Naked Lunch

“The citizens are well adjusted, cooperative, honest, tolerant and above all clean.”

After meeting Dr. Benway, Lee describes the state of Freeland, where Benway was once an advisor. On the surface, Freeland seems like the ideal state, without violence or conflict. However, we learn that the authorities achieve this state through a massive and oppressive process of social and psychological control and manipulation.

“Every citizen of Annexia was required to apply for and carry on his person at all times a whole portfolio of documents.”

Annexia is the precursor state to Freeland, of which Benway was in charge. His task was to completely demoralize and break down the population and reshape citizens in the desired form. However, he didn’t do this through overt violence or oppression but by subjecting citizens to a ridiculously complex and arbitrary bureaucracy that kept them in a permanent state of anxiety.

“Complete silence—their speech centers are destroyed—except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine.”

Benway describes the effects of long-term heroin addiction. Ultimately, this destroys the ability of users to think or communicate and leaves them cut off in silence. It also leaves them weak and prone to abuse, as evident in the same scene when children tie up a user and light a fire between his legs.

“The man sniffs. His jaws begin to work. He makes snatching motions with his hands. Saliva drips from his mouth and hangs off his chin in long streamers.”

Benway shows Lee one of his test subjects who has irreversible neural damage due to Benway’s experiments. Like the long-term drug user, he has lost most traces of humanity. However, he’s still technically alive and exhibits mechanical, instinctive reflexes when Benway presents a bar of chocolate. Thus, such an individual endures a kind of living death.

“You young squirts couldn’t lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture.”

Benway makes this comment when a nurse suggests that a toilet brush, which he is using for surgery, should be sterilized. He argues that all the skill and individuality has been removed from medicine and replaced by automation. Through this scene, Burroughs attempts to satirize our faith in modern technology and medicine—and our obsession with hygiene.

“Clothes and hairdo suggest existentialist bars of all the world cities.”

Lee describes the start of a pornographic scene and the clothes worn by the male and female actors. They’re designed to imitate the styles adopted by the self-styled “existentialists” of the time. In this way, Burroughs satirizes those who talk about individuality and authenticity while simply, and superficially, following trends.

“Gentlemen, the human nervous system can be reduced to a compact and abbreviated spinal column.”

What Dr. Schafer says to an international psychiatry conference in Interzone posits the idea that the human organism might survive without a brain or consciousness. This is a metaphor for the “experiment” that heroin users perform on themselves in destroying their own consciousness. As with Schafer’s test subject, it results in transforming the user into something unrecognizable by others as human.

“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.”

Lee describes the effects of taking the hallucinogenic drug yage. The intent is to break down the sense of the individual self as located in a specific time and place. Instead, Lee feels as if he has entered a fluid union with all other people and races, not only in the present but stretching into the future.

“Ordinary men and women going about their ordinary everyday tasks. Leading their ordinary lives.”

The leader of the Arab Nationalist Party makes this comment while looking down at the marketplace from a balcony. He tells his lieutenants that such “ordinary” people are what the party needs and to whom they should appeal. However, this sentiment is hypocritical and self-serving, as the party leader is sipping whisky and smoking cigars—and then runs over an elderly man in an expensive car. Burroughs suggests that such political figures, who appeal to “the people,” merely use them for their own ends.

“Why not one all-purpose blob? Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?”

Benway’s response when Schafer comments that eradicating the mouth could “simplify” the human digestive system precipitates a bizarre story about a man whose anus eventually takes over his life and body. On one level, this reflects a desire on the part of Benway and Schafer to control and limit the human body. On another level, the story is a parable about the dangers of making a spectacle of, and exploiting, one’s own body to entertain others.

“Bureaucracy is wrong as cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action [...]”

Lee explains why he opposes bureaucracy. Like cancer, or a virus, it’s parasitical and depends on healthy, creative life for its own existence while slowly killing the host. Like cancer cells, it’s homogenizing: It tries to make everything the same and attempts to reduce the diversity and individuality of human existence to its homogenous being.

“Muscles move into place like autonomous parts of a severed insect.”

This quote describes a “cured” gay man who is now, supposedly, straight. The image suggests a gruesome and dehumanizing process of dismemberment and reconstruction. It also suggests his being subject to external control and stimuli.

“We have imported a thousand bone fed, blue ribbon Latahs from Indochina.”

The Leader of the Nationalist Party makes this comment as he attempts to orchestrate an anti-French riot in Interzone. Latahs are humanoids who compulsively mimic others’ behavior. Thus, this suggests that the riot is entirely artificial and external rather than the expression of any authentic or autonomous response by “the people.” It also suggests that the riot’s premise is unthinking, mass conformity.

“You see control can never be a means to any practical end… It can never be a means to anything but more control… Like junk…”

Lee discusses the goals of the Sender party in Interzone. This group seeks to submit all human beings—down to their emotions, thoughts, and physical movements—to a single controlling force. However, as Lee suggests, the group doesn’t seek this control for any practical purpose. Rather, the group seeks control for its own sake, which encourages the desire for even more control.

“‘As far as the eye can see, nothing but replicas,’ he says, crawling around on his terrace and speaking in strange insect chirps.”

Discussing the parties of Interzone, Lee moves on from the Senders to The Divisionists, who use parts of their own flesh to replicate themselves. Here, Lee describes the ultimate desire of the Divisionists: to have a world surrounded by nothing but their own replicas. Such a world, however, would be fundamentally inhuman and would destroy the possibility or need for language, as the “insect chirps” suggest.

“This is due to the vast numbers of records pertaining to absolutely everything, all filed in the wrong place […]”

Lee gives an account of the County Court House, which deals with civil law cases in Interzone. Lee must go there to get an affidavit to avoid eviction. However, it’s impossible to settle a case there, or get what one needs, due to the number of obscurely filed documents. Lee is again criticizing the nature of bureaucracy, which serves to frustrate and undermine human communal life rather than enhance or facilitate it.

“Something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum.”

A man named Carl must submit to “tests” to determine whether he’s gay. One of these tests involves ejaculating into a jar, in front of a nurse. The real purpose of these “tests,” however, is not to diagnose but to objectify and humiliate him.

“Some huge insect was squirming in his hand. His whole being jerked away in an electric spasm of revulsion.”

This quote—which describes what Carl feels when he has completed Benway’s various “tests,” supposedly to determine whether he’s gay—reveals that the true goal of the examination is to make Carl view his sexuality as shameful and disgusting and thereby to objectify and dissociate him from it. The insect in his hand symbolizes this, as this insect is how he has come to see his sexuality—that is, as something both revolting and separable from his true self.

“This is no rich mother load, but vitiate dust, second run cottons trace the bones of a fix.”

Lee makes this seemingly obscure comment after an elderly drug user asks, “Have you seen Pantopon Rose”? Pantopon Rose refers to a user’s first euphoric high from taking a drug, which the user is continually trying to rediscover. The absence of a “mother load” and the “vitiate dust” suggests that the user will never find “Pantopon Rose” and will remain trapped, endlessly searching for it. Meanwhile, repeated use of the drug yields only a pale, muted, imitation of that initial rush.

“Moldy objects, worn out in unknown service, littered the floor."

A drug dealer and user called The Sailor brings a boy back to his apartment to take heroin. The narrative describes the place as dilapidated, filthy, and malodorous. This reflects the neglect of oneself and one’s life to which drug addiction leads.

“You have something I want… five minutes here… an hour someplace else… two… four… eight… Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Every day die a little.”

When the boy asks The Sailor what he wants in exchange for heroin, the Sailor says “time.” Here, he explains what he means by this: that the true price the boy will pay for the drug is both the reduction of life expectancy and the time lost while comatose on the drug. This will at first seem like only a small amount of time but will escalate until the drug starts consuming whole months and years of his life.

“I don’t know what I am doing there nor who I am.”

Lee is in Tangier, having escaped the New York police for the second time. However, his drug addiction has dislocated him from a proper sense of place or time—and hence from a sense of self. The novel’s narrative structure, which is often fragmentary and non-linear, reflects this feeling as well.

“Morphine having depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion […] I must report virtual absence of cerebral event.”

A tourist in Tangier asks Lee what he’s thinking. Lee responds that he isn’t, and can’t, think anything. The reason, he claims, is that the motivation for thought, which links to the front part of the brain, comes from the emotional and libidinal “back” part of the brain, the hypothalamus. In other words, we think in response to certain emotional and libidinal needs. Since drug use has numbed his hypothalamus, he not only feels no effect—except for the desire to get his fix—but has no active thought process.