Naked Lunch opened a path into the world of the addict, the homosexual, the social outlaw. Burroughs expanded the content of fiction, giving artistic form to extremes of contemporary abjection. Perhaps Burroughs’s achievement represents a threat to the well-mannered, conventionally crafted, middle-class novel. While early support for Naked Lunch from such mandarins as Mary McCarthy and John Ciardi has been matched over the years by encomiums from many of our best writers and by a substantial body of excellent academic criticism, the overall literary world’s recognition of Burroughs has been grudging more often than not.
In today’s censorious climate, police work dominates the pages of the book reviews: this writer has the wrong attitude and must be done away with.īurroughs has always elicited a testy response from the cultural establishment. Shits have an uncontrollable need to pass judgment on and be right about everything. Johnsons have a live-and-let-live, mind-their-own-business mentality. Or, to use one of Burroughs’s favorite distinctions, members of the Johnson Family from the Shits. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists, social reactionaries from libertarians. This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.”īurroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test.
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