Quote:
Originally Posted by beppe
To appreciate Naked Lunch it might take an acquired taste. To get that taste you have to be in a certain disposition of spirit, even more than that, you have to be in a certain phase of your life. Now, the way I am now, I would not touch it.
Try some Bukowsky, and before that On the Road, they could be a good introduction.
|
I first read
Naked Lunch as a little kid and roughly fifteen other books by Burroughs during a two-year period after that. The only Burroughs I feel holds up over time is
Junky, his first novel. It's the only one in which he masters Conrad's trick of casting ordinary shallow characters in an eerie light: "His face was lined with a suffering in which his eyes did not participate. It was a suffering of his cells alone."
I've always preferred J.G. Ballard, whom I read at the same time as Burroughs but consider infinitely more accomplished.
Things one reads at around the same time during one's youth: Sade, Burroughs, Ballard, Celine, Lautremont, surrealist and Dadaist manifestos.
I've never liked Bukowski's Tramp of Truth shtick, though certain of his stories have a kind of neo-realist integrity. Can't say I like Ginsberg or Kerouac, either, or any of the beats except Dianne Di Prima and the black mountain poets (Denise Levertov, John Wieners) if they count.
In fact, I once wrote a piece about how awful Ginsberg and Kerouac really are. It was published in an anthology called
Crimes of the Beats, but I don't recommend it because my writing has since improved. I only mention it because I truly despise the cult of spontaneity, which the beats appropriated from surrealist automatic writing, only to attach a certain faux rebellious attitude that gets in the way of saying anything useful.
In
The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon does exactly what Kerouac claimed but failed to do in
On the Road: It riffs in the way an accomplished bebop horn player does.
Real jazz soloists play against chord changes and reinterpret song structure. They can rip it open or even seem to ignore it, but you always feel structure's presence in their work.
Kerouac, on the other hand, is riffing on
nothing: There isn't any structure in his novels and thus his improv is masturbatory and aimless. Whereas in
Crying Lot, Pynchon is riffing on the myth of Orpheus like a virtuoso and the result is something you can reread endlessly and still discover new veins of grace. You can feel the structure he's playing against because he's the truer musician.
Do research and you'll find out Ginsberg revised constantly even as he taught his students to "write another poem" instead. For that and many other reasons, I actually hate him.
This is not to disrespect people who love G and K, however. Other readers' pathologies simply require different emphases than mine. Other writers might well receive something of lasting value from the very influences that irritate me most.