From Nightmare to Seredipity: A Retrospective Look at William Burroughs

Abstract

In the past decade or so, the experience of drugs has replaced sex as the daring subject of avant-garde literature. Like so much else in modern literature, this new writing is largely concerned with special states of consciousness; but whereas the former deals with madnesses from more-or-less natural causes varieties of mental derangement from neurosis through perversion to insanity the latter literature portrays externally induced psychic experience. Authors of drug literature include Aldous Huxley (of the best known and, perhaps, the least convincing), Henri Michaux, Michael McClure, Clarence L. Cooper, Paul Bowles, Alexander Trocchi and even Alexander King, among others; but, to my mind, the most extraordinary work in this drug literature so far is William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (Paris: Olympia, 1959; New York, Grove, 1962: London, Calder, 1964). Probably the most universally controversial book since Joyce's two masterpieces indeed, perhaps the sole contemporary work capable of inspiring, arguments that dissolve friendships Naked Lunch is a great work precisely because it transcends a concern with