Naked LunchThe Restored Text

The first and best trip into the realm of Addiction Existentialism
For its true-blue, (tie-)dyed-in-the-wool devotees — three or four generations of beatniks and hippies, punks and slackers and fellow travelers — the middlebrow afterlife of William S. Burroughs's 1959 opus must surely be a dubious pill to swallow. For the rest of us, it provides a time-lapse cultural history: Naked Lunch was, upon its U.S. publication, widely banned as obscenity, and its ample sex scenes remain wondrously sordid arrangements of lithesome boys and baroque diction. But if the pedophilia and sadism still shock and awe, what's really unsettling is the familiarity; from the perspective of its 50-year anniversary, Naked Lunch seems like nothing so much as the progenitor of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and other Oprah-ready drug-redemption books — a legacy that might be called Addiction Existentialism.

Naked Lunch's William Lee is hooked on morphine ("junk"), nearly so on cocaine ("C"), and dabbles in much else besides (mescaline, LSD, Benzedrine); seeking the next score and evading the narcotics squad propels Bill's manic narration from New York to Mexico to Tangiers and, finally, the hallucinatory "Interzone." Addiction no doubt sets into motion here the basic Beat conceit — that is, a white American male on a picaresque of the "authentic"— but Burroughs soon abandons On the Road-style momentum in favor of discrete torrents of consciousness. Burroughs's most lasting innovation was his recreation, in non-linear bursts of words, of the subjective distortions of drug-fueled benders and agonizing withdrawal. No wonder non- or semi-addicts now overstate their own improprieties, pharmacological and criminal: as delivered by Mark Bramhall, whose baritone voice work is closer to full-bore theater than the typical audiobook reading, the surprisingly compact muscularity of Naked Lunch's prose makes altered brain states sound like deeper ones — which may not be true, but it feels good.