Chronotope And Cybertexts:. Bakhtinian Theory For Tracing Sources Of. Narrative In Interactive Virtual Environments: From Naked Lunch To Fast City

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James Barrett D Essay English D2 HT03 HUMlab

Chronotope and Cybertexts: Bakhtinian Theory for Tracing Sources of Narrative in Interactive Virtual Environments: From Naked Lunch to Fast City

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Contents:

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….3

Definitions…………………………………………………………………………………...4

Textuality through Contact………………………………………………………………….6

The Chronotopes...................................................................................................................12

The Body…………………………………………………...12 The City.................................................................................19 The Author.............................................................................27 Summary................................................................................................................................36 Notes......................................................................................................................................38 Appendix (A Selection of Online Cybertexts and Related Sites)……………...…………...44 Bibliography..........................................................................................................................46

3 Dream hunters plunge into other people's dreams and sleep and from them extract little pieces… Milorad Pavic The Dictionary of the Khazars

Introduction: It is clear that a printed book and an electronic text have the potential to embody different forms of narrative language. However this is not a comparative study between narrative forms, nor a lament for the perceived diminishing of the traditional printed text. The Book is rather seen here accompanying the Cybertext as new narrative forms are articulated using new media technologies and taking their place in the long tradition of story telling (1). An example of this is Jennifer Ley’s cybertext The Body Politic (1999) which incorporates images from as early as the 14th century and poetic language structures that are firmly rooted in print based media. Other forms of cyber narrative construction have their origins in the Dadaist and Surrealist texts based on trance experiments, visual dreamscapes and language games of the early decades of the 20th century. Yet others are the electronic translations of printed text narrative forms, the relationship between the two forms in translation having already been much discussed and analyzed. These include critiques by George P Landow (on Borges The Aleph and Other Stories), Janet H. Murray (on Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Lawrence), Katherine Hayles (Borges The Don Quixote of Pierre Menard), Espen Aarseth (among many Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch) and Lisa Yaszek (several texts including Joanna Russ The Female Man). To these texts I propose the addition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959).

As well as the sources of narrative as embodied in cybertexts there is, as Aarseth (1999) and Hayles (2002) point out, a need for new approaches to the understanding of textuality in order for these new contexts of language and reading to be incorporated into critical studies. One of these lines of inquiry is the application of the theories of Bakhtin to electronic texts. Through the use of Bakhtinian critical method I intend to contrast and compare narrative devices locatable in Burroughs’ novel with those of three interactive second generation cybertexts found on the World Wide Web, in order to establish proximal relations between the two textual forms (2).

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Definitions: This work attempts to examine narrative in a historical context, primarily through comparison of chronotopes in an early postmodernist text and in three contemporary cybertexts. It is based on the concept that with any change in the nature of a chronotope there correspondingly develops a change in narrative (and so on in cycle), as that which is understood to be the artistic measuring or depiction of reality. This is developed through the examination of a printed text, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs (1959), which is often placed within taxonomies as an early postmodernist text, and what elements of the narrative features from this text can be located within contemporary cybertexts. For a methodology I have utilized a small portion of the large body of work surrounding the Russian philosopher Mikhail Mikhaylovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). The main Bakhtinian feature I will be employing in this work is Chronotope (3):

Literally, ‘time-space’. A unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented. The distinctiveness of this concept as opposed to most other uses of time and space in literary analysis lies in the fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent. The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they sprang (Emerson and Holquist 1981 425-425) {3a} The purpose of chronotopic analysis is not only to look back and critique the sources of these narrative devices, but they are also able to provide a sense of destination as to meaning and situation in emerging cultural forms:

What is the significance of all these chronotopes? What is more obvious is their meaning for narrative. They are the organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification that to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative. (M. M. Bakhtin 2002 250) All literary chronotopes of course utilize language to establish relations of time and space. This language comes to both the sender and receiver from history as;

…the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!) but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, other people’s contexts, serving other peoples intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. (Bakhtin 2002 294).

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In order for narrative dialogue to occur (in contrast to monologue or first person reportive e.g. diary or confession) there must be present at least two ‘voices’ in the text. This ‘differentiated speech’ is referred to by Bakhtin as heteroglossia:

…mean[ing] not simply the variety of different languages which occur in everyday life, but also their entry into literary texts. These languages bring with them their everyday associations, which can of course include literary ones, as well as making their own in the textual setting. Because all languages are related hierarchically, dialogic interaction will occur within textualized heteroglossia, with potentially position altering effects. (Vice 1997 18) The Norwegian researcher Espen Aarseth introduces the term Cybertext in his thesis work Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature as “a machine for the production of a variety of expression” (Aarseth 1995 3).This is expanded later in the same thesis in theoretical terms as: a perspective on all forms of textuality, a way to expand the scope of literary studies to include the phenomenon that today are perceived as outside of, or marginalized by, the field of literature, or even in opposition to it, for [….] purely extraneous reasons. (Aarseth 1995 20). My use of the term ‘Materiality’ comes from N Katherine Hayles’ text Writing Machines, as:

…material metaphor, a term that foregrounds the traffic between words and physical artifacts….To change the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading (although that too has consequences the importance of which we are only beginning to recognize) but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring the relation of word to world. (Hayles 2002 2223) Indeed the text itself is the first order chronotope in all narratives and this is precisely why the work of Bakhtin applies so well to critical analysis of cybertexts. All forms of artistic expression must situate narrative in some manifestation of time and space (chronotope) and it must also be recognized that the text and the narrative are separate but simultaneously interdependent entities. This is most often accomplished through techniques of metaphor where the implied distance between the represented and representation is developed through a navigation of figurative meaning. The text is the vehicle for the representation but it is the reader who creates the narrative in negotiating a reading path in relation to the text as a dialogic process. Although Hayles’ application of the concept of materiality is mainly concerned with the process of textual reading I see it as applicable also to the construction of

6 narrative. In reader driven cybertexts the construction of narrative and the negotiation of the text (reading) are simultaneous activities with the boundaries of the physical artifact also providing the boundaries to the immediate narrative. When we undertake a heteroglossic reading of the text the boundaries of the narrative are much more difficult to discern being grounded in the long term dialogic relations that exist in all languages. The study of a predigital text such as Naked Lunch allows us to trace the construction of narrative features within the broad system of ‘The Postmodern’ and the associated metaphors from some of their earliest formations.

I have divided the analysis of these texts into those aspects concerned with the internal features, such as Chronotope and Heteroglossia, and the external, such as Materiality and the ongoing text. I begin with the external textual features.

Textuality through Contact: The text known as Naked Lunch as attributed to author William Burroughs was first published in short extracts in the American magazine Black Mountain Review in the fall of 1957. In March 1959 ten sections of the text were published under terms of controversy by the recently dismissed staff of the Chicago University’s Literary Review in their self-run publication Big Table. The resulting court cases concerning obscenity and, according to the original court deposition, “lustful thoughts” were to last seven years. It was first published in book form as 29 ‘routines’ (4) by Olympia Press in Paris in July 1959. Imported Naked Lunch was the last book to be banned from being carried by the United States postal service and did not pass out of courtroom examination until 1966. It could not be legally sold in the United States until 20th November 1962. It was published in America by Grove Press in 1962, which also published Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, D. H Lawrence, and Malcolm X. By the 7th July 1966 when the Massachusetts Supreme Court overturned the finding of obscenity by the Superior Court the text had been published internationally, described by some as a work of genius, by others as the end of civilization itself and been established as a text of the canon of the mass counter-culture movement of the 1960’s. Since then it has been reprinted many times with a Grove 25th Anniversary Edition in 1984 and the death of the author in 1997 not preventing ‘new’ chapters being published in 1998, and the ‘restored text’ being published in 2001. I categorize Naked Lunch as an ongoing text, with a number of individuals and organizations

7 collaborating as authors and editors, and as exhibiting textuality through contact which precedes reader driven interactive cyber narratives by forty years (5). In order to develop this further we must briefly look into the construction of what is called Naked Lunch as a material metaphor.

In the purely material form (ignoring auto/biography and heteroglossia) Naked Lunch began as a long series of letters written by the primary author William Burroughs between 1953 and 1958 to his friend and lover, the poet Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs during the course of this time traveled in a decidedly non-linear fashion between numerous South American locations, New York, London, Paris, and Tangier in Morocco, where he lived permanently between 1954 and 1959. On the 6 September 1951 in Mexico City Burroughs shot his wife dead in a drunken ‘William Tell game’. He stated several times during his life that this senseless act drove him to a life long exercise in description and examination performed as a writer (Morgan 1990 198).

Ginsberg kept everything which Burroughs sent to him, typing and collating much of it which has been published in various forms since, most famously as The Yage Letters (1963), much of which had already been woven into the text of Naked Lunch. In 1953 Burroughs also began writing satirical and surreal narratives, often in short bursts amounting to no more than ten to fifteen pages and always on a typewriter. Some of these were sent to Ginsberg but many were not shared with anyone until the second half of the decade in Tangier. By 1955 he had decided writing was his calling but struggled with it, often spending hours sitting at the typewriter “certain he had no talent, and sat for hours looking at a blank page” (Morgan 1988 252). Using the surroundings of the international zone of Tangier, crime and detective genres, and his sensory impressions experienced under the influence of hashish, yage and heroin, the form of Naked Lunch gathered through 1956 and 1957. By the end of 1957 there had been amassed in Burroughs tiny room in Tangier somewhere between 500 and 1000 typewritten pages. The community of authors extends to the title which was suggested by Jack Kerouac, who stayed with Burroughs in Tangier between early February and April 5th 1958: The title was suggested by Jack Kerouac. I did not understand what the title meant until my recent recovery. The title means exactly what the words say NAKED LUNCH – a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork. (Burroughs 1993 7)

8 Between April 2nd and June 10th 1958 Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ansen continued the work started by Kerouac until: Over a period of two months, working steadily, they integrated and edited and typed the material, which was an incredible mosaic of Bill’s fantasies over the past three years, until the had about 200 pages of finished manuscript typed in duplicate. (Morgan 1988 265) {6} It was Ginsberg who organized the publication of some Naked Lunch in Black Mountain Review in the Fall 1957 edition (as From Naked Lunch, Book III) and in Big Table in March 1958. The Big Table edition contained 10 routines from Naked Lunch (Atrophied Preface, I can feel the heat closing in, Hospital, Lazarus Go Home, Hospital, I can feel the heat closing in, Islam Inc., Benway, Islam Inc, a chapter of calligraphic drawings , Joselito) and resulted in the above mentioned obscenity trial. Negotiations had begun in November 1957 in Paris with Olympia to publish the text but it had been rejected early in 1958. When the controversy developed it was urgently accepted for publication and Burroughs had two weeks to prepare it for the printers. In July 1959 it was again a collaborative effort as the text went through a further reworking as: Sinclair Beiles [who went on to construct early examples of hypertext as poetry] and Brion Gysin helping [Burroughs] with the editing, as section after section was carried by Beiles from the Beat Hotel to the Olympia offices a few blocks away. The sections were sent to the printer in random order, but when the galleys came back the order seemed to work, and they were kept that way, except for a couple of changes. (Morgan 1988: 313) Burroughs in interviews has said both that the order was changed and was not changed: We had about 500 pages of notes so Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and I sat down and assembled this. A chapter went to the printers and we said we would figure out the order later but when it came back from the printers we took one look at it and said there is no need to make any changes. (William Burroughs interview 1978 featured in Chuck Workman’s documentary The Source 1999.) A mass of notes, perhaps 1000 pages with the sections which appeared in Big Table the most complete. We prepared the manuscript in two weeks. The only change we made was the beginning became the end. In the section where the two detectives walk in, and the printer did not read English incidentally. There are fewer mistakes that way. (Burroughs interview with Kathy Acker Institute of Contemporary Art Conversations 1986. at http://www.rolandcollection.com/rolandcollection/literature/101/W41.htm)

9 From these quotations it becomes clear that the collaborative dynamics in creating the text extend as far as into the anonymous and arbitrary determinants of printing machinery and its operator, even to the distance between the three points of the collaborators shared domicile in the ‘Beat Hotel’ (9 rue Git le Coeur, Paris), the offices of Olympia Press and the printing shop. In relation to multi-user textuality it is apparent that the construction of Naked Lunch is consistent with Klastrup’s definition of multi-user text as “the expression of a collaborative act of writing and creating experience, in a shared community of writerreaders” (Klastrup 2002: 2).

Following the publication of Naked Lunch in Paris it went on to eventual publication in the United States where extra material was added most likely in anticipation of trouble with the censors. This was the Deposition Concerning a Sickness and then again following the first American edition another metafictional section was included in the obscenity trial notes and A Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs (originally published in The British Journal of Addiction 1956) both of which “remained part of the textual package long after the threat of official persecution ended, effectively becoming part of the narrative experience.” (Loranger 1999 5) As generally illustrative of the textuality through contact adherent to Naked Lunch the inclusion of the section Naked Lunch on Trial in the middle order editions (it has been dropped from the 1993 and 2001 editions but then restored in the 2001 and the 2003 editions) is typical of how those and that which came into contact with the text, entered it. The transcript of the obscenity trial of 1965 came to be appropriated as part of the text and it included testimony from Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg. Verbatim testimonies from these writers and even the presiding judge’s ruling were included in the editions published after and including the 1966 publication. This is perhaps the clearest example of textuality through contact whereby even those antagonistic towards the text come to be included in it. For the 30th Anniversary edition of Naked Lunch a whole new [but ‘original’] chapter called “The Word” was included in the text, it was published in 1999 but Burroughs had already died in 1997. This chapter had in turn been taken from the text Interzone (1989) edited by Burroughs’ long time companion and manager of his estate after his death, James Grauerholz. Grauerholz was chief editor for Naked Lunch: The Restored Text version of 2001 which contained the statement of authenticity: Burroughs’ own notes on the text, all the accompanying essays that he added to later editions, and – most exciting of all – an appendix of abundant, newly

10 discovered material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the edition eventually published by Olympia Press. (Dust jacket of Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, Grove Press 2001) The section of the text described as ‘calligraphic drawings’ has never been republished since the 1958 Big Table text, although a single drawing by the author was the dust jacket art on the 1959 Olympia edition. When asked in 1986 about the difference between visual and verbal thinking Burroughs replied that he did not “think they were separable. It’s like a film script. You have movement and you have words, you have action and you have words. I think a writer is seeing a film. At least I am seeing a film when I write and then I try to get that film across to the reader.” (Burroughs Roland Collection Interview 1986). Another Burroughs reference to visuality in narrative was made in reference to the famous ‘cut-ups’ (7) when he explained: You see the random factor in life every time you look out the window or walk down the street. Your consciousness is being continually cut by random factors. I try to make this explicit by taking words and cutting them up. That's what happens all the time anyway. That's my theory about art. Art is making you aware of what you know and don't know you know. That is, the actual facts of perception. (Burroughs quoted in Kramer 1981: 95-97) Burroughs reference to the window echoes in material metaphor the screen of the computer, or perhaps even the television. Television, like the movie theatre of the early 20th century, was an early form of immersive narrative. However unlike cinema the television in the darkened room was also an interactive medium by the mid 1950’s with the introduction of the remote control device. The years 1950-1959 are described as “an exciting time period for television. In the USA, B&W television exploded onto the scene at the beginning of the decade, middecade saw electronic color television and remote controls launched. [my italics] (http://www.tvhistory.tv/1950-1959.htm)

This new electronic medium had a tremendous impact on the culture of America particularly upon those trying to find a new voice distanced from certainties of McCarthyism and the Cold War. Even in resistance and condemnation to the new medium, its influence was felt through the propagated metanarratives of Freedom, Consumption, and Democracy. It is a visual medium with the capability through the remote control to produce viewer driven non-linear narrative. Although the programming is very closely determined at the authoring end of production, a cut-up is only a click away. Naked Lunch contains several references to

11 television and it is most often used as a satirical device, such as in the sections A.Js Annual Party, and Ordinary Men and Woman. A glimpse of this new mass medium as changing narrative processes (8) comes from this account of a night in 1956 in the house of Neal Cassady when: After dinner with everyone somewhat ill at ease we watched Neal and television, all of us sitting [Cassady, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso] on our low bed in the dark bedroom with Neal perched on the edge ready to pilot the machine from channel to channel. Gregory [Corso] didn’t understand the game and bellowed, ‘How can I see the show?’ but Neal [Cassady] explained that since you always know what is going to happen next, this way you could watch all the shows. Jack [Kerouac] added: ‘It’s all one show!’” (Cassady 1991 281) This same form of non-linear narrative and random structuring is present throughout the text of Naked Lunch. Toward the end of the text in The Atrophied Preface one of several authorial voices present in the text instructs readers:

You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point…I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to the Negro race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her Afghan Hound…. (Burroughs 1993: 176) In terms of immersive narrative the text of Naked Lunch utilizes several techniques including stream of consciousness and metafiction with a strong emphasis upon filmic visual narrative codes. The most striking is perhaps the trope of water in the text with it filling rooms in mid conversation as beautiful boys swim around spearing fish (65) or Greek satyrs have sex with boys in aqualungs while immersed in green water (71). The Meet café …was built into one side of a stone ramp at the bottom of a high white canyon of masonry. Faces of The City poured through silent fish, stained with vile addictions and insect lusts. The lighted café was a diving bell, cable broken, settling, into black depths. (Burroughs 1993 53)

Interzone is an immersive chronotope from which there is little chance of escape and this is discussed further below in The City as chronotope.

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The Chronotopes I begin this examination of chronotope with acknowledging the historicity of the text, as the chronotope is primarily historical:

Although every text has its own chronotope or set of them, which interact dialogically with other chronotopes within and between texts, some texts are more fruitful to approach in this way than others, for instance those which are set at a particular fraught historical moment, which set out to represent a historical event, or adopt one of the forms where relations between time and space are especially clear. (Vice 1997 202) This is also related to the heteroglossic reading of chronotope as mentioned above, the chronotope functions both on a historical level of language meaning and within the situation of the text itself.

The Body Both Naked Lunch and cybertexts contain chronotopes centered upon personal forms, where relations between time and space are developed around themes of the individual or individual identity. Those chronotopes chosen for this study; The Body (9), The City and The Author each display the characteristics of being both compositional and simultaneous, as identity itself is. This compositional self is historical and spatial in the example:

The blonde God has fallen to untouchable vileness. Con men don’t change, they break, shatter – explosions of matter in cold interstellar space, drift away in cosmic dust, leave the empty body behind. Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside… (Burroughs 1993 24) The “cold interstellar space” had become a reality for humanity with the launch of the USSR’s Sputnik I on October 4 1957. By the mid 1950’s the horrors of the Nazi race laws introduced in Germany and the occupied territories in the 1930’s and enacted up until 1945 were becoming common knowledge internationally. The term Holocaust was “devised in the late 1950's to describe the Nazi program of the wholesale physical annihilation of European Jewry.” (http://www.adl.org/children_holocaust/more_resources1.asp ). Burroughs had been studying medicine in Vienna in 1936 and 1937 and “Nazis were everywhere in evidence.” (Morgan 1988: 62). Being homosexual he feared the murderous intolerance of the “blonde God”, but

13 was also fully aware of the Nazi party’s own homoerotic elements, having a “fascination” with SA leader Ernst Rohm who was homosexual and had been murdered in 1934’s Night of the Long Knives (Morgan 1988: 61). Burroughs had been travelling in Italy when this happened, where Mussolini’s fascists had been in control since 1922. The world’s first Hydrogen bomb was exploded in the Pacific in 1952 and between 1950 and 1958 the United States conducted 77 nuclear device tests above ground.

This narrative extract refers to the fall of “the blonde God”, a “Con”. It is constructed as metaphor around the idea of failure or cessation, in a violent or sudden manner. As any con is dependant upon a single unquestioned monologic version of reality as being the sole story/history/narrative (in this case white supremacy) it cannot change, but must continue until it “breaks”. In the case of “the blonde god” it was World War Two which shattered the con, only to create new ones. In this case the metanarrative of progress through technology as depicted in space exploration. The result is an adjustment of the position of Earth in a larger spatial ontological hierarchical structure, that of interstellar space. But then the spatial orientation within the narrative changes, it is the form of the body which carries the “matter”; the “con” is not objective but subjective. Although the “Con men” have drifted “away in cosmic dust” the empty body remains behind, carrying the identical “Mark”. Of the successful early space missions none, including those which carried dogs, returned to earth, but drifted out into space. The time of Space is not of day and night, the Body of earth does not function in Space. However “The Mark Inside” remains in all circumstances, it is the human propensity toward the acceptance of con/metanarrative. Although in this instance the referent to the Atomic Bomb is oblique it is developed elsewhere in the text and it is a linkage between chronotopes. It acts upon Body, Author and City throughout Naked Lunch.

The Body of Naked Lunch is perforated, either by design (orifice) or intention (injection) with sexual and narcotic penetrations occurring throughout the text in a variety of forms.

The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you make preparing to take a shot…Sometimes the needle points like a dowser’s wand: Sometimes I must wait for the message. But when it comes I always hit blood. (Burroughs 1993 62) This passing through of the body in a transient sense, as sex and drug use are also transcendental acts, is consistent with the Body as vehicle without static borders. The Body

14 shares awareness with the brain, in the Positivist tradition considered the seat of awareness, here as narrator having to wait for the Body to instruct the Self in the ‘best’ course of action/vein to hit. The message sent from within is the antithesis to the message received from outside as discussed below. The hypodermic as dowser’s wand as an implement supporting non-causal knowledge transcends both flesh and logic (magical). In both strands within the chronotopic Body the body is formed and altered by dialogue passing through it which is sourced elsewhere.

A telescopic narrative is common in Naked Lunch, which is the spatial development of chronotope developing outward from a smaller to a larger narrative plain or in reverse. In the above example the middle point is established in the beginning as the subject dissected: The Blonde God. This is then entered from the perspective of the body, as vessel for matter, or cosmic dust, which in turn floats out into the endless expanse of space. Beyond this there remains “The Mark Inside”, this is presumable beyond matter and completes the three level spatial expansions. This telescopic progression as means to contrasting and collapsing accepted spatial features is found throughout the chronotope of the Body in Naked Lunch: “They wear shorts…I can see the goose pimples on their legs in the cold Spring morning….I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust”. (Burroughs 1993: 58)

Once again awareness as individual and the Body are divisible, this time through the medium of vision as binoculars. The “I” of the text is watching schoolboys play across the street through binoculars. It is an example of a literal telescopic self, based in a body but present in the schoolyard, as “disembodied lust”. The space occupied by the Body has been extended through technology, beginning with the dimension of goose pimples. The time axis of chronotope remains stationary, “a ghost in morning sunlight”. This unbalanced narrative weight lends dynamism to the text through a spatiality that is near plastic in texture:

No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this straightjacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection. (Burroughs 1993 174) The Body is not a fixed arrangement but rather a malleable “straightjacket of jelly”, which is not in reality actually controlled by the wearer, “No matter how tight the Security”. There is

15 give and take, opportunities to shape, use and mould the jacket but it is always there as present, “ahead of every moment”. It is held in each moment in a direct and consistent manner through each thought and impulse expressed presumably by the same “I” which is both trapped within “the straightjacket” and is able to project out across the street as “disembodied lust”. The physical being is a trapped identity in time as the Body is contextualized through the dual; “I…always somewhere Outside giving orders”. The connotations of “straightjacket”: a reality for Burroughs and several of his closest friends (all patients at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in the 1940’s), promotes an extra dimension to the question of formed identity. The physical shape taken by the “I” is the result of “orders” (directions, instructions, truths?) given by the “I” which exists outside the Body but is always present in time (“ahead of every moment”). This is the clearest articulation so far of the juncture of the time and space axes in the chronotope of the Body in Naked Lunch. A time that is individual and internalized sourced in the Body but controlled externally. The chronotopic Body as bearer of narrative, as a malleable host to a cyborg entity and as a politicized symbol manipulated by outside forces is carried forward to a cybertext published forty years after Naked Lunch.

In Jennifer Ley’s cybertext The Body Politic (1999) written text is constructed along multiple strands in three contexts (text bar, text window and text in main window), accompanying images from Renaissance art (14th-16th centuries) and contemporary medical diagrams. These combine in a narrative concerning the Body, its appetites and products and the beliefs which surround them all, particularly relating to Christianity and the treatment of animals in our culture. The opening lexia (10) of The Body Politic is a triptych image combining a twin image of a Bosch-like grotesque face eating a sausage and in the middle panel a clickable text ladder offering six choices. These choices are Epidermis, Dermis, Occipital Lobe, Temporal Lobe, Spine and Vertebra. The cursor roll-over of each of these anatomical terms corresponds as TEXT, SUBTEXT, VISUAL, AURAL, STAIRCASE, and STAIR. This is the first of the spatial relations within the chronotope of Body as arranged within the work, with a personified metaphorical relation implied between the named body part and a textual, aesthetic or structural feature from the world. This is as; Dermis: SUBTEXT, the Dermis being the middle layer of human skin, and Epidermis: TEXT, as the Epidermis is the outer, visible layer of skin. Occipital Lobe: VISUAL acknowledges the scientific medical understanding that within the human “The Peristriate region of the occipital lobe is involved in visuospatial processing, discrimination of movement and color discrimination” (Kandel 1991 from: http://www.neuroskills.com/index.shtml?main=/tbi/boccipit.shtml )

16 The remaining metaphorical associations are perhaps self-explanatory where form corresponds to function or situation along metaphorical trajectories of meaning. Beginning with the opening window the narrative paths available to the reader are various and in the context of this work it is not applicable to recount the various possible reading paths available in negotiating the text The Body Politic. Sufficient to say that once the reader has progressed beyond the first window, they do not return to it except by closing the text and beginning again. The reading paths in between can be placed along a narrative spectrum between the purely visual text (the reader can simply look at the pictures) and the written text (reader can read it as a prose piece), or various alterations between the two.

In this context I will concentrate mainly upon the time/space (chronotope) relations of ‘Body’ in Ley’s text. To begin negotiating the text The Body Politic, one can certainly ‘cut in at any point’, and again like The Body of Naked Lunch it is necessary to cut in, not so much as to enter or partake of. The visual content within the text gives the first indication that we are again dealing with a Body as chronotope the boundaries of which are not determined by skin, but rather by our conceptual thinking regarding the body form itself. In the Material sense of the text this is through the linkages of images, such as spine, nerve and tooth linked to the image of a Renaissance soldier’s back. Metaphorically it is necessary to slice into the flesh/thinking if one is really going to taste/understand what is on ones plate:

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The Body as chronotope in Ley’s text is the body extended, dismembered and perforated. It is also the body following exterior orders in the narrative of ‘the real’. These are presented as the hidden body of his dead sister alongside the infant Jesus in the manger in On Sister’s Shoulders, the mystic self-mutilating girl in union with the divine attempting to prevent a ‘temporal’ marriage in Beatified and the bulging earth as the real over the image of the perfectly round globe in On Movement and Perception. All of these narratives contradict those images accompanying the text as “What you see may belie what you hear”. My death was part of your emergence as out of her womb you climbed to claim the world, an only child, a savior with blood on his baby hands. On Sister’s Shoulders Once again the chronotope of Body is functioning within a historical context, and in common with the Naked Lunch chronotopic Body it is again a dual internal/external narrative device. Blood here features as a signifier of truth as it does in Burroughs’ text (e.g. “the dowser’s wand…” excerpt above) and elsewhere in The Body Politic. There is a duality in the dead twin sister and the body of the infant Christ that seems to almost physically tear apart the metanarratives of History and Christian theology. The truth is not located in the form/Body of the baby Jesus but in the dead body of the sister and the forgotten history which began with the forgotten body. It is a postmodernist appraisal of the same Burroughsian ‘Con’ where it is not truth presented but the image (the blonde god/the baby Jesus ‘meek and mild’), which is narrative as a multidimensional Reality. Of course this image of the Christ child has changed through history, but in relation to the chronotopic form examined in The Body Politic Jesus has never been presented as female embodied, nor could he be when we consider the History. The Body is again transgressed, with blood as signifier, in the lexia Beatified again through the device of chronotopic metaphor; “Her mother found the blood upon her sheets that morning, crossed herself to mark what she thought was a daughter's normal passage…”

18 The reference is established to the religious context for the body and its products, a time for reflection for the mother, but not one to be avoided as it is a ‘normal passage’ her daughter is having, a turn of phrase somewhat reminiscent of 1950’s sex education lectures. The structural ambiguity here is the turning point for this metaphor when the narrative reveals the ‘passage’ is not ‘normal’ but is actually the perforated flesh of self-mutilation. “…the willfullness of a child who took a knife to her own flesh in order to better avoid becoming a temporal bride.” By going through or into the flesh, and the image as such, there is something gained which exists outside the image and representation. The duality of entering in order to escape is present in Beatified and it is again as the perforated body: “She had given herself to him and the means of entry and egress -- his spirit wracking her thin body -- now leaked from palm and foot, seeped a slow river from her side.”

Without using the word BLOOD there is established a passing through of the body by what must be ‘spirit’ or ‘the means’ but it is as a fluid that it is manifest. In this ‘entry and egress’ the flow of narrative and construction of image has been reversed and the wounds do not actually hinder the function of the body: “why copy the psalms at all when the new singing inside her created more potent music, waiting only to be annotated and sung?” The exact location of Self has become impossible to determine with it being dissolved in a union which breaches the flesh, an eroticized image of the chronotopic body where the self is locatable as dynamic within the process of union (communion/communication/dialogue). As was the case with the dowser’s wand in Naked Lunch, the Self waits on the message (‘more potent music’) which is delivered by non-causal knowledge. Scientific knowledge is taken up in the final aspect of the Body chronotope from The Body Politic to be discussed here. The ambiguity of ‘Body’ is present in the text as we have moved in chronotopic scale to the cosmic from the internal and cellular of the above examples. Here the bodies are heavenly but the same binaries are applied to the manufacturing of reality through representation. Mars must be retrograde to make things this ruddy under what should have been a Libra sky. Even the earth is said to bulge as it spins, never true to round, while magnetic north

19 strays ever from the true. And the measure of what cannot be is most clearly defined by the wish we made on that planet, errant from its course, we mistook for a star. On Movement and Perception

The binary Movement and Perception (Space and Time compliments) placed on the planetary scale but viewed from the perspective of logic are critiqued as narrative constructions. The real is ‘never true to round’ and the irregular orbit of Mars (traditionally a ‘male’ planet) leads to mistaken identity and the wish made false. Nothing is stationary in this narrative and as whatever is moving is also changing and the measuring of such within the context of time is impossible. Earth as a body is as cognitively constructed as are the bodies all individuals are designated as inhabiting, while north as being up ‘strays ever from the true’. However, the narrative exists as does the sources for the narrative and these must be incorporated in some way together into a representable form. The key to the Body as chronotope is that it is likewise compositional and simultaneous in the heteroglossic sense of language, as is The City chronotope (11). The reader of The Body Politic in determining narrative path and content complies with the phenomenon of textuality through contact found in the production and editorial side of Naked Lunch. In both cases the reader encounters no particular ending or climax to the narratives but instead repeated elements which provide movement through narratorial space and time.

The City Within the major chronotopes locatable in Naked Lunch that of The City can be positioned in the narrative structure as between the Body and the final to be examined here, the Author. It is within the structure of this chronotope that we are able to see/read the context of The Body. This is the environment of the Body as the external material field of expressive self-identity:

…a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In the lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long. (Burroughs 1993 24) The City in the early sections of the text (to the biographical death of ‘Jane’ 30 and routine of Dr. Benway 31-42) can be characterized by the above quotation; ‘a vast subdivision’, constructed of sealed (‘lifeproof’) houses where the young are guarded (from what is not

20 stated but it seems to be from themselves) and the sky (space, beauty, escape, heaven?) is ‘meaningless’. The City as ‘subdivision’ can be equated with centripetal forces in narrative as identified by Bakhtin (12). It is the whole as a single demarcated ‘One’ which features as a single form of the City chronotope in the pejorative sense throughout the text, particularly in the sections describing ‘Freeland’:

All benches were removed from the city, all fountains turned off, all flowers and trees destroyed. Huge electric buzzers on the top of every apartment house (everyone lived in apartments) rang the quarter hour. Often the vibrations would throw people out of their bed. Searchlights played over the town all night (no one was permitted to use shades, curtains, shutters, or blinds). (Burroughs 1993 32) Although there is, in the superficial sense, the same joined feature to individual compartments it is radically different in chronotopic content than in the antithesis of the subdivision, the composite as discussed below. With the subdivision the living quarters inhabited by each Body or individual is a clearly demarcated cell breached only by the invasion of authority as searchlight, electricity and time. Any polyglossic discourse in a real sense (as contradictory to the title Freeland) is discouraged mainly through the use of gross forms of technology (lights, buzzers). Even sleep is no longer a private activity as it is invaded by enforced linear time (somewhat contradictory to dream time) with the electric buzzers waking people every fifteen minutes. This is a totalitarian narrative model based on a control which, as described in other sections of the text, is not overtly enforced but rather, as the double voiced title ‘Freeland’ indicates is enacted through narrative control in language. This control recognizes the fundamental elements of narrative as time and space, which are maintained often as extreme forms of satire, within single dimensional linear forms throughout the sections dealing with Freeland and the subdivided City chronotope. There is no breaching of walls or bodies in the narratives of Freeland, rather all barriers are tightly controlled and the subsequent isolation is maintained through hospitals concerned with modifying individual behavior.

As bodies move through the city they alternate less and less often with the attributes of the Freeland urban structure and engage more and more into the non-linearity of Interzone:

All houses in the City are joined. Houses of sod – high mountain Mongols blink in smoky doorways – houses of bamboo and teak, houses of adobe, stone and red brick, South Pacific and Maori houses, houses in trees and river boats, wood houses one hundred feet long sheltering entire tribes, houses of boxes and corrugated iron where old men sit in rotten rags cooking down canned heat, great

21 rusty iron racks rising two hundred feet in the air from swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multilevel platforms, and hammocks swinging over the void. (Burroughs 1993 92) (13) The subject orientated in chronological time and space diminishes as the spatial and temporal attributes of such passages leave the reader with the sensation of ‘swinging over the void’. The presence of so many layered historical, cultural and climatic categories in a single setting (Maori and Mongols?) is logically not sustainable. The chronotope does however have a sense of time, which is more akin to poetic imagery than descriptive narrative. It is an organic time of growth and decay, used and discarded but not removed from the scene. These layers of time are formed though one structure placed on top of another in a stratified genealogy of simultaneous being. This passage comes from the description of Interzone “a composite city where all human potential is spread out in a vast silent market” (Burroughs 1993 91). The organic transgressive quality of Interzone is the most elaborate aspect of the City chronotope in Naked Lunch and it is within its malleable spatiality that much of the narrative of the text is set:

The zone is a single vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowded into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house, the next bed that is, since the rooms are mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted. A hum of sex and commerce shakes the Zone like a vast hive. (Burroughs 1993 143) The composite city is the antithesis of the ‘subdivision’ and it is equitable with what Bakhtin described as the centrifugal forces which operate in language systems (14). It is horizontal not vertical and of a cyclical time with the whole being composed of many independent but interrelated parts. The end is not ‘The End’ just another room which opens though a closing soft wall and the cycle of time continues with an expanded radius. In terms of spatial hierarchy it is determined by the metaphor of the “vast hive” in which the leader (Queen) is not at the pinnacle, as in a tower or indeed castle but deep within a crowded circumference. This hive is a self-generating and collective composition without a true centre but is rather stratified. This is a suitable chronotopic vehicle for a non-linear multi-user narrative and the similarities between Interzone and the World Wide Web from a structural point of view at least have been discussed by several critics. The internet has been described by cyber theorists as the largest hypertext (Hayes 1999, Laurel 1991) and the parallel in structural relations to the chronotope of Interzone adds further to the idea of Naked Lunch as an influential proto-

22 hypertext. The chronotopic structure of the City in Naked Lunch goes so far in cybertext conceptions of time and space as to being locatable in the material metaphor of the text itself.

Don Bosco’s “hypermedia reading experience” Fast City (2002) is composed of 60 lexias accompanied by sound both as music and effects. The text was produced by a student at Singapore National University as part of the Ph. D assessment requirements for the Department of English Language and Literature. The opening lexia depicts on the left side of the screen an image with similarities to a portable personal computer device (described by the author as a ‘personal digital assistance device’), an interface through which increasing numbers of people in affluent societies are building the narrative of their lives. Within the ‘screen’ of this image are displayed the written text of the work, presented in free verse forms with little use of punctuation, and no contextual metafiction or titles to each section. On the right hand side of the lexia are 60 blue crosses which are the contact sensitive activators producing linkages to the written text lexias with each having individual sound samples and also producing various sounds in combination. All sounds used in Fast City are an integral part of the text and are woven into it with the effect of producing an immersive urban narrative. At the bottom of the screen is a clickable choice function for a variety of dub bass beats which can be manipulated in tempo or switched off by the reader (exiting the text is accompanied by the sound of a gunshot!), and once running it does not change the lexia except through addition of extra beats to the rhythm. Within my analysis I will include the sound as a portion of the narrative text and relate it to the chronotopic reading of the text. The text of Fast City can be played as a Flash instrument with the dub samples running a constant but changeable beat and the crosses providing reader driven rhythms and samples. In the same sense that Jennifer Ley’s The Body Politic displayed a reading spectrum between the purely visual elements of the paintings and the written text, Fast City ranges between the poetic narrative of the written text and the purely aural text of largely improvised music.

The crosses upon which the reader navigates the lexias are not arranged in neat horizontal rows so it is difficult to establish any sort of order to the textual progression if followed in the traditional left to right reading pattern. Accidentally brushing the cursor over a cross also opens a lexia and plays a sound drawing the reader into an altered narrative path, which can be seen as a near literal example of textuality through contact, the material metaphor of the text drawing the reader into the random narrative paths held within its structures. If the reading pattern is navigated from top to bottom or vice versa (as is the reading path with some

23 East Asian scripts) then the progression of narrative follows the sequence of the crosses. Gradual navigation of the crosses produces random lexia sequences and combinations of certain crosses produces sounds which cannot be produced by single or other combinations of crosses. Each cross can be clicked on and it switches to the lexia produced by the cursor passing over the diametrically opposite cross (i.e. click on top right hand corner = bottom right hand corner lexia). The written portion of each lexia is in poetic language forms, as is the case with The Body Politic and similar to the prose style of Naked Lunch; the flexibility of such a form must be conditional when considering the difficulties in producing functional narrative flow in a non-linear textual setting. Once again the author invites us to "dive right in” the text and begin constructing narrative.

The written narrative depicts an urban landscape and society populated by mainly young people for whom technology is so familiar as to be an extension of the Self. It is also an environment of tradition and magic, of weekends dancing on islands in the Gulf of Thailand to techno music at ‘trance raves’ only to return to the high-tech ‘cult of his workplace’ on Monday morning (‘a lifetime of thin stiff penduluming’). Multinational companies are capable of being ‘fronts for child sacrifice’ (‘a brand is a mark, any mark of the beast’ [15]), fortune telling is the ‘future as religion’ and the dead arise when ‘on a full moon the soil parts’. The metanarratives of mathematics (‘prevents people from counting’) literature (‘stop

24 people from reading’), science (‘dissuade people from experimenting’) and geography (‘to forget where one is’) are discounted through the inverted reality of Baudrillard’s Simulacra. As is consistent with the postmodern aesthetic narratives in The Body Politic and Naked Lunch deconstruct what is termed as Knowledge or Reality either as opinion, the function of power relations in the narrative of history or a conspiracy of the senses. Fast City can be read as a cybertext representation of the composite city which is also located in the narrative of Naked Lunch:

mob! legion! we are one if we are many the collective consciousness possessed in the violence of technology This collective metaphor is consistent with the place of the text in a broader social context when we consider the role of technology and the polyglot urban environment of Singapore (the multiple languages and dialects even within such resident groups as Chinese, Indian, Malay, and Euro). This combined with an authoritarian semi-democratic political system gives similarities in many ways comparable to the international zone of Tangier in the early 1950’s. This heteroglossic space under pressure is in turn mapped out in the text of Fast City along visible and invisible lines of technology with the main activities conducted along them being broadly classifiable as commerce and pleasure. The centripetal forces in language are represented within the text as several references to Authority ‘breaking’ or ‘bursting’ in so as to enforce codes of behavior. The chronotopic imagery of the fortress is employed as counterpoint to further emphasize the horizontal flow of information within the affluent young smart mobs which are the chief inhabitants of Fast City: each floor demands its own access code and clearance sequence tight as a fortress of information what it lets not in it can never leak out

25 Within the centrifugal forces the surveillance is built into the structure but for the horizontal there is the external authority which breaks into or monitors the flow of visible information and attempts to locate the flows of invisible information. In this way the composite city is always changing just as the heteroglossic language of the street, the prison, the ghetto, the techno tribe or the playground is always changing as a living and largely verbal language This patois was termed by Bakhtin as ‘skaz’ in his work centered primarily around the novel as discourse (16).

A chronotopic reading reveals the composite city of Fast City utilizing present time third person narrative and through the interplay between technology and spatial arrangement articulating the City chronotope as similar to the ‘vast hive’ of Burroughs’ text. The structural metaphor of the opening lexia is consistent with the ‘hive’, in that the crosses are arranged in such a fashion as to make access to the central ones impossible to access without first triggering the outer ones. This leads the reader into set patterns of narrative negotiation and draws them off into longer paths in order to reach the inner crosses and corresponding lexias.

This is an example of the narrative path being completely dependant upon the material nature of the text and even the reader being unable to choose reading paths. If the written text lexias are ignored in favor of the sound effects, they reflect the same inclusive randomness dependant upon structure, and are again determined by the material metaphor of the text. The chronotopic axis of time in Fast City is also consistent with the bee-hive spatial metaphor. There is no temporal beginning or end to the text except in the exit of the reader, signaled by a gunshot sound as an implied metaphor for death. The passing of time within the narrative of the text is not distinguished by the passing of day or night or the transience of subjects. In fact characters only interact with each other directly in present third person reportive tense, and most often through a technological interface (e.g. mobile phone, surveillance camera, data base) in many ways similar to the manner to which the reader interacts with the text itself. When a sense of time is invoked directly in the narrative it is nonsequential with nearby lexias and subsequently bares little relation to plot/s:

26

she took an online personality test right after checking her junk mail and making sure there were no messages in her instant messaging folder and then double-checking her email by posting a message to herself and just in case forwarded her personal details to the sender of a junk mail promising dubious credit lines

ten thousand people killed, but none dead that is the puzzle of scientific truth a misguided army exercise misprogrammed into an amok routine target a parade square of recruits statue-still with martial pride they didn’t see it coming the state spiritualist summoned quickly moved to tears raises his hands a pose for his national duty raises the dead to awed media coverage

Text from Two Adjoining Lexias in Fast City Each example begins with a recent past tense statement but the next line brings the reader up to present time. This is consistent throughout the lexias of Fast City where past tense voice is articulated. The constant orientation toward present tense accompanying the movement through metaphoric space produces a collapsible telescopic sensation in narrative progression. The city in Fast City is structured in similar fashion to the actual hive like material metaphor of the text as screen image. The use of the personal digital device as the visual interface for the text is referential to the metaphorical mapping undertaken by the reader in their individual narrative progression through the text and includes hearing the sound effects. Lexias as compartments of narrative progress present the reader as the only character able to pass between each of them, unlike Naked Lunch where the reader is positioned outside the text in narrative but meets one of the authors to be guided through the text (“Bill’s Naked Lunch Room….Step right up...Good for young and old.” Burroughs 1993: 13). This is perhaps a result of the technology now able to include the reader as a generator of text, but in Burroughs’ situation the best he could manage in the printed text was to arrange the routines in random order of narrative sequence and make it possible to ‘cut in at any time’. However the same non-linear intention is present in both texts. The multi-user-ness and subsequent inclusive textuality (i.e. ‘through contact’) of the printed text was entirely in the authoring side of the process and Burroughs articulated this with an emphasis on the imagery and

27 metaphor within the narrative rather than the material variables available in such cybertexts as Fast City.

In Fast City the author acknowledges the narrative source of the interactive digital game Dance Dance Revolution but takes full credit for the formulation of the text. It is however interactive and the narrative progression can be generated by the reader within the actual fixed content of the lexias themselves (i.e. the words remain the same but the sequence, speed, dimensions of text and levels of emphasis on written as opposed to sound narratives are determined by the reader). In regard to the single chronotope of the City, Fast City carries a number of similarities to the City chronotope in Naked Lunch, such as the hive spatial metaphor, centrifugal and centripetal forces acting through metaphors in the text, and the layerdness of represented reality corresponding to the structure of the city along which narrative progresses.

The Author The final chronotope I wish to explore in this work is that of the Author. This is perhaps the most complex of the chronotopes discussed in this study. Although the identity of the creator or originator of a text may seem straightforward in the sense of the name on the cover or next to the title of a work, within the work the authorial voice is complex and often difficult to detect. When considering multi-user cybertexts the authorial voice is double-voiced in that the reader is driving the narrative in one sense, while simultaneously the text has been created for it to be done so and boundaries and guides to the narrative progression have been set in place by the formulator/s of the text in all their dimensions (from author of story to artists to builders and writers of the software etc.). In the case of online cybertexts such as are discussed here the text never really moves out of the direct control of the author as it is only present as projected from a internet server as a reproduction when a reader is logged on to ‘the Net’. It is never an autonomous text in the sense of a book where once it is published it is a

28 formed text only changeable in the sense of critical interpretation and reading contexts. The cybertext authors can remove their work from circulation (as M.D. Coverley has done with the online Book of Going Forth by Day) or alter it while still maintaining its continuity of narrative content (this is the reason why Coverley’s text is currently offline). In an earlier form of the ability of the primary author to recall or alter the text after publication Naked Lunch has changed over time. As was also discussed earlier as an extreme example of the ongoing nature of the text, following the death of Burroughs the narrative development of the text underwent further alteration.

Bakhtin identifies the author as: …outside the work as a human being living his own biological life. But we also meet him as the creator of the work itself, although he is located outside the chronotopes represented in his work, he is as it were tangential to them. (Bakhtin 2002 254) Locating and formulating the Author in relation to the text Naked Lunch is somewhat more complex than is popularly perceived when considering the mythology surrounding the dominant autobiographically centered reading of the text. Perhaps the most accessible branch of the text; the film adaptation of Naked Lunch (1991) by Canadian director David Cronenberg approaches the novel as an autobiography. A brief survey on the World Wide Web displays a ‘cult of Burroughs’ stretching from India to Iceland where the texts and the man are clearly identified as one in the same.

Loranger (1999 6) identifies five separate authorial voices, four of which are referred to by variation in name, within the text of Naked Lunch: 1.

Scientist (William Burroughs)

2.

Junky (William S. Burroughs)

3.

Agent (Bill Lee)

4.

Author (William Seward, Young Seward)

5.

Journalist (Letter from a Master Addict)

Adopting these I classify them for analytical purposes as: a)

Instructional (Agent)

b)

Biographical (Junky)

c)

Metafictional (Scientist, Journalist)

d)

Narratorial (Author as Story Teller)

29 Further to these strata of functional identities the narrative device of satire runs through each one. Bakhtin designates satire as a device of polyphonic voicing and heteroglossia as it overturns monoglossic discourse through a carnivalized ‘breaking-through’. This coupled with passages of semi-scientific metafiction throughout the text destroys any monodimensional Author chronotope in Naked Lunch. Rather the chronotope of Author in Naked Lunch needs to be ‘peeled’ by interlaced layers if it is to be separated from the text as narrative in acknowledgment that: …there is a sharp and categorical boundary line between the actual world as source of representation and the world represented in the work. We must never forget this, we must never confuse - as been done up to now and is still often done – the represented world with the world outside the text (naive realism); nor must we confuse the author-creator of a work with the author as a human being (naive biographism); nor confuse the listener or reader of multiple and varied periods, recreating and renewing the text, with the passive listener or reader of one’s own time (which leads to dogmatism in interpretation and evaluation). (Bakhtin 2002 253) This approach is also applicable to cybertexts, even those which are reader driven due to the fact of representation being implicit in any form of narrative. There must be some form of boundary between the text as representation and what it represents, which in turn positions those which engage with it as readers, viewers, or players etc. In a dialogic (or even poststructuralist) reading of a text the material metaphor (book, electronic text, art installation etc.) operates as a kind of nodal point of language where polyphonic and chronotopic lines branch out in potentially endless structures that potentially go beyond even the rhizome visualization of Delueze and Guatari. This is perhaps best illustrated in the chronotope of the Author.

The metaphor of the Agent runs through much of the work of Burroughs’ early writing career. In relation to one strand of the narratorial voice in the text of Naked Lunch it is a subversive device operating on multiple dimensional and fluid understandings of reality, similar to the ‘Con’ which introduced us to the Body chronotope above: Some of us are on different kicks and that’s a thing out in the open the way I like to see what I eat and vice versa mutatis mutandis (17) as the case may be. Bill’s Naked Lunch Room…..Step right up…Good for young and old, man and bestial. Nothing like a little snake oil to grease the wheels and get the show on track Jack. Which side you on? Fro-Zen Hydraulic? Or you want to take a look around with honest Bill? (Burroughs 1993 13)

30

This passage is taken from the Post Script…Wouldn’t You?, from the introductory section Deposition: Testimony Concerning A Sickness, which begins in the narrative voice of the journalist, transmutes into the ex-junky and finally engages with the proceeding text itself as the instructing agent addressing the reader directly (all within seven pages and intersected with metafictional references to physiology, anatomy and travel).

The central metaphor implied by this chosen speech genre (or one could say narrative script) is the traveling patent medicine show. This image is an example of carnivalization of language where language rules are overturned in a process of subversion related to a specific demarcated zone of experience. In this metaphor the empty promise of long life and health by nomadic strangers (“step right up…..good for young and old…..nothing like a little snake oil”) is a parody of specific reality narratives of everyday life, the capitalist and positivist paradigms of Progress and Health. This is what Burroughs as Agent is promising us, a subverted experience from daily narratives and with the occurrence of this it is necessary for the reader to choose “Which side you on?” The culmination of the introduction is this direct address to the reader where there occurs a ‘pulling in’ to the text which compares in many ways to the narrative position of the reader in such cybertexts as Fast City, as being positioned within each lexia of the text through the choosing of it as a narrative path.

The next narratorial voice encountered in Naked Lunch is Burroughs as biographical Junky, which is also closely related to the Author as journalist in the text (18). Beginning with the opening routine and continuing for thirty pages until the introduction of Dr Benway (Entitled Benway in 1993 but ‘Doctors and Scientists’ in a 1982 Picador publication A William Burroughs Reader) and the simultaneous realization that “Jane” is dead the Author is relating a semi-autobiographical narrative in third person direct form. It is an almost linear account of the years 1945-49 in the life of Burroughs the man as he becomes addicted to opiates, engages in the post-war underworld centered around New York’s Times Square, runs from the police to Texas, New Orleans and then Mexico. It is a literary form of the cybertext main-screen whereby the material metaphor is introduced to the reader and vice versa, the scene is set and the main narrative themes introduced. In this early section of Naked Lunch and throughout the novel the reader continues to be addressed directly through the device of metafiction. With the introduction of Dr Benway (“a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems” Burroughs 1993 31) the narrative voice of authority in the form of monologic biographic or journalistic

31 voice begins its steady fragmentation as each Authorial voice encounters another Author in a developing chronotopic whole. The most easily recognized form of biographical authorial voice found in the text following the introduction of Benway is as drug addict, or in the 1940’s dialect so often favored by Burroughs, ‘Junkie’ (the more modern spelling of ‘Junky’ arose in the 1960’s): He is conscious of his surroundings but they have no emotional connotation and in consequence no interest. Remembering a period of heavy addiction is like playing back a tape recording of events experienced by the front brain alone. Flat statements of external events. ‘I went to the store and bought some brown sugar. I came home and ate half the box. I took a three grain shot etc. (Burroughs 1993 41) The Dr Benway routine begins with the author as agent being “Assigned to engage the services of Dr Benway for Islam Inc” (Burroughs 1993 31). Following a description of the philosophy of Benway and his unorthodox medical practices (a device satirizing Medicine as Science) the reader first encounters the Author as story teller:

Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. Who can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandrill, alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can shit on a dying adversary who, dying eats the shit and screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in his mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle reader I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals? (Burroughs 1993 44) This extract is not a warning but an invitation through the satirized double voice of direct address positioning the reader as compliant with the narrative of the text. We understand perfectly well that both the tongue and the pen can accommodate these scandals and that is precisely what we are reading as the text. The author as story teller is rather formulating how we are reading the text, as active participants not as passive recipients (19), in a new language or rather a new way of formulating language as narrative through chronotopic relations. A further example of the random nature of the narrative carried by Naked Lunch is the Author as story teller explaining the extra-textual activities of the characters found in the text (and elsewhere apparently):

I am not American Express…..If one of my people is seen in New York walking around in citizen clothes and next sentence Timbuktu putting down lad talk on a

32 gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he (the party non-resident of Timbuktu) transported himself there by the usual methods of communication…… (Burroughs 1993 172) We can summarize this in the term ‘language as experience’ which goes against the premodernist conception of language as a structured form of communication following sets of knowable rules. Language as experience is consistent with immersive narratives and reader driven multi-user texts of contempory cybertexts.

Naked Lunch contains metafiction from a number of subject settings including medicine, anthropology, physiology, anatomy, pharmacology, travel, literature and theology. This narrative device acts upon the reader as a means of stepping out of the text and provides a decentralization of subject within the text that lends toward a heightened immersion in the narrative. As stated above in regard to the prose style of the text, the flexibility of such a form must be conditional when considering the difficulties in producing functional narrative meaning in a non-linear textual setting. The metafiction in Naked Lunch is presented in a genre reminiscent of popular science magazines and ‘Amazing Stories’ annuals which were popular in the 1950’s. It occurs as bracketed decontextualised segments with little evidence of source or accuracy: “(Eskimos have a rutting season where the tribes meet in the short Summer to disport in orgies. Their faces swell and their lips turn purple.)” (Burroughs 1993 75) The uncertainty of many of these passages in the text complies with Patricia Waugh’s description of metafiction as “"fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality" (from http://www.geneseo.edu/~johannes/Metafiction.html). This point goes further toward emphasizing the themes in Naked Lunch of narrative as reality, and language as experience. Metafiction also positions the Author within the larger chronotopic construct in relation to the text. The effect is a further marginalizing of the overall chronotope of The Author as single narrative entity.

Through this brief discussion of The Author as chronotope it is clear that much of the narrative of Naked Lunch can be analyzed as a critique on the linear concept of Author. Toward the end of the text the issue is raised as a direct questioning of the reader in regards to the nature of the text, the word and the context from which they actually come to the reader:

33 So I got an exclusive why don’t I make with the live word? The word cannot be expressed direct…It perhaps can be indicated by mosaic of juxtaposition lie articles abandoned in a hotel drawer, defined by negative and absence. (Burroughs 1993 98)

In other words narrative as metaphor, text as metaphor and even Author as metaphor. In recognition of the supreme metaphor being Creative Art the final cybertext for this study is a work centered round its author/creator as subject, not in a metaphoric sense but rather a purely descriptive one. However, the entire text becomes a metaphor in that descriptive process and through choices made by the reader the author as subject is re-inscribed and this occurs ever time the text is read/run.

Kenneth Goldsmith and Clem Paulsen began the text Fidget on June 16 1997 (20). It began as: …a transcription of writer Kenneth Goldsmith's every movement made during thirteen hours on June 16, 1997 (Bloomsday). This online edition includes the full text, a self-running Java applet version written by programmer Clem Paulsen, and a selection of RealAudio recordings from Theo Bleckmann's vocal-visual performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Bloomsday 1998. (From the host website @ http://www.chbooks.com/online/fidget/about.html)

It seems the original intentions of the authors were to examine issues concerning the body, its movements, and the contexts to which the various interactions involved are undertaken and understood. In constructing such a cybertext a dynamic relationship is also created between the text, the author/s, the readers and the narrative/s. Many of these can be compared to the dynamics found in the narrative of Naked Lunch. In critical terms Fidget occupies the boundaries between written text, virtual art instillation, computer game, interactive digital device and website. The Author as chronotope in Fidget is constructed on levels of subject, narrator, and creator but however is never directly present in any of these forms. Despite the absolute minimalism of variation in plot there exists a narrative in the text of Fidget, centered upon the body of a man as it engages with its immediate space through the man’s spoken narrative (21). From this basis the dynamics of engagement are expanded into the field of the reader negotiating a kinetic script as is flows and floats through an applet window upon the computer screen.

Four Stills of the Applet Window from Fidget This applet is negotiated in real time as it records the moment of first loading into the readers digital interface device and then proceeds from that point over the thirteen hours it takes to negotiate the text. If this is not performed in one thirteen hour stretch then it begins each time from the narrative point encountered when the window was last opened. The page which opens onto the applet window also provides a short explanation of the work and a history of its production and performances. There are a series of six ten minute improvised vocal sound interpretations of the text by Theo Bleckmann which can accompany the reading of the text. The reader drives text negotiation in a variety of ways; through clicking on words which lead to other passages with the same word in the text, by changing the color of both background and typeface, by changing the size of the text in relation to the window (between 7 and 200 scale zoom) and by scrolling and dragging around the screen with the mouse cursor producing collisions of text, backwards text, single word or letter text and through the use of zoom geometrical lines in the absence of written text.

35 The author is not the subject in Fidget but rather the physical and ontological parts of the Author are the compositional but simultaneous subjects of an ‘authorless’ text. This reporting on the physical parts of the subject (described elsewhere as ‘the Author’) provides the basic structure for the narratorial voice created by the reader in negotiating the text and is a dialogic process in its most blatant form. The boundaries of the text are the thousands of descriptive sentences, which can be broken down to single letters in a reading of Fidget, as they attach themselves to the reader’s interaction and the window in which they appear. The creators of the text could have had no conception that the exact combinations as pictured above could have been formed by a reader of the text. In a sense Fidget is a text generator but without a reader as creator there is no text, and this is a specific metaphor for dialogic process undertaken in the reading of cybertexts and the textual manifestation of the Author as chronotope. Despite this necessity for a reader to generate text, and thus experience the textuality through contact common to all texts discussed here, the time (chronos) of the Author as subject has been preserved in the thirteen hours it takes to negotiate the entire text of Fidget. This places the text within a narrative framework as the subjects physicality is the progression through time. Narrative can be always regarded as time and space meeting in a representational form (i.e. ‘the text’). Without the reader as actively present in the case of cybertexts such as Fidget, the narrative is never realized.

Burroughs recognized the dialogic nature of reality and its importance in representation as narrative, writing about it and utilizing it creatively several years before the work of Bakhtin became generally known in the west and post-structuralism began to develop in the late 1960’s (22). In Naked Lunch one of the authorial voices as narrator directly addresses the reader in regard to literary theory even referring back to a character in the carrying text (‘The County Clerk’) explaining: What the Mariner actually says is not important…He may be rambling irrelevant, even crude and rampant senile. But something happens to the Wedding Guest like happens it psychoanalysis when it happens if it happens. If I may be permitted a slight digression….an analyst of my acquaintance does all the talking – patients listen patiently or not…He reminiscences…tells dirty jokes (old ones) achieves counterpoints of idiocy undreamed of by The County Clerk. He is illustrating at some length that nothing can ever be accomplished on the verbal level…He arrived at this method through observing that The Listener – The Analyst – was not reading the mind of the patient….The patient – The Talker – was reading his mind… (Burroughs 1993 78)

36 Bakhtin wrote that language required at least two voices as minimum, as does a story. Meaning does not reside with either party involved in a language matrix, but rather moves through it in a dynamic sense, as ‘reading his mind’ indicates self, narrative and reality. Cybertexts are often an elegant material metaphor for that dynamic sense found in living language.

The Summary: During historical periods of rapid cultural shifts, most often accompanied by some form of material upheaval (technological, economic, geographical, or social) the mediated forms of representation have undergone dramatic change. Bakhtin recognized the period now referred to as the Renaissance as a time of great ontological shifts and the literary works of Francois Rabelais (circa. 1494-1553) as being reflective of this change in the nature of representational mediations of reality. The later half of the 20th century can also be seen as a time of tremendous shifts and collisions in conceptions of reality and culture. This is reflected in the important works of representation which emerged out of this time, including the novels of William S. Burroughs. Through analysis of chronotopes in the three cybertext discussed above it is possible to identify narrative continuances sourced in the work of Burroughs, which in turn could be traced from Burroughs to earlier works as heteroglossic filaments. The cyborg or extended body, the city as spontaneous, stratified matrix, and the author as a collective construct are all tropes current in both electronic and written English language narratives. The social aspect of language and its meanings were a further primary theme in Burroughs’ work, not only in regard to Cultural dynamics but also Technology. In recognition of the computer as material metaphor Burroughs wrote in Naked Lunch; “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods.” (Burroughs 1993: 33). This is a further recognition of the context of language as presiding over meaning and the boundaries of the text stretching to the horizons of those contexts. Like the binocular cyborg watching the schoolboys, the perforated ghost-body of the junkie or the vision of the “composite city where all human potential is spread out in a vast silent market” (Burroughs 1993: 91) conceptual representation of space and time are here revolutionized. In the early 21st century these indeterminate boundaries have found a meaningful context in the material metaphor of the cyborg where “…the border between interiority and exteriority is destabilized. Distinctions between self and other are open to reconstruction. Difference becomes

37 provisional.” (Mitchell 1996 31).The narrative representations of these chronotopic borderlands between ‘in an out’, ‘here and there’, ‘us and them’, ‘I and you’ are the fundamental chronotopes found in Naked Lunch and the three cybertexts discussed. They continue to be re-articulated as technology continues to provide variations upon how we organize and represent the material metaphors of ‘Reality’ in all its forms.

The Non-End

38

Notes: 1.“Through the ambiguity and irony that are at the heart of all good stories, we become an active part of metaphor, and this occurs whether we are sitting around a hearth fire or before the glowing screen of the internet.” Harold Scheub The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry and Narrative Wisconsin Press London 2002 pxii 2. The association between Burroughs and electronic texts has been written about in general terms by Loranger (1999) and Silberman (1997). The actual boundary where one generation ends and another begins in cybertexts is not so much a line as very broad fuzz. I draw on this guide from Hayles’ online essay Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature (2002): So rapid has been the development that one can speak, as I have, of two generations of works. Dating the watershed between the generations is a matter of critical debate, but most people agree it falls somewhere between 1995 and 1997. First generation works, often written in Storyspace or Hypercard, are largely or exclusively text-based with navigation systems mostly confined to moving from one block of text to another. Second generation works, authored in a wide variety of software including Director, Flash, Shockwave and xml, are fully multimedia, employ a rich variety of interfaces, and have sophisticated navigation systems. The trajectory traced by developments subsequent to 1997 can be broadly characterized as moving deeper into the machine. Increasingly electronic literature devises artistic strategies to create effects specific to electronic environments. (Hayles 2002 1 @ http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Articles/Hayles/NHayles.htm ) 3. “Chronotope: (literally “time space”) the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically, culturally, scientifically expressed in their respective forms. “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole. Time, as where it thickens, taken on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.” (Gardiner 1994:p84). “The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification that to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative….Time becomes in effect palpable and visible: the chronotope makes narrative events concrete.” (M. M. Bakhtin quoted in Morris 1994 P187). Bakhtin adopted the term from physics to which he and those of the circle of thinkers around him (Voloshinov, Medvedev etc.) applied their own theories and concepts. Bakhtin’s work on the chronotope is extensive (three long essays) but to summarize its function in the broader narrative structure as “…the primary means for materializing time in space, [so] emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel. All the novel’s abstract elements- philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect – gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work. Such is the representational significance of the chronotope” (Bakhtin 2002 250). 3a. Quoted in Bernhard F. Scholz Bakhtin’s Concept of the Chronotope: The Kantian Connection from Mikhail Bakhtin: Sage Masters of Modern Thought 2003 147

4. ‘Routines’ as a descriptive term for the short narratives by Burroughs was first used by Allen Ginsberg in letters to the Burroughs describing the material he was sending to

39 Ginsberg. As a descriptive term it removes the time and space of the short narrative sequence from most fictional contexts, certainly as they were in the 1950’s with the possible exception of stand up comedy. The genre allows a freer range of movement and association within the text and permits surreal connections to be made within the narrative and the brevity of the routine removes the need to develop the situation to a point of logical or satisfactory ‘closure’. The step between the routines and lexia of hypertext could be seen in the 1930’s Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse where random phrases are written on various folded sides of a piece of paper by different people (usually four). After the last writes the paper is unfolded and the combined phrases make a single sentence. The first time this was played the phrase “Le cadavre exquis boira du nouveau vin” was generated. 5. Textuality through contact: whereby through contact with an attribute of a text (author, written word, Multi-user virtual world, reviewer, moderator, etc) either as a reader, character, or otherwise the narrative surrounding that contact becomes a part of the text. In the materiality section of this essay I would like to describe Naked Lunch as a Codex text in the sense that in its original form it was a series of unbound ongoing mini-narratives which could be added to at any time and subsequently were. Burroughs originally expressed a desire against the text being put into book form but offers of payment soon dissuaded him. In this way it is similar to the unbound manuscripts kept between boards in early European libraries and also in the pre-Columbian empires of South America which were added to by subsequent authors following the initial formation of the text. This as a line of investigation and similarity between hypertext and written text narratives is currently being researched by academics such as Tatiana Nikolova-Houston a Ph. D. student at the University of Texas who states in a recent article: Medieval hypertextuality can be defined as: a. Non-linearity: multiple choices in the viewing order of blocks of text, illustrations, marginalia, and the links between the items. b. Multi-vocality: the several relationships that are possible between the text and the illustrations, i.e., whether illustrations provide a literal equivalent of the text, or whether they provide additional information not included in the text. c. Inter-textuality: references to other sources mentioned explicitly in the text or implied in the text. d. Decenteredness: the lack of one dominant, unifying center and the ability of the text to offer different paths of investigation to different readers. (http://www.tekka.net/login/) 6. The collection of pages that had been accumulated over a period of what was actually 5 years. One of the earliest pieces of writing which made its way into the final text was taken from a letter to Allen Ginsburg dated July 10 1953 from Lima in Peru (published in The Yage Letters 1975 44-46). Referred to as the “All the Houses in the city are joined” text, most of it appears verbatim in Naked Lunch 54 and again 92-93 (“Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades…”). 7. Cut-Ups: According to Burroughs: “The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for seventy years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writings seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit--all writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return

40 to this point--had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors. "The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different-cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise-in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: "Poetry is for everyone." And Andre Breton called him a cop and expelled him from the movement. Say it again: "Poetry is for everyone." Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud's place.” (From The Transcriptions Project at the University of California Santa Barbara English Department Website at http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/ ) Burroughs work with the cutup progressed into the tape-cut ups of the 1960’s which is an early example of technology and narrative intersecting and is furthermore relevant to the place of Burroughs as a source of early cybernarrative. 8. The important place television occupies in the development of narrative genre in the 20th century is described by artist and theorist Mark Meadows as: “the presence of broadcast commercials (full-volume mini-narratives advertising interruptions of the larger narrative) at high tension points in the story caused us to restructure the way we consider stories and he attention span we bought to them.” (Meadows 2003 56) 9. “The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.” (Bakhtin 2002 85)

10. Lexia: “The process of linking lexias, (alternate names for the individual unit of text that is being linked) in a hypertextual web proceeds from combinatory thinking based on associative rather than causal ordering. Hence, a link which may, for instance, be whatever word, image or discursive 'unit' in a given lexia, leading to another 'lexia' which can be a prose comment on the preceding text, an image that explains a detail further, a poem that is placed there because a sentence in the previous lexia has made the 'author' think of this poem and so forth. In principle, there are naturally no limits to the numbers of and nature of the links that can be embedded in a particular lexia.” Dr Lisbeth Klastrup from her website at http://www.itu.dk/people/klastrup/Dischap1.html

11. There are within the broad concept of heteroglossia more specific strands of language which run through literary texts. According to Bakhtin these are “…the specific phenomenon that are present in discourse and that are determined by its dialogic orientation, first, amid others’ utterances inside a single language (the primordial dialogism of discourse), amid other ‘social languages’ within a single national language and finally amid different national languages within the same culture, that is, the same socioideological conceptual horizon.” (Bakhtin 2002 275)

12. Centripetal forces are what Bakhtin calls “unitary language. This aims to ‘unify and centralize the verbal ideological world’. An example of such a unifying force is any system of

41 linguistic norms, Bakhtin says, meaning not just abstract grammatical rules but a verbal ideological force which aims to keep a national language free from [perceived] foreign or heteroglot influences. Contemporary instances of the activity of such a unitary force include the English only constitutional amendment in the United States and the political use of received pronunciation in the United Kingdom.” (Vice 1997 71) 13. This quotation comes directly from The Yage Letters in a letter dated July 10 1953 describing the effects of the Amazonian hallucinogenic drug Banisteriopsis Caape which Burroughs wrote of as: “space time travel. The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian – new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants grow out of the Rock and vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of body) across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island.” (Burroughs 1975 44). Five years after this was written it was included in the text of Naked Lunch (Burroughs 1993 91) with the passage beginning at: “The room seems to shake…” and the word “New” dropped from “new races” and “grow out of the Rock” becoming “grow out of genitals”. "Canned Heat" was an alcohol-rich cooking fluid (brand name Sterno) that was used as a substitute for bootleg liquor by those who couldn't afford it during the 1929-39 Depression. Unfortunately it had some nasty side effects as being mostly methanol, it could make you blind. 14. Centrifugal forces in language are those which act against the establishment of a single central point of reference toward a heteroglossic ideology of language. Bakhtin states in The Dialogic Imagination: “At the time when poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world in the higher official socio-ideological levels, on the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all ‘languages’ and dialects, there developed the literature of the fabliaux and the Schwänke of street songs, folk sayings, anecdotes, where there was no language-center at all, where there was to be found a lively play with the ‘languages’ of poets, scholars, monks , knights and others, where all languages where masks and where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face.” (Bakhtin 2002 273) 15. This biblical metaphor of “The Mark of the Beast” is also echoed in Naked Lunch with: “Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside….” (Burroughs 1993 24) 16. Skaz: as a Russian word it is described by Bakhtin in the English translation as “Stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written) everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc.)” (Bakhtin 2002 262) This is particularly important in establishing the novel as genre and continues on in cybertext as a structural device for the polyphonic narrative found in many non-linear texts. The text of Fast City could be described as an electronic articulation in skaz. 17. “The phrase Mutatis Mutandis is Latin and means "that having been changed which had to be changed" or more commonly, "with the necessary changes". Mutatis Mutandis MUX is an interactive gaming environment created with this concept in mind; that in order to create, one must change, and that change is inevitable as a fundamental given. All things change. We can

42 only strive to make the changes that will create a better world.” taken from the game site at: http://www.mutatismutandis.org/ 18. Burroughs first novel Junkie (1953) was published as a pulp fiction confessional in a twofor-one series of paperbacks (selling for 75 cents they now retail for $2500 in good condition). Much of the journalist/junky authorial voice can be traced to this work which was written in the style of a novel that had a great effect on Burroughs; Jack Black You Just can’t Win (1926), the autobiography of a small time gangster, drug user and thief. It was much of the form, tone, and voice of this narrative that Burroughs adopted in the journalist/junky voice used in his own early writing. In examining the Author as chronotope the main area looked at here has been authorial voice and brevity of space has prevented a reading of heteroglossic and structural sources to narrative. Literary and textual sources abound in Naked Lunch, many hidden behind the satirical routines so central to the narrative.

19. Burroughs provides further direct address regarding the narrative process through an intertextual reference to Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: What the Mariner actually says is not important…He may be rambling irrelevant, even crude and rampant senile. But something happens to the Wedding Guest like happens it psychoanalysis when it happens if it happens. If I may be permitted a slight digression….an analyst of my acquaintance does all the talking – patients listen patiently or not….He reminiscences…tells dirty jokes (old ones) achieves counterpoints of idiocy undreamed of by The County Clerk. He is illustrating at some length that nothing can ever be accomplished on the verbal level…He arrived at this method through observing that The Listener – The Analyst – was not reading the mind of the patient….The patient – The Talker – was reading his mind…” (Burroughs 1993 78) 20. Further information regarding the beginnings of Fidget includes: Fidget was originally commissioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris as collaboration with vocalist Theo Bleckmann. The live performance was at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris on June 16, 1998 at 8p.m. Bleckmann's vocal interpretations of Fidget are available here in RealAudio. A gallery installation of Fidget opened at Printed Matter in New York City. Printed Matter featured Goldsmith's collaboration with seamstress Sydney Maresca. The exhibition ran from June 11-September 4 1998. (http://www.chbooks.com/online/fidget/about.html) 21. In relation to the minimal narrative content in cybertexts such as Fidget Espen Aarseth writes: “Even if the cybertexts are not narrative texts but other forms of literature, governed by a different set of rules, they will, to a lesser or greater extent, have retained some aspect of narrative.” (Aarseth 1995 5) 22.

Bakhtin wrote the bulk of his works prior to 1950, yet it would be more than 30 years before the first of his texts made their way into English translation. Rabelais and His World was printed in English in 1968, followed by

43 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics in 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language -- a text of disputed authorship that is viewed by many scholars as being at least influenced by Bakhtin -- also was translated into English in 1973, positing, among other things, a social view of language theory. (Taken from http://www.public.iastate.edu/~honeyl/bakhtin/chap3a.html)

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Appendix 1. Selection of Online Cybertexts and Sites: Those Cited: http://www.studiocleo.com/cauldron/volume1/jenniferley/index.html The Body Politic by Jennifer Ley http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/fiction/bosco/index.html Fast City by Don Bosco http://www.stadiumweb.com/fidget/ Fidget by Clem Paulsens and Kenneth Goldsmith

Others: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/darkhouse/play.shtml The cybertext Dark House which accompanied the BBC TV series as a Flash text http://www.studiocleo.com/cauldron/volume2/contents/index.html A number of cybertexts which make up the journal Cauldron Vol.2 http://34n118w.net/ The GPS based interactive game of the same name http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/WalkerAlison.pdf Descriptive criticism of the CD ROM hypertext The Many Voices of St. Caterina of Pedemonte http://www.drunkenboat.com/db3/memmott/index.html Hypertext fiction by Talen Memmott and link to the electronic text journal Drunken Boat http://www.sunypress.edu/joyce/hypertext.html A links page of online hypertext from first generation hypertext author Michael Joyce http://www.111.co.za/SBPoemsArt.htm Older form of kinetic hypertext poems by collaborator on Naked Lunch (1959) Sinclair Beiles http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/htlitov.html A links page with cybertexts under headings of Autobiography, Drama, Fiction and more http://www.altx.com/thebody/ A Cybertext entitled The Body; A Wunderkammer by Shelley Jackson, author of the early hypertext Patchwork Girl. http://www.diacenter.org/shimabuku/ A visual text which was developed from an ancient Chinese fairy tale, downloadable as screen saver.

45 http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/dmyunfinal/frames.html A map based hypertext about travelling and living in New York http://www.supervert.com/ The multimedia online journal Subvert (much adult content but very good as a source of experimental and extreme hypertext) http://califia.hispeed.com/Egypt/ One of the greats of cyber literature, BUT currently offline due to reworking. Entitled The Book of Going Forth by Day by M.D. Coverley http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/index.html The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti A Hypermedia Research Archive http://www.heelstone.com/lascaux/ A digital hypertext narrative on the cave art at Lascaux http://www.heelstone.com/resume/ The online resume of cybertext artist and author Jennifer Ley http://beehive.temporalimage.com/bee_core/index.html Journal of hypermedia with many links and examples http://www.poemsthatgo.com/ideas.htm Index of links to hypermedia, critique, and forums http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/goldsmith/111/ Another example of the obsessive creativity of Kenny G http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/ecology/combinFormation/ An instance of interface ecology. A generative space for browsing, authoring, collecting http://www.shadoof.net/in/inhome.html Indras Net of machine modulated poetry and unbound books http://www.shadoof.net/in/riverisland.html RiverIsland is a downloadable for Mac only navigatable text of transliteral morphs and interliteral graphic morphs http://mission.base.com/geometries/index.html "Geometries of Power" is a multi-user online 3D world that uses the interactive characteristics of space, geometry and sound to question concepts of power and control. Shared event VRML technology enables participants to collaboratively create a 3D visual environment in real time. It was developed during a workshop on Interactive 3D Virtual Reality Environments at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany. http://www.playcreative.co.nz/posthuman/html/ A collection of sites containing essays and examples of hypertext and hypermedia

46 http://home.nyc.rr.com/strickland10021/vniverse.html The Vniverse of Stephanie Strickland. A sky. A star. A story. http://hypermarks.english.ucsb.edu/ An index of many online hypermedia fictions

Bibliography: Books Aarseth, Espen Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature University of Bergen 1995. Bell, David and Kennedy, Barbara M. The Cybercultures Reader Routledge London 2000. Breton, André What is Surrealism: Selected Writings (Ed. Irving Rosemont) Pathfinder New York 1978. Burroughs, William Naked Lunch Harper Collins/Flamingo Modern Classics London 1993. Burroughs, William The Burroughs File City Lights Bookstore San Francisco 1984. Burroughs, William and Ginsberg Allen The Yage Letters City Lights Books San Francisco 1975. Calder, John (Ed.) A William Burroughs Reader Picador London 1982. Cassady Carolyn Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg Penguin New York 1990. Gardiner, Michael (Ed.) Mikhail Bakhtin: Sage Masters of Modern Thought Vols1-3 Sage Publications London 2003. Gerrig, Richard J Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading Yale University Press New Haven 1993. Hables, Gray, Chris, Figueroa-Sarriera, Heidi, Mentor, Steven (Eds.) The Cyborg Handbook Routledge New York 1995. Hayles, Katherine N. Writing Machines MIT Press/Mediawork Cambridge 2002. Hutcheon, Linda A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction Routledge New York 1988. Lakoff, George and Johnson Mark Metaphors We Live By University of Chicago Press Chicago 1980. Landow George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contempory Critical Theory and Technology The John Hopkins University Press Baltimore 1992.

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