America hoped to hold a monopoly of nuclear weaponry, which we believed would be the ultimate defense against any form of Otherness. They also assert that telepathy, by its very nature is not a one way process, and the attempt at setting up a process of one way telepathy “must be regarded as an unqualified evil” (Burroughs 152). However, telepathy would have to belong exclusively to the Factualists for it to be used for the benefit of humanity, therefore the Factualists would themselves be asserting control and power over the rest of humanity by hoarding telepathic research and its uses. 37 The Factualists compare telepathic research to atomic research; they “oppose, as we oppose atomic war, the use of such knowledge to control, coerce, debase, exploit or annihilate the individuality of another living creature” (Burroughs 152). The paradox is that research associated with atomic and hydrogen weaponry was done for the very purpose of controlling, coercing, debasing, and annihilating the individuality of whole nations, though like the Factualists, it was done under the facade of protection against those who would threaten our own freedoms and individuality. One way sending, to the Factualists, is inherently evil and, like atomic power, could “[reduce] the earth to cosmic dust” (Burroughs 153). While telepathy could be highly beneficial to humanity, like atomic power (not atomic weaponry), telepathy would be impossible to keep out of the hands of those who are looking to perform such afore-mentioned atrocities. The Factualists believed the only way to avoid the annihilation of individuality would be for the Factualists to assert complete control over the other parties, and thus the rest of humanity. In essence this would produce nothing shy of the annihilation of individuality and therefore humanity. Similarly, the postwar American politicians and military leaders believed hoarding atomic research and instilling in the American public a strong fear of Otherness was beneficial to American society but ultimately it put the global society on the brink of collapse. Hoarding telepathic research would do exactly what the Factualists claim they want to avoid. While the Factualists assert their opposition to the annihilation of the individuality of other living creatures, their “anti-” policies make them hypocritical 38 on that point. The Factualists, like each of the other parties, strive to annihilate all persons who demonstrate Otherness. The Factualists refer directly to the inhumanity of Senders: The Sender is not a human individual...It is The Human Virus. (All viruses are deteriorated cells leading a parasitic existence...They have specific affinity for the Mother Cell; thus deteriorated liver cells seek the home place of hepatitis etc. So every species has a Master Virus; Deteriorated Image of that species.) (Burroughs 153) But like the Senders and the other political parties, the Factualists live a parasitic existence, feeding off of all non-Factualists. The Factualists are considered the “good” party in the battle between good and evil according to critics like Jenny Skerl, but the Factualists are not unlike the other three parties. Without the Liquifactionists, Divisionists, and Senders, the Factualists could not exist. The Factualists claim to fight for individuality, but individuality cannot exist when one party is opposed to all persons belonging to any other party or group, and are suspicious of their own selling out. They assert the dangers of the parasitic existence of control addicts, but they too are parasites, feeding off of the existence of the other three parties. Without the host, the virus would die. The Factualists assert the dangers of the control addict on humanity, but they too are control addicts, working to destroy all of humanity, manipulating the people and brainwashing them to the dangers of the other three parties in order to gain power and control over the globe, much like the republicans. 39 Since the Factualists cannot exist without an opposition, like the other three parties, the Factualists would begin working within their own party after the other three have been annihilated, leading to the destruction of humanity. Each of these four political parties has a system to destroy and eliminate Otherness entirely for the purpose of gaining more power and protecting the power already possessed. But those systems are like a virus feeding off of the population until there is nothing left to feed off of. The parties are headed by addicts who need to continue to feed their addiction. That need will be the driving force to destroy one man after another until there is only one man remaining. However, as Burroughs demonstrates, the principle of addiction is that a junky cannot survive without his substance. That one remaining man will be soon to die for his lack of bodies to feed off of and control. Burroughs creates these parties to satirize the political events of the post-war world. While Naked Lunch appears to have the classic good versus evil story line, there is no such thing as good in the world Burroughs has created. Humanity, while it may strive for good, remains a body of human beings with the innate potential to defect “because all Agents defect and all Resisters sell out” (Burroughs 186), to become an addict, to live as a virus feeding off the bodies of others. Burroughs demonstrates the effect control addiction will have over humanity. He shows that when those who hold power work only to maintain their power and gain more, not to serve humanity, humanity will be destroyed. Since there is no one outside of the system and no one who is “good” within the system, there is no hope for humanity to be saved. Control addiction will be cataclysmic. 40 The political parties of course are not a man in charge who spouts political rhetoric and millions of people follow. They are intricate bureaucracies designed so that it is often impossible to tell who belongs to what party, and who is working for whom. And there are members of Interzone who are not politicians per se, but who do political work. Doctor Benway is one of those figures. Benway has his hands in a number of political systems and has worked for Annexia, the Freeland Republic, has been in cahoots with Salvador Hassan O’Leary (a notorious Liquifactionist but suspected Sender) in illegal trafficking, and was recruited by Islam Incorporated. His major task in Annexia as well as the Freeland Republic, and that for which he was recruited to Islam Inc., is to use his scientific capabilities to homogenize the population, and when it was impossible to “fix” the body of the “ill” he turned them into sub-human beings. Benway is commissioned by political figures to perform medical experiments and homogenization. Lee arrives at Freeland to persuade Benway to perform homogeneity for Islam Inc. (Burroughs 30), and while he is there, Benway sheds some light on who is behind the scenes, and why these horrific medical and scientific activities occur. Benway tells Lee I deplore brutality...it is not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, show of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is 41 something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct. (Burroughs 21, emphasis in original) As Benway has explicated, there are control addicts who are behind all activities that occur within the global communities. There are intricate bureaucracies that carry out countless tasks for those control addicts who are “anti-human.” Humanity is too messy for control addicts. Human beings are able to think and feel, and possess the potential to revolt and rebel, perhaps overthrow the powerful bureaucracies. It is the “personal identity” that is under attack when subjects are selected for interrogation and medical investigation, and it is not just the individuality that the control addicts seek to destroy, but it is the humanity of the subject they hope to remove, and they always are very successful. Benway goes on to describe the operations of the bureaucracies of Annexia, and how the operations not only prevent the citizens from contacting the control addict in charge directly, but they keep the citizens in a perpetual state of anxiety and paranoia, where their identity is constantly being called into question, and the possibility of being accused of being a suspected agent or saboteur is incredibly likely. This again is a comment on American paranoia of communist spies; at any given moment, anyone it seemed could be accused of being a spy. Red-baiting and communist witch hunts called personal identity into question; if one dressed too European, or was a suspected homosexual, his or her political allegiance too could be called into question. 42 The police and bureaus in Naked Lunch operate in such a way to keep citizens at a distance from political figures, but also to keep them horrified. They work on the pretext of finding and prosecuting “suspected agents, saboteurs and political deviants” (Burroughs 23) but citizens of Annexia are kept under the thumb of control addicts because of the paranoia and fear, not only that one’s neighbor might in fact be a political deviant, but that one himself might be accused of political crimes he has not committed. In this routine Burroughs satirizes the use of scare tactics and witchhunts to keep the American people at bay. In Annexia, citizens were expected to carry at all times a variety of documents, in essence, to prove their identity. At any given time, they could be stopped in the street and made to present specific documents to the Examiner who is himself unidentifiable. The Examiner then stamps the documents, but if a group is approached, he will select a few people’s documents to stamp and not others. But when someone is stopped and his documents are not properly stamped, he is then arrested; being arrested means being put into “provisional detention” (Burroughs 21) until his “Afidavit of Explanation, properly signed and stamped, was approved by the Assistant Arbiter of Explanations” (Burroughs 21). Of course, the official almost never goes to his office so prisoners spend weeks or months waiting to be released. They are kept in unheated offices with no place to sit and no toilets to use. Documents are issued in vanishing ink and new documentation is constantly being required of the citizens. “The citizens rush from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet all impossible deadlines” (Burroughs 22). 43 Privacy is denied all members of Annexia; no one is permitted to lock their doors and police have pass keys to every room in the city, searchlights play over the city at all hours and no one is permitted to use blinds on their windows, no one looks at anyone because of “strict laws against importuning, with or without verbal approach, anyone for any purpose, sexual or otherwise” (Burroughs 22). Liquor laws are near prohibitionist. Personal freedoms are completely infringed upon, and the citizens obey as best they can for fear of being imprisoned or being accused of being a saboteur or political deviant. Police barge into rooms at random with a mentalist in company and “start looking for it” (Burroughs 22), it being anything at all. The idea is to frighten and humiliate the citizen. They submit the citizen to “the most humiliating search of his naked person on which they make sneering and derogatory comments” (Burroughs 22). “After a few months of this the citizens cowered in corners like neurotic cats” (23). These scare tactics and the ceaseless runaround the citizens are put through are methods of gaining and maintaining control. If the citizens are kept afraid, and are driven to believe that at any second they would find themselves in prison, they would have neither the time nor energy to revolt. All citizens are not only paranoid that their neighbor may be a political deviant, but face the fear that they themselves may be picked up and imprisoned for crimes they have not committed. This is similar to the scare tactics and witch hunts that were occurring in American in the post-war era. There was significant paranoia that a neighbor might be a communist, and also that one might be suspected of being a communist himself. To avoid the horrors of 44 trial and punishment for treason, citizens denied their Otherness and behaved as upstanding citizens, while cowering in their own corners. Another major component of the political system and intricate bureaucracies of Naked Lunch is Islam Incorporated, though “the exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line” (Burroughs 145). Burroughs juxtaposes Islam Incorporated and the political parties by including all in one routine, obviously titled, “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone” (Burroughs 131). We are never informed of exactly what it is Islam Inc. does, or how it operates, though Burroughs does show us that it is involved in nearly everything that occurs in the novel. Notorious political figures such as A.J. and Salvador Hassan O’Leary (supposed sworn enemies) work together within Islam Inc. Benway, too, is commissioned to perform homogenization for Islam Inc. It is important to note that a variety of figures interact within the intricate bureaucracies, and that sworn enemies actually work together, and that no one, not even the members of Islam Inc. actually know what the purpose of Islam Inc. is. The purpose of the bureaucracies is to keep the citizens at a distance from those who are in control while at the same time, attacking the citizens directly. Even members of the bureaucracies have to be kept in the dark so they, too, can be controlled and used by the addicts in power. Doctors for example, people who are supposed to help and protect the citizens, actually represent the link that connects the citizen to the political control addict, thus simultaneously keeping the citizens at a distance from the control addicts and bringing them under the power of the control 45 addict. Also, if sworn enemies are actually working together, it becomes impossible to trust anyone, thus keeping everyone paranoid, fearful, and timid. The cooperation of A.J. and O’Leary also demonstrates the blurring of lines between political parties, further showing the man to man combat for power rather than the party to party battle for power for the sake of goodness. The purpose of these intricate systems is to keep citizens in fear, at a distance from control addicts, while pulling them under the thumb of those in power. Burroughs demonstrates the distance the highest political figures have from the population and the bureaucracies they have working underneath them in his vague description of Islam Inc. While it is primarily an Arab representation at the actual meetings, the work done within Islam Inc., whatever it may be, is performed by all types of persons from Interzone, and branches out into all corners of the global community. Burroughs writes, “Representatives from every conceivable Arab party make up the rank and attend the actual meetings from which the higher ups prudently abstain” (Burroughs 132). The higher ups within the system do not attend the meetings of Islam Inc., keeping themselves at arms length from other bureaucrats, from the population, and from the riots and business that occur at such meetings. By abstaining from meetings, they could deny any kind of affiliation, and they can, like A.J. and Hassan, keep their identity under wraps. There is significant cover-up occurring within Islam Inc. and other branches of the political system in Interzone. O’Leary attempts to distance himself publicly from the Inc.: “one of his subsidiary companies has made unspecified contributions, and one of his subsidiary personalities is attached to the organization in an advisory 46 capacity without in any way committing himself to, or associating himself with, the policies, actions, or objectives of Islam Inc.” (Burroughs 132). O’Leary is not the only figure who attempts to distance himself from the organization while participating fully in it. Interzone itself “has an ordinance forbidding meetings of Islam Inc. within five miles of the city limits” (Burroughs 132). There is also a discrepancy about who belongs to what party, what their association to Islam Inc. is, and what their objectives are. As I have mentioned in my discussion about the political parties of Interzone, it is often impossible to distinguish one party from another since “the parties are not in practice separate but blend in all combinations” (Burroughs 151). This is evident within the workings of the obscure Islam Inc. and also with two particular notorious party members, who are also important members of Islam Inc.: A.J. and Salvador Hassan O’Leary. Although they are “mortal enemies” (Skerl 41), they are so similar they could in fact be the same man. These two men are microcosms of the political systems in which they work. As enemies who are essentially the same, Burroughs comments on how, though sworn enemies for their wretched Otherness, American democracy and communist nations and the republican and democratic parties (opposing forces in a binary system) are near replicas of each other in wickedness. “A.J. is an agent...but for whom or for what no one has ever been able to discover. It is rumored that he represents a trust of giant insects from another galaxy. I believe he is on the Factualist side...; of course he could be a Liquifaction Agent...You can never be sure of anyone in the industry” (Burroughs 133). No one believes A.J.’s playboy cover story, though no one knocks him out of power. “A.J. 47 claims to be an ‘independent,’ which is to say: ‘Mind your own business.’ There are no independents any more...The Zone swarms with every variety of dupe but there are no neutrals there. A neutral at A.J.’s level is of course unthinkable” (Burroughs 141). While we do not know what party A.J. belongs to, nor do we know what his role is in that unknown party, we do know he has a tremendous amount of power. He is at a high level within the system, as well as a financer for Islam Inc. (Burroughs 131), though he is also one of the most obscure figures in the novel. Lee informs us that A.J.’s cover story- as it is clear all political figures and all bureaucrats need a cover story- is that he is “an international playboy and harmless practical joker” (Burroughs 133). A.J.’s nationality comes into question along with his political affiliation. “He is actually of obscure Near East extraction- had at one time come on like an English gentleman. His English accent waned with the British Empire, and after World War II he became an American by Act of Congress” (Burroughs 132-33). As an obscure agent of obscure background, A.J.’s practical jokes are also of an obscure nature. Throughout the pages that describe the pranks he has pulled, A.J. becomes associated with the United States, Germany, South America, Bolivia, France where he “broods over the greatest cuisine in the world” (Burroughs 134), Italy, Latin America, among other international spots. A.J. seeks, destroys, and moves on, seemingly unaffiliated with any place or any party. Burroughs makes sure not to single out any one bureaucratic nation in Naked Lunch. The end of the world is coming, not just the fall of an empire. Salvador Hassan O’Leary is another notorious political figure who is, if not as obscure as A.J., then more so. “Hassan is a notorious Liquefactionist and suspected 48 to be a secret Sender- ‘Shucks, boys,’ he says with a disarming grin, ‘I’m just a blooming old cancer and I gotta proliferate’“ (Burroughs 141). Again, it is impossible to discern for whom Hassan is working and what his political allegiance is, but he is, without much contest, still one of the top figures. Like A.J. Hassan has an unknown origin and is involved in business on a global scale. He has picked up a Texas accent, though when he is excited he lapses into broken English, and “his accent at such moments suggest an Italian origin. He reads and speaks Etruscan” (Burroughs 142). His name alone suggests a multiplicity of ethnicities. Hassan, like A.J., and like any other important political figure, has a cover story. He has a seemingly endless list of aliases and has held 23 passports. His business endeavors, all varied, and all shady, have taken place in New York, Yokohama, Beirut, Panama, Holland, and North Africa to name a few. Burroughs mirrors these two characters even further in the two routines “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” and “A.J.’s Annual Party.” At Hassan’s party a boy is hanged with an erotic aspect to the spectacle. The party breaks out into an orgy which A.J. ruins with a herd of women. At A.J.’s party, he has a screening of Blue movies with three actors who erotically hang each other and engage in group sex. The gatherings, or parties, are much the same, as we can also say about the political parties. There is essentially no difference between these two characters, for both are vile and corrupt and out to destroy humanity. Despite their nearly identical roles in the world, they are sworn enemies. A.J., a factualist agent, is supposed to be taking down the evil other three parties, but he himself is just as evil and obscure as the members of those other parties. Burroughs would probably have said the same about 49 the bureaucratic nature of both communism and democracy, the Democratic Party and Republican Party, even the heartland republicans and the eastern republicans, as they existed in the 1950s. The obscurity of these two particular political figures not only distances them from the population as well as other political figures, it serves to keep people at bay and in fear of them. Even insignificant members of the political systems are obscure to the point of disbelief in their actual existence like “the District Coordinator or whatever he calls himself...new title every week. Doubt if he exists” (Burroughs 31). No one can ever know if A.J. or Salvador Hassan O’Leary, or Benway or the District Coordinator for that matter, is with them or against them, and the fear of the unknown is what keeps people cowering in the corners like neurotic cats, easy to manage and easy to control, thus easy to destroy. In the “Talking Asshole” routine, Dr. Benway tells Dr. Schafer the story about the asshole that took over. In this routine Burroughs speaks through Benway about the detrimental nature of the complex and intricate bureaus headed by and working for control addicts who are running rampant in Interzone, and also in the 1950s world. Benway says: Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet 50 needs of the people who participate in the functioning unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to the complete parasitism of a virus...Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapses. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host. (Burroughs 121-22) According to Benway, whom Burroughs is using as a vehicle to speak to his reader, the bureaucratic state of America as well as other global forces, was well on its way to choking out humanity. Bureaucracy, a virus, as detrimental and lethal as cancer, was working against humanity rather than with it, and would eventually kill the hostmankind, leaving nothing but gaping craters on the face of the globe. Burroughs suggests a “cooperative” principle for governing, an idea that is so far out of the scope of vision for the control addicts, both in the global communities of Naked Lunch, and the global communities of Earth, it is impossible. This passage also serves to deepen his metaphor of equating addiction, particularly to control, as a virus. Without a population to assert control over, the individual control addicts cannot survive. The bureaucracies, completely occupied by control addicts, cannot survive without the “common” men and women, the ordinary people who have no power, not even over their own existence. Again, this image is apocalyptic. Once the “structure of the state collapses,” once all of the “ordinary” people are destroyed, and the destruction begins working within the bureaucracies, the existence of humanity is on the brink of total annihilation. 51 In Naked Lunch Burroughs hints that, perhaps there is a cure. The apomorphine cure saved him from a junky life, perhaps overthrowing the control addicts and establishing a “cooperative” government would save humanity. As I have established, Burroughs uses junk addiction as a metaphor for the control addiction that is so critical to the apocalypse in Naked Lunch. In the introduction to the novel, while discussing his own addiction to heroin, and the nature of heroin addiction he writes “Addicts can be cured...when this is done, junk pyramids of the world will collapse” (Burroughs xxxvii). Although there could be a cure to heroin addiction— the Apomorphine Treatment—it is not pursued. Using the metaphor of heroin addiction, Burroughs is here saying that, though there is a way to put a stop to it, it is still running rampant, and though there could be a prevention to the apocalypse, Burroughs goes to great lengths to show how those very control addicts, represented by the tops of those “junk pyramids,” take measures to insure no revolution will occur. In Naked Lunch, as we read, we wait for the end of humanity with every turn of the page, and though we never see it, we are sure it is coming, with no hope in this dismal world. It seems a logical question to ask why didn’t people of the world, and of Interzone step back and see the approaching apocalypse? While, perhaps many Americans saw Armageddon on the horizon, it was not at the fault of their own governing bureaucracies, but that of the communist; their government was trying to prevent the apocalypse and protect them from ultimate demise. The same goes for the peoples of the global communities in Naked Lunch. It is a critical element of this text that all procedures designed to eliminate Otherness, and therefore humanity, are 52 presented to the public in a positive light, under the pretense of benefiting society as a whole. “Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion” (Burroughs 168-69). If the citizens believe the methods of the control addicts were for the greater good, and if the control addicts kept the citizens placated with minor benefits, the chance of the citizens overrunning the political systems and dethroning the powerful control addicts was reduced to none. Section IV: The Body The human body is important to control addicts in Naked Lunch. The control addicts who run the global communities in Naked Lunch use the body as their primary means of gaining, asserting, and maintaining control. Like a virus they invade, degrade, and change the body in order to remove any Otherness from it, until the host body has been completely voided of humanity. By removing the Otherness, or the humanity within the body, the body becomes an empty non-human mass. Once all bodies have been degraded to non-human, insect-like creatures, humanity will no longer exist. For Burroughs, the apocalypse does not necessarily entail a world void of human forms, but rather a world void of humanity. Foucault demonstrates in the chapter “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish that by disciplining the body, the body becomes more efficient. Burroughs shows in Naked Lunch that invading and changing the body is degrading, though at 53 the same time, it produces a body that is efficient for the control addicts, though not for humanity. Foucault discusses the assertion of power over the body in Discipline and Punish. He writes: The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body- to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces...in every society, the body was in the grip of very strict powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions or obligations. (Foucault 136) In Naked Lunch, Burroughs demonstrates this idea of the body as an object of power. The body is the most critical element in gaining, maintaining, and asserting power for the control addicts in the novel. The body that is Other is impossible to control, and so the addicts invade the body as a virus and force it to obey and respond, to become a non-thinking, empty body that is an object that is easily controlled. Foucault explains how the manipulation of the body serves the purpose of efficiency: [The body becomes] more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, is gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A “political anatomy,” which was also a “mechanics of power,” was being born; it defined how one may have a 54 hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. (Foucault 138) In Naked Lunch, nothing exists to serve the greater good, to protect and advance humanity. Power and therefore bodily manipulation serve the control addict. The population is destroyed in the name of power gains. And so, efficiency, for Burroughs, is not the use of time and space to an advantage, but the notion of efficiency refers to how efficiently a body can be controlled. As Foucault describes, in Naked Lunch, the body is rearranged and broken down and forced to operate as the control addict wishes. The body becomes empty with no thought or emotion or motivation to revolt. The individual body is not an effective tool in political or economic growth until it is interfered with, until it is disciplined to fit within a political mechanism, to become more useful. A mass of organic bodies moving about the state on their own free will would be counterproductive. The slightest detail must be paid to every aspect of the body as the body begins to serve as a machine, as Foucault writes, “a meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans and data” (Foucault 141). It is not enough, for example, for a soldier to raise his rifle to his shoulder, the entirety of the time and space had to be regulated and the body had to be disciplined to execute the maneuver efficiently, and to blend all soldiers into one 55 cohesive unit: “Prussian regulations of 1743 laid down six stages to bring the weapon to one’s foot, four to extend it, thirteen to raise it to the shoulder, etc.” (Foucault 154). A simple movement like raising one’s rifle need be broken down in systems of bodily control because “one must seek to intensify the use of the slightest moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation, were inexhaustible or as if, at least by an ever more detailed internal arrangement, one could tend towards an ideal point at which one maintained maximum speed and maximum efficiency” (Foucault 154). Not only did the scale of control move from large wholesale to small individual bodies, but the object of control changed as well: “It was...no longer the signifying elements of behavior or the language of the body, but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization...the only truly important ceremony is that of exercise” (Foucault 137). The body was disciplined by the methods of control over the individual, controlling the elements of the body, and constant monitoring of the body. “[Discipline] became general formulas of domination” (Foucault 137) in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If the body can be disciplined and molded, if it can be dominated, time and space can be used with no waste, creating the ultimate of productivity; the body is no longer an individual human being operating freely, but it becomes a cog in a machine, moving rhythmically in pre-established patterns in synch with the other parts of the machine. Of course, not all pieces of a machine are the same, and so it also became necessary to compare bodies with others, and to classify them in accordance with skill, speed, and efficiency (Foucault 145). Since the seventeenth century there has been a “detailed political investment of the body, a ‘new micro-physics’ of power; 56 and... [techniques of discipline] had constantly reached out to ever broader domains, as if they tended to cover the entire social body” (Foucault 139). The manipulation and assertion of control over the body became increasingly important in power structures because politically and economically the docile body is the greatest tool in progress and advancement. What Burroughs demonstrates in Naked Lunch is all of these elements applied to the body with the intention of creating docile bodies to the point of being empty and unthinking entirely, as well as completely homogenous, for the purpose of creating a society that is easily controlled. Perhaps the intention of bodily control is to create an efficient machine, but Burroughs shows how manipulating and degrading bodies is counterproductive to humanity when it is in the hands of control addicts. As Jennie Skerl writes, “The addict’s experience has led to the realization that the body is a biological trap and society is run by ‘control addicts’ who use the needs of the body to satisfy their obsession with power” (Skerl 37). Bodily manipulation services the control addicts in power by reducing bodies to sub-human empty vessels, and it is precisely the manipulation of the body for the benefit of control addicts that will bring the apocalypse. Disciplining the body is not a tool for human advancement and achievement in Naked Lunch; the invading and changing of the body in Naked Lunch is a political tool and important to political structures because it degrades the body to sub-human, it leaves people unable to revolt and unable to slip outside of the scope of control of the addicts in charge. Homogeneity is dire to the control addicts in Naked Lunch. As Foucault describes, homogeneity breeds efficiency. But in Naked Lunch homogeneity is 57 important for control addicts because only like people are easily controlled. If there are people who are unable to conform, their bodies are changed and degraded, and essentially the humanity within the body is eliminated. A body that is disciplined can act out of habit; the disciplined body does not need to be a thinking person but can be empty and act on instinct, like an insect. It is these unthinking bodies that best serve the control addicts in charge. The effects of bodily manipulation are speckled throughout the entirety of Naked Lunch, but the routines that best exemplify the reasons behind bodily manipulation, the methods, and the effects of bodily manipulation are “Benway,” the untitled routine commonly known as the “Talking Asshole” routine, “The Examination” and “Meeting of International Conference of Technological Psychiatry.” Benway, as mentioned, is a medical doctor who is commissioned by different political heads and works in a number of political bureaucracies. First and foremost, Benway is a scientist. The science he practices happens to be medicine, putting him in direct contact with bodies; those bodies sent to him are considered degenerate and in need of fixing. Benway’s medicine is somewhat backward from what one would consider good medical practices. Benway is himself a virus that invades the body of an individual, changes that body, degenerates that body, and often times destroys the body. But like any virus, a host is always needed for survival. Without bodies to invade and destroy, Benway himself would be destroyed; “Doctoring is in [his] blood” (Burroughs 30). Benway is hooked on his work and the role he plays in the bureaucracies the same way control addicts are hooked on power. Benway refers to 58 his work as his “habits” (Burroughs 30). Just as the junky needs junk to survive, and the pusher needs junkies to survive, as the virus needs a host, and as the control addicts need bodies to control to survive, Benway needs bodies to invade to survive. Benway’s focus is the individual body rather than groups of bodies forming a population. He evaluates the Otherness of each individual body and determines the best and most effective way to change that body. Since each body is different, as Foucault suggests, each body can not receive the same treatment. Benway has devised a number of methods to change the body, to remove the dangerous humanity that lurks beneath the flesh, and create a mass of homogenized empty bodies. Lee arrives at Freeland to persuade Benway to perform homogeneity for Islam Inc. (Burroughs 30), and while he is there, Benway shows him around the hospital. There is a vast array of patients in the institution who may or may not be ill, but all have one thing in common: an identity that has been deemed “Other.” There are homosexuals, schizophrenics, religious fanatics, intellectual avant-gardists, “suspected agents, saboteurs, and political deviants” (Burroughs 23) among others. All have Otherness in common, an Other way of thinking, living, and being that is out of the scope of control of the power structures. So those political figures, clinging desperately to their control, enlist the likes of Benway to “cure” them. In Freeland, Benway is director of the R.C., the “Reconditioning Center” (Burroughs 27). He tells Lee: “Lester Stroganoff Smuunn- ‘El Hassein’- turned himself into a Latah trying to perfect A.O.P., Automatic Obedience Processing. A martyr to the industry...’“(Latah is a condition occurring in Southeast Asia. Otherwise sane, 59 Latahs compulsively imitate every motion once their attention is attracted by snapping fingers or calling sharply. A form of involuntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once.) (Burroughs 27) The R.C. is a department designed to produce bodies that are obedient and homogenized. All of Benway’s work has the objective of producing automatic obedience: disciplined bodies that are made docile and operate without thought or reason. As Foucault suggested, a body that has been disciplined and conditioned to act out of habit, without thought, is an effective and necessary political tool. In Naked Lunch, creating bodies that not only operate out of habit, but are unable to think and therefore cannot act any other way, is one of the most critical of political tools for control addicts. A society of Latahs would be one of the easiest imaginable societies to control; at the snap of a finger, the entire population would imitate the leader. It would create a completely homogenized society with no Others, everyone behaving exactly the same, and no one thinking or able to revolt. After the R.C. ward, Benway shows Lee the “IND’s...Irreversible Neural Damage. Over-liberated you might say...a drag on the industry” (Burroughs 30). Lee looks into one IND’s eyes and “Nobody, nothing looks back” (Burroughs 30). There is no person left inside of the body. The body is completely empty and void of human qualities. These people who were too liberal, too liberated in their natural life have been admitted to the hospital and are degraded to their instinctual core; they become some of the people who are empty bodies, little more than insects. 60 “They still have reflexes. Watch this.” Benway takes a chocolate bar from his pocket, removes the wrapper and holds it in front of the man’s nose. The man sniffs. His jaws begin to work. He makes snatching motions with his hands. Saliva drips from his mouth and hangs off his chin in long streamers. His stomach rumbles. His whole body writhes in peristalsis. Benway steps back and holds up the chocolate. The man drops to his knees, throws back his head and barks. Benway tosses the chocolate. The man snaps at it, misses, scrambles around on the floor making slobbering noises. He crawls under the bed, finds the chocolate and crams it into his mouth with both hands. (Burroughs 31) Benway refers to the INDs as “our failure” (Burroughs 31). These bodies were too liberated, they were impossible to homogenize. It is the intention of Benway and the other scientists at Annexia and Freeland to homogenize the population, to create a society of docile bodies through rigorous discipline. But on occasion a body comes along that is “over-liberated” and they have to be reduced to sub-human, to empty bodies that operate only on instinct. INDs “don’t come back, won’t come back, once they’re gone” (Burroughs 31). INDs are as close to dead as a body can be, but by remaining alive, they remain under the jurisdiction of the control addicts getting off on their degradation. While he is showing Lee around the hospital, Benway demonstrates and explains many of the methods used to “cure” the patients sent to him in Annexia and Freeland Republic. These methods, designed to homogenize bodies and eliminate the humanity from bodies are much like what Foucault calls discipline. These procedures 61 are what Foucault describes as “coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior” (Foucault 138). Benway tells Lee that: While in general I avoid the use of torture- torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance- the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. (Burroughs 23) Torture is used as a means of obtaining information from a subject, a confession of Otherness or a selling out of the Otherness of others, as well as keeping the population in fear as I have demonstrated in my discussion of bureaus. But as Benway explains, physically tormenting the body not only makes an enemy out of the torturer, but it makes the body resist. If the enemy, the torturer, is the one who is attempting to obtain information, and the body is in resistance to the torturer, it is more difficult to obtain that crucial information from the body. Benway prefers to pose a constant threat of torture. When the body is threatened, but that threat is not carried out, the body becomes grateful, and rather than resistant, the body is helpless. In this state, when the body is rigid with fear, information is easily obtained. However, Benway does find a use of torture “as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved” (Burroughs 23). Benway describes it as a treatment, implying that it is a process to cure the body. There are of course phases of treatment, and elements of treatment cannot be applied 62 before the patient is ready: a patient cannot enter physical therapy before his bones have completely healed, and in the medicine Benway practices, torture is a phase of treatment that cannot be used before the patient’s body is at a point where receiving torture would be beneficial to the purpose of the control addicts. Benway also explains the subject deserves torture as a punishment. In this statement it puts the blame of Otherness on the body, as though it is his own fault he a “different” and thinking body. The control addicts are not blamed for their paranoia of Otherness or their insatiable need to invade and degrade bodies for their own fulfillment, but rather, the body that is considered Other not only needs to be changed, but is punished for being Other. Beyond torture and the threat of torture to make the body docile, Benway explains the use of drugs in obtaining incriminating information from subjects, and degrading subjects’ bodies to non-thinking sub-human empty vessels. “Drugs remain an essential tool of the interrogator in his assault on the subject’s personal identity” (Burroughs 25). Again, in this instance, Benway is very candid about the happenings within the hospital and the state of Annexia. Subjects are picked up for a variety of reasons, all pertaining to Otherness, and are tortured, or not tortured, interrogated, and administered drugs, not because they hold pertinent information, but because their personal identity is being attacked. Being identified as Other is the only real crime in the global communities of Naked Lunch. Drug use not only assaults the subject’s personal identity, but also serves to produce “[dissolved] resistance” (Burroughs 24) and “automatic obedience” (Burroughs 25). As Foucault describes, a disciplined body is able to operate on the 63 principle of automatic obedience; a body that is disciplined is able to act accordingly without thought, but by habit. Benway describes methods of producing automatic obedience by invading the body with drugs. He describes the different effects of different drugs and combinations of drugs that work or do not work, and their specific effects on the body and brain: “The subject can be reduced to deep depression by administering large doses of benzedrine for several days. Psychosis can be induced by continual large doses of cocaine or demerol or by the abrupt withdrawal of barbiturates after prolonged administration. He can be addicted to dihydro-oxy-heroin and subjected to withdrawal” (Burroughs 25). All of these bodily effects dissolve resistance to doctors and interrogators, and produce automatic obedience to doctors, interrogators, and most importantly control addicts in power. Drugs can be effective in not only producing automatic obedience in subjects, but also in degrading the body to sub-human, creating a non-thinking body that is incapable of resisting the control addict’s authority, or creating a revolt. Benway also describes to Lee the effects prolonged cocaine use has on the brain and body: Brain cells don’t come back once they’re gone, and when the addict runs out of brain cells he is in a terrible fucking position. Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence- their speech centers are destroyed...a group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. (Burroughs 24) 64 The body has been reduced to an insect-like existence like the INDs. He cannot speak; he has no concern for his surroundings or his health. He is no longer a human being, but an insect. Like an ant easily caught under the magnifying glass of a child attempting to burn him, he jerks from the flame, responding only by instinct. Benway creates an apocalyptic image of “idiots [stretched] to the horizon” (Burroughs 24) as a demonstration of how possible it would be to reduce all of humanity to this insect state. In the novel, doctors and scientists are already well on their way to making such an image real. But the image is a horrible glimpse at the apocalyptic world the control addicts are in the process of creating. Benway also describes a number of psychological methods used to break down the subject and make him confess, homogenize, and change: “There are various ‘psychological methods,’ compulsory psychoanalysis, for example” (Burroughs 25). Benway puts psychological methods in quotation marks because, while the brain is being manipulated, drugs are still needed to create a body that can undergo the psychological methods; “you can dig it with drugs and hypnosis” (Burroughs 26). The body is always the path to the mind and therefore the path to total control and complete automatic obedience. One of the most well-known routines in Naked Lunch, untitled but commonly referred to as “The Talking Asshole” routine, is important in demonstrating the use of the body to create an efficient body that is easily controlled. In this routine, Benway clearly explains that a body that is unable to think is the most efficient kind of body. In this routine Doctor Benway and Doctor Schafer are performing an operation. Benway says to Schafer 65 The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place. (Burroughs 119) As Foucault suggests, the purpose of disciplining the body is to change it for the sake of efficiency. For Benway, discipline goes further. Change is not simply an alteration, but an elimination of the human qualities of a body. By physically altering the body, the human inefficiencies of the body can be eliminated, and the body will be less likely to get out of order. Order and the elimination of chaos caused by Otherness are priorities of control addicts in power. Benway proceeds to tell Schafer about “the man who taught his asshole to talk” (Burroughs 119). The story goes that a man had developed a sort of ventriloquist act with his asshole, but as time progressed, the asshole began talking on its own. The asshole developed the ability to eat as well, and became, like Benway suggested would be the epitome of efficiency, one all-purpose hole. The asshole then proceeded to take over the body, sealing up the mouth and the whole head would have amputated spontaneous...except for the eyes you dig. That’s the one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was not 66 more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk. (Burroughs 121, emphasis in original) It is important to note that the brain dies. Benway had already suggested that an all-purpose hole would make the human body more efficient, and knowing the story of the man who taught his asshole to talk, he was already aware of the potential implications of creating such an “efficient” body. In the global communities of Naked Lunch, bodies that do not think or feel are essential to control addicts because they are the easiest bodies to control, and by being the easiest to control, they are the most efficient bodies in the population. All of the bodies that are invaded by the doctors in Naked Lunch are manipulated and changed into bodies that are unable to have independent thought or emotion, and therefore are unable to revolt or resist the authority of the control addicts. One of the most important means of manipulating the body and degrading the body for the effect of automatic obedience is “sexual humiliation” (Burroughs 26). Sexual humiliation is seen frequently throughout Naked Lunch and as Ihab Hassan writes in his essay “The Subtracting Machine: The Works of William Burroughs”: “In Burroughs’ work, sex is usually a violation. It is sterile, inhuman, malevolent. It is a perversion of the life instinct, an organic process turned mechanical. Sadism, masochism, and pederasty prevail; tenderness, love, and knowledge are absent” (Hassan 55). Benway is able to take a natural bodily need and function and turn it into a source of humiliation and shame, leaving the body at the mercy of the doctors and 67 other bureaucrats, namely powerful control addicts. Benway describes the possibilities of the process to Lee: Nakedness, stimulation with aphrodisiacs, constant supervision to embarrass subject and prevent relief of masturbation (erections during sleep automatically turn on an enormous vibrating electric buzzer that throws the subject out of bed into cold water, thus reducing the incidence of wet dreams to a minimum). Kicks to hypnotize a priest and tell him he is about to consummate a hypostatic union with the Lamb- then steer a randy old sheep up his ass. After that the Interrogator can gain complete hypnotic control- the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame...I recall this one kid, I condition to shit at sight of me. Then I wash his ass and screw him. And he was a lovely fellah too. And sometimes a subject will burst into boyish tears because he can’t keep from ejaculate when you screw him. Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. (Burroughs 26-27) Sexual humiliation creates an endless possibility of automatic obedience. Humiliating the body sexually disciplines the body in such a way that not only creates automatic response along the lines of Pavlov’s dogs, but also degrades the body and the mind, leaving the body vulnerable, ashamed. When the body is in such a state of degradation and humiliation he is at the complete mercy of the Interrogator; the body is left in much a similar state as with the forced entries into the homes of the population of Annexia by the police, as Benway also described. 68 Again, the subject is considered a political threat because of his Otherness and is treated as a political prisoner. Benway explains to Lee that “Homosexuality is a political crime” (Burroughs 34, emphasis in original). Not only is he being “reformed” by the medical teams and political systems, but he is interrogated. It is never specified what the interrogators are hoping to drag out of the subjects. It seems the subjects are interrogated only as a means of mental breakdown, making them crack under pressure, allowing the interrogators and doctors, and thus political control addicts, to gain control more easily. Sexual humiliation is the opposite of natural sex. Natural sexual activity creates new life through the body whereas sexual humiliation serves to destroy the life that exists in the body. As Hassan writes, “Sex and junk express for Burroughs the extinction of life” (Hassan 56). This is accurate in that not only is the individual body being destroyed through sexual humiliation and sexual degradation, but no further life will come from that body. Sexual humiliation is one major component to the apocalypse. Sexual humiliation tied to interrogation is very clearly demonstrated in the routine titled “The Examination” (Burroughs 168-78). Carl Peterson is called into Benway’s office in “the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis” (Burroughs 168) in Freeland. Carl, upon receiving notice of his appointment questions “‘What on earth could they want with me?...A mistake most likely.’ But he knew they didn’t make mistakes. Certainly not mistakes of identity” (Burroughs 168). Carl had been noted as a potential Other, a possible homosexual. Benway explains to Carl 69 ‘take the matter of uh sexual deviation...We regard it as a misfortune...a sickness...certainly nothing to be censored or uh sanctioned any more than say...tuberculosis...any illness imposes certain, should we say obligations, certain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authorities concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed...compatible with adequate protection of other individuals who are not so infected...I am sure you will agree that individuals infected with hurumph what the French call “les malades gallants” heh heh heh should be compelled to undergo treatment if they do not report voluntarily.’ (Burroughs 170-71, emphasis in original) In this passage, Benway equates one particular form of Otherness, sexual deviance, to tuberculosis, explicating that, like a genuine illness, Otherness can and must be cured. It is of major concern of “the authorities concerned with public health,” who in the global communities of Naked Lunch, would be the control addicts as well as medical professionals. Patients, as Benway explains, are forced to be cured if they do not do so willingly. There is no liberty of choice, and there is no option to remain an Other. All Otherness will be stomped out under the visage of being cured or healed. Benway goes on to explain to Carl that he has been called in to be tested for homosexuality, though his explanation is as meandering as the “steel enamel labyrinth of the Ministry” (Burroughs 169). Benway evades Carl’s questions and goes on a number of tangents, drawing out the whole procedure, clearly part of the intended humiliation and mental breakdown. Carl is sent to a room to give a semen sample and “felt ashamed as if his mother had laid out a handkerchief for him” 70 (Burroughs 173). The nurse who is working at the time treats Carl with disgust and contempt. As he leaves the Ministry “the broken, false grin burned his face with shame” (Burroughs 4). When Carl leaves he is confronted by a homosexual tourist who “looked at him and raised a knowing eyebrow” (Burroughs 174). Carl, humiliated and offended, curses at the tourist who responds “Oh! I wouldn’t be calling any names if I were you, chicken. You’re hooked too. I saw you coming out of the Institute” (Burroughs 175). The activities that occur within the institution not only humiliate the patient and fill him with shame of his own body, but by merely entering the hospital doors, the patient is understood to be a homosexual, whether he is or not. This sort of humiliation degenerates the body and mind of the patient, making him more easily controlled. At his second appointment, Benway tells Carl, again after much digression, that his test was negative, though fingering through his file, Benway “finally...stopped and frowned and pursed his lips” (Burroughs 175), a sign that all was not well with Carl. Benway then begins to question Carl about his time in the military and asks if he had any pin-up girls. Benway proceeds with a test, asking Carl to choose a pin-up girl from a group. After Carl selects, Benway tells him he has excellent taste and that some of the women in the photos are actually men in drag. In the next phase of the interrogation Benway asks Carl “you will please oblige to tell me how many times and under what circumstances you have uh indulged in homosexual acts???...If you have never done so I shall be inclined to think of you as a somewhat atypical young man” (Burroughs 178). Carl informs 71 Benway that while in the military service he had engaged in homosexual activities, to which Benway responds he would have done the same. But next Benway proceeds to ask if Carl had ever engaged in homosexual prostitution. All of this interrogation serves to humiliate the subject and make him feel shame about his body. Like the citizens of Annexia who have no privacy and are constantly being imposed upon by the police, and end up cowering in their corners, unable to resist, the sexually humiliated body is also left unable to resist. Carl has a moment during the questioning when “a green flare exploded in [his] brain. He saw Hans’ lean brown body- twisting toward him, quick breath on his shoulder. The flare went out. Some huge insect was squirming in his hand” (Burroughs 178). Benway, it appears, has convinced Carl that he was called to the hospital because he truly is a latent homosexual. Benway explains to Lee the method of executing such a feat: “An agent is trained to deny his agent identity by asserting his cover story. So why not use psychic jiu-jitsu and go along with him? Suggest that his cover story is his identity and that he has no other. His agent identity becomes unconscious, that is, out of his control; and you can dig it with drugs and hypnosis. You can make a square heterosex citizen queer with this angle...that is, reinforce and second his rejection of normally latent homosexual trends...drugs, hypnosis, and-” Benway flipped a limp wrist. (Burroughs 26) Carl had experienced many moments in the interrogation when it was apparent that perhaps he had been drugged or telepathy is being used on him, but clearly “psychic jiu-jitsu” was being used on him. He seems to fall asleep twice- the 72 first time he saw himself “opening a green door” (Burroughs 173), and the second is the incident with the green flare. He also has the feeling “something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of the testes, the contractions of the rectum. He was in a room filled with green light” (Burroughs 174). All of these incidents are inexplicable to Carl and he says “the whole thing is unreal” (Burroughs 179). Each of these incidents connected by the color green indicates an invasion of Carl’s body by Benway, unbeknownst to him. The use of “psychic jiu-jitsu,” as Benway calls it, ties in nicely with sexual humiliation as a means of degrading the body, forcing it to cower like a neurotic cat, unable to resist or revolt, leaving it completely vulnerable to the control addicts who need that body. It is apparent at the end of the routine that Carl has been destroyed by the interrogation and sexual humiliation. He attempts to leave: “walking across the room toward the door. He had been walking a long time. A creeping numbness dragged his legs. The door seemed to recede. ‘Where can you go, Carl?’ The doctor’s voice reached him from a great distance. ‘Out...Away...Through the door...’ ‘The Green Door Carl?’ The doctor’s voice was barely audible. The whole room was exploding out into space” (Burroughs 179). There is no way out for Carl. Benway has claimed his mind by attacking his body. The result of all such methods of reducing the human to an empty, homogenized body-denying it its natural state- is demonstrated on a number of occasions throughout the novel. The first incident is in the “Benway” routine when the subjects in the R.C. are accidentally released. The scene is chaotic; it is evident that any patient who enters a hospital will not leave because they are unfit to operate 73 in society, perhaps worse off than before they were “reconditioned,” though they better serve the needs of the control addicts. From the roof of the R.C. we survey a scene of unparalleled horror. IND’s stand around in front of the cafe tables, long streamers of saliva hang off their chins, stomachs noisily churning, others ejaculate at the sight of women. Latahs imitate the passers-by with monkey-like obscenity. Junkies have looted the drugstore and fix on every street corner...Catatonics decorate the parks...Agitated schizophrenics rush through the streets with mangled, inhuman cries. A group of P.R.’s- Partially Reconditioned- have surrounded some homosexual tourist with horrible knowing smiles showing the Nordic skull beneath in double exposure...A contingent of howling simopaths swing from chandeliers, balconies and trees, shitting and pissing on passers-by. (Burroughs 35) The riot carries on for some seven pages, all with the same animalistic images. The bodies that have been released are no longer human. They behave as caged animals, freed from their confines. They kill and fuck and destroy; they act on instinct alone, unable to think or feel. They revert to the behaviors that landed them in the hospital: junk abuse and sexual perversions, among other behaviors, but more extremely. A combination of treatment- reduction to instinctual bodies- and sudden freedom has driven the bodies to horrific behavior. Of course, those bodies that have undergone the most extreme of treatments, the INDs, are unable to even act out their animal aggression; they stand around drooling. 74 In the routine “Meeting of International Conference of Technological Psychiatry” (Burroughs 94-96), Burroughs creates the image of the centipede to demonstrate the effects of forced homogenization of bodies by control addicts who desperately fear Otherness. Doctor “Fingers” Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid (Burroughs 94), who has worked with Doctor Benway, is presenting his “Master Work: The Completely All American Deanxietized Man” (Burroughs 94) at the conference. Schafer has earned his moniker by performing “forcible lobotomy” (Burroughs 95). Schafer explains to the group “the human nervous system can be reduced to a compact and abbreviated spinal column. The brain, front, middle and rear must follow the adenoid, the wisdom tooth, the appendix” (Burroughs 94). Schafer connects the brain to parts of the body that are all unessential and disposable. The adenoid, wisdom tooth, and appendix can all be removed from the body with the intention of curing the body from illness, with little negative consequence. Schafer implies at the conference that the brain can be reduced to its core, removing the ability of thought and emotion with the intention of “curing” the body by removing any possibility of Otherness. Clarence, Dr. Schafer’s All American Deanxietized Man, is carried out onto a platform at the conference: “The man wriggles...His flesh turns to viscid, transparent jelly that drifts away in green mist, unveiling a monster black centipede. Waves of unknown stench fill the room, searing the lungs, grabbing the stomach” (Burroughs 94). The man turned centipede is indicative of the results of the destruction of Otherness in the quest for total control. Clarence was a man, but Schafer invaded his body and degraded his brain for the sake of experimental medicine and psychology 75 commissioned by control addicts looking for new ways to assert their power. The result of the centipede is the physical representation of the degradation of humanity. As Hassan writes “Metamorphosis...destroys the objective reality of the world, the identity and separateness of things; it is the actual image of disintegration. Disintegration is indeed the end for Burroughs’ vision...a dark apocalypse” (Hassan 59). The doctors participating in the conference reel in horror and disgust from the appearance of Clarence the centipede. It is not the medicine that Schafer has practiced, nor the reasons for performing such experimental medicine that disgusts the conferents. After all, they are all participating in the same Conference of Technological Psychology and all, it can be assumed, practice similar procedures. Doctor Benway is one of the doctors present at the conference, and he as much as anyone else, shows horror at the appearance of Clarence the centipede. Benway, more than any other doctor in Naked Lunch, has performed countless atrocities against humanity, and himself has reduced human beings to insect-like creatures. The difference is that Benway’s insects still physically maintain a human form and for the most part, the horror of the transformations Benway has performed on human beings is able to be hidden from the general view. Clarence is disgusting and horrific because his degradation is out in the open for the public to see. The doctors at the conference burn Clarence to death. In his attempt to reduce Clarence to a non-thinking human being, unable to exhibit Otherness, Schafer failed and created a creature that was so removed from humanity that it was unable to maintain a human form, and therefore exhibited an Otherness that was horrible. 76 Since all Otherness is considered dangerous in the global communities of Naked Lunch, Clarence has to be destroyed. His body was invaded, his ability to think and feel were removed, but the procedure was unsuccessful. The only option remaining is to eliminate Clarence entirely. After the burning of Clarence there is a trial for his murder. The trial is primarily a performance, necessary to keep the public calm and unafraid of their government, to divert the horror away from the political leaders and put it onto Schafer, and to present a facade of protection. During the kangaroo trial, The D.A. points dramatically: “He it is...He and no other who has reduced whole provinces of our fair land to a state bordering on the far side of idiocy...He it is who has filled great warehouses with row on row, tier on tier of helpless creatures who must have their every want attended...’The Drones’ he calls them with a cynical leer of pure educated evil...Gentlemen, I say to you that the wanton murder of Clarence Cowie must not go unavenged: This foul crime shrieks like a wounded faggot for justice at least!” (Burroughs 96) In this dramatic performance, the District Attorney places the full blame on Schafer for not only the reduction of Clarence, but of countless other human bodies. He diverts all attention from the political control addicts who are behind the reduction of humanity, who commission the likes of Schafer and Benway to perform such procedures. He shouts for justice and makes dramatic declarations, but no justice is ever brought as far as Burroughs shows us. There is no punishment for Schafer or any of the doctors who burned the centipede. But by holding the trial, the population is convinced that the government is there to protect their well being and that nothing 77 of what happened to Clarence will ever happen to them. By placating the population who have yet to undergo bodily invasion and “reconditioning” of their own, and by maintaining the visage of goodness, protection, and being of a welfare state, the control addicts and all who work in their bureaucracies are able to divert a possible rebellion. The powerful control addicts in Naked Lunch operate as a virus, invading and degrading the body. Ironically it is often medical doctors who are commissioned to work for the control addicts who are in physical contact with the bodies. The addicts need to assert control to survive, just as a junk addict needs junk to survive, and the most efficient way to gain, assert, and maintain control over the population is to create a population that is homogenous, docile, and unable to have independent though and feeling. Otherness left unchecked presents the potential of resistance and revolution against the control addicts. Otherness must then be eliminated. By invading and degrading the individual body, Otherness can be eliminated, thought can be eliminated, and bodies can be left empty, operating on Automatic Obedience, unable to resist. The individual body is the most important element in the assertion of power of the control addicts. The patients admitted to the hospitals essentially are used like junk. Once they are selected by the control addicts in power to be changed, they never make it back out and operate as human beings in society. So the more bodies the control addicts use, the more they need to survive and maintain power. But like junk addiction, the more bodies the control addict has under his jurisdiction, the more bodies he will use and destroy. This is precisely why the apocalypse is on the 78 horizon. As long as there are control addicts, there will be the destruction of humanity. As Foucault suggests, a disciplined body, a body that is able to act out of habit brought by intense training and discipline, without having to think, is the most efficient body, and will produce the most efficient society. Foucault states that the body is a political object and a target of power. In Naked Lunch, it is very much the case that the body is targeted by political figures with the intention of changing the body and creating non-thinking bodies for the purpose of efficiency. However, in Naked Lunch, the concept of efficiency is not attributed to the society, but it is attributed to the ability of the control addicts to gain efficiently, assert, and maintain power. It is the degradation of the body to insect-like creatures that will ultimately bring the apocalypse. Eventually all bodies will be degraded and humanity will no longer exist; humanity is not just the appearance of being a human- of having a human body- but humanity includes the qualities of being human, which include the ability to think independently and to experience a range of emotion. When those elements are eliminated, and all human bodies are reduced to insect behavior, human kind will be eliminated. Section V: Technology Section V A: Technological Advancements of the Post-War Era 79 Another major component of the postwar era that Burroughs comments on in Naked Lunch and uses to demonstrate the coming apocalypse is detrimental scientific and technological advancements. Burroughs saw the technologies developed during the era as having the potential to eliminate humanity through the process of eliminating individuality. Paranoia and fear of Otherness turned into urgency with the development of the Cold War, and that urgent fear of the Other drove the American government to seek ways to annihilate that Other before they could annihilate us. Science played a critical role in the post-World War Two era. Man was using science to control and destroy other men. Technology was developed that could wipe out entire countries of people, and the development of these technologies was moving at a rapid rate. Science gave man the godlike power to choose an enemy and destroy them; it took the fear of Otherness to a whole new level- it created the potential to eliminate Otherness entirely. The post-war era was a time of fearful change. The American enemy was changing: the Soviet Union and China, once allies, were becoming America’s archnemeses, and once enemies Japan, Germany, and Italy were becoming allies (Halberstam 27), and the ways of conducting warfare were growing more and more lethal. In 1945 America successfully tested the atomic bomb for the first time, and from it Truman was changed; Winston Churchill, after learning of the test, stated about Truman’s behavior “After having read the report, he was a changed man. He told the Russians just where they got off and generally bossed the meeting [at Potsdam]” (Halberstam 24). Filled with new confidence in the weapon and a firm 80 believer in Soviet ineptitude, Truman was sure that the Russians would never be able to build a bomb equal to that of America’s (Halberstam 25). While some top scientists and intelligence agents believed the Soviets were five years behind America (Halberstam 25), there was a general American skepticism of Soviet expertise, and there was a sense of safety and protection from the evil communist other. The American monopoly of the atomic bomb only lasted for four years, and ended on September 3, 1949 (Halberstam 25). On that day it was discovered that the Russians had detonated a nuclear device sometime between August 26 and 29 (Halberstam 25). On the 19th of September the Atomic Energy Commission confirmed the dreaded news that the Soviets had the bomb too (Halberstam 25-26). David Lilienthal, head of the Atomic Energy Commission wrote in his diary that this event was “what we’d feared ever since January, 1946” (qtd. in Halberstam 26). “Both American foreign and domestic politics were instantly and dramatically altered. This, noted Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the leading Republican internationalist, ‘is now a different world’“ (Halberstam 26). The time of security was over. America still had the potential to obliterate their enemy, but their enemy held the same potential; we could strike first, but they could strike back, or worse, they could strike first. SAC commander Curtis LeMay once articulated that Joe One, the Russian nuclear bomb test, had ended “the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows in doing it” (qtd. in Halberstam 26). With the Soviet development of the atomic bomb, and with the loss of the ability to completely annihilate the Russians with no worries, there was a growing 81 sense of impending doom in America. George Kistiakowsky, a member of the team that fashioned the bomb, believed the Trinity explosion, the test of the American atomic bomb, was “a glimpse of the apocalypse” (Halberstam 29). He said “in the last milli-second of the earth’s existence- the last men will see what we saw” (qtd. in Halberstam 29). While many politicians claimed the use of the atomic bomb had saved millions of lives because of Japanese resistance to American forces (Halberstam 29), there was still a sense that Armageddon was on the horizon. Debate about the development of the hydrogen bomb began. The possibility of the H bomb had been present since the early 1940s when atomic bomb research was underway (Halberstam 29), but the debate about the hydrogen bomb was different from that of the atomic bomb. The hydrogen bomb was a weapon that would unleash one third of all of the explosive power used in World War Two in one explosion (Halberstam 29), and debate about developing this weapon was occurring during a time of peace, rather than in a time of war, like the atomic bomb (Halberstam 29). With no full-blown war occurring America was nonetheless preparing to develop a weapon that “threatened the very existence of humanity” (Halberstam 29). Winston Churchill wrote in 1955 “The atomic bomb, with all its terrors, did not carry us outside the scope of human control or manageable events in thought or action in peace or war” (qtd. in Halberstam 30), but the hydrogen bomb did. The hydrogen bomb was placing godlike powers into the hands of common men, men who were paranoid. The power to destroy humanity out of fear was a real possibility. Since the Soviets were so close behind America in their development of the atomic bomb, there was no doubt that the Soviets would also have the ability to 82 develop the hydrogen bomb. Senator Brien McMahon, considered a moderate democrat on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy who became the most important congressional member on the issue of atomic weaponry, had said on the Senate floor “[The bombing of Hiroshima was] the single greatest event in world history since the birth of Jesus Christ” (qtd in Halberstam 36); if the Russians had taken the lead in the nuclear race that would, according to McMahon, put “total power in the hands of total evil [which] will equal total destruction” (qtd. in Halberstam 36). Lilienthal said that what McMahon was essentially talking about was “the inevitability of war with the Russians and what he says adds up to one thing: blow them off the face of the earth quick, before they do the same to us- and we haven’t much time” (qtd. in Halberstam 36). There was of course the issue of the perpetual race for a more deadly weapon; “The Super [hydrogen bomb] did not necessarily offer greater security, but might only create an endless race for ever more powerful weapons” (Halberstam 35). The playing field had to be level if we were not ahead, and so peace time research and development of the hydrogen bomb commenced. On November 1, 1952 the first thermonuclear (hydrogen) test took place (Halberstam 98). “Mike,” the first thermonuclear explosion, yielded 10.4 million tons of TNT, a force a thousand times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, and left a crater a half mile deep and two miles wide (98-99). The Russians were not far behind America, however, and by the summer of 1953 had completed the plans for their first thermonuclear test, and on August 12, 1953, four years after their first atomic test, the Russians carried out their first thermonuclear test (Halberstam 99). The first tests were not bombs but rather very large devices, but on November 22 of 1955, the 83 Russians tested a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb (Halberstam 99). A hundred miles away from the impact the windows blew out of a meat-packing plant, and even further away soot blew into the homes of a small town; even the men who had built the bomb were awestruck (Halberstam 99). But the atomic bomb and later hydrogen bomb were not the only technological advancements of the time that were used to eliminate Otherness. Early in the century, Henry Ford had perfected the assembly line to mass produce automobiles. In the post-war era the economy was surging in America, there was a “desperate hunger for products after the long drought of some fifteen years, caused by the Depression and then by World War Two” (Halberstam 118), and automobiles were a major commodity of the time. “Ordinary Americans could afford the ModelT” (Halberstam 116); vehicles were not for the white collar Americans only any more. With more Americans owning automobiles, more roads were developed. Networks of roads and highways began to open the vast farmlands that surrounded American cities. William J. Levitt saw the potential for suburbia. After the war there was a general vision of a better life of prosperity and happiness on the horizon, and at the core of that vision was the prospect of owning one’s own house (Halberstam 131). A vehicle was one kind of status symbol, but a house was a different kind of status symbol; it represented prosperity and happiness on a different level. More often than not, the people who intended to own one had, in the past, rented apartments, which symbolized not merely a lack of space but also a lack of independence and security. Owning a house came to be the 84 embodiment of the new American dream. As promised by endless Hollywood films, it represented fulfillment, contentment: confident dads, perky moms, and glowing children, attending good schools and, later, college. A house brought the American family together at precisely the moment, of course, when cars and television began pulling it apart. (Halberstam 132, emphasis in original) William J. Levitt was sure he knew what the new era and the new American family wanted. He said as he was beginning his first development “We believe that the market for custom housing, like that for custom tailoring no longer exists. People who want to buy that kind of thing will always be able to get it, but the real market is for the ordinary, mass-produced suit of clothes. And you can’t build thirty-thousand dollar houses by the six-thousands” (Halberstam 134), and in 1946 the Levitts pushed ahead with the dream, creating a community twenty miles from Manhattan that would become the largest housing project in American history (Halberstam 134). Levitt believed, and it seemed he was right, that the post-war era in America was calling for conformity rather than individuality. Levitt recognized the potential to create a suburb where ordinary American people could own their own mass produced house. He took Ford’s techniques of mass production of the automobile and applied it to the production of housing, which was up until that point in time, the most neglected industry in America (Halberstam 132). The Levitt team knew the old way of building homes was never going to work if they were to produce houses in mass and have them affordable to ordinary American families, so “they analyzed the construction process and broke it down into 85 basic components” (Halberstam 132), and realizing there were twenty-seven separate steps, they decided to train twenty-seven separate teams, each working on one specific step in the process (Halberstam 132). They were able to use less skilled workers and still manufacture more houses in less time (Halberstam 132-33). William Levitt’s adaptation of the Henry Ford assembly line was a development of “sheer genius” (Halberstam 136). Where a car was small enough to move along an assembly line and the workers were able to remain stationary, a house was far too large to be constructed on a traditional assembly line. So Levitt created an assembly line where specialized teams of workers would work on a stationary house, and when their work was completed at that station, the workers would move on to the next house (Haberstam 136). As Levitt pointed out, the development site became the factory (Halberstam 136), but even more importantly, the men became the machine. By July of 1948 the Levitt workers were constructing 180 houses a week (Halberstam 136-37). William Levitt’s adaptation of the assembly line is a clear reflection of Foucault’s docile body. Bodies were trained to perform one task habitually and any thought was eliminated from the work of the men. Men who had little or no skill were still able to work on the assembly line because their bodies were easily trained and disciplined. Levitt’s suburban development not only created a culture of conformity and homogeneity but took the humanity out of the process as well. Levitt began a suburban revolution; beginning in 1950 and lasting for thirty years, the nations top eighteen cities lost population as families swarmed the newly developed farmland that surrounded them, and the suburbs gained some sixty million 86 people (Halberstam 142). By the middle of the decade Levitt developments and similarly produced developments accounted for seventy-five percent of new housing. While it would appear that William Levitt made the new post-war American dream possible for millions of ordinary American families, the suburban development follows the same pattern of fear of Otherness that was a rampant theme during the post-war and Cold War years. What Levitt was doing was a primary target for those who disliked the new post-war society and culture (Halberstam 139). John Keats, a writer at the time, wrote For literally nothing down, you too can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we’re building around the edges of American cities...inhabited by people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversations, dress, possessions, perhaps even blood types are almost precisely like yours... [These houses] actually drive mad myriad of housewives shut up in them. (qtd. in Halberstam 139, emphasis in original) The suburban housing revolution created mass conformity. Everyone appeared startlingly the same; though at the time, sameness was welcomed, it was Otherness that was not only unwelcome, but hated, distrusted, and feared. Much of the criticism of Levitt’s developments came from people who were able to afford more traditional middle-class housing (Halberstam 139). Housing was a matter of preference and options to them (Halberstam 139). Lewis Mumford, a distinguished architectural and social commentator, was one of the most noted critics of suburban development of the time (Halberstam 139). He claimed Levitt was “using new-fashioned methods to compound old-fashioned mistakes” and though 87 “mechanically it [was] admirably done, socially the design [was] backward” (qtd. in Halberstam 139). Mumford’s articles were persistent and cruel, as though Levitt and his subdivision came to symbolize all that Mumford hated about the homogenization (and democratization) of American culture then being wrought by the combination of increasing affluence and mass-production technology. Levittown, he implied, represented the worst vision of the American future: bland people in bland houses leading bland lives. The houses were physically similar...so the people inside must be equally similar; an entire community was being made from a cookie cutter. (Halberstam 140) Ten years after the first Levittown was finished, Mumford described it as a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless command waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis. (qtd. in Halberstam 140) But Mumford was not the only critic who strongly disagreed with the conformity culture of the postwar era. Halberstam notes the original The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was, according to Ron Rosenbaum, about the horrors of suburban life where neighbors had completely lost their individuality and so could be taken over by alien pods, and no one could tell the difference (Halberstam 140). Burroughs, too, comments negatively on the suburban revolution in Naked Lunch. His creation of Interzone, the global community in his novel, demonstrates 88 his impression of suburbanization: “The Zone is a single, vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house, the next bed that is, since the rooms are mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted. A hum of sex and commerce shakes the Zone like a vast hive” (Burroughs 162). It is a comical image, quite silly, but at the same time horrific. The entirety of Interzone is composed of this hive-like housing that is not large enough to accommodate everyone at the same time. It is the place of life and of work; it forces people into interaction while simultaneously keeping people apart. Closeness is arbitrary and dependent only upon who is living in the next box over and not upon familial bonds. Though technological advancements were made in the suburban revolution, social advancements were not made, and were even set back. Not only was the suburban conformity culture so much a part of the fear of Otherness, but those who could not conform appropriately were not allowed in. Blacks could not buy a house in any Levittown, a policy that lasted long after the rest of the country began to rid itself of lawful segregation (Halberstam 141). While Levitt was Jewish, and understood the implications of racism and prejudice, he had said “I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community...We can solve the housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem but we cannot combine the two” (qtd. in Halberstam 141). 89 The American family began to disintegrate with the suburban development as well; families became less connected to relatives and the sharing of homes with relatives became a thing of the past (Halberstam 142). The new houses with more available transportation on new roads in new cars and affordable television began to drive a wedge in family ties. The progress women had made before and during the war was halted as well with the suburban development (Halberstam 143). Women were physically separated from the workplace, and for a time, left them “isolated in a world of other mothers, children, and station wagons” (143). The technological advancements in the post-war era were much a result of the fear of Otherness that was rampant at the time. Bombs were developed and made more and more lethal so that, when the time came, the Other of the moment could be wiped of the face of the planet. Levitt developed already existing technology to mass produce housing that not only coerced conformity, but forced it. Others, like the African American population, were strictly prohibited. The white population, out of fear or paranoia, or simple ignorance, would then not join a community that allowed Others in. The technological developments of the era also turned man into a part of a machine. The scientists involved in developing the atomic and hydrogen bomb were only a part of the process. They were there to work and solve equations, and figure calculations, but what was done with their work was not in their hands. They were a part of the machine run by political and military figureheads. And Levitt adapted the assembly line so that men could be put into a machine and serve as a cog. They would learn one skill and repeatedly perform that one task, never producing anything, 90 but being a small part of the production. A part of humanity was erased with the technological developments of the postwar American culture. Section V B: Burroughs Comments on Technological Development as a Component of the Apocalypse Burroughs was acutely aware of these issues and comments directly on them in Naked Lunch. Burroughs, like many Americans in the post-World War Two era, saw the world on the brink of Armageddon. But in Naked Lunch it would not be warfare with hydrogen bombs that would bring the apocalypse, it would be the political spheres headed by control addicts, systematically destroying the individual with the use of technology and by destroying the body. It would be a slow process destroying humanity, but would most definitely happen. Control addicts who horde all of the power would infect the world like a virus and kill until mankind was wiped out. Burroughs saw the scientific developments of the era as atrocious. The technology was not being created to advance human kind, but rather to set it back, to destroy any kind of individuality, and potentially wipe humanity off the face of the earth. The technological developments in Naked Lunch are equally as detrimental to humanity and pose the same apocalyptic threat that the hydrogen bomb possessed, though the annihilation of humanity would be a much slower process. The technologies in Naked Lunch work primarily against the body to alter not just the 91 human form, but the human mind and spirit as well. Humanity would be annihilated individual by individual. As previously mentioned, the political parties of Interzone each have their own method of invading and controlling the body, and therefore controlling and destroying the population. However, it is important to note that technologies are used by the political parties, namely the Senders, to invade the body. The Senders, who are considered to be the most dangerous and evil party, have developed their techniques of one-way telepathy by utilizing technologies similar to those of Benway, a combination of machine and body to capture the mind. The logical extension of encephalographic research is biocontrol; that is control of physical movement, mental process, emotional reactions and apparent sensory impressions by means of bioelectrical signals injected into the nervous system of the subject...shortly after birth a surgeon could install connections in the brain. A miniature radio receiver could be plugged in and the subject controlled from State-controlled transmitters....The biocontrol apparatus is a prototype of one-way telepathic control. The subject could be rendered susceptible to the transmitter by drugs or other processing without installing any apparatus. Ultimately the Senders will use telepathic transmitting exclusively. (Burroughs 147-48, emphasis in original) The progression to telepathic transmission began for the Senders with technological devices surgically installed in the brain. The Senders would be powerless without the development and use of technology and experimental medicine, without the use of machines and drugs to render the subject helpless. 92 The Factualists are anti-all parties, but primarily anti-Sender. The Factualist party does not oppose the use of telepathic research, however they do desire to hold a monopoly over the technology. Much as the American political systems and military desired a monopoly over atomic and hydrogen weaponry for the purpose of having such technology in the “right hands” and therefore protecting the “good” populations, the Factualists consider themselves the “good” party and are determined to have a monopoly over telepathy to “protect” humanity. They claim “telepathy properly used and understood could be the ultimate defense against any form of organized coercion or tyranny on the part of pressure groups or individual control addicts. We oppose, as we oppose atomic war, the use of such knowledge to control, coerce, debase, exploit or annihilate the individuality of another living creature” (Burroughs 152). However, just by the nature of monopolizing the technology of telepathy, the Factualists would in fact control, coerce, debase, exploit, and annihilate the individuality of all living creatures. The Factualists and the Senders so closely represent American democracy and Soviet communism of the time. Each desires possession of a technology that potentially could lead to the annihilation of humanity, and each desires a monopoly over that technology. Both parties see the other as the most evil of all enemies and focus not on protecting their population, but instead focus on destroying the other, ultimately putting their populations in threat of complete destruction in the process. It is no coincidence that Burroughs references atomic war in the section describing the Factualists desire for a monopoly over telepathy. 93 The Divisionists and Liquifactionists focus primarily on the body and do not employ outside technologies in their quest for total global domination and total global destruction, however “the parties are not in practice separate but blend in all combinations” (Burroughs 151). Experimental medicine comes in to play with each party, and doctors are commissioned by all parties to aid in their take-over. Benway is referenced in the section describing the Divisionists, implying that although there are the primary methods of controlling the population- Division, Liquifaction, and Sending, and for the Factualists, opposing all the aforementioned, there too are secondary methods carried out by the intricate bureaucracies, namely doctors. Burroughs creates a number of mad scientists in Naked Lunch, men who are dedicated to experimental medicine and the development of technology to destroy individuality. Doctors who resemble mad scientists more than medical doctors are central to the novel. Doctors are the connecting factor between the body and technology. Tim Armstrong, in his book Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study notes that In the first decades of [the 20th] century, the British and American enthusiasts for bodily reform could choose among a vast array of methods, ranging from mind-cure techniques to mechanical manipulation....The body became the site of techniques which operated externally and internally to regulate and reorganize....The technological reformation of the body suggested that it could be optimized, that it was ‘perfectible,’ as Kenneth Dutton has recently suggested...For William James, the body is a liminal zone, alternately part of the self and part of the object-world, familiar and strange. (Armstrong 106-7) 94 Burroughs demonstrates this connection between the body and technology in Naked Lunch. He comments on the technological developments of the era and their potential to destroy all individuality and all of humanity while connecting it to the body, the primary concern of control addicts in his novel. The technology Burroughs creates in Naked Lunch, as Armstrong suggests, is used to change the body and to “perfect” it to the standards of perfection established by the control addicts, however it is also a comment on the potential apocalypse the technologies of the era presented. Burroughs’s use of doctors as central figures in Naked Lunch connects technology and the body, and simultaneously reflects on the scientists of the post-war era. As Jennie Skerl writes: Doctors’ central role in a mythology of addiction corresponds to what Burroughs sees as their central role in American society: those who use science and technology to control and degrade man. And in the popular mind, doctors are the most highly respected professionals in the United States. Dr. Benway, Dr. Schafer...Dr. Berger and the German doctor of “Joselito” represent the type of man scientist and parody modern scientist’s disregard for the human and social results of his experimentation. Benway is the servant of repressive social systems, using his knowledge to control human behavior. The end of his experiments is the IND...a body without a mind. Dr. Schafer produces the “Complete All American De-Anxietized Man,” a black centipede. Dr. Berger creates perfectly healthy men through brainwashing that removes all thought. When his “overliberated” end-products lose their usefulness as subjects, they are sent to “disposal.” These controllers who use 95 knowledge and power to dehumanize complement the subhuman victims that appear elsewhere in the novel. (Skerl 39-40) I have already demonstrated the effects on the body the mad scientist doctors have, but it is important to note each scientist develops and uses a variety of technologies in their work. While often times the exact technology that is employed is not explicated, as in the case with Dr. Schafer and Clarence, the doctors are “scientists...Pure scientists” (Burroughs 119). As Wayne Pounds suggests in his essay “The Postmodern Anus: Parody and Utopia in Two Recent Novels by William Burroughs,” the talking asshole routine “is a full blown parody...of the discourse of scientistic, behaviorist human engineering. As a parody, it implies a utopia: Benway’s monologue describes an experiment designed to further the creation of an engineering-efficiency utopia, which the parody shows to be a dystopia” (Pounds 219). It is also important to note that the doctors have little regard for the human subject they work with; their concern is only the technology and pleasing the control addicts who have hired them. Burroughs demonstrates the lack of concern for the human subject in a number of ways. Benway performs operations in a lavatory and uses a toilet plunger, washed in a toilet bowl, to internally massage the heart of his patient (Burroughs 55). Burroughs also writes about Leif the Unlucky who collapsed with strangulated intestines, perforated ulcers and peritonitis in Cairo and the hospital was so crowded they bedded him in the latrine, and the Greek surgeon goofed and sewed up a live monkey in him, and he was gangfucked by the Arab attendants, and one of the orderlies stole his penicillin 96 substituting Saniflush; and the time he got the clap in his ass and a selfrighteous English doctor cured him with an enema of hot, sulphuric acid, and the German practitioner of Technological Medicine who removed his appendix with a rusty can opener and a pair of tin snips (he considered the germ theory “a nonsense”). Flushed with success he then began snipping and cutting out everything in sight: “the human body is filled up vit unnecessitated parts. You can get by vit von kidney. Vy have two? Yes dot is a kidney...The inside parts should not be so close in together crowded.” (Burroughs 165) The doctors’ concern is not the patient or health and well-being, but rather pushing technology as far as they can, using new and different techniques, and creating efficiency, as previously mentioned. It is no coincidence Burroughs titled the German practitioner a doctor of Technological Medicine. But even the scientists who perform the procedures for those in power will in time be not only expendable but necessary to eliminate. The technology those scientists are creating will become the technology that makes them obsolete, leaving them open to be prey for the control addicts because, after all, it is thinking bodies that are the most threatening. One of Benway’s experimental projects is the thinking machine: “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets” (Burroughs 23). When work was being done on the hydrogen bomb, all of the calculations were being done manually by scientists. There was significant pressure on other scientists to develop computer technology, and in June of 1952, the IAS computer 97 was dedicated, and “it was to become the most important model of its time” (Halberstam 96). But in the mean time, the scientists working on the Super (the hydrogen bomb) struggled along with the calculations that would make the weapon possible: “The computers that were soon to come would have made the calculations for the Super easy” (Halberstam 97). Not only could computers do the job of humans, but they could do it more efficiently. With computers to do the work of men, men would not be needed. Benway’s thinking machine would operate under the same principle. Benway is not merely externalizing himself in gadgets, he is essentially creating a machine that operates exactly as a human brain, perhaps even better because it would lack a body, all mixed up with feeling and emotion. This technology could become the device that destroys all of humanity. The control addict has need for certain people to work for him; he has an intricate bureaucracy, not only to keep the “subject” from contacting him directly, as Benway explains, but so that an array of skills that he does not possess can be employed to do his dirty work. The control addicts in charge need the likes of Benway with his scientific and medical expertise to get inside the bodies of the subjects, but with a thinking machine, an external brain, the likes of Benway would become obsolete; the thinking machine could perform his tasks, leaving Benway open for consumption by the control addicts. During one particular operation Benway is in the midst of performing, he tells the nurse “You young squirts couldn’t lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture...Soon we’ll be operating by remote control 98 on patients we never see...We’ll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery...All the know-how and make-do” (Burroughs 55). Once technology develops, there will be no need for thinking people any more. Just as computers would have taken the thought out of the hydrogen bomb; scientists would only need to be button pushers sitting at a computer and pressing the key, just as the control addicts would have it. Similarly, the development of the suburbs not only manipulated millions of Americans into conformity, eliminating Otherness, but it simultaneously removed the need for individual thought and skilled minds and bodies, much like the development of the computer. The principle of the assembly line, like Benway’s thinking machine, eliminated the need for skilled workers; one man, or group of men, is trained in one specific step in production that they perform over and over all day every day. There is no need to have a man who is capable of building an entire car engine, or constructing a house from the ground up, or performing an intricate surgical procedure. More can be produced in less time when many men are working together on one project, each performing their specific task. The development of the suburbs occurred in assembly line fashion; specialized groups of workers...performed their chores and moved on...Everything had to be made simple...America was not a country of skilled workmen- there were few enough of them around under the best of circumstances, and none were likely to go to work for Levitt’s company, where the stress was laid not on individual, elegant workmanship but on the maximum number of houses to be built in a given amount of time....Of the 99 tedium involved in so mechanized a process, Alfred Levitt once said “The same man does the same thing every day....It is boring; it is bad; but the reward of the green stuff seems to alleviate the boredom of the work.” (Halberstam 136) The suburbs were eliminating individuality by putting people into their cookie cutter boxes and their cookie cutter lives, but they were also eliminating the need for thinkers. With the emphasis turning away from craftsmanship to mass production, and the incredible popularity of mass produced goods, it was only a matter of time before individually thinking minds would cease to exist. In Naked Lunch, Burroughs comments directly on the elimination of thinking bodies as a major factor in the apocalypse. What the doctors practice is more harmful than good of course, but they are accomplishing the task at hand; they are employed by powerful figures to fulfill specific requests. What those political figures do with the results is not of Benway’s, or any other scientist’s concern. When operating with Dr. Schafer, Schafer confides in Benway that he “can’t escape a feeling...well, of evil about this” (119). Benway responds: “Balderdash, my boy...We’re scientists...Pure scientists. Disinterested research and damned be him who cries ‘Hold, too much!’ Such people are no better than party poops” (119). For Benway, there are no moral implications of his job. He is a scientist pure and simple. He is given a task to complete and he does it without concerning himself with the use of the results or the effects his work will have on society, or even on his own person. 100 There was similar unrest amongst the scientists of the postwar ear who were developing the atomic and hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer was one of the most important scientists of the new era. But after the bombing of Nagasaki, he was exhausted and depressed and speculated aloud “whether the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not luckier than the living” (qtd, in Halberstam 34). He was morally and mentally exhausted, his genius and work had caused tremendous death, and so he left Los Alamos and further development of the hydrogen bomb. His leaving caused a divide in the scientific community (Halberstam 35). The scientists were, like Benway, interested in science pure and simple. They were given a project, a problem to solve, and did so because that was what they did. But the atomic bomb and potential for the hydrogen bomb took science to a new plane. Science was being used to destroy, not advance, and lives were being terminated. The scientists were beginning to find out the limits of their power: They might have become, as C. P. Snow had noted, the “most important military resource a nation state could call upon,” but in the end they had little control over the consequences of their work; they pursued the unknown, like great explorers, because it was there. But more and more, they ventured into a world filled with moral ambiguities, if not pure terror. Yet no one exercising political power in the United States or the Soviet Union was very interested in the piety or guilt of the scientists. (Halberstam 35) Truman had a meeting with Oppenheimer after he had decided to give up his job. He told Truman “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands” while Truman responded 101 “Never mind. It will all come out in the wash” (qtd. in Halberstam 35). Truman was disgusted by Oppenheimer’s reaction and later told Acheson “After all, all he did was make the bomb. I’m the guy who fired it” (qtd. in Halberstam 35). On the other end of the spectrum was Edward Teller, another scientist who had worked on the atomic bomb. Teller lobbied heavily for permission to go ahead with work on the hydrogen bomb (Halberstam 90), and became obsessed with the project (91). After the first thermonuclear test Oppenheimer asked Teller “Well, Edward, now that you have your H bomb, why don’t you use it to end the war in Korea?” (qtd. in Halberstam 99), and Teller responded “The use of weapons is none of my business, and I will have none of it” (qtd. in Halberstam 99). Doctor Benway and Doctor Schafer shared a similar relationship and experienced much of what Teller and Oppenheimer experienced. Benway was the disinterested researcher. He was handed a project by the power structures, or given a problem that he was to solve scientifically, and he went ahead with it because “Doctoring was in [his] blood” (Burroughs 30). Benway existed for the purpose of science. While he was aware of the political structures run by control addicts, it was not of his concern. He did not care for the moral implications of his work; it did not sway Benway that he was a key factor in bringing on the apocalypse. Schafer on the other hand is more of an Oppenheimer. Schafer sees the potential evil in the science he practices. And like Oppenheimer, Schafer had previously engaged in scientific inquiry and experimentation that had destroyed countless people. Oppenheimer had the atomic bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Schafer had forced lobotomies and Clarence the centipede. 102 Technology in Naked Lunch does not only serve to eliminate ordinary men and women, but also presents a method for the higher ups to eliminate doctors and scientists as well. Technology eliminates Otherness, and most importantly, eliminates the need to think or feel or act. Technological advancements are a critical part to the potential apocalypse presented in the 1950s and also to the inevitable apocalypse in Naked Lunch. Section VI: Conclusion Burroughs created a new type of apocalyptic novel with Naked Lunch. In Naked Lunch the apocalypse is systemic, and takes place over a span of time, rather than being caused by one cataclysmic event. Burroughs shows that all human beings participate in an unintentional conspiracy to destroy humanity, that no one person is safe, and no one person is outside of the system, so no one can stop the apocalypse from occurring. We are all addicts. We all have an insatiable need that we are at the mercy of, and we all live within a system where power and control are not used to serve and protect humanity, but rather are addictive substances as deadly as junk. Within this system, Otherness is incredibly dangerous to control addicts. An Other cannot be controlled, and therefore poses a tremendous threat to the addict. Otherness must be removed. It is in that removal of Otherness by invading the body, and using technology, that the apocalypse is allowed to occur. Burroughs views the 103 source of humanity as the ability to be an individually thinking and feeling human being, and the removal of Otherness turns human beings into insect-like monsters who cannot think or feel or act. By removing Otherness, humanity is destroyed. In Naked Lunch there is no hope for humanity. Burroughs creates this dismal image to sound a warning. 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