Shelf Aware: The Naked Lunch.

Ceci n'est pas un livre. This is not a book. It looks like a book, feels like a book, smells like a book. Parts of it even read like a book. But a book it is not. It's an art object, William S. Burroughs' (1914-1997) most infamous invocation of the objet d'art that is a book. Its non-linear text can - intentionally - be read in no particular order, beginning practically anywhere.

What narrative there is doesn't so much unfold as writhe, convulsively convoluted, retracing its own tropes. Its short spurts indulge in wordplay, anecdotal slivers of conversation overheard somewhere smoky over the din of some drunken jazz band across filthy alleys upstairs some dingy hotel room, over sirens and noisy neighbours, trains rumbling underground cars roaring overhead. Spoken word snatches of the city soundscape, the buzz and verve of the urban landscape.

Cataloguing Burroughs' obsessions, in particular pharmacological terminology and hustler's jive, The Naked Lunch samples the lingo - not so much a cut-up as a mash-up - reveling in the qualities of highly specialised talk. A word hoard embellished by "routines", like the one about the adolescent who - literally - gets "his first piece of ass" (in a manner that would make Shylock's detractors faint), or the infamous parable about the man who taught his asshole how to talk.

It roisters in all the stuff that comes out of us, is produced by us, in its undisguised form - the naked us - blending maxims, quotations, antiquated expressions, frequently veering from hip to technical jargon within the same sentence. The anarchy isn't solely designed to shock, but to utterly trash bourgeoise notions of "good taste". Burroughs has it out with practically everyone he couldn't abide: pretentious puritans, fanatical fundamentalists, mercenary merchants, rabid racists, and insipid imperialists. All seen fit for flogging.

Curiously, The Naked Lunch also manages to depress the last half-century's global political hot-buttons: consumerism, bigotry, terrorism, xenophobia, drug and disease pandemics. Proving perhaps that the current struggle is always about the past. Despite his obfuscating manner, Burroughs strove to expose readers to the true state of things; the world through the eyes of a gay man attempting to escape in every manner possible the confines of closeted middle American life.

His writing explored the nature of obedience and manipulation, in order to locate the methods of control which perpetuated the sad state of world affairs, and - if not destroy them outright - disrupt them. For without them society as it had been organised couldn't exist. To Burroughs, the church, the state, and the suppression and repression of sexuality represented the primary tools with which populations could be kept subservient.

"Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out."

The Naked Lunch plunges readers into a fast-moving world of constant, frenetic action, lightly mirroring Burroughs' own itinerant existence, rushing from place to place, from hit to hit, vaguely following an ambiguous clandestine entity whose raison d'être is to bring about the collapse of all systems. It stirs up conflict, chaos, panic, confusion, wherever it appears, engaging in evil regardless of its utility. Like an exceptionally malignant virus.

Burroughs had a particular interest in the constraints imposed by language, the way its limitations determine our ability to define reality. It may be universally agreed that two plus two equals four, but what we mean by "two", and what "four" represents says a lot about who we are and where we come from. Burroughs particularly wanted to expose the culinary camouflage we employ to disguise that which would be hard to swallow if we only took the time to examine what we "actually eat and drink". We may call what quivers at the end of the fork chateaubriand, but that don't change the fact it's a piece of flesh ripped from a living creature.

The manner with which Burroughs rouses the reader may be disagreeable - the multiple fetishistic hangings interspersed with explicit homosexual and heterosexual sex, intended as a critique of capital punishment were once labeled "obscene" and "pornographic" - but sometimes the only way to snap people from their stupor is a slap across the face. Which is what reading Burroughs frequently feels like; as painful as enjoyable. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, to get hung up on Burroughs style is akin to complaining that the man who bangs on your door in the middle of the night isn't particularly eloquent when announcing that your roof is on fire.

Regardless of which version of the text one may be reading - the first published in August 1959 by Olympia Press, the first American edition published by Grove Press in 1962, or the 2001 restored text - The Naked Lunch resists interpretation precisely to point out interpretations' limitations, revealing how in order to perceive a cohesive whole certain things must be ignored. Its antiexpressive, antidiscursive antinarrative calls into question both "expressiveness" and "intentionality" in literature, expanding the concept of writing far beyond its formal limits and intentions.

As such, it has been a source of inspiration for all artists venturing outside the "normal" limits of expression - particularly in film and pop music (there are those who blame Burroughs for Cyberpunk, but they've presumably never heard of Alfred Bester). But despite being the origin of "heavy metal" and numerous band names, most of Burroughs' admirers seem more enamoured with his image than his writing.

Hence his impact on popular culture has been greater than his influence on literature, touching even those who've never read him. The idea of Burroughs - a man who stared into the abyss and came back to report on it - always more appealing than the man himself or his writing ever was. The iconic Burroughs is a middle-aged, deadpan expressionless businessman, neatly attired in a three-piece suit and tie, practical haircut, who'd taken all manner of drugs known to man, and spews notions - with the voice of a St. Louis banker - that would make your parents froth at the mouth.

"That's the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there's always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness..."

The Naked Lunch is the text that created this cult figure, banned and narrowly escaping censorship in a trial that established the American obscenity standards for the following decades. It follows that the work itself is obscured by myth - often embellished and perpetuated by the writer and his cohorts themselves. There's claims the writer was doped while writing, that it was assembled from jumbled sources in a mad rush two weeks before first being printed in Paris, or that it's Burroughs' first foray into cut-ups.

The last is easiest to dismiss, as Burroughs was first introduced to the technique by Brion Gysin nearly a month after the first edition of The Naked Lunch hit the stands. It's possible Burroughs was writing under the influence, but it's not entirely clear of what: drugs, or his unrequited love for Allen Ginsberg. More likely he simply wanted to obscure just how much of his own experience he (consciously) imbued the text with - particularly his personal politics, which at the time leaned more towards the cooperative than the libertarian.

The order of the text's that comprise The Naked Lunch isn't as random as purported either. While the different editions have differed significantly, the main part of the manuscript - some one hundred pages - had been written by early 1957, and remained largely unaltered since. Towards the end of 1956, Burroughs had kicked his habit for the first (but not last) time, and it's the beginning and end - if, indeed, they are such - that bear the marks of three different pairs of hands (Burroughs', Ginsberg's, and Jack Kerouac's) attempting to cobble a book together on at least four different occasions.

The myths are partially a byproduct of the main dish, a particularly runny concoction, threatening to "spill off the fork in every direction" practically all of the time. They may provide the hapless reader with some semblance of cohesion, yet simultaneously threaten to counter what may be the work's intended purpose. Half a century since it was first published, The Naked Lunch remains a baffling and fascinating indelible stain on the American literary landscape, and has become a preeminent classic of Beat literature.

Shelf Aware: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Though many viewers of the purportedly unscripted television show Big Brother may be aware of its title's origin in George Orwell's last novel, to a vast majority it simply seems to denote the omnipresent arbiter of the show. Its quite malignant connotation appears to have evaporated from the public consciousness in the six decades since Nineteen Eighty-Four was published - perhaps in the wake of ordinary people's surprising eagerness to exhibit themselves, warts and all, on television. Despite lasting linguistic contributions - neologisms like "thought police" lifted straight from its pages, or the practically universal reference to anything repressive as "Orwellian" - the novel appears relegated to the heap reserved for Cold War relics. Which is a pity, for though its dystopian account of life under a totalitarian heel is far from unique, Orwell's exploration of what motivates such systems - what makes them tick - remains one of the most perceptive, and has aged surprisingly well. While clearly referencing the time and place in which it was written, it reveals how people can be crushed mentally as well as physically by restrictive, authoritarian, and mendacious governments of any stripe. Every libertarian provoked by society's impositions may well reach for it to decry curtailments of personal freedom, but Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn't particularly promote nor vilify any specific ideology. "Ingsoc," Orwell writes, "grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology," but only paid lip-service to its ideals. So, despite charges of being "pro-Communist," or assertions of the opposite, it pertains to any regime or self-aggrandising autocrat striving to shove their particular brand of "truth" down people's throats.

It's a much darker and more complex novel than Orwell's more popular Animal Farm, particularly in its fascination with the morality of language. That aspect alone makes Orwell's prescience increasingly impressive in an era of readily available editing tools and alarming impermanence of records. But it mainly retains its currency because totalitarian regimes as well as attempts to corral reality are still common in our world. The blocs and spheres of influence may have shifted, but the oppression continues unabated. In view of the last decade, Nineteen Eighty-Four appears even more prophetic as even nominally democratic governments around the world claim it necessary to record all private communication in the "fight against terror." An archetypal Orwellian concept; a conflict virtually without end against a vague enemy practically anyone could be accused of colluding with. An enemy portrayed every bit as pervasive, shrewd, ruthless, and imperceptible as the poorly defined adversaries in Orwell's novel. Requiring our constant vigilance and, likely, the sacrifice of our essential right to privacy - as mass surveillance is persistently presented as the ultimate remedy for terror. Yet, Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a bold prediction so much as an account of the forces that have always threatened liberty. It seeks to expose how expedient lies enable those in power to exploit the ruled. It remains a vital protest against the authoritarian in each of us, against the passive conformist in each of us, and against the orthodoxies we leave unquestioned.

It was written in the wake of both personal tragedy and public success, in circumstances that very likely contributed to the writer's death. In 1946, despite the international success of his fifth novel Animal Farm, George Orwell was a struggling widower and single parent. His chain-smoking black rolling tobacco exacerbating the decline of his health. Following his wife Eileen's death the previous year during a routine hysterectomy, Orwell supported his infant son Richard and himself as a contributing writer to several publications. He'd been a literature reviewer and correspondent with The Observer weekly since 1942, and its editor David Astor now offered to lend Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to complete his next novel. In May 1946, shortly after his older sister Marjorie died of kidney disease, Orwell arrived at the abandoned Barnhill house on the island of Jura. Twelve kilometres from the nearest phone, forty kilometres from the nearest pub. Far from the hubbub of literary London, Orwell - whom the locals knew by his real name, Eric Blair - shared four small bedrooms over a spacious kitchen and a large bedroom that doubled as a storeroom with his younger sister Avril, his son Richard, and - for a while - his housekeeper Susan Watson. No electricity, a battery-powered radio the only link to the world at large. The spare surroundings may have influenced those of Nineteen Eight-Four almost as much as the atmosphere of constant conflict and random terror in wartime London must have done. The winter of 1946-1947, which Orwell spent in London, likely contributed as well. One of the century's harshest, the national fuel shortage left the writer no choice but to burn his furniture and his child's toys to stay warm. Having visited Jura in the New Year, Orwell left London for good in April 1947.

The idea for his new novel had germinated sometime in 1943-1944, with the working title The Last Man in Europe. Orwell later claimed the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt with Stalin - one of the aggressors of the Second World War - at the Tehran Conference served as inspiration. Orwell was convinced the recently allied leaders consciously "divided the world up" among themselves. But he only began working on the novel in earnest in 1946, eight months after reviewing a French translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 novel We, from which he borrowed several elements. In May 1947 Orwell had completed a third of the draft, and informed his publisher that he expected to have it finished by October. However, Orwell, Avril, and Richard nearly drowned in the Jura sound's Corryvreckan whirlpool - the third largest in the world, practically within earshot of Barnhill house - upon returning from a boat trip along the coast in August. The incident did Orwell's frail health no good, and in November the writer collapsed with pneumonia. The draft of the novel was a mess, two-thirds of which in Orwell's own estimate needed rewriting. Just before Christmas 1947 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. There was no cure for TB in 1947, but to Orwell's - and many future reader's - benefit his mentors managed to procure a small amount of an untested drug, streptomycin, imported to the UK from the US for experimental purposes.

It's possible that Orwell received excessive doses of the recently discovered antibiotic, as the side effects he experienced were quite horrific. One can easily imagine how the throat ulcers, the blisters in his mouth, the loss of hair, peeling skin, disintegration of toe and fingernails inspired the physical degradation that Orwell's protagonist comes to experience in the novel. Yet after three months of treatment Orwell's TB symptoms vanished, and the writer returned to his draft - with added pressure from his publisher to finish by the end of 1948, earlier if possible. Again it would be easy to imagine a further autobiographical tinge, as Orwell might have felt as much a shell of his former self as his protagonist becomes towards the end of the novel. He finished the draft by October 1948, though had still not decided whether to stick with the original title, The Last Man in Europe, or Nineteen Eighty-Four - a date derived from the fact that (in the draft) the narrative occurs successively in the years 1980, 1982, and, finally, 1984. Ultimately, Orwell's publisher Fred Warburg suggested that the latter was a more marketable title, and the many popular explanations of the title's "mysterious" origin are little more than publishers' hype. A perennial favourite among the many myths is one originated by the novel's American publisher, later furthered by the conservative Anthony Burgess in his reactionary rebuttal 1985, claiming that Orwell simply reversed the last two digits of 1948. As if the terror he sought to describe didn't exist regardless of time. With this novel Orwell made clear it can occur anywhere, whenever we become negligent of the challenges to liberty. In fact, the reason why Orwell chose to set his story in (what was then) the future could be to convincingly describe a totalitarian state at its fullest extent.

By November 1948 the now bedridden writer had typed up the draft himself, and had it delivered to London - as promised - in December. In January 1949 Orwell left Jura for a TB sanatorium in the Gloucestershire village of Cranham. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June, and during that summer the Orwell's fortunes appeared to be looking up. But though the writer's finances improved his health continued to decline. In September he was transferred to the London University College Hospital, and though he was "rediscovered" by many old acquaintances, Orwell appears to have been increasingly lonely. In October he married Sonia Brownell, whom he'd unsuccessfully courted nearly four years earlier. But despite plans for the future and a steady stream of visitors, on January 21, 1950, Orwell suffered a massive haemorrhage in his lungs and died alone. His sister Avril and son Richard, who were still living on Jura, first heard of his death on their battery-powered radio.

"My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions ... which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism. ... The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere."

George Orwell, June 16, 1949.

Shelf Aware: Slaughterhouse-Five.

It's forty years since the novel that foistered fame onto Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007) was published. He'd achieved critical acclaim in 1963 with Cat's Cradle, but it was Slaughterhouse-Five that brought popular success and a million-dollar multi-book contract. It remains Vonnegut's most popular work - certainly his best known, most read, and likely the one which introduces him to a majority of readers.

It relates the remarkable story of the most unremarkable myopic optometrist Billy Pilgrim, who plays a quite unremarkable role in the Second World War. Like Vonnegut himself, Pilgrim is taken prisoner, manages to survive the bombing of Dresden, and returns home to an incredibly unremarkable existence. Save for the fact that during the course of it Billy also manages to get himself abducted by aliens from a distant planet - an event that leaves him "unstuck in time."

Thus Billy flutters through his own life, fleeting from one moment to the next, almost simultaneously inhabiting past, present, and future. One moment he's in the cellar of a Dresden slaughterhouse, seeking shelter from the firestorm unleashed by bombers above, the next he's on display in an alien zoo, caged together with a salacious actress in the hope they'll mate. It's all quite a bit silly, and Vonnegut never pretends otherwise.

Though often categorised as a "black humourist," there's nothing particularly "black" about Vonnegut's attempts to make his fellow human beings laugh at the stark inevitabilities of change and death. Most often, laughter is the sole remedy available against the inevitable. As his stream of consciousness prose suggests, Vonnegut's a raconteur rather than a writer, closer in sentiment to classic storytellers of traditional folk or fairy tales.

Not that his stories are stylistically traditional: Slaughterhouse-Five was perhaps the first broadly popular novel to completely abandon traditional restrictions on narrative. At least as far as fixed spaces and time-lines are concerned. Yet it's as easy to read as a children's story. All the recurring themes and motifs are introduced in the first chapter, all the clues present, the whole point explained right there at the beginning.

While Vonnegut clearly attempted to address the lack of attention the bombing of Dresden received after the war, his main objective was to process the trauma inflicted by what he had personally witnessed. And while he managed to challenge the established view at the time - that the bombing had been necessary, that the only people killed were murderous Nazis - he also, far more importantly, attempted to introduce a device for dealing with loss and grief.

Though unlike his protagonist we're not "unstuck in time," Vonnegut argued that maybe it would be a good thing if we were. Listen. Instead of expending our emotions on births and deaths, on beginnings and ends, wouldn't it be better - Vonnegut seemed to say - if we simply accepted that everything - life, relationships, lunch - has a beginning and an end, and concentrated on what's between instead?

Despite this, Slaughterhouse-Five is surprisingly often interpreted as an affirmation of fatalism. Yet, Vonnegut's attempt to focus his readers' attention on life between its terminal points clearly sought to make them consider what can be altered - not accepted as inevitable. Even the aliens who abduct Billy the myopic optometrist appear to be a parody of fatalists and their ilk, equally myopic in their unwavering determinist outlook.

My father died many years ago now - of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.

Vonnegut had tried to describe his experiences in Dresden ever since the war ended. Three different drafts of the novel, now held at the University of Indiana, bear witness to his protracted struggle - as do frequent mentions of the bombing in many of his short stories. Though Vonnegut seemingly found release in the unusual amalgam of science fiction and personal confession finally published in 1969, the bombing of Dresden receives passing mention in at least six of his other novels.

One of the most blunt and stark attempts to describe what he'd survived was likely one of the first - a letter written to his family in 1945 from a POW Repatriation Camp in France. Though first published in the posthumous 2008 collection of writings, Armageddon in Retrospect, it could easily serve as a preface to Slaughterhouse-Five. In fact, it could easily serve as a preface to Vonnegut's entire career as a writer.

Slaughterhouse-Five is also Vonnegut's most controversial work. Frequently banned from American literature classes, removed from school libraries, it regularly makes the top 60 of the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged titles. Not that its pages contain anything particularly challenging. Unless one happens to be a supercilious bigot, militaristic jingoist, religious zealot, reactionary moralist, or simply dumb - in which case the novel likely presents an insurmountable challenge.

For the sufficiently elucidated reader its sole offense is relying on David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden as a source. Irving's book was an international bestseller in the 1960s, and one of the first to question the morality of the indiscriminate bombing of German cities. It's easy to comprehend why Vonnegut would rely on it to provide his account with what was then considered reliable facts and figures.

That Irving, virtually unknown outside of Britain at the time, would become a notorious historical revisionist, a convicted racist and anti-Semite, incarcerated for Holocaust denial, was something neither Vonnegut nor anyone else could've foreseen. However, the inclusion of Irving's findings contribute to the controversy; they're crucial to whether the bombing of Dresden should be considered a crime or the result of war's general melee.

As Vonnegut's myopic protagonist is told in the novel at the very beginning of his career in optometry "frames are where the money is," and the framing of historical events such as the bombing of Dresden are lessons in how atrocious events past can be smoothly rationalised and adjusted to prepare ground for future "inevitable" and "necessary" actions. Framing is everything. So it goes.

Ultimately, Slaughterhouse-Five is a work of fiction not entirely concerned with facts and figures. It's readers shouldn't be overtly concerned with them either. Does it really matter how many people were burned alive in Dresden a mere twelve weeks before the war ended? Would it seem less atrocious if, say, only a handful of people had been roasted? Anyone who answers with a resounding yes ought to have their head examined. Professionally.

Listen. The debate over numbers is a ruse. Many, many people were killed; many, many of their cultural artifacts were destroyed forever. For reasons increasingly difficult to justify as time marches on. That's all anyone needs to remember in order to avoid a repeat. That's all Vonnegut wanted to say.