This collection gathers material william s. burroughs wrote after completing junky and queer.
The title is derived from Tangier’s status as an “international zone” during the time that Burroughs
lived there. Originally, this material was part of
what would become the naked luncH manuscript, but very little of the actual text of Interzone
appears in Naked Lunch; nor does Burroughs avail
himself of this material in the cut-ups trilogy that
followed Naked Lunch. The work collected here
thus provides a key transition between the linear,
hard-boiled style of Junky and the surreal, poetic,
fragmented style of Naked Lunch. Along with
Queer and The yaGe letters, Interzone is crucial reading for those who wish to come to Naked
Lunch by following the author’s early development.
Certainly, a familiarity with the earlier works enables a much more informed reading of the difficult
Naked Lunch.
In his introduction to Interzone, James Grauerholz, Burroughs’s longtime companion and editor,
says that Interzone is based on an early manuscript
version of Naked Lunch rediscovered by Bill Morgan in 1984 among allen ginsberg’s papers at
Columbia University. “Interzone” was in fact the
working title of Naked Lunch. Grauerholz included
the material from this lost manuscript that had
not been previously published and supplemented
it with work from the same period that he found
in Burroughs’s collections at the University of
Arizona, Columbia, and the University of Texas at
Austin. Many of these pieces were first written in
letter form to Ginsberg. The most significant find
in the manuscript at Columbia is entitled “Word,”
a literary bloodletting that reads as if Burroughs is
purging himself to transform himself.
From the collection at the University of Arizona, Grauerholz includes “Twilight’s Last Gleamings,” first written with Kells Elvins in 1938. Based
upon the sinking of the Morro Castle in 1935, this
story of a captain and his crew sneaking aboard the
lifeboats of a sinking ship exists in various shorter
versions in other works by Burroughs. This is one
of Burroughs’s favorite stories, and he uses it often
as a metaphor for what happens when the “ship of
state” goes down: Those responsible for sinking it
jump ship and leave the passengers to die.
In the next story, “The Finger,” a man cuts
off the end of his finger to impress a woman. Although written in the third person about a character named Lee (Burroughs’s mother’s maiden
name), the story is clearly an autobiographical retelling of Burroughs’s own attempt to impress his
boyhood love Jack Anderson. However, Burroughs
worried that the homosexual angle would render
the story unpublishable and changed the object
of desire from male to female. In later years, Burroughs would further obfuscate the facts, claiming,
for example, that the finger end was blown off in
a chemistry accident. The straightforward, factual
presentation of the act of cutting off one’s finger
reflects the emotionless, junk-influenced style of
Junky.
“Driving Lesson” has a similar style and is also
about his relationship with Anderson. The Burroughs character is called “Bill,” and he and Jack
carouse in the bars of East St. Louis. Bill comes to
realize that Jack is stupid and asks Jack if he would
like to drive his car, even though Jack has little experience behind the wheel. As if to prove his point
about Jack’s stupidity, Bill encourages him to drive
so fast and recklessly that Jack ends up totaling
Bill’s father’s car. The clear self-destructive urge of
Bill is not commented upon. His father takes him
home and makes little of the incident, since neither Jack nor Bill was seriously hurt.
“The Junky’s Christmas” has actually been
anthologized in collections of holiday stories. As is
true of the previous two stories, this one was written in a letter to Ginsberg (circa mid-1950s) with
the hopes that he could have it published. It is the
story of “Danny the Car Wiper” who, on Christmas Day, comes out of a three-day jail sentence
junk-sick and broke. When Danny finally scores,
he gives up his junk to a young man in the flophouse apartment next to his who is suffering horribly from kidney stones. A Christmas miracle occurs
for Danny when he suddenly feels “a warm flood”
pulsing through his veins, and he thinks that, because it is Christmas, he must have “scored the immaculate fix.”
The remaining stories in this section are all
set in Tangier and are only loosely related. Grauerholz selected them from among the letters Burroughs sent to Ginsberg. “Lee and the Boys” is
Burroughs’s most extensive picture of his life with
Kiki, the Spanish boy who appears in many of his
works: “Like many Spanish boys, Kiki did not feel
love for women. To him a woman was only for sex.
He had known Lee for some months, and felt a
genuine fondness for him, in an offhand way.” A
second brief Tangier story, “In the Café Central,”
sketches a crowd of sybarites and scavengers who
live in hotel lobbies, prey on the rich, and delight
in each other’s humiliations. One anecdote here
has to do with Tennessee Williams, an unapproachably famous guest in Tangier, who is nonetheless
approached by one of these sybarites and rebuffs
him. Burroughs eventually met Williams, and they
became friendly. The related “Dream of the Penal
Colony” casts Tangier metaphorically as a place
inhabited by colonists who are actually prisoners.
The colonists can be recognized by “the penal colony look: control, without inner calm or balance;
bitter knowledge, without maturity; intensity, without warmth or love.” This useful list of characteristics reveals Burroughs’s growing ambivalence about
Tangier, which had originally appealed to him (as
had Mexico) as a place of total freedom. The intrigue and secret-agent plot here will surface in the
passages of Naked Lunch that are set in Tangier.
Burroughs wrote “International Zone” in response to Ginsberg’s suggestion that he might be
able to sell a magazine article about his Moroccan
experiences and observations. Burroughs would
later reject the essay as far too conventional, but
it is hardly so and can hold its place with the very
best travel writing of the period. It is also a revealing self-portrait of Burroughs as fatally defeated
character. For Burroughs and the other desperate characters living there, the “special attraction
of Tangier can be put in one word: exemption.
Exemption from interference, legal or otherwise.
Your private life is your own, to act exactly as you
please.” Such freedom was crucial for Burroughs
at this period, having been successively run out of
America and Mexico. Burroughs would eventually
leave Tangier because he felt the walls closing in
after Morocco gained independence and Tangier
was no longer an international zone.
The “Lee’s Journals” section of the book is
mostly drawn from letters that Burroughs sent to
Ginsberg. During this period, Burroughs drew no
line between the writing of letters and the writing of his books, and he depended on Ginsberg
to collect and edit his work. The “journals” detail
Burroughs’s development of the novel that would
become Naked Lunch. They testify to Burroughs’s
heavy self-criticism of his work, show how thoroughly he revised his work, and how willing he was
to cut out any material that was not up to his high
standards. For example, many of the “routines” included here were cut from Naked Lunch.
These journal entries also reveal Burroughs’s
dedication to creating a new kind of self-referential
novel. As he says of himself in “International
Zone,” he is in a “larval” stage, ready to change
into something but not knowing what: “What am I
trying to do in writing?” he asks in “Lee’s Journals.”
“This novel is about transitions, larval forms, emergent telepathic faculty, attempts to control and
stifle new forms. . . . I feel there is some hideous
new force loose in the world like a creeping sickness, spreading, blighting.” While in Junky, Queer,
and The Yage Letters he reconstructed his past; he
writes that the new novel “is an attempt to create
my future. In a sense, it is a guidebook, a map.”
Such notes suggest that Naked Lunch is a more
personal book than has been understood before: It
is literally Burroughs’s guidebook for his life.
Burroughs saw the writing of Interzone/Naked
Lunch as decidedly antiliterary. He says in “Lee’s
Journals” that until he was 35 and wrote Junky,
he “had a special abhorrence for writing, for my
thoughts and feelings put down on a piece of
paper.” To overcome this hatred of literary novels
and of their self-revealing “feelings,” Burroughs
wrote in a hard-boiled style in Junky, displaced
his “feelings” in the “routines” of Queer, and put
together an epistolary novel in The Yage Letters.
Throughout these journal entries, he struggles to
articulate a form of novel writing that will not disgust him. Essential to his concept of the novel is its
fragmentary nature and its self-referentiality: “The
fragmentary quality of the work is inherent in the
method and will resolve itself as necessary. That
is, I include the author Lee, in the novel, and by
so doing separate myself from him so that he becomes another character.” Such notes show that
the radical form of Naked Lunch was thoroughly
thought-out beforehand. “The Tangier novel,” he
writes, “will consist of Lee’s impressions of Tangier,
instead of the outworn novelistic pretense that he
is dealing directly with his characters and situations. That is, I include the author in the novel.” He
will not, as some other novelists do, pretend that
the author is hidden. Another key to the technique
of Interzone/Naked Lunch is the “routine” that he
first developed in Queer. The routine allows for the
“uncontrollable, the unpredictable,” and the dangerous to enter into the novel. Such explicit technical discussions of the writing of Naked Lunch are
invaluable, and scholars of Naked Lunch will find
the “Ginsberg Notes” section here to be central.
“Word” is the longest piece in Interzone and
quite possibly are the words that jack kerouac
typed that gave him nightmares when he visited
Tangier in 1957. In many ways, this manuscript can
be seen as a rehearsal for the kind of “antinovel”
that Burroughs has sketched out in the “Ginsberg
Notes” and other journal entries. It does take on
the kind of mosaic form that Burroughs sought.
But the work is decidedly undisciplined, too: “This
book spill off the page in all directions.” “Word” is
more than anything else the record of Burroughs’s
first sustained attempt to unleash his “word hoard.”
The method is purgative; the metaphors, not accidentally, scatological. Like Naked Lunch, there
is great poetry in these pages, too. Yet, the overall
feel of this key, transitional work is that Burroughs
wrote it for himself, with no hope of ever getting it
published.
Bibliography
Grauerholz, James. Introduction. Interzone, by William
S. Burroughs. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989.
ix–xxiii.
Rob Johnson