Naked Lunch

These first chapters of Naked Lunch contain many perplexing aspects. Perhaps the most confusing, and seemingly central, of these is the status of Freeland and Annexia. The first three chapters take place in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, and Mexico. Thus, while what occurs there has surreal aspects, such as Bradley the Buyer’s “digesting” other people, the locations are real. This changes, however, in Chapter 4, when Lee is “assigned to engage the services of Dr. Benway” (19) and the narrative introduces the fictional states of Freeland and Annexia. Lee arrives in Freeland but hasn’t yet been shown around the Reconditioning Center there. It’s unclear what we’re to make of this, what these two states represent, and why the novel departs so radically from the ordinary sense of place.

One explanation is that these places are the continuation of a drug-induced fantasy. When Lee vaults the barrier at the subway station and evades the police officer, he symbolically escapes the sane, sober order of normality. Although he lingers in normal reality, to a degree, after this in terms of place, this soon breaks down too. Along with any ordinary sense of narrative, character, or authorial identity, location becomes both fictitious and bizarre. Annexia is a state where each citizen is “required to apply for and carry on his person at all times a whole portfolio of documents” (19). The citizens must have officials properly stamp these documents to avoid arrest. However, the examiners stamping them often use vanishing ink or deliberately stamp the documents of only a few when confronted with a group. This is also a world of fantastical torture devices. The “Switchboard” is a machine with “electric drills that can be turned on at any time [and] are clamped against the subject’s teeth” (21). Officials then force the subject to operate the board’s switches, but incorrect connection activates the drills. Additionally, citizens are subject to nightmarish machines of sexual humiliation. After feeding them aphrodisiacs and denying them release, the officials put them in a bed where “erections during sleep automatically turn on an enormous vibrating electric buzzer that throws the subject out of bed into cold water” (24).

Thus, we can understand Annexia as a place beyond conventional standards of reason and morality. It oppresses citizens in ways that far exceed—and are far more surreal than—any intelligible state. In this way, Annexia is one more expression of the unhinging of Lee’s consciousness from reality—except that here, the distortion applies to a whole state and assumes a particularly nightmarish hue. The character of Benway supports this reading. Benway, whose arrival in the narrative coincides with the abandonment of any normal sense of place, appears as a severely amplified and sadistic version of Lewis Carroll’s “mad hatter.” Responsible for the treatment of citizens in Annexia, Benway delights in experimenting on—and warping—human nature and morals. Using drugs, rape, and mind control techniques, he deliberately makes straight subjects gay and gay subjects straight. Additionally, he turns human beings into “neurotic cats” and dogs who defecate on command. As Benway says, reflecting the breakdown of all barriers, “the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden” (25). Benway’s own liminal status also reflects this. Although supposedly a doctor, he has absolutely no concern for his patients, and the profession long ago expelled him after his baboon assistant tore a patient to pieces during an operation.

However, there’s even more to it. While Annexia can no doubt represent a drug-inspired nightmare—one that subverts ordinary moral standards—it’s also the fantastical projection and revelation of a world that already exists. This is the world of surveillance and social control in 1950s America, where officials strictly police drug-taking and moral “deviance” and enforce conformism. However, they don’t do this through traditional oppression. As Benway says, “I deplore brutality […] it’s not efficient” (19). Replacing the threat of violence and torture are “scientific” methods” that deprive citizens of privacy, freedom, or any outlets in others or substances, and encourage them to identify with the controlling authority. This is the logical precursor of Freeland. In this reading, Freeland is not some dull but ultimately benign state distinct from Annexia. Instead, it’s the very state of which Annexia is an embryo—and the end for which Annexia’s methods are a means: The “total demoralization” (19) in Annexia is the breaking down of citizens to “build up” and mold society in the desired fashion. It’s how the system forges the “well-adjusted, cooperative, honest, tolerant and above all clean” (19) yet homogenous and domesticated society. This is what the riot at the Reconditioning Center seeks to break from. Likewise, this secure and comfortable—but lifeless—vision of normality is what the narrative eventually seeks to challenge.