Naked Lunch for Lawyers: William S. Burroughs on Capital Punishment
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Batey: Naked LunchNAKED for Lawyers: LUNCH William FOR S. Burroughs LAWYERS: on Capital Punishme WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, PORNOGRAPHY, THE DRUG TRADE, AND THE PREDATORY NATURE OF HUMAN INTERACTION t ROBERT BATEY* At eighty-two, William S. Burroughs has become a literary icon, "arguably the most influential American prose writer of the last 40 years,"' "the rebel spirit who has witch-doctored our culture and consciousness the most."2 In addition to literature, Burroughs' influence is discernible in contemporary music, art, filmmaking, and virtually any other endeavor that represents "what Newt Gingrich-a Burroughsian construct if ever there was one-likes to call the counterculture."3 Though Burroughs has produced a steady stream of books since the 1950's (including, most recently, a recollection of his dreams published in 1995 under the title My Education), Naked Lunch remains his masterpiece, a classic of twentieth century American fiction.4 Published in 1959' to t I would like to thank the students in my spring 1993 Law and Literature Seminar, to whom I assigned Naked Lunch, especially those who actually read it after I succumbed to fears of complaints and made the assignment optional. Their comments, as well as the ideas of Brian Bolton, a student in the spring 1994 seminar who chose Naked Lunch as the subject for his seminar paper, were particularly helpful in the gestation of this essay; I also benefited from the paper written on Naked Lunch by spring 1995 seminar student Christopher Dale. Gary Minda of Brooklyn Law School commented on an early draft of the essay, as did several Stetson University colleagues: John Cooper, Peter Lake, Terrill Poliman (now at Illinois), and Manuel Ramos (now at Tulane) of the College of Law, Michael Raymond of the English Department and Greg McCann of the School of Business Administration. Invaluable research assistance was provided by the reference librarians at the College of Law, in particular Sally Ginsberg Waters; also helpful were Sandra Anderson Garcia, professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of South Florida, and Ray Ravis, now a graduate of Stetson's School of Business Administration. Of course, none of these persons bears any responsibility for my scandalous choice of subject or for the curious way in which I treat it. * Professor, Stetson University College of Law. 1. Robert Cohen, Dispatchesfrom the Interzone, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 15, 1995, at 9 (reviewing WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, MY EDUCATION: A BOOK OF DREAMS (1995)). 2. James Wolcott, Night Crawlers, THE NEW YORKER, Jan. 16, 1995, at 83, 83 (reviewing MY EDUCATION). 3. Cohen, supra note I, at 9. Cohen identifies "Thomas Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick and countless others" as Burroughs' literary successors. Id. Wolcott sees Burroughs' influence in the music of Patti Smith, Lou Reed, David Bowie, and the entire cadre of heavy metal rockers, as well as in movie special effects and video games. Wolcott, supra note 2, at 83. For Burroughs' impact on films, see infra notes 35, 74, 150, 161, 201, 210, 272 & 293. 4. "It is a masterful performance that refuses classification: a paradoxical masterpiece by a writer who eschews masterpieces." Jenny Skerl, Introduction to WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, NAKED LUNCH at xix (Grove Press, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary ed. 1984) (1959). 5. Olympia Press first published The Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959. The American edition, by Grove Press, appeared in 1962, with a shortened name and additional material: an introduction and an appendix, both written by Burroughs. See MICHAEL BARRY GOODMAN, CONTEMPORARY LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP: THE CASE HISTORY OF BURROUGHS' NAKED LUNCH 145-46 (1981). See infra note 10. Published by CWSL Scholarly Commons, 1996 1 102 CaliforniaCALIFORNIA Western WESTERN International INTERNATIONAL Law Journal, Vol.LAW 27, JOURNALNo. 1 [1996], Art.[Vol. 3 27 critical acclaim 6 and contumely, 7 the novel was briefly banned because of its scatological depictions of drug addiction and of sadistic, mostly homosex- ual intercourse.' Despite this checkered early history, Naked Lunch has endured, because its fierce humor and cynical rage9 continue to connect with readers well into the novel's fourth decade. It seems implausible to link a countercultural icon, and his scarcely respectable masterpiece, to the law. Yet this essay attempts to develop the lessons that Naked Lunch may hold for lawyers and legal scholars. These ideas proceed from rather specific messages about such legal issues as capital punishment and pornography, to a broader assessment of drug addiction as a cultural phenomenon (including its treatment by criminal law), and finally to a general indictment of the predatory nature of contemporary human interaction. Burroughs has insisted that the most scandalous chapters in Naked Lunch-pornographic scenes in which sexual intercourse precedes murder and 6. In 1959, Norman Mailer wrote that "'Burroughs will deserve rank as one of the most important novelists in America'; three years later, Mailer added that "Burroughs was 'the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius."' Id. at 160 (quoting Mailer's Advertisements for Myself and the publicity brochure for the American publication of Naked Lunch). Mailer testified similarly at the 1964 Massachusetts obscenity trial regarding Naked Lunch. See id. at 195-200. John Ciardi, who also testified at the obscenity trial, id. at 179-84, wrote in 1960 that "'Naked Lunch' is a powerful empathetic descent into the hell of dope addiction." John Ciardi, Epitaph for the Dead Beats, in A CASEBOOK ON THE BEAT 256, 263 (Thomas Parkinson ed., 1961). In 1962 Mary McCarthy hailed Burroughs' work as "a new kind of novel," bracketing Naked Lunch with Nabokov's Lolita and Pale Fire as the leading exemplars of this trend. See MARY MCCARTHY, THE WRITING ON THE WALL AND OTHER LITERARY ESSAYS 42 (1970). 7. See Lionel Abel, Beyond the Fringe, PARTISAN REV., Spring 1963, at 109, 111 ("[I]t is foolish ... to justify Naked Lunch as literature.... In fact, it has only a tiny bit of literary merit."); Ugh ... , TIMES LITERARY SuP., Nov. 14, 1963, at 919, 919 (Burroughs' novels are "pure verbal masturbation"); John Wain, The Great Burroughs Affair, THE NEW REPUBLIC, Dec. 1, 1962, at 21 (comparing Burroughs unfavorably to the Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller, Louis- Ferdinand Celine, Alfred Jarry, James Macpherson, the author of Peyton Place, and porno- graphers in general). 8. See generally GOODMAN, supra note 5. 9. JERRY H. BRYANT, THE OPEN DECISION: THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVEL AND ITS INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND 208 (1970): There is a rage in the way [Burroughs] presents his world that cannot easily be pacified, and that rage expressed in satire is a violent blow directed at the conditions he depicts. He taunts the perpetrators of those conditions with an exaggerated "truth" that has a close enough correspondence to the actual world for it to strike home with effect. Regarding the humor in Naked Lunch, see William S. Burroughs, My Purpose Is to Write for the Space Age, in WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS AT THE FRONT: CRITCAL RECEPTION, 1959-1989 at 265, 266 (Jennie Skerl & Robin Lydenberg eds., 1991) [hereinafter Burroughs, My Purpose] (original emphasis): "I have always seen my own work in the light of the picaresque-a series of adventures and misadventures, horrific and comic, encountered by an antihero. Much of my work is intended to be funny." A student comment shows how well Burroughs fulfilled his intent: "Many readers, including myself, feel that Naked Lunch is absolutely hilarious. I found myself laughing out loud many times over. In fact, I could not keep certain passages to myself and I read them to my friends." Brian Bolton, Naked Lunch... An Addiction 4 (Apr. 22, 1994) (unpublished seminar paper, on file with the author). https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cwilj/vol27/iss1/3 2 1996]Batey: Naked Lunch forNAKED Lawyers: LUNCH William FOR S. LAWYERS Burroughs on Capital Punishme mutilation-"were written as a tract against Capital Punishment."'" Though this self-serving statement is not entirely trustworthy," these chapters do make trenchant comments about the psychological motivations both of proponents of the death penalty and of consumers of pornography. The former seem tainted by sexual sadism' 2 and the latter, by a fear of aging and death kept only temporarily at bay by masturbation. 3 Thus the champions of capital punishment and pornography can be seen as addicts, no better than the brutal and pathetic drug addicts Burroughs depicts throughout the novel. Drug addiction is the prime topic of Naked Lunch. Because concern about narcotics use is a main theme of current criminal law, Burroughs' excruciating depiction of the drives that dictate the addict's life is decidedly pertinent to lawyers. He shows, in essay form'4 and in fiction both naturalistic 5 and surreal,' 6 how the structure of the junk business and the addict's insatiable needs force him into conduct progressively more depraved. While Burroughs implies that the addict must become a pusher, preying on those beneath him in the pyramidal structure in order to survive, at the end of Naked Lunch he holds out the hope of deliverance, that the addict may kick his habit. 7 The novel thus makes a strong argument for drug decrimi- nalization-because legal sanctions are meaningless to those subject to the drives he depicts-but presents an even stronger argument for drug denial, addressed to each addict. Apart from its discussions of capital punishment, pornography, of drug addiction, Naked Lunch has a deeper implication for those who work in law. Burroughs sees the drug trade as the model for predatory practice in vast categories of human enterprise 8 : business, politics, government, religion, philosophy,' 9 and the professions-especially medicine20 and law.2' The anarchy of Burroughs' virtually plotless creation and the surrealism of many 10.