Naked Lunch

At A.J.’s party, the pornographer Slashtubitch shouts at actors, “Do you think to pass a counterfeit orgasm on me?” (75) if he believes they’re faking it. He also denounces the “shoddy trickery” and “dubbed gasps” (75) associated with such efforts. Thus, we may wonder whether Naked Lunch is criticizing artificiality—that is, holding up an ideal of “authenticity,” in terms of naturalness and self-consistency, to which film and art should aspire—and suggesting that literature, drugs, and sex may be a means to such values. Many reasons indicate that it isn’t. In the very first scene shown onscreen at A.J.’s party, we learn that the actor’s “clothes and hairdo suggest existentialist bars of all the world cities” (75). As such, existentialism and its alleged concern with authenticity is painted as a fad and a cliché. It’s something itself reducible to superficial symbols, as evident when Slashtubitch can easily replicate its appearance in his films—and is therefore no longer culturally relevant or vital.

Beyond this hint, though, are many other indications that Burroughs wishes to satirize rather than endorse the pornographer’s concern with what’s “authentic” and “real.” For one thing, the actors use sex toys when coupling, including artificial penises and vibrating chairs, along with the actors’ constant interchange of roles and identities. Mary adopts the male role when penetrating Johnny. Then, Johnny is reborn as Mark, after Mark supposedly kills Mary. When the three “dead” actors re-emerge, “they are not as young as they appear in the Blue Movies […] They look tired and petulant” (87). The performance was largely an illusion in terms of who and what was shown. Distinguishing the real from the apparent becomes impossible. Further, this doesn’t apply only to portrayals of sex but to sex itself. Lee reveals this when he discusses stomach tucks and how the models who have had them are liable to “flee from your arms like fairy gifts fading away” (98). Our perception of their beauty is not only fleeting but necessarily bound up with illusion and artifice.

An even more radical continuation of this idea is evident when Lee takes the hallucinogenic drug yage. Yage often links to the notion of a profound “spiritual” experience and the discovering of oneself. However, what Lee experiences, or rather how he experiences this self-discovery, is in the breakdown of any coherent sense of self or identity. As he says, “the blood and substance of many races […] Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian, races as yet unconceived and unborn passes through the body” (92). He doesn’t merely feel his body and identity pass through and transform into these different races and genders, as when he feels himself becoming a Black woman; he’s connected to new and future people. Like the “medicine men” who use yage to “foretell the future” (92), Lee experiences himself as stretched, transforming across, time itself. The ordinary self-identical self, located at a specific moment in time and space, breaks down.

Moreover, this experience—and Lee’s criticism of static notions of identity—forms the basis of his critique of religion. Following his yage epiphany, Lee satirizes all the major figures of world religion, including Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Buddha, Mohamed, and Confucius. The basis of this satirical criticism is that these characters held themselves to be, or others held them to be, superior to others and thus became static. As Lee says, they were “hanging around being better’n other folks” (96). This presents a problem because both their identities and what they said then became ossified and enshrined. As Lee says, “Life is a school where every pupil must learn a different lesson” (97).

However, these figures—or at least how religion has incorporated them—present a fixed, timeless (and thus static) notion of life and wisdom. They represent, as Lee says, “a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action” (112). In other words, like bureaucracy, which Lee criticizes on similar grounds, they supress individuality—precisely by linking humans to a static, self-contained notion of the self. Religion sets us up with a distinct soul and, on moral grounds, condemns the kinds of experiences of intoxication and pleasure that may break down or radically transform this soul. This is also why Lee’s own message “cannot be expressed direct” (97). Rather, only through a “mosaic of juxtaposition […] like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer, defined by negatives and absence” (97) can he reveal it. He can’t use “explicit” ordinary language, which enshrines and reinforces the self-identical notion of the self, to escape that self.