#blahreads Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Every year or two I read a classic that I just don’t get. It’s not that I can’t read difficult books (considering I did finish Infinite Jest). But sometimes, rarely, a book become such an ordeal that I can’t finish it. Naked Lunch joins Walden in my pantheon of unreadable American classics. 

I can see why it’s important. I can see why it’s thematically and stylistically pathbreaking. I can see why it WAS shocking. But those are attributes that mattered at the moment when it was printed, not today. 

The hallucinatory nightmares of the junkie life have been portrayed better. The staring into the abyss of hell as personal experience has been done better. The graphic sex (and not just the gay sex), the assholes full of shit being rimmed and penetrated, the festering sores and turning tricks for a hit, the ejaculation of a corpse‘a penis at the moment of death, the necrophilia and cannibalism...all of it have lost the power to shock since 1959. 

I don’t see the humour and the social commentary people say the has. 

Instead I see the absence of plot and narrative structure. I get the idea that in certain books, you don’t need structure or plot, that you can dive into a liquid pool of pure words, images and ideas. But does that really work when what you dive into is just more of the same turgid crap (pardon the pun) again and again? Shorn of the power to shock with the passing of time, it becomes repetitive, puerile and pointless. 

When it was printed, Naked Lunch was like nothing ever written before. It broke every rule and every taboo. It shocked and gave voice to a generation that was lost and didn’t seek to be found. It took a chainsaw to society and convention and morality. I was raw. It was visceral. It was revolutionary. 

60 years later, it is a victim not just of its own success, but the success of the literary revolution it launched. 

60 years later, Naked Lunch is boring. Boring as shit.