Naked Lunch

After the frivolity and surrealism of earlier sections, these chapters take a darker, more sinister, and more socially grounded turn. Significantly, they also take place mostly outside Interzone or relate to groups trying to change it. The first indication of this is the town of Pigeon Hole. Situated outside Interzone in a “surrounding area of swamps” (142) where signs read, “Urbanite Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here” (142), Pigeon Hole is a satirical take on the rural American South that is similarly hostile to outsiders. When Pigeon Hole officials force Lee to go through customs to reach the County Court House, they subject him to a demeaning inspection in which the inspectors “paw […] through his papers” (143) for three hours, while suggesting that they could penalize him. More worryingly, it also involves them “probing his ass for contraband and examin[ing] it for evidence of sodomy” (143) before dunking his hair in water to check for drugs.

The purpose of these actions is to degrade and intimidate Lee. In addition, their intent is to objectify him and prepare him for what happens next. He finds the County Clerk amidst the labyrinth Court House but must wait while the clerk regales his assistants with a series of covert and overt racist anecdotes. One of these is about a white man who leaves his wife for a 15-year-old Black girl. Another is about a blind Black man whom white men slowly burn to death after a white woman claims he was “looking at me so nasty” (147). The clerk’s “joke” here is that the men who burned him “don’t even settle up for the gasoline” (147). In addition, he explains how his father chained a Black man with a mental health condition to a bed and then took him to see the man for entertainment.

These stories obviously betray a casual but deep-rooted and odious racist attitude. In this sense, the County Clerk’s behavior is a comment on the institutional and brutal racism prevalent in America in the 1950s, especially in the South. The latter enshrined racial segregation and inferior status for Black people in the “Jim Crow” laws they enacted after emancipation. However, this scene is about more than that. Each of the stories relates not just to racism but to a process of objectification, whereby certain people force others to become what they make of them. The Black man chained to the bed becomes the “mad n*****” (148), as the white men reduce him to a literal spectacle for their sons, while denying him any voice or perspective of his own. The story about the blind man is similar: While he has no ability to objectify anyone by physical sight, the white men objectify his perspective and deprive him of even the recognition of his blindness, denying his individual humanity in a fundamental way.

Furthermore, the County Clerk ropes Lee into all this. The clerk’s monologue is partly to exclude but also to test Lee. Despite his responding to these stories with “horror” (148), Lee must self-objectify if he wants the clerk to help him. That is, to get the affidavit he needs, he must make a derogatory remark about minorities so that the clerk accepts him as a “good ol’ boy” (148). Thus, Burroughs comments not only on racism, but on the ability of powerful groups to force others to conform to their socially desired image. This dynamic is also evident in Chapter 18 and the “examination.” When officials force Carl to see Benway in Freeland, the doctor makes him take two tests to determine if he’s gay. In the first of these, the doctor asks Carl to ejaculate into a jar, in front of a waiting nurse, in a “bare white-walled cubicle” (160). In the second test, the doctor shows Carl photographs of people who look like women and asks Carl to indicate which ones he considers the most attractive. The doctor then reveals that some photos are really of men in drag.

The stated purpose of these tests is to determine Carl’s sexual orientation so that they can “help” him if he’s gay. However, the true purpose of the tests isn’t diagnostic. It’s obvious that neither “test”—especially not a semen sample—could reveal sexual orientation. Rather, their real aim is to demean and objectify Carl and to make him submit to Freeland’s judgment that being gay is not an expression of human desire or sexuality but a “deviation” and a “sickness.” This is evident in Carl’s sense, during the first test, that “something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate” (160) and in the “obvious distaste” (160-61) of the nurse as she picks up the jar afterward. In other words, the purpose of the tests is to make Carl see his own sexuality, through these situations, as grubby, shameful, and pathological. Their ultimate purpose is to make him dissociate from his gay desires and experiences and begin to see them as something outside himself. By the end of the examination, the tests have accomplished these goals. As Carl says, “Some huge insect was squirming in his hand. His whole being jerked away in an electric spasm of revulsion” (165). It is also why, symbolically, he can’t leave Benway’s office. Through this dissociation he has become defined and trapped by the judgment of the social order that he previously wanted to escape.