I won’t even pretend that I’m capable of
talking about Naked Lunch in terms of
plot or meaning as the author intended it. In fact, Burroughs mentions in the
novel that the reader should be able to flip to any chapter, start reading, and
it have the same intended effect. This, to me, suggests that any implicit
meaning in Naked Lunch is relegated
to the way in which the novel is read, not to the content in particular. And
this is just as well—every time I picked up where I last left off reading, I
may as well have been flipping fifty pages ahead.
So if I can’t talk about the What or the Why of
the content, I can talk about the How of its impact on me. Naked Lunch was a prose experience unlike any other I’ve had
before. I’ve read things that blur the line between prose and poetry, but not
quite like this. Here image upon image upon scene upon scene erupt from a hot
magma source that glows with an olden magic—a source that is dark and
frighteningly obscure yet familiar all the same. This source is the unconscious,
and when I say that I don’t know if I mean Burroughs’s unconscious, my unconscious,
or Jung’s collective unconscious. No matter where I started reading, it felt as
though my mind, in response to the violence, sexuality, baseness, and mystery,
was reaching into its core and throwing a fishing line into a region very far
away. That’s the best way to describe it. There was no clarifying it any
further. I just went with it.
So what did it this novel do to me as I was
reading it. It pulled me under. It dragged me down and tore off with me,
leaving me no choice but to hang on and ride it out. Burroughs used his
addiction to heroin as a driving force of the “narrative,” and this in a way
limited my perspective. He was coming from a particular angle in reference to a
particular experience with a particular substance. I have no personal
understanding of where he was coming from on that, but I did strongly feel that
the themes of addiction and withdrawal running through the novel could in some
ways be compared to a certain brand of American Dread. I don’t think I have to
define this Dread, because I think everyone has experienced it and each in her
own way. Anyway, to put words to it would be to put borders around it, and this
feeling, this Dread, has an inherent property of making itself resistant to
limits.
The Dreads go along with widespread Mental
Sickness; they are both symptoms of a larger, far more malign problem. That
problem is reality, or, more appropriately, the Keepers of Reality whose reign
we silently consent to by virtue of doing nothing. Rather than experiencing
reality through the unique and natural lens of our own minds, we let others
think for us. Worse yet, we let idiots think for us. And in the chasm that
emerges, there are the Dreads, there is the Mental Sickness. Each of the
characters that wander through Naked
Lunch are experiencing the world through a Mental Sickness carried to its
extreme yet logical end. And this is honest and as it should be. In many ways,
this is one of the most honest novels I have ever read: because everything is
weird and sinister and horrible, but taken as the same old same old. The SNAFU
principle at work.
Other ways the novel affected me: the point
where dreams and waking life merge; the similarities between dream state and
conscious state that often go unnoticed; language as the fundamental building
block of reality; the alignment of prose and conscious life as we shape it; the
alignment of poetry and worlds of the unconscious; rewiring the centers of the
brain that sift through the information of reality; acknowledging a personal
darkness that is really more neutral than good or bad; the world as a science
fiction—Interzone; resigning oneself to the unfathomable and going with it; and
so on.
To sum it up:
Archetypes of the unconscious
Addiction-->American
Dread
Mental Sickness as a reasonable symptom
Misc.
No comments:
Post a Comment