ABSTRACT
An extensive chapter treats Naked Lunch as the high point of a career whose individual projects are subordinate to the production of an ongoing meditation on a cluster of themes summed up by the chapter’s title. The Nietzschean orientation of Burroughs’ writing, his interest in scientific information as a springboard for invention, and his homosexuality emerge as an interwoven set of constants over the course of his career, which would develop in the direction of an elaboration and codification of the authorial persona as a public character. Informed by a detailed knowledge of Burroughs’ work, David Cronenberg’s film exemplifies this development but also displays the assimilation of its forbidding qualities, originally conceived as a form of resistance to the mystery of control, in a later era when that character could be treated as an aesthetic construct.
