Words Between the Lines of Age

I remember as an adolescent William Burroughs used to blow me away. There was that great awe that art can inspire -- yes, we needed exactly this -- and my god, how did he figure out how to come up with something so original and convincing. Naked Lunch just spoke to my adolescent soul, eager for a more direct experience with thinking and feeling outside of the box than Jane Austen or other great novelists, who I could see had a gift for something but who clearly smacked of the approval of the adult world and somehow left me with a feeling that there was realy nothing new under the sun. Compelling heroines driven to cliffhanger marriages, the brooding moors, even Anna's remarkably doomed passion for Vronsky and the balanced world of Levin, seemed a bit tame next to images of people hanging each other in perverse ecstasies and armies of wild boys swaying in orgies of abandon. Reading Naked Lunch at 15 was more than reading a novel, it was like responding to a call to arms, joining a cult, signing in to join the wild boys, and finding the odd perverse adult authority of William Burroughs who somehow knew enough to distrust the system of fabulous wealth and corporate success (the Burroughs family) that had created him and was tearing it apart for all to see. By 18 Burroughs had been replaced by Genet and Celine.By the end of college Burroughs had been replaced by Proust, Joyce and Thomas Pynchon.My friends would look back, circumspect about our total sophomore year abandon, with a kind of caution. Almost in the same way that we put our Led Zeppelin and Sex Pistols records in the back of the closet and thought fondly, wasn't it interesting that there was a time when we really did think this would change the world.I recently re-read Naked Lunch. It did not hold up as the magnum opus of the 20th century and as a psychiatrist I admit it, I couldn't help but indulge in a fair amount of psycho-biography -- what exactly had Burrouhgs gone through that would make this world of total perversion, a wired version of Hieronomysus Bosch on hallucinogens -- the most compelling creation that would pull him through the long arduous process of withdrawing from heroin addiction in Tangiers. But once I left that aside and just let myself be with the text, it was all still waiting there -- the eerie power of his turn of a sentence, his ability to write close to the denudded bone of the id with no apology, and the sincerity behind this which I think animates all great writing -- this was the book he had to write -- without consideration for an agent, a publisher, a marketplace, or fans. I guess all in all the truth is rarely pretty and Burroughs tapped deep into that vein, but somehow the trip back left me energized.