24. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Naked Lunch was from the first a sprawling, uncontrolled project that Burroughs (and Allen Ginsberg, his editor) spent a great deal of time pummelling into shape. Oliver Harris wrote in his edition to The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-59 that Burroughs began by conceiving the novel ‘as a tripartite work consisting of sections entitled “Junk”, “Queer” and “Yage”’ and that the finished work could be read in any order. Neither was the title fixed until a late stage: Burroughs was enamoured with the idea that eels seal up their anuses before travelling to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, and suggested numerous Sargasso-related titles: ‘Meet Me in Sargasso’; ‘I’ll See You in Sargasso’, ‘The Sargasso Trail’...

Burroughs always credited Jack Kerouac for suggesting the title Naked Lunch, and Kerouac wrote to Allen Ginsberg in June 1960 confirming this was true: ‘Don’t hear from Burroughs [lately] but was pleased he mentioned I named Naked Lunch (remember, it was you, reading the ms., mis-read ‘naked lust’ and I only noticed) (interesting little bit of litry history tho).’

Burroughs explained: ‘The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED lunch – a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.’ Naked Lunch, therefore, is to do with a moment of existential clarity, perhaps a little too clear, perhaps a little disgusting (after all, what is on the end of someone else’s fork is not necessarily very nice). It is certainly nothing to do with gastronomy. In the book there is no lunch, nor dinner, barely even a snack. For Burroughs, food is allied to the cow-like existence that he seeks to escape through the more cerebral virtues of drugs and sex. The apotheosis of his disgust for food in the book appears in a restaurant menu which is composed entirely of the inedible: ‘Filet of Sun-Ripened Sting Ray basted with Eau de Cologne and garnished with nettles/The After-Birth Supreme de Boeuf, cooked in drained crank case oil served with a piquant sauce of rotten egg-yolks and crushed bed-bugs.’

Consulted:
Burroughs, WS: Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (ed. Grauerholz and Miles, 2005)

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