The last modernist

Naked Lunch, last of the landmark novels of the Modern Movement, and first published in Paris 50 years ago, is here reissued in an anniversary edition. I read it as a schoolboy in the mid-1960s, when it shocked and liberated me (but I was a soft target – already shocked and liberated by Jean Genet and Francis Bacon). It took a little longer for William Burroughs to become a celebrity at the cutting edge of social and artistic instability: the literary Establishment found him either offensive or risible, and he advanced largely through pop culture. In 1967, he made it on to another work of genius, the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album cover, along with Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud and Marilyn Monroe. Ten years later punk canonised him.

It is fitting that the novel which began Burroughs’s long-term project of unlacing the printed text from its cemented boots through cut-up, fold-in and deranged repetition should have an uncertain title. It was first published just about everywhere as The Naked Lunch, inspired by Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. A pared-down Naked Lunch was favoured by the book’s pre-publication editor, Allen Ginsberg, as cooler and more abstract. Burroughs used both titles, in conversation as well as in his writing, but, if pressed, he favoured the shorter.

By the time of David Cronenberg’s 1991 film of the book, Naked Lunch had settled down as the standard title. I thought I’d celebrate its 50th birthday by taking a look at the film. The central character, William Lee, a surrogate for Burroughs himself, is played by Peter Weller, who has an uncanny resemblance to Daniel Craig. The film is ciné noir in psychedelic colours, with a smoky, Chandleresque atmosphere shifted into the jazz-crime bohemia of New York, Paris and Tangier in the 1950s. The film’s producer, Jeremy Thomas, has said that “Burroughs was ecstatic with the finished result”. It’s a shame Burroughs couldn’t have been more sceptical, because the film completes a process that had begun some years earlier, whereby he was defused and repackaged for mainstream consumption. Through a combination of fatigue and necessity, he was willing to be reabsorbed into the conformist web to whose rupture his work had previously been dedicated.

This repackaging started when Burroughs was salvaged by American well-wishers from the cul-de-sac in which he found himself in 1970s London. He effortlessly linked up with fashionable Studio 54 Manhattan, hobnobbing with Warhol, Capote and Diana Ross. His addiction to drugs was presented as cured – but it hadn’t been and never was. And his homosexuality, always vividly actual in his books, was desexed into a style choice. Indeed, Cronenberg’s film, which foregrounds the wife, has a gay boy ask Burroughs, “Are you a faggot?” to which the Burroughs character replies, “Not by nature, no, but by circumstances.” This was the exact opposite of the truth. Heterosexual marriage was the circumstantial act. His nature was deeply homosexual and it consciously drove his work.

All Burroughs’s subversiveness is anaesthet­ised in this entertaining film. And would subversiveness, I wondered, survive a rereading of Naked Lunch itself? The answer is yes, it does – yet that wasn’t what struck me most. Early reviews of the work coped by suggesting it was a modern Pilgrim’s Progress that looked fearlessly into the double-hell of the heroin addict and the sexual deviant. But I’ve discovered that in the internet age, where an explosive clash of images and ideas is normal, the book is much easier to read than first time round. The prose may contain too many lists, but it is not from another planet, and its brilliance is distinctive and infectious.

What comes through, above all, is not some quasi-religious downerism, but a new mythology in which comedy is indistinguishable from fury. And at a time when gay people are very visible but homosexuality has been ring-fenced, Burroughs’s erotic explosions still wrong-foot many of his so-called fans. His essential message – escape the machine – could well be more relevant, and difficult to emulate, than ever.

Duncan Fallowell’s “Going As Far As I Can” is published on 13 August by Profile Books (£8.99)

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