IT’S AMAZING how little is needed to slake the thirsts of the pornography-hounds, the prurient sniggerers, the protectors of public morals. From the title of William Burroughs’s masterpiece they will be led to expect something illicitly agapoid, a sort of phallic Laocoön, and they will be disappointed. What they will find, on the other hand, is a palimpsest of obscenity so emetic that no amount of casuistry will be able to justify a charge of inflammation and corruption. This, God help us, is no Fanny Hill or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It is a picture of hell, and hell is not corrupting. The obscenity is not of Mr Burroughs’s devising: it is there in the world outside. We’re all sitting grinning at a ghastly meal which he suddenly shows us to be cannibalistic. The meat on the end of every fork is revealed as the guts and blood of our fellow-men. It is a revelation which will please nobody and may spoil a few appetites, but it has to be made, though few have the courage to make it. Mr Burroughs joins a small body of writers who are willing to look at hell and report on what they see. The body is, in fact, so small that I can think of only one other writer with whom he may be compared. This is Jonathan Swift.
I suppose there is a sense in which Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ may be regarded as obscene, or perhaps the final book of Gulliver’s Travels. But only a corrupt world will be disgusted by saeva indignatio. Swift’s starting-point was a sense of outrage with the world that the corrupt may still regard as insane. Burroughs’s vision is that of a man who has escaped from the agony of drug-addiction and regards the inferno with the cleansed eyes of the remembering artist. His introduction is autobiographical and clinical: he appends a long article from The British Journal of Addiction. Some of his more charitable readers, too weak-stomached to take the art, may wish to look on the whole work as a snakepit record, a terrible but necessary thesis on the nature of the life of the damned, a piece of unusually frank didacticism. They will be wrong, since Burroughs is demonstrating that his difficult subject can only be expressed through the static (that is, neither didactic nor pornographic) shaping of the artistic imagination.
Naturalism is not enough here, nor is the euphemistic or periphrastic. There are flights which some will glibly categorise as surrealistic, fantasias of violence which are cognate with those in the ‘Journal of an Airman’ of Auden’s The Orators but which serve no mere schoolboy rebelliousness. There are fugues which derive their themes from the everyday symbolism of rage – the processes of sex and excretion, developed into perversion and coprophagy. The creation of new and horrible worlds, as in the same author’s The Ticket That Exploded, is as necessary to Burroughs’s vision as it is to Dante’s. There is no device which seems to me to be purely fanciful or gratuitous; I can think of no other way in which a book like this could possibly be written.
As in any important piece of literature (and The Naked Lunch is very important) one ends by admiring the art which is able to transmute such terrible subject-matter into the pretext for a kind of joy (compare King Lear). It is the mystery of art which enables us to read Swift again and again and emerge not harrowed but elated. Mr Burroughs’s art is highly individual. He has in his time admired both Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, but he has developed techniques which seem to betray very little of the influence of that mistress and that master. For that matter, he admires Sterne and Jane Austen. His concern is with art first and last, and it is doubtful whether the cries of outrage which his book will undoubtedly provoke in this country will disturb him much. The making of this particular work of art was part of an ineluctable vocation. It demands to be read.
Guardian, 20 November 1964
Review of The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
(London: John Calder, 1964)