I watched the film Queer last week. (Or at least I think it was last week; over the Twixmas break time starts to blur.) A fairly random choice, made mainly because I had a free film ticket expiring, there was a showing with a reasonable start time, and I’d heard fairly positive reviews about the film. I still don’t know what I think about film. I do know that, after watching it, I felt unclean, inside and out.
Most scenes in Queer have, as background decoration, the grimy aftermath of hedonism pursued relentlessly and habitually. William Lee, Burrough’s thinly concealed narrative alterego, played by Daniel Craig, looks by turn affectless or predatory, sitting in bars, surrounded by fellow travellers in the pursuit of bodily pleasures, well-to-do and learned exiles from polite society, surrounded by cigarette butts, shot glasses, spent spirit bottles, by smoke and ash and musk, the implied miasma of bodily effluvia, looking forever impatient and bored and lost in thought and… and looking hungrily at that pretty young man, and that pretty young man, and that pretty young man, pursuing sexual encounters with the same instrumental imperative as a junkie seeking his fix.
Eventually, Lee manages to persuade one of the pretty young men to stick with him,1 to follow him on a druggie’s sacred quest for what Lee calls ‘telepathy’. In a south american jungle Lee and The Boy engage in what might now be called Chemsex, using a now well-known shamanic psychedelic. Then, in magical realist fashion, they drift apart and lose two years. Lee is back to his starting haunt. Nothing, fundamentally, has changed.
Watching Queer reminded me of distant memories catching a few minutes, late night, of Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of Naked Lunch, in which Peter Weller plays Lee; in particular, of the talking insect typewriter with its pulsating fleshy orifice. A day or so later, I decided to watch the film again. Carnal pursuits and pleasures, shown largely ‘straight’ (ironically?) in Queer are instead rendered as carefully crafted magical realist latex monstrosities in Naked Lunch. Whereas Queer is languid and episodic, the narrative structure of film noir is used in Naked Lunch to give the suggestion, at least, that Lee’s adventures in Interzone - his self-imposed exile from justice2 - are those in which, if one squints, the protagonist can be perceived as a tragic hero battling forces of darkness, rather than a relatively well-heeled flaneur pinballing from desire to desire.
Down the rabbit hole a bit further. I decided to read The Naked Lunch. I’m currently about half way through, though I don’t know which half, as the book - more like Queer and less like the film adaptation - also lacks an underlying plot and structure, and comprises a series of strange, dark, dank, dirty, lustful, fantastical vignettes linked more by a tone and sensibility than by a common narrative scaffold.
In terms of the experience of reading The Naked Lunch, the film adaptation of Queer seems to better capture the sense of restless uncleanliness, whereas the film The Naked Lunch appears to better capture the quality of dark, monsterous imagination that pervade the tracts. Somewhere between the two films, for better or worse, seems to be the grimy essence of the book.
The book, The Naked Lunch, also reminded me of not one, but two, fictional books that featured in episodes of South Park. In one episode, the child protagonists decide to write a deliberately disgusting and offensive book as a prank.3 The book causes readers to vomit violently, but at the same time critics herald it as a literary masterpiece. And in another episode, the children’s teacher decides to write a romance novel, in which his sexual preoccupations find themselves on full display, with over six thousand references to male genitalia. Somewhere between these two fictional books, for better or worse, seems to be the essence of the real book, The Naked Lunch.
The enduring appeal, sympathy and romantic tint shown towards Burroughs as a literary and cultural figure should surprise us almost as much as Burroughs’ managing to live into his eighties despite his lifestyle.4 Pigeonholed and cordoned, likely more in retrospect, into a movement called The Beats, the radical honesty, free living, and apparent rejection of orthodoxy and orthodox values professed and lived by Burroughs and other Beats figureheads in the forties and fifties laid the groundwork for the Hippies in the sixties and seventies (as well as being why the Beatles are called the Beatles and not the Beetles). And in this freedom, this rejection of old orthodoxies, this looking within and listening go and following of bodily desires, there was an expectation that progressive economic, political and sociological change would follow. Put simply: both the Beats (and by extension Burroughs) and the Hippies were coded as chaotic agents of the radical Left, bringing hope of liberation to the many.
But the economic base supporting Burroughs’ hedonistic lifestyle cannot be ignored. Burroughs was born to a very wealthy and privileged family: his grandfather was the inventor of a patented technology, analogue business computers, that made him fabulously wealthy, and so Burroughs’ own parents were also very wealthy. And Burroughs’ parents used a portion of their wealth to send Burroughs a generous monthly stipend to him, whereever he was in the world, to do with as he pleased. Burroughs, in effect, lived off his affluent parents for decades. And it is with their largesse, an accident of pure privilege, that Burroughs was able to pursue a lifestyle that, for those less economically fortunate, would almost inevitably have led to the desperate crimes of those feeding all-consuming addictions - burglaries and robberies, prostitution - followed by imprisonment, homelessness, overdose and early death. Burroughs’ economic privilege, which was likely further compounded by him living in middle income countries, where the dollar stretched further, meant his experiences as an addict, of bodies and substances that can enter bodies, grimy and dank as they are, were likely always somewhat rareified and unrepresentative of the typical consequences of pursuing the lifestyle he chronicalled and mythologised.
Which brings me to the title of this post: Brother Lee the Antimonk. Because the need to be either gainfully employed, or to be locked in a cycle of desperate acquisitive crime to feed expensive habits, was partially or entirely removed from Burroughs for long stretches of his life, he could pursue the calls of the body and flesh with greater purity than the majority of ‘junkies’. Much as the lifelong room and board of a monk at a monestary, supported by the charity of lay members, allows a monk to devote his life to a vocation of spiritual contemplation and denial of the flesh, so Burroughs’ life appears almost as a mirror of the Christian monk’s vocation: a life devoted entirely to the present, to hedonism, to bodily pleasures and experiences, no matter how sodden or rotten or extreme.5
Footnotes
One audience review of Queer I read complained that The Boy’s character was underdeveloped. I agree, but think this lack of interest in the minds and personalities of Lee’s quarries came from Burroughs himself.↩︎
Burroughs was convicted in absentia of manslaughter for shooting his wife in her temple, and sentenced to two years imprisonment. Which I believe he never served.↩︎
In the episode, the children write the book because they are disappointed that J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye does not live up to its notoriety. I am sure if they had read Naked Lunch they would not have been similarly disappointed.↩︎
Tragically, William S. Burroughs’ identically named and neglected son was similarly afflicted by addictive impulses, but died before his father, aged just 33.↩︎
A magical realist caricature of Burroughs may therefore be Clive Barker’s Cenobites!↩︎