A Song Fades Into The Oblivion Of Night.

It was a hot summer in July, l959, when Olympia Press published the first one hundred copies of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. Groves Press would eventually discover the small pup fiction novel, and then the problems would begin. Amid the backdrop of a court case, in which Henry Miller would be asked to testify; the ashes of Burrough's past life rested in Tangier with the accidental death of his wife Joan in a game reinacting the medieval classic of William Tell, the scope and force of the novel was soon lost in an un-dying sea of controversy. Even today, a great deal of confusion surrounds the novel, and the literary public often becomes more concerned with the lifestyle of the author of Naked Lunch, rather than dealing with the issues that the novel sought to portray. From the grief caused by the death of his wife, Burroughs would literally sweat blood into his prose; writings that continued for over fifty years. By the turn of the century, he would never cease to remind his readers and his own tormented soul, that it was the death of his wife Joan that contributed to his emergence as a writer. Poetic justice would prove fatal in his case, and would haunt the poet, novelist/prose writer for the rest of his life.

Naked Lunch pulled readers into a world that they had never entered before, and soon took the reading public by surprise. Strange characterizations and imagery mixed with coherent carefully planned symbolism formed a structural prose that presented the old paradigm of a traveler moving through strange lands in a newer format. The narrator enters another world through the use of various psychadelic and narcotic substances to look at the hidden underbelly of society. William Burroughs once stated that he thought up the name of Naked Lunch over coffee and breakfast in conversa- tion with Jack Kerouac. Kerouac coined the term Naked Lunch as a point during the course of an evening meal, when everything that has been eaten becomes apparent, and all of the participants see what is at the end of the fork with clarity. Nothing slips away in the moment of meaning, and the food being consumed is seen for the essence contained in that current reality. Thus, the observer is served his or her Naked Lunch. It is that moment of recognition that the novel attempted to capture. Through the use of semi-conscous prose, the ancient narrative technique of the traveler, and a series of carefully planned images that reflect the symbolism

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