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
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Date
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Dr. Donald J. McNutt, Assistant Professor
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Date
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Dr. Alan L. Steinberg, Professor
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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.
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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
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Date
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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”
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(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.
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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.
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“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.
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“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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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.
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“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
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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
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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
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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‘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”
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(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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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).
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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,
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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
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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“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.
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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
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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.
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