W.S. Burroughs

In terms of Burroughs being "transgressive", it definitely seems like he had it out for the society he lived in. I noticed that two common topics in almost all of the excerpts from Burroughs' writing were disease and society. Basically every one of his cut up poems included the words "cancer" or "virus" and gave off really ominous vibes, which is interesting because he made them out of actual news stories. Maybe that's just what he wanted his audience to realize; that society is really creepy and dark if you look at it in a more creative way. In the first excerpt from Naked Lunch, Burroughs illustrates how Bradley the Buyer is overcome by his own kind of disease: an addiction to "contact" with junkies. In the second and third paragraphs of the excerpt, we watch the physical symptoms of Bradley's "disease" overcome him. "He can't drink. He can't get it up. His teeth fall out." He's always sucking on candy bars, which is really weirdly disturbing to imagine because he doesn't have teeth, and his skin turns a grayish green color. When he asks a junkie if he can rub up against him in order to satisfy his addiction, the junkie asks why he can't just get physical "like a real human". This question and Bradley's actions after really reinforce the imagery that Bradley has turned into some kind of weird subhuman golem-ish creature who gets off by "[making] himself all soft like a blob of jelly" and rubbing and touching junkies and government agents and then becomes covered in green smelly slime when he climaxes. One of Burroughs' greatest strengths here is being able to make the reader feel and experience exactly what he wants them to. I think this makes him transgressive because he is able to control his audience and make them feel things they don't want to feel. This is of course also true in the second excerpt from Naked Lunch, which left me feeling confused, violated, and kind of paranoid even though I don't know why. I also noticed that the two different excerpts from Naked Lunch have no similarities that would make anyone think that they came from the same book. This reminded me of what Burroughs said in the interview about picaresque novels and how they have no real plot but are just a collection of "transformed and exaggerated" series of events. Every aspect of the plot and dialogue of the second part was so absurd and wrong on a really specific and dark level, like the way Dr. Benway is so nonchalant about performing "surgery" in a bathroom with no regard to hygiene, intricacy, the right equipment, or the patient's life. I was especially drawn in by the passage, "Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall.... The cup makes a horrible sucking sound", because it just made me feel real weird on the inside. Maybe it's just because I haven't yet figured out what his intent was or what point he is trying to make here. Is he even trying to make a point at all? I think he is because in the interview, he doesn't seem dark or disturbed at all. In fact he just seems really calm and reasonable, even when discussing different remedies for withdrawal symptoms, creating a myth for the space age, and being hassled internationally by the American Narcotic Department.