Naked Lunch

Title origin

Burroughs wrote in his introduction that "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 originally used the title Interzone for his manuscript.[1] He also considered several titles involving the Sargasso Sea, including Meet Me in Sargasso and The Sargasso Trail, possibly inspired by William Hope Hodgson's Sargasso Sea Stories.[2] Near the end of the novel, when Lee escapes from Hauser and O'Brien, he describes himself as "occluded from space-time like an eel's ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to the Sargasso".[3][4]

The final title began as a mistake. Reading aloud from the manuscript for Queer, Allen Ginsberg misread the phrase "a leer of nakedlust wrenched" as "a leer of naked lunch", and Jack Kerouac suggested Burroughs embrace this mangled wording as a title. The title originally referred to a planned three-part work made up of "Junk", "Queer" and "Yage", corresponding to his first three manuscripts, before it came to describe the book later published as Naked Lunch.[5] Ginsberg would later interpret and expand on the title in his poem On Burroughs' Work, published in the collection Reality Sandwiches:[6]

A Naked Lunch is natural to us,     we eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce.     Don't hide the madness.

— Allen Ginsberg, On Burroughs' Work

The book was originally published with the title The Naked Lunch in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press. Because of US obscenity laws,[7] a complete American edition (by Grove Press) did not follow until 1962. It was titled Naked Lunch and was substantially different from the Olympia Press edition because it was based on an earlier 1958 manuscript in Allen Ginsberg's possession.[8] The definite article "the" in the title was never intended by the author, but added by the editors of the Olympia Press 1959 edition.[9] Nonetheless The Naked Lunch remained the title used for the 1968 and 1974 Corgi Books editions, and the novel is often known by the alternative name, especially in the UK where these editions circulated.

Scholarly research has also suggested Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) of 1863 as Burroughs' inspiration for the title.


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