Q minus A

In introduction, my three lists are American 20th century fiction and nonfiction and the city (major), American 19th century fiction and nonfiction and the problems of sovereignty and nation, and American film and photography and society. Junky (1953) is one of the first novels that I read, suggested by my husband as a good example of a city novel from the 1950s.

Junky is William Burroughs’s 1953 novel/memoir originally published under the name William Lee. Written during Burroughs’s tenure in Mexico about his time in New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City, it tracks a junk habit that dogs Bill Lee the entire way. It ends with Bill searching for Yage in South America, a journey that Burroughs in fact undertook in an effort to escape Mexico after (accidentally?) shooting his wife Joan in the head. In Junky, in the second to last paragraph, Bill Lee explains tersely that “My wife and I are separated” (152).
Of Junky, Burroughs’s biographer Graham Caveney states that “in its detached understatement the narrative enacts its own autism” (77). Caveney finds that Junky serves as a satire of 1950s affluence with heroin being the “ultimate merchandise” (78). What Caveney finds to be “detached understatement” is the low-affect style in which the text is written, a style that I find less “detached” than in some sense dismembered, like the subject is still bound to his lost body part, still finds himself to have phantom pains, but is nonetheless without the limb. Detachment may seem to be not necessarily terribly original; Junky, indeed, is not the most-read of Burroughs’s texts, so the uniqueness of style can be called into question. What I find fascinating about the style is the way that the affect is so low as not to care about dynamics of the social as well as the internal life that seem ingrained: there is a moment in which the narrator observes that a psychiatrist who comes to visit him when he is taking “the cure,” “was not effeminate. He simply had none of whatever it is that makes a man a man” (98). Burroughs’s narrative voice is so incapable or unwilling to designate positives, to evaluate, that what makes a man a man is “whatever”: the narrator does not care even about gender, about any positive demarcation of gender lines. Caveney and other critics seem to find that this affectlessness, this sludginess, intends to match with the numbing experience of being a junky, but it also seems unique to this narrator, who is perhaps unusually well-suited to heroin and morphine. It is not, then, just that the narrative enacts junkiness in its tone but also that the affectlessness of the narrative voice demands an encounter with an ideal junky on the part of the reader.

Here are some of my things to consider, and disconnected thoughts:
-The city’s role here- NY vs. New Orleans, etc.
-the “horrors”: see also Naked Lunch; what do these do for the narrative?
-“middle class negatives”? ~41 -the problem of the middle class; also the problems of decorum
-“measured out my life in eyedroppers” ~xvi - what do these literary allusions do for WB?

Posted by Megan at 2:57 PM  

Labels: 20th century American, beats, major lists, novels