Naked Lunch and Junky
- Burroughs at Amazon
- Naked Lunch
- Junky
- The Wild Boys
- Nova Express
- Interzone
- The Ticket That Exploded
- Yage Letters Redux
- Exterminator
- Queer
- Burroughs Live
- Soft Machine
- Word Virus
- Last Words
- Literary Outlaw
William S. Burroughs, Junky: 50th Anniversary Definitive Edition and Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
It is of course a paradoxical enterprise to establish "definitive" editions of Burroughs' two most important works, Junky and Naked Lunch. Both were written in times of personal disarray and assembled from diverse manuscript sources — meaning that no "original" exists for either book. The first edition of Junky was pared down by a mass-market publisher anxious to soften the impact of Burroughs' vision for its middlebrow readership. And Naked Lunch was not "authored" in any conventional sense of the word but was rather redacted from an enormous "Word Hoard" that Burroughs accumulated during the course of the 1950s. Many other hands — Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others — participated in the shaping of both books, and of course Burroughs himself is no longer around to lend his official imprimatur to any revisions.
The editors of both new books were well aware of these difficulties. With Junky, Oliver Harris (who also edited Burroughs' correspondence) overcomes the problem through scholarly rigor. A thorough and thoughtful introduction prepares the reader for the definitive text, and endnotes document every alteration to the "old" Junky. There are in fact significant changes that occur from the first printing (1953) to the unexpurgated version (1977) to this new definitive edition (2003). Ultimately, about ten thousand words have been added to the text, bowdlerizations have been restored to the original, errors have been corrected — with the upshot being that Junky emerges as a more clearly Burroughsian text than the 1953 edition.
Naked Lunch, on the other hand, has not changed much since the American edition of 1962 (though that edition did differ in small ways from the 1959 first edition put out by Olympia in Paris). The editors, Burroughs' longtime amanuensis James Grauerholz and biographer Barry Miles, explain their approach in an appendix but, unfortunately, do not provide detailed notes as Harris did in Junky. Probably this was because there were indeed fewer changes to be made. In consequence, the appeal of this new edition of Naked Lunch lies less in textual revisions than in the addition of previously unpublished material, such as a sketch called "The Death of Mel the Waiter" and outtakes featuring familiar Naked Lunch characters: Doctor Benway, A.J., The Rube, and so on. And though this additional material is interesting, insofar as it's always interesting to read the first drafts and notes and chicken scratches that gave rise to something great, unfortunately there are no real gems to be had. Evidently most of Burroughs' Word Hoard had already been depleted: portions of it flowed into The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. A collector's edition with a variant of Doctor Benway was published in 1979. And in 1989 Grauerholz edited Interzone, which apparently collected the best of Burroughs' remaining fragments of the 1950s — including the astonishing "Word" chapter that Burroughs deleted from Naked Lunch. What remained were relatively meager bits and pieces, and the editors admit to a "certain sadness at reaching the textual outer limits of what Burroughs' novel can ever encompass" — meaning that these additional texts form the Word Hoard's absolute rear guard, the stragglers, the exhausted and the weak.
Still, the William Burroughs Trust is to be commended for setting its house in order and publishing these new editions — compare, for example, to the Samuel Beckett Estate, which has stingily put out almost nothing since the Nobel laureate's death. The new Junky and Naked Lunch will no doubt be what they intend to be — definitive — and therefore they are essential for any serious reader of Burroughs' work.
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