Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

Product Information

Filmmakers, including Stanley Kubrick and Antony Balch, using a script from Brion Gysin, attempted to adapt William S. In Burroughs's "Deposition: A Testimony Concerning A Sickness", "The Blue Movies" (appearing in the vignette "A. There are fugues which derive their themes from the everyday symbolism of rage - the processes of sex and excretion, developed into perversion and coprophagy. We take pride in offering a wide selection of used books, from classics to hidden gems, ensuring there?

The book begins with the misadventures of Burroughs' alter-ego, William Lee (also referred to as "Lee the Agent"). His pointed refusal to endorse “the garden of delights” of the psychedelic movement, though widely ignored at the time, reflects the stubborn complexity of a born realist. There is no glorification of drug-taking in Naked Lunch, except in the glories of Burroughs's writing.

Since he pictures liberation as a state of tranquillity and “mineral silence” rather than one of religious or sexual ecstasy, this goal seems close to Freud’s ambition to replace neurotic unhappiness with ordinary unhappiness. The leisure took the form of paralysing drug addiction - Burroughs once said he could stare at the end of his shoe for eight hours on end - while the travel was motivated by evasion of the law, and the romance was mostly paid-for sex with "boys" in exotic locations. Some of his more charitable readers, too weak-stomached to take the art, may wish to look on the whole work as a snakepit record, a terrible but necessary thesis on the nature of the life of the damned, a piece of unusually frank didacticism.

Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs had all seen the insides of prisons and mental hospitals by the age of 30. With additional material by Burroughs, a note on the text by the editors, and an afterword by Barry Ulin. Both the courtroom transcripts from the 1966 Boston obscenity trial and Burroughs’s “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” that preface all later editions of Naked Lunch serve exactly the same satirical purpose as the frontispiece disclaimers and pledges of high moral altitude that accompany any picaresque novel out to shock, from Defoe’s Roxana to Nabokov’s Lolita. This ruling ultimately had a profound effect on the country's obscenity laws and blasted open the doors regarding the legality of sexually explicit materials.Grove compared Naked Lunch to Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Tropic of Cancer, which had also been challenged for obscenity, and included transcripts of the court testimonies in a new edition of the book.

AVEC: A Journal of Writing Premiere Issue Volume One, Number 1 Featuring an Excerpt from the Lost Chapter of Naked Lunch By William S. These include the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Factualists, and the Divisionists (who occupy "a midway position").In 1962, a parent in Temple City, California found the language “crude, profane, and obscene” and argued that the novel attacked “home life, [the] teaching profession, religion, and so forth. Turning to it again recently, I was less put off than I used to be by the sexual hangings, since I knew what was coming ("He leaves her tied on the platform in piles of old used condoms, while he adjusts the rope") but still inclined to hurry past the talking asshole.