Naked Lunch Summary

In her work “Notes from the Orifice: Language and the Body in William Burroughs”, Robin Lydenberg suggests that Naked Lunch is a “history of voice and body, of language and materiality” (56). Lydenberg discusses the use of language in which she looks closer at binaries, metonymy, and metaphors. The focus on her paper lies in relationships between the literary devices and binary oppositions. In which she reveals concepts of dehumanization and dismemberment. While Foucault addresses the relationship between power and its subjects, Lydenberg suggests that Burroughs illustrates the “dual structure of human life” (59). Foucault’s revealing of the invisible power mechanisms and how they function, and Lydenberg’s argument of the dual structure of human life connects the two due to the impact these relations and structures have on people’s

Lydenberg argues that in Naked Lunch there is “a basic contempt for human life always initiates the impulse to improve on nature, on the body” (61). One can see that both of the theories refer to improvement of the body. Instead of illustrating the point of body improvement by addressing the surgical aspects of Naked Lunch as Lydenberg does (61), this paper rather explores the theory in connection to simians. The Simopath disorder that Burroughs describes is a condition that is peculiar to the army (23). A person suffering from Simopath disorder is convinced he is an ape or other simian and discharge cures it (23). In this instance both the theories of Foucault and Lydenberg intersect. While Foucault reveals the structure of a system, Lydenberg addresses the life that is affected by it. Lydenberg states that the “truncated creatures who grope blindly around Naked Lunch are dismembered remnants of human life” (61) and that they have been “[d]ehumanized into insects, automatons, or body parts, they have been cut off from human evolution, from the”‘independent spon-taneous action' " (NL,