Great ApesI received William Burroughs's seminal (in more sense than one!) novel Naked Lunch as a form prize when I was fifteen. I read it with a distinct sense of horripilation, as if the vile secretions it described might ooze through the pages and the orgiastic rituals it depicted were subject to incorporation into my own, fevered imagination.Burroughs's influence on me as a writer has been impossibly confused with the impact of his writing. From his life I took the dubious message that in order to nurture a standpoint of fearless detachment -- from country, from class, from all allegiances -- it was permissible to indulge in the most irrational derangement of the senses. Yet while this was the pose, its enactment was one of steely-eyed perspicacity. If there was the Burroughs of Nova Express, Dead Fingers Talk, and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, willfully employing his unconscious as a test bed for the most exuberantly unpleasant of visions and ideas, then there was also the harsh empiricism of Junky to act as a corrective. But the main lesson the gestalt of Burroughs's life and his work taught me was that there exists a sinister congruence between the control systems implicit in capitalist societies (with their obsessional manufacturing and their compulsiveconsuming) and the uncontrollable psyche of the drug addict. It was Burroughs's great contribution to twentieth-century literature to merge his own psychopathology with the collective malaise. Truly, to paraphrase his friend Jack Kerouac, he made us all look at what was on the end of our forks. |
Contents
Section 1 | 1 |
Section 2 | 15 |
Section 3 | 28 |
Section 4 | 40 |
Section 5 | 56 |
Section 6 | 74 |
Section 7 | 93 |
Section 8 | 118 |
Section 13 | 210 |
Section 14 | 232 |
Section 15 | 260 |
Section 16 | 284 |
Section 17 | 296 |
Section 18 | 315 |
Section 19 | 335 |
Section 20 | 359 |
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Common terms and phrases
alpha animal arms arse arsehole artist bipedal body Bohm bonobos brachiating Braithwaite breakdown Carchimp Charing Cross Hospital chimpanzee chimps chimpunity chup-chupp cocaine consort countersigned delusion denoted door Dr Bowen Dr Busner drugs Dykes's euch-euch ex-alpha eyebrow ridges eyes feel felt female fingers fucking gallery Gambol George Levinson gesticulation gestured glass going Grebe grnn grnnn grooming gru-nnn grunts H'hooo h'huu Hamble hands head fur Heath Hospital hooo HoooGraa hospital huuu infants inparted ischial scrag jacket Jane Bowen Jean knuckle-walked legs looked male mating monkeys muzzle nest novocal oestrus paintings pant-hooted patient patrol Peasenhulme pulled Rauhschutz Saatchi Gallery Sarah scrag scruff scut Sealink shiny happy shit shoulder signed Simon Dykes Simon thought squatted sub-adults swaggered swelling swelling-protector Tabitha there-there there's thing Tony Figes took turned vocalised Volvo What's Whatley wild humans Wiltshire Wraaa Zack Busner