Writing on the Wall (7 page)

The phenomenon of repetition, of course, gives rise to boredom; many readers complain that they cannot get through
The Naked Lunch.
And/or that they find it disgusting. It
is
disgusting and sometimes tiresome, often in the same places. The prominence of the anus, of faeces, and of all sorts of “horrible” discharges, as the characters would say, from the body’s orifices, becomes too much of a bad thing, like the sado-masochistic sex performances—the auto-ejaculation of a hanged man is not everybody’s cantharides. A reader whose erogenous zones are more temperate than the author’s begins to feel either that he is a square (a guilty sentiment he should not yield to) or that he is the captive of a joyless addict.

In defense, Swift could be cited, and indeed between Burroughs and Swift there are many points of comparison; not only the obsession with excrement and the horror of female genitalia but a disgust with politics and the whole body politic. Like Swift, Burroughs has irritable nerves and something of the crafty temperament of the inventor. There is a great deal of Laputa in the countries Burroughs calls Interzone and Freeland, and Swift’s solution for the Irish problem would appeal to the American’s dry logic. As Gulliver, Swift posed as an anthropologist (though the study was not known by that name then) among savage people; Burroughs parodies the anthropologist in his descriptions of the American heartland: “...the Interior a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky...Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals.” The style here is more emotive than Swift’s, but in his deadpan explanatory notes (“This is a rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependents”), there is a Swiftian laconic factuality. The “factual” appearance of the whole narrative, with its battery of notes and citations, some straight, some loaded, its extracts from a diary, like a ship’s log, its pharmacopoeia, has the flavor of eighteenth-century satire. He calls himself a “Factualist” and belongs, all alone, to an Age of Reason, which he locates in the future. In him, as in Swift, there is a kind of soured utopianism.

Yet what saves
The Naked Lunch
is not a literary ancestor but humor. Burroughs’ humor is peculiarly American, at once broad and sly. It is the humor of a comedian, a vaudeville performer playing in “One,” in front of the asbestos curtain of some Keith Circuit or Pantages house long since converted to movies. The same jokes reappear, slightly refurbished, to suit the circumstances, the way a vaudeville artist used to change Yonkers to Renton when he was playing Seattle. For example, the Saniflush joke, which is always good for a laugh: somebody is cutting the cocaine/the morphine/the penicillin with Saniflush. Some of the jokes are verbal (“Stop me if you’ve heard this atomic secret” or Dr. Benway’s “A simopath...is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army and discharge cures it”). Some are “black” parody (Dr. Benway, in his last appearance, dreamily, his voice fading out: “Cancer, my first love”). Some are whole vaudeville “numbers,” as when the hoofers, Clem and Jody, are hired by the Russians to give Americans a bad name abroad: they appear in Liberia wearing black Stetsons and red galluses and talking loudly about burning niggers back home. A skit like this may rise to a frenzy, as if in a Marx Brothers or a Clayton, Jackson, and Durante act, when all the actors pitch in.
E.g.,
the very funny scene in Chez Robert, “where a huge icy gourmet broods over the greatest cuisine in the world”: A. J. appears, the last of the Big Spenders, and orders a bottle of ketchup; immediate pandemonium; A. J. gives his hog-call, and the shocked gourmet diners are all devoured by famished hogs. The effect of pandemonium, all hell breaking loose, is one of Burroughs’ favorites and an equivalent of the old vaudeville finale, with the acrobats, the jugglers, the magician, the hoofers, the lady-who-was-sawed-in-two, the piano-player, the comedians, all pushing into the act.

Another favorite effect, with Burroughs, is the metamorphosis. A citizen is turned into animal form, a crab or a huge centipede, or into some unspeakable monstrosity, like Bradley the Narcotics Agent who turns into an unidentifiable carnivore. These metamorphoses, of course, are punishments. The Hellzapoppin effect of orgies and riots and the metamorphosis effect, rapid or creeping, are really cancerous onslaughts—matter on the rampage multiplying itself and “building” as a revue scene “builds” to a climax. Growth and deterioration are the same thing: a human being “deteriorates” or grows into a one-man jungle. What you think of it depends on your point of view; from the junky’s angle, Bradley is better as a carnivore eating the Narcotics Commissioner than he was as “fuzz”—junky slang for the police.

The Naked Lunch
contains messages that unluckily for the ordinary reader are somewhat arcane. Despite his irony, Burroughs is a prescriptive writer. He means what he says to be taken and used literally, like an Rx prescription. Unsentimental and factual, he writes as though his thoughts had the quality of self-evidence. In a special sense,
The Naked Lunch
is coterie literature. It was not intended, surely, for the general public, but for addicts and former addicts, with the object of imparting information. Like a classical satirist, Burroughs is dead serious—a reformer. Yet, as often happened with the classical satirists, a wild hilarity and savage pessimism carry him beyond his therapeutic purpose and defeat it. The book is alive, like a basketful of crabs, and common sense cannot get hold of it to extract a moral.

On the one hand, control is evil; on the other, escape from control is mass slaughter or reduction to a state of proliferating cellular matter. The police are the enemy, but as Burroughs shrewdly observes in one passage: “A
functioning
police state needs no police.” The policeman is internalized in the robotized citizen. From a libertarian point of view, nothing could be worse. This would seem to be Burroughs’ position, but it is not consistent with his picture of sex. To be a libertarian in politics implies a faith in Nature and the natural, that is, in the life-principle itself, commonly identified with sex. But there is little affection for the life-principle in
The Naked Lunch,
and sex, while magnified—a common trait of homosexual literature—is a kind of mechanical man-trap baited with fresh meat. The sexual climax, the jet of sperm, accompanied by a whistling scream, is often a death spasm, and the “perfect” orgasm would seem to be the posthumous orgasm of the hanged man, shooting his jism into pure space.

It is true that Nature and sex are two-faced, and that growth is death-oriented. But if Nature is not seen as far more good than evil, then a need for control is posited. And, strangely, this seems to be Burroughs’ position too.
The human virus can now be treated,
he says with emphasis, meaning the species itself. By scientific methods, he implies. Yet the laboratory of
The Naked Lunch
is a musical-comedy inferno, and Dr. Benway’s assistant is a female chimpanzee. As Burroughs knows, the Men in White, when not simple con men, are the fuzz in another uniform.

The Naked Lunch,
Burroughs says, is “a blueprint, a How-To Book...How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall.” Thus the act of writing resembles and substitutes for drug-taking, which in Burroughs’ case must have begun as an experiment in the extension of consciousness. It does not sound as if pleasure had ever been his motive. He was testing the controls of his own mechanism to adjust the feed-in of data, noting with care the effects obtained from heroin, morphine, opium, Demerol, Yage, cannabis, and so on. These experiments, aiming at freedom, “opening a door,” resulted in addiction. He kicked the imprisoning habit by what used to be known as will power, supplemented by a non-addictive drug, apomorphine, to whose efficacy he now writes testimonials. It seems clear that what was involved and continues to be involved for Burroughs is a Faustian compact: knowledge-as-power, total control of the self, which is experienced as sovereign in respect to the immediate environment and neutral in respect to others.

At present he is interested in Scientology, which offers its initiates the promise of becoming “clears”—free from all hang-ups. For the novel he has invented his cut-out and fold-in techniques, which he is convinced can rationalize the manufacture of fictions by applying modern factory methods to the old “writer’s craft.” A text may be put together by two or three interested and moderately skilled persons equipped with scissors and the raw material of a typescript. Independence from the vile body and its “algebra of need,” freedom of movement across national and psychic frontiers, efficiency of work and production, by means of short cuts, suppression of connectives, and other labor-saving devices, would be Uncle Bill Burroughs’ patent for successful living. But if such a universal passkey can really be devised, what is its purpose? It cannot be enjoyment of the world, for this would only begin the addictive process all over again by creating dependency. Action, the reverse of enjoyment, has no appeal either for the author of
The Naked Lunch.
What Burroughs wants is Out, which explains the dry, crankish amusement given him by space, interplanetary distances, where, however, he finds the old mob still at work. In fact, his reasoning, like the form of his novel, is circular. Liberation leads to new forms of subjugation. If the human virus can be treated, this can only be under conditions of asepsis: the Nova police. Yet Burroughs is unwilling, politically, to play the dread game of eugenics or euthenics, outside his private fantasy, which, since his intelligence is aware of the circularity of its Utopian reasoning, invariably turns sardonic.
Quis custodet custodes ipsos?

March, 1963

The Hue and Cry

W
HEN I READ
EICHMANN
in Jerusalem
in
The New Yorker
last winter I thought it splendid and extraordinary. I still do. But apparently this is because I am a Gentile. As a Gentile, I don’t “understand.” Neither do any of my Gentile friends and relations, who speak about it to me in lowered voices. “Did
you
get that out of it?” “No.” The only Gentiles who have “understood” in print have been rather special cases: Judge Musmanno, who was attacked in the book, Professor Trevor-Roper, who has a corner on Nazi history in its popular form, and Richard Crossman, M.P., who has been championing the state of Israel since 1946 and who winters in Tiberias.
*
So far as I know, all Miss Arendt’s hostile reviews, not counting these, have come from Jews, and those favorable to her from of Gentiles, with four exceptions: A. Alvarez, George Lichtheim, Bruno Bettelheim, and Daniel Bell. The division between Jew and Gentile is even more pronounced in private conversation, where a Gentile, once the topic is raised in Jewish company (and it always is), feels like a child with a reading defect in a class of normal readers—or the reverse. It is as if
Eichmann in Jerusalem
had required a special pair of Jewish spectacles to make its “true purport” visible. And such propagandists as Lionel Abel, writing in
Partisan Review
(Summer 1963), and Marie Syrkin, writing in
Dissent,
have been eagerly offering their pair to the reader for a peep into Miss Arendt’s mind. “The Clothes of the Empress” Miss Syrkin calls her review, advertising a display of Miss Arendt seen through, exposed in all her nakedness. In a cruder way, her antagonists in private “expose” her as an anti-Semite, and a newspaper story speaks of the wife of an Israeli official in New York who kept calling her “Hannah Eichmann”—by a slip of the tongue, of course. More moderate parlor critics talk of “arrogance” or “lack of proportion” in her treatment of the Jewish Councils while conceding that Miss Arendt is of course not an anti-Semite or an admirer of Eichmann’s. But this is said in the tone of a
concession;
these Jews, many of whom call themselves friends of the author, are more interested in enumerating the shortcomings of her book than in repelling the slanders that are circulating about her in and out of print. These slanders, which they hear all the time and which are intended to destroy the reputation of a living woman, excite them far less than Miss Arendt’s “slander” of the Jewish leadership, who are dead and beyond being hurt by it, if it
is
a slander. I am told that at a meeting held under the auspices of
Dissent
to discuss Miss Arendt’s book only one voice from the audience was raised in her defense and that voice was shouted down; some others present including Jews disagreed with what was being said but they remained silent.
**

In such an atmosphere, so remote from that of free speech,
Partisan Review
published Lionel Abel’s “The Aesthetics of Evil,” with the announcement that it was opening a discussion. In other words, Miss Arendt’s defenders would be given an opportunity to reply. Daniel Bell’s very good piece in the last issue was not so much a defense as a plea for an armistice, so I am going to speak up, but it is with a heavy heart. First because I am Miss Arendt’s friend, and friends are regarded as prejudiced. Second because I am a Gentile, and I fear that this fact will only rejoice her enemies, since are not all Gentiles anti-Semitic? Third because I do not feel that Abel’s piece deserves a reply on its own merits. I can only see it as a document in a hate campaign against Miss Arendt and one of the worst. The two serious points Abel raises—a) how does Miss Arendt account for the mass slaughter of Jews in the Ukraine when no Jewish organizations existed there? b) how does she reconcile her criticism of the Jewish leadership with the picture of totalitarian terror she gave in
The Origins of Totalitarianism?
—are so entwined with insinuations, innuendoes, charges of bad faith that it is hard to free the trunk of his argument from this mass of creepers and look at it squarely. He accuses Miss Arendt throughout of deliberately suppressing evidence (“She must know very well,” etc.) that does not suit her hand, and he nudges the reader to guess what that “hand” may be: infatuation with her own ideas, a love-hate affair with totalitarianism, a preference for butchers over their victims, for the strong over the weak, for—why not say it?—the Nazis over the Jews. As a reader, Abel claims to feel that Eichmann “comes off so much better in the book than his victims.” This is given a priori, though it is also his conclusion, which is arrived at by a vicious circle—the term never sounded more apt. “Eichmann is aesthetically palatable, and his victims are aesthetically repulsive,” he finishes, as he began. He offers no evidence on behalf of this idea. He can defend it, if he wishes, as his personal impression. But this is more of a judgment of Abel than of Miss Arendt: reading her book, he liked Eichmann better than the Jews who died in the crematoriums. Each to his own taste. It was not my impression.