Naked Lunch, Or, the Last Snapshot of the Surrealists

Abstract

Naked Lunch opens with drug use in Washington Square station and concludes with a drug deal gone. In between is a proliferation of shocking and lascivious scenes of drug use, deals, trafficking, and control, that travel from New York to Mexico to Tangier to the laboratories of Dr. Benway. Challenging readings that align Naked Lunch’s drug use with an aesthetics of shock, this chapter argues that drugs provide a lens through which the novel starts to map the new domestic and international geographies of US empire. This chapter argues that in linking together urban renewal projects at home and modernization and development projects such as Truman’s Point Four plan abroad, Naked Lunch focalizes the nascent political, economic, aesthetic, and psychological transformations that occur as a new system of US global hegemony was forged.