“No glot . . . C’lom Fliday . . .” William S. Burroughs’ Curious Chinese

By Benjamin J. Heal

Abstract

Encounters with otherness, through representations ranging from apparently alien creatures to inner demons, are central to William S. Burroughs’ oeuvre, and form part of what makes his work so challenging and resonant. His representations of the Chinese, while often overlooked, stand out in particular, because of their incongruous appearances in unexpected places and contexts, and because they are presented in a mostly positive light. This article places these references in historical, textual, and biographical context while considering their significance in the contemporary context of what Paul Giles terms “American world literature,” and the ‘worlding’ of Beat and proto-Beat literature. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) presents Chinese characters with a direct connection to drugs, and as such they act as a metaphor for something that is simultaneously attractive and repellent, reflecting Burroughs’ oscillating and often ambivalent attitude towards the foreign Other. Such representations can be seen to destabilize national identities and expose the ambivalent discursive processes of Othering, which arguably renders his works as complex, multi-faceted critiques of contemporaneous US race narratives and neo-colonialism. These representations can also be seen to challenge the notion of a dominant hegemony while highlighting how aspects of Orientalism can be seen through the construction of minority groups. These texts demonstrate Burroughs’ understanding of identity politics and power relations, primarily because they can be seen to parody contemporaneous stereotypes informed by the ‘Yellow Peril’ metaphor (the constructed Western fear of the Eastern Other), in a deliberate attempt to subvert such arbitrary constructions.

Keywords: Burroughs, Orientalism, Transnationalism, Yellow Peril, Otherness, Chinese

“No glot . . . C’lom Fliday . . .” William S. Burroughs’ Curious Chinese

Critical commentary on Burroughs only infrequently mentions issues of race and imperialism, with readings focused more on the representations that conform to mid-twentieth-century stereotypes. However, his references to China and representations of the Chinese hold a symbolic status in his work, showing some level of understanding of the complexity of othering, stereotypes and racism within the contexts of US neo-Imperialism, and reflect a nuanced view of American perspectives on the Chinese. To some extent this aligns him with poststructuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva, who also grappled with representations of China, though their approaches have been critiqued for their own problematic elements. The frequent decentering of whiteness in his works often recalls the tendency of “less-than-savory depictions of otherness (in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality) always cropping up in Beat writing” noted by Jimmy Fazzino.[1] Such tendencies are explored in essays such as A. Robert Lee’s “The Beats and Race” (2017) and Todd F. Tietchen’s “Ethnographies and Networks” (2017), but with a focus on black/white race relations and colonial exploitation that misses the references to the Chinese, an overly homogenized group with a unique relationship with America in terms of foreign policy, immigration, and diaspora. Burroughs’s fascination with Chinese language and culture stems in part from his interest in disrupting the logocentric foundations of language, echoing poststructuralist critiques of language and meaning. From this starting point, this essay examines references to China and how Chinese characters are represented in Burroughs’ texts in order to demonstrate that within his specific political and historical context his works reflect on and deconstruct American and Orientalist narratives of identity, compellingly prefiguring later approaches to identity politics. For example, Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs (2001)explores how Burroughs’ recurring depictions of non-normative sexual relationships and his critique of reproductive futurism foreshadow queer theorists’ challenges to the primacy of heterosexual reproduction and family structures in identity formation. In addition, as texts such as Brian T. Edwards’s Morocco Bound (2005) and Greg Mullins’s Colonial Affairs (2002) have shown, Burroughs both participates in and critiques narratives of the “Orient” and exoticism, particularly in works such as Naked Lunch (1959) and The Yage Letters (1963), that can be seen to reveal the constructed and political nature of identity within colonial and postcolonial contexts. In challenging fixed categories of race, gender, and sexuality, critiquing systems of power, and exposing the constructed nature of cultural narratives, Burroughs’ works anticipate queer theory, postcolonialism, Foucauldian critiques of power, offering fertile ground for exploring how identity is shaped and contested in a complex, globalized world.

Lee and the ‘Chinaman’: Burroughs and Racial Stereotypes

The problematic idea of an American national identity depends, as Paul Giles states, “upon a bounding and demarcation of space, a separation of “American” as a descriptor from more expansive or inchoate worldly coordinates.”.[2]  Continuously reinscribed across American history as politically required, as noted in Robert G. Lee’s Orientals (1999), the Chinese in Burroughs’ texts are ambiguous, ambivalent, oppressed, diasporic racial minorities that constitute a particular foreign other to the main protagonist, exerting a menacing power often through black market economies.[3] This contrasts with the emerging ‘model minority’ myth that gained traction in the early years of the Cold War. The myth was based not so much on the success of Asian-Americans, but rather in contrast to the perceived failure of African-American communities to assimilate. As Lee suggests:

The representation of Asian Americans as a racial minority whose apparently successful ethnic assimilation was a result of stoic patience, political obedience, and self-improvement was a critically important narrative of ethnic liberalism that simultaneously promoted racial equality and sought to contain demands for social transformation.[4]

This new national narrative did not fully whitewash the history of opium dens, criminality and the Chinese Exclusion Act, but rather incorporated it into an assimilation myth that reinforced unity where, “America’s anxieties about communism, race mixing, and transgressive sexuality might be contained and eventually tamed.”[5] The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a federal law that marked the first significant restriction on immigration based on ethnicity or nationality. It prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country, reflecting widespread anti-Chinese sentiment that had been fuelled by economics and racism during the late 19th century. The Act severely limited Chinese immigration, separated families, and fostered decades of discrimination against Chinese communities. It remained in effect until 1943, leaving a lasting impact on U.S. immigration policies and race relations.[6]

A very specific problem with the seeding of the more positive model minority myth was the strong association between the Chinese and the opium underworld. The resolution appears to have been the fierce attack on drug users, instigated by the creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics by Harry J. Anslinger in 1930, effectively eradicating opium smoking which was replaced by the far more efficiently trafficked and injected heroin and morphine derivatives, a shift that concurrently led to a dramatic reduction in Asian-American addicts, and hence their association with the illegal trade.[7]

The representations of China and the Chinese in Burroughs’ Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953, hereafter Junky) and Naked Lunch (1959, also marketed in an illegal drug context) can be seen to respond to those still embedded Asian stereotypes by using specifically contextualized Chinese representations, with the attention shifted to the formation of those stereotypes through the gaze of the American, and the construction of American identity as formed in the encounter with the other.[8] The otherness that Burroughs’ Chinese characters represent reflects the gaze of the protagonist, forcing a confrontation with their own status of otherness and alienation (as expatriate, addict, or homosexual) that can be seen in the context of Paul Ricoeur’s formulation, whereby selfhood “implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other.”[9] Informed by travel and expatriation, these representations of othering reflect Burroughs’ status as a dissenting American, in a position that resists, to some extent, embedded, binary race narratives, rather than adopting the simplistic position of complicit white neo-imperial Orientalist.

Knowledge of expatriate communities and diasporas inform much of Burroughs’ work, particularly in how such communities affect and are affected by the countries in which they reside, most often in revolutionary political and anti-Imperial contexts.[10] For example, Burroughs’ cut-up novel Nova Express (1964), described by Oliver Harris as a “manifesto for global resistance against the 1 percent who run our planet like an alien colony”, acts as “a call to arms against those who brought us Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, the novel showing solidarity with the Japanese who suffered both in the atomic bomb blasts, and in internment camps in the US, the former of which are mentioned several times in the text in anti-American-imperialist contexts.[11] Similarly, Burroughs shows sympathy for Colombian rebel groups in their fights with puppet dictatorships in the earlier The Yage Letters, while his radical Cut-up agenda of the 1960s takes an interest in Mao Zedong’s guerilla warfare tactics.[12] As Tomasz Stompor notes in relation to Burroughs’ 1965 cut-up/collage publication Time, Burroughs’ commitment to Chinese communist politics is problematic: “Burroughs had a rather ambivalent fascination for Maoism”. Strikingly, Stompor notes a letter of January 4, 1969 to Brion Gysin in which Burroughs, in a counter-Orientalist view, argues that mandarin might in some way be immune to propaganda, and therefore superior to Western languages. Indeed, Stompor sees the alignment of an image of Mao with Burroughs’ name under Henry Luce’s iconic magazine’s logo on the collage cover of Time as an alignment between the writer and Mao against the anti-communist bias of Luce’s actual magazine. Burroughs is essentially fetishizing Chinese communism for his own dissenting politics, adopting a rose-tinted view of Chinese language and politics in order to critique what he saw as Western media propaganda.[13]

Burroughs’ work is often mentioned as an influence on poststructuralist theorists such as Foucault and Deleuze, with Burroughs meeting Foucault on at least on occasion.[14] Such thinkers have similarly been accused of this kind of fetishization, as Rey Chow highlights: “[P]ost-structuralism’s dismantling of the sign, … began in an era when Western intellectuals, in particular those in France … ‘turned East’ to China for philosophical and political alternatives”.[15] Both Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes represented China as subversive of Western ideologies, while Maoism was embraced by the journal Tel Quel in 1971, in which communist China is presented as the radical Other of Western society.[16] Lisa Lowe posits that “Although Kristeva’s, Barthes’s, and Tel Quel’s representations of China served as critiques of the nationalist ideologies supported by earlier orientalisms, their figurations of the Orient utilized some of the very same terms, postures, and rhetoric employed in the earlier texts.”[17] It is therefore unsurprising that this interest in Mao and the Chinese demonstrates a charge of ethnocentrism that can also be levelled at Burroughs.

Originally published under the pseudonym ‘William Lee’, Junky uses the same name for the protagonist/narrator. Ostensibly this was out of respect to Burroughs’ family given the potentially controversial content of the novel, yet Burroughs used his mother’s maiden name ‘Lee’, a decision that Harris regards as “a very equivocal choice”.[18] Nevertheless, Lee perseveres throughout Burroughs’ oeuvre, indeed is a central character in Naked Lunch and the cut-up trilogy, shifting from a junky to a revolutionary hero and sell-out ‘inspector’.[19] The choice is notable in that Lee is a common anglicized Chinese surname, and by choosing this name Burroughs highlights the history of Chinese immigration to America, the Yellow Peril, the neo-imperialism of the Korean war, and the anti-opium drug hysteria that goes back at least to 1875.[20] Due to the influx of Chinese ‘sojourners’ following the discovery of gold in California in 1848, arriving as indentured laborers known pejoratively as ‘çoolies’, what David Courtwright describes as a “safety valve” appeared in the form of dens of vice in the Chinese areas of towns “Chinatowns”. Arriving as part of this system was the smoking of opium.[21] In 1886 The San Francisco Chronicle estimated that half the Chinese immigrant population of 30,000 had an opium habit.[22] As Courtwright notes, at this time the criminal underworld was inextricably linked to opium and the Chinese underclass:

“It’s a poor town now-a-days,” remarked a white smoker in 1883, “that has not a Chinese laundry, and nearly every one of these has its lay-out [pipe plus accessories]. You once get the first ticket [letter of introduction written in Chinese] and you’re booked straight through.”[23]

The 1909 Smoking Opium Exclusion Act made opium smoking dangerous and expensive, with many users switching to morphine and heroin, but the association of narcotics with the Chinese underclass remained, despite the dramatic decrease in the Chinese population following the racial antagonisms brought on by the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Burroughs’ unpublished 1966 story, “Lee and Wong”, a short piece about the sexual effects of spliced tape recordings, foregrounds the Chinese association with the name Lee. Having the unmistakably Chinese name Wong alongside the more ambivalent Lee renders both names, at first glance, Chinese. Assuming the pseudonym ‘William Lee’ was a marketing strategy aimed at readers who associated the junky with the pre-war stereotypical Chinese opium smoker, it is possible Burroughs equated the increasing persecution of the opiate addict with the persecution of Chinese immigrants.[24] Harris argues that “the novel itself points to the unaccountable, to that which, like the junky identity, ‘escapes exact tabulation’ and so remains irresistibly elusive, leading us on but always slipping away.”[25] Such an elusive ‘junky identity’ is akin to Burroughs’ representations of a stereotypically ambiguous Chinese identity.

This ingrained stereotype of the inscrutable, ambiguous Chinese remains deeply ingrained in American culture, which still often portrays Asians as mysterious, emotionless, and unknowable. Rooted in 19th-century Orientalist attitudes, this trope emerged prominently during the era of Chinese immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), when anti-Chinese rhetoric cast Chinese workers as alien and unassimilable. Characters like Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu helped exemplify this stereotype, portraying Asians as cunning and devious. Characteristics of this stereotype include inscrutability, perceived moral ambiguity, and an association with secrecy or manipulation, contributing to a broader dehumanization of Asian individuals in American cultural narratives. The stereotype itself is, as Lee points out, “a complex racial representation, made up of contradictory images and stereotypes.”[26]        

The name Lee plays on that same ambiguous, elusive quality, much like Burroughs’ first and much preferred title for­ Junky,­ “Junk”. Unlike the term ‘opiates’, ‘junk’ has a range of associations; a slang for opiates, an English word for a type of South-East Asian sailing ship, and useless objects or waste, the latter cited as a reason the publisher rejected Burroughs’ preferred title, as they thought readers would think the book was about garbage.[27] Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs’ literary agent at the time felt the proposed title was actually “straightforward, original, and yet very typical of junkie’s talk, and characteristic of author.”[28] The use of “Junk” as a title creates both ambiguity and a focus on opium itself, with its broad East-Asian and Imperial connotations with the opium trade, offering a wider contextual consideration of the United States’ place in Imperial trade relations. Like its glossy first-edition cover, the published title Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict focuses luridly on the protagonist; a victim-blaming criminalization that reflects much of Anslinger’s US narcotic policy; itself focused on what Kathleen J. Frydl describes as a:

“Good guys, bad guys” view of narcotics trade through the Asian prism, illuminating the essential character of nations for Americans to better apprehend, or so they believed. Anslinger seized on opportunities to nominate illicit narcotics trade as one more repugnant dimension to America’s already hated enemies – first the Japanese empire, then Communist China.[29]

Given the types of identity-shifting characters featured in Burroughs’ cut-up novels, particularly the ever-shifting ‘Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin’ and corruptible Inspector Lee characters, it is no surprise that Burroughs’ narrator/nom de plume William Lee should hold such ambiguity within that ‘good guys, bad guys’ binary prism. Indeed, Burroughs notes in The Third Mind (1978) that, “Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin, in my mythology, is a God that failed, a God of Conflict in two parts so created to keep a tired old show on the road…”.[30] This notion of a “God of Conflict in two parts” further channels Burroughs’ attack on dualism. As Robin Lydenberg argues, “Burroughs’ strategy of resistance consists of attacking the power of this “simple binary coding” and thus of all language codes with his own word power”.[31] The ambiguity embodied by Lee and Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin also points to Burroughs’ invocation of the transgressive, liminal space of the ‘Interzone’.[32]

Ambiguous Interzonality

The Interzone, first depicted in Naked Lunch, is a city-space based in parton the international zone of Tangier, which existed from 1925 to 1956. With roots in the “Composite City”section of The Yage Letters,“The Market” section of Naked Lunch begins with the description of a “Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast, silent market”, suggesting a cosmopolitan space of equality. Burroughs’ positioning of the Chief of Police of Interzone, a prototype of Inspector Lee of the Nova Police of the later cut-up novels, presents a stereotype of Chineseness as a pardigm of inscrutability, demonstrating that by repeating stereotypes Burroughs was not immune to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ attempts to “illuminate the essential character of nations”[33]: “The Chief of Police is a Chinese who picks his teeth and listens to denunciations presented by a lunatic. Every now and then the Chinese takes the toothpick out of his mouth and looks at the end of it.”[34] This section draws from an observation also featured in The Yage Letters, taken almost verbatim from a July 1953 letter to Ginsberg:

How sane they are and how little they expect from life. He looked like junk to me but you can never be sure with the Chinese. … A lunatic came in the bar and went into a long incomprehensible routine. … The owner sat there picking his teeth. He showed neither contempt nor amusement nor sympathy.[35]

Whether as an imagined Chinese Chief of Police in Interzone, a figure of order and authority in a space paradigmatic of chaos, or a real immigrant Chinese bar owner in Peru, this character is an outsider, in a liminal space of either Interzone or a Peruvian expatriate bar, who has gained and exerts power through indifference. Given that this model of Interzone liminality comes from Burroughs’ real experience of a Chinese immigrant in Peru, the emphasis critics often place on Tangier as a model for Interzone may be overstated, and that models for cosmopolitan liminal spaces had already revealed themselves to Burroughs in his earlier South American experiences. Indeed, Burroughs’ conflation of Asian, and South-American and North-African otherness is a further complication of his sometimes-overgeneralized representations of otherness. As an outsider addict, homosexual and expatriate Burroughs sympathizes with and identifies with the Chinese other, as an individual stereotyped by a society looking for scapegoats. Their apparent indifference, symbolized by the bar owner’s teeth picking, is a virtue for Burroughs in the face of such social (and hence state) aggression. Burroughs is also clear that the fluid reinscription of the Chinese from useful labor resource to dangerous immigrant is similar to the connotations of the word ‘junk’ or the name ‘Lee’.

The representation of the Chief of Police in Naked Lunch does reinscribe negative, patronizing stereotypes, but the context of the space where the representation is depicted, Interzone, and the expression of power through indifference and ambiguity, makes it an representation of otherness that challenges convention.

Nevertheless, Tangier and its imagined counterpart remain important in Burroughs’ works, largely, because he discovered that, “A city so cosmopolitan yet so small could almost shut out the individual past”, an important suspension of the individual self.[36] As Jonathan Eburne notes, the importance of Interzone (and hence Tangier) is as a liminal space beyond binaries:

This interzone, neither fully formed nor immaterial, is a crossroads whereby the attractions, the addictions, of either side of the binary are traffickable as commodities— … but only at the price of deferral, violence, and the endless craving of metabolic addiction.[37]

While Eburn places this in a bodily, “metabolic” context of need, it more appropriately fits a space of deferred meaning, forged in linguistic discontinuity. This almost existential disconnection, produced by the city-space, can be seen reflected in and embodied by both the junky and the Chinese diasporic characters; indifferent and ambiguous.

Similarly, Homi Bhabha’s notion of the ‘Third Space’, a split space of intercultural communication, aims to reveal an ‘international’ culture, “based not on exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.”[38] Burroughs’ Interzone and his representations of the Chinese, can to some extent be seen as attempts to achieve this hybridity.[39] By stressing the ambiguities of attempts at fixing cultural representation, Burroughs’ texts turn against their protagonists’ attitudes, highlighting their own alienation and self-loathing, and their reinscription of tired stereotypes. This perspective presents Burroughs as less concerned with racial differences (although these are of course apparent), but rather with the discursive systems that govern how we make sense of the world, produced by what Stuart Hall sees as “the interplay between the representation of racial difference, the writing of power, and the production of knowledge.”[40] Daniel Punday offers the counter-argument that Burroughs’ embrace of ambiguous heterogeneities, such as Interzone, “produces not hybridity but a table of choices”, and that “mixing heterogeneous materials without some aesthetic principle to give them meaning simply produces categorization and control.”[41] Burroughs’ parodic, ironic and incongruous representations of the Chinese, in attempting to elude essentialism during a period when polarities were being ideologically imposed by the Cold War, are nevertheless forced into new hierarchies, just as Asian-Americans became the model minority as increasingly non-Asian addicts became criminalized.

This can be seen through Lee’s interactions with natives and foreigners in Mexico in Junky, where Lee’s identity is increasingly hybridized, the division between self and other increasingly blurred. Lee’s first comment on the foreignness of Mexico is directed at a group also apparently foreign to Mexico:

My first night in town I walked down Delores Street and saw a group of Chinese junkies standing in front of an Exquisito Chop Suey joint. Chinamen are hard to make. They will only do business with another Chinaman. So I knew it would be a waste of time trying to score with these characters.[42]

This uncharacteristic dismissal of a possible drug supply stems from the perceived alterity of the Chinese. The idea that they are “hard to make” invokes stereotypes (such as the inscrutable Chinaman, and association with fast-food and laundry) held both by Lee and many Americans at that time.[43] The stereotyped representation nevertheless draws attention to and destabilizes itself because of the presence of the “Exquisito Chop Suey joint”, which sounds more like a parody than an authentic Chinese restaurant. Conventional attitudes and perceptions are both highlighted and subverted via the restaurant’s hybrid mix of China, the US and Mexico: ‘Exquisito’ is a Spanish word, ‘Chop Suey’ is an Asian-American Chinese dish with a complex mythology, and ‘joint’ is American slang for a place or a marijuana cigarette.[44] The final word, “characters”, is significant in its double meaning; likely referencing written Mandarin, given the earlier reference to a “Chinese character” in a different context in the novel.

The scene presents Lee making a racist comment on the “Chinese character in red lacquer” painted on Mary’s apartment wall: “‘We don’t know what it means,’ she said. ‘Shirts thirty-one cents,’ I suggested.”[45] The character on the wall symbolizes an ambiguity where meaning can be re-inscribed by Lee and Mary, while the reader never learns its true meaning, leaving it elusive and enigmatic. Mary’s statement implies some aphoristic (and perhaps stereotypical) meaning, with Lee boiling it down to basic economics and a more obviously crude, stereotypical joke association with the Chinese laundry. The phrasing brings to mind Frantz Fanon’s statement about the objectification of the other, “this behavior betrays a determination to objectify, to confine, to imprison, to harden. Phrases such as ‘I know them,’ ‘that’s the way they are,’ show this objectification successfully achieved.”[46] Yet Lee’s laundry joke draws attention, showing objectification in action while highlighting the inherent weakness of the process. It is notable that Burroughs returns to mandarin via a specific Chinese ideogram that appears in Burroughs’ 1964 cut-up novel Nova Express. Here Burroughs gives it meaning, the character acting, like the “hard to make” Chinese junkies, as a symbol of resistance and dissent: “The Chinese character for ‘enemy’ means to be similar to or to answer — Don’t answer the machine —— Shut it off —”.[47] Burroughs, albeit inadvertently, is reinscribing Chinese stereotypes of inscrutability within a wider framework of empowerment and resistance that can inform those wishing to resist Western power structures.

“No Tickee, No Washee” – “No Glot, C’lom Fliday”

Burroughs’ representations are therefore not as one-dimensional as they might, at first glance, appear. Certainly, stereotyping humor such as Lee’s laundry joke is racist, but if read by the initiated as an unfunny parody of racist attitudes it acts to highlight prejudice. Harris describes this as Burroughs’ “recurrent tactical trap, insinuating the reader’s complicity … and making visible our voyeurism”.[48] As Burroughs knew, American society invariably associates the Chinese with laundry, one of the few professions Chinese immigrants could pursue after the Chinese Exclusion Act.[49]Attention is focused on the ironic ignorance and double bind of both Lee’s crass comment and Mary’s ignorance associated with the presence of the red lacquer painting in the first place; a primitivist attraction to the cultural stereotype of the mystical and spiritual nature of Chinese culture aligned with the historical reality of institutional racism against the Chinese.

The final line of Naked Lunch, “No Glot, C’lom Fliday,” not only recalls the references to the Chinese laundry, and use of Chinese stereotypes and discrimination in Junky, but it also returns to Lee’s uncomfortable use of humor in Junky, along with the broader history of American vaudeville humor based on pidgin English.[50] Most pernicious in this context is the “No tickee, no washee,” joke, which while poking fun at pidgin pronunciation and Chinese prevalence in the laundry business, it notes the power of the oppressed minority over such transactions.[51] The result of the political persecution during the Chinese Exclusion Act was an increase in all forms of cultural stereotyping. A key element was dialect, used as a shorthand to reveal the subordinate position of the dialect speaker, as Terry Abraham states, “if the story is told in dialect, you are also being told that the dialect speaker is an ‘other,’ an immigrant, an alien, a foreigner, a member of a lower class”.[52]

With racism a recurring theme of Naked Lunch, examples such as the “County Clerk” section for present the titular character as an anti-Semitic racist speaking in extravagantly exaggerated vernacular. Rob Johnson rightly sees the representation as “one of the most scathing – and uncensored – portraits of a racist penned up to that point in American literature.”[53] At the obscenity trial of Naked Lunch Ginsberg stresses the specifically moral, anti-racist thrust of the section, in that Burroughs “is making a parody of the monstrous speech and thought processes of a red-necked Southern, hate-filled type”.[54] But even so, as Johnson notes, “Burroughs appears to be having a bit too much fun telling these racist and anti-Semitic jokes, he is hardly condoning such opinions.” [55]

The Chinese pusher’s use of pidgin with “No Glot, C’lom Fliday” has, nevertheless, a different effect that is closer to Robert Young’s understanding of pidgin: “The structure of pidgin—crudely, the vocabulary of one language superimposed on the grammar of another—suggests a different model from that of a straightforward power relation of dominance of colonizer over colonized.”[56] Such ambivalences disrupt the assumed logocentric foundations of language, and demonstrate the importance of language in maintaining power relations – and represent the menace of the hybrid in linguistic terms.[57]

As if to restate its importance to the whole, the full phrase “No Glot, C’lom Fliday” occurs twice in Naked Lunch, as the final line of the novel, and as a note at the end of the chapter “Ordinary Men and Women”.[58] The note revisits Lee’s observations in Junky, that match the actual circumstances of the time, albeit resulting from changing drug laws, and with many Chinese also leaving America: “In 1920s a lot of Chinese pushers around found The West so unreliable, dishonest and wrong, they all packed in, so when an Occidental junky came to score, they’d say: ‘No glot,….C’lom Fliday…’”.[59] In placing Burroughs as working within an Orientalist framework, albeit from a “contestatory position”, Edwards argues that “No glot,….C’lom Fliday…”, “represents the unbridgeable gap between East and West, rendered as poor translation, with ls substituted for rs.”[60] Mistranslation, which Edwards sees as producing an “excess of meaning”, is not the central issue. Indeed, there are no “rs” or “ls” in ‘no’, ‘got’, or ‘come’ – and there is no standard Chinese mispronunciation of those words. Instead of a vague excess of meaning, “No glot,….C’lom Fliday…”, like “no tickee, no washee”, powerfully underlines the power held by the Chinese pushers. Taken out of the context of its first iteration in the novel, the line can be read as a simple derogatory representation. However, if read in this context the capitalized terms ‘The West’ and ‘Occidental’ insinuate the reader in its consideration of identity politics and colonial power relations.

By presenting “Chinese pushers” both in and out of the initial 1920s context, around the time of the increasing persecution of opium addicts by Anslinger and the decreasing Chinese-American population, and literally ‘pushing’ the Chinese pusher closer to the individual junky, Burroughs is noting the reinscription of both the Chinese and individualized junky, how they are being redefined for political purposes. The first iteration can be read as parodic imitation, Chinglish words repeated by an unknown and likely non-Chinese third-person narrator. It is notable that the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ are missing in the interlocutory phrase, marks of selfhood that show the existence of two, speaker and listener. Paul Ricoeur notes such statements as ‘straightaway a bipolar phenomenon: it implies simultaneously an “I” that speaks and a “you” to whom the former addresses itself.’[61] This separation is inevitable, as “every advance made in the direction of the selfhood of the speaker or the agent has as its counterpart a comparable advance in the otherness of the partner.”[62] The removal of pronouns broadly suggests a dissolution of the self (and agency) of the speaker and the listener, and therefore the reader and the text.

In the context of the first iteration of “No glot,….C’lom Fliday…” we have a third-person narrator observing, yet as Ricoeur notes the third-person, “does not exist as a third person, at least in an analysis of language that takes as its basic unit the instance of discourse, as it is expressed in the sentence.”[63] Such a circumstance places “No glot,….C’lom Fliday” as a phrase recounted by an unknown narrator, in which an unnamed group of Chinese make an interlocution that eschews direct reference to self and other, while noting the non-existence of an unspecified thing (junk) and requesting the unnamed other to return at an unspecified time (next Friday, presumably). This array of unspecified detail and presumption, inherent in discourse of this kind, is central to the fluid construction of identity and its place in the language systems that govern power relations that Burroughs wishes to expose. In this sense the first iteration undermines the third-person narration, exposing it as racist in pathetic, obvious terms – why is it necessary to say what the Chinese pushers would say? It is not funny, like the “Shirts thirty-one cents” joke, and fails to do what parodies are supposed to; expose the source, in this instance the Chinese pushers, to derogatory ridicule.[64] Instead the focus is shifted back to the creator of the parody, the narrator, and its authorial source. The parodic instabilities are practically endless: The Chinese pushers may have perfect English and be mimicking Chinese immigrants who have poor English, the narrator might be parodying pidgin English, the narrative frame could be presenting a parodic representation of a narrator writing in pidgin English. A fixed understanding and meaning is impossible, hence this endless deferral.

“No glot,….C’lom Fliday…” can also be seen as intertextual assemblage, recalling the three iterations of “Clom Fliday” in Naked Lunch, and his references to Chinese in other texts. This textual fluidity demonstrates Burroughs’ increasing obsession with breaking down binary logic and highlighting how subjective the formation of meaning ultimately is.[65] “No glot,….C’lom Fliday…” also recalls the scene in “The Market” section of Naked Lunch that describes the “Composite City” of Interzone. The recurring vaudeville con men, Clem and Jody (that resemble an extreme version of the King and the Duke from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) cause the maximum offense possible at an Islamic funeral, which concludes with the statement that, “Jody can do a fake Chinese spiel that’ll just kill you-like an hysterical ventriloquist’s dummy. In fact, he precipitated an antiforeign riot in Shanghai that claimed 3,000 casualties.”[66] The slightly imprecise pidgin of “No glot,….C’lom Fliday…” suddenly takes on additional meaning if we read it in the context of Jody’s Chinese impersonation. The section also references the most famous section of Naked Lunch, the ‘Talking Asshole’ routine, a short section about a carny performer who teaches his asshole to speak. It eventually takes control, and in the context of Jody’s act it powerfully underlines the power of language and Burroughs’ later use of the dualistic cipher Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin. Finally, the “antiforeign riot” notes the power of language to produce action, while underlining the importance of context (why would Jody do his spiel in a Chinese city, unless it is to directly allude to “No glot,….C’lom Fliday…”?) and demonstrating Burroughs’ historical knowledge with a reversal of the anti-Chinese riots and lynching in the US precipitated by the Chinese Exclusion Act.

This is patently not, however, the “unbridgeable gap between East and West” Edwards describes, but quite the opposite; Burroughs is highlighting the gap and effectively dissolving it in his dissection of language and meaning. For Edwards, as for Fazzino, Naked Lunch is a “piercing indictment of a culture of control and a society of hypocrisy”, yet this statement returns the text to an America-centric position – that is that the text is predominantly about America – which belies their own recontextualization of the text in global contexts.[67] Moreover, the fundamental ambiguity of “No glot,….C’lom Fliday…” and its Derridean endless deferral of meaning, underlined by the use of ellipses, does not “break the junk economy” of control and replace it with an anal economy as Edwards contends but rather throws everything into a state of chaos, like the elusive “Green Door” Carl is unable to reach in “The Examination” section of Naked Lunch.[68] In terms of the marginalized Chinese diaspora, “No glot,….C’lom Fliday…” does give ‘The Orient’ a voice, one that challenges the equally marginal Occidental junky. It also acknowledges adaptation and appropriation of English, which represents a menacing reversal of power relations between ‘The West’ and ‘The Orient’. How the Occidental junky, effectively a stand in for Burroughs himself and his alter-ego, William Lee, communicates in Burroughs’ representation is unstated; at this stage he does not even have a voice.

In this context Ian MacFadyen’s reference to the Chinese in Naked Lunch as personifying, “the inhuman, racial other” misses some of the wider complexities of the representation.[69] MacFadyen does make apt reference to the aforementioned Rohmer, the English author who created the fictional Chinese master criminal Dr. Fu Manchu, a popular yet grotesque caricature that helped popularize cultural stereotypes, as critic Jack Adrian notes, “Rohmer’s own racism was careless and casual, a mere symptom of his times.”[70] Burroughs was acutely aware of such representations, and “No glot…C’lom Fliday…” both parodies and reinscribes Rohmer’s casual racism.[71] This phrase and apparent ‘parting shot’ is not only about Burroughs mimicking the “inhuman, racial Other,” but rather a double edge defined by power and language, both mimicry and parody. The Chinese pushers control access to junk, but as the author’s interjection about Orientalism reminds us, the West dominates the foreign Other, who as a non-white will never be allowed to fully integrate, a point underlined by the pusher’s use of pidgin English. However, it is also clear that the grotesque caricature of the Chinese pusher is a fiction, a deliberate parody of a vaudevillian stereotype. Like “no tickee, no washee,” “No glot…C’lom Fliday” is sympathetic to the Chinese pusher’s position of disempowerment that the junky can relate to; the Harrison Act and Anslinger’s policies created vilification of junkies much as the Chinese Exclusion Act led to the vilification of the Chinese.[72] Burroughs’ representation of the Chinese pusher echoes the (mis)representation of the junky of that era, always inhuman and over the top, forming yet another matrix of mythologies that made up contemporaneous American identity narratives Naked Lunch sought to reframe.

Outsider Identification

Burroughs’ ambivalent and often parodic representations of Chinese identity are at least partially analogous, if we add homosexuals and addicts to his list of aliens, with Edward Said’s analysis of imperial attitudes, whereby “[t]he Oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien.”[73] In Naked Lunch  and Junky there persists the increasingly persecuted figure of the junky, while all non-outsider aspects of Western civilization, particularly the hegemonic mechanisms and ideologies that support it, are attacked. Such tools, like derogatory representations of pidgin English, are exposed and neutralized. The link Said makes between the Oriental and degenerate characteristics of Western marginalized groups makes it appear that Burroughs, as drug addict and homosexual, identified with this conception of the Oriental.[74]

Burroughs’ self-identification as degenerate junky in this context does not, however, fit neatly within the wholly negative framework Said presents, as can be seen in a fictionalized 1953 letter to Ginsberg featured in The Yage Letters:

At 5 o’clock had a few drinks in a Chinese restaurant, where the owner picked his teeth and went over his books. How sane they are and how little they expect from life. He looked like junk to me but you can never be sure with the Chinese. They are all basically junkies in outlook.[75]

While reinforcing the ‘inscrutable Chinaman’ stereotype, Lee/Burroughs is also making a point of identification. This has echoes of what Rey Chow terms “ethnocentrism”, not the rejection of another culture seen as less sophisticated, but rather a consideration of  “how positive, respectful, and admiring feelings for the ‘other’ can themselves be rooted in un-self-reflexive, culturally coded perspectives.”[76] The owner is seen as a fastidious businessman, going over his books, in sharp relief to the American dream of success and contemporaneous Yellow Peril imagery by being both “sane” and expecting “little […] from life.” Again referencing the association of the Chinese with opium and inscrutability, “He looked like junk to me but you can never be sure with the Chinese”, Burroughs is recalling Lee’s impression of the Chinese junkies in Mexico and suggests an affinity with Derrida’s theories of untranslatability in his essay “Des Tours De Babel” (1985), which emphasizes the inherent ambiguity and “undecidability” of language, where meaning is never fixed but always deferred and open to multiple interpretations. Yet Burroughs even destabilizes the ambiguity through the elliptical essentialism of the racist final statement that again reads as possible parody, “They are all basically junkies in outlook,” once again equating the junky with a monolithic Chinese, uniting the downtrodden, outcast members of American society, as part of a global economy of imagined outsiders.

Resisting or Reinscribing Orientalism?

In order to achieve what Giles sees as essential aspects of a transnational reading, it is necessary to “demystify metaphorical maps of the world that place the US at their subliminal center […] and should replace them with an alternative grid in which relations between text and place are theorized more self-consciously”.[77] Burroughs’ representations of the Chinese as other effects a reminder that there are foreign invaders in these writers’ semi-imaginary, liminal and colonial spaces, and that American identity, defined by immigration and diversity, always impure and unstable, cannot speak from a position of power and dominance. Indeed, as Eburn points out, ‘“the void” of otherness ceases to function merely as a commodity that exists (in the words of bell hooks) “solely to suggest new aesthetic and political directions white folks might move in” and becomes a category as inadequate—and indeed as suspect—as that of the white, middle-class, heterosexual male “self”’.[78]

Burroughs’ representations do demonstrate the central role of language in constructing identity and the problems of maintaining power relations, particularly in racial and colonial contexts.[79] He presents Lee in ambiguous terms, confronting difference in terms not confined to race or national identity alone. An unpublished piece from 1969 titled “On China” praises Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, arguing that, “Class and individual difference, deliberately accentuated and exploited by vested interests, have brought the West to a state of chaos and disaster. […] The influence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the West is very far reaching.”[80] This observation shows Burroughs was interested in the realities of China, rather than popular perceptions and media representations of China and the Chinese; he had been around long enough to see those, along with the treatment of addicts, change repeatedly. Returning to Stompor’s analysis of Burroughs’ cut-up assemblage Time (1965), a parody of Time magazine, complete with an image of Mao on the cover, it is correctly pointed out that China is positioned as a “powerful antagonist against American hegemony after 1945.”[81] In this context one must ask why Burroughs selects China? Perhaps, like Nixon in 1972, Burroughs could see in China an unlikely ally and model of strategic resistance. Throughout the 1960s he certainly cited Mao in positive terms, particularly in the Revised Boy Scout Manual (2018), where Chinese is also seen as an exemplary language of resistance.[82] The problem with this largely positive view of Chinese politics and culture is that it is still rooted in Western representations of China, an essentialism based on an imagined Chineseness, reinscribing the traditional orientalist perspective. In Burroughs’ texts Chinese language is a cipher used to highlight and reverse the ambiguities he sees as embedded in Western languages, as explained via his ‘language is a virus’ thesis.[83] As with Hall’s conception of race as a sociohistorical or cultural construct, Burroughs’ ostensibly positive view of Chineseness fits his own purpose of exposing the easily manipulated systems of language and meaning.[84] Mao becomes a symbol of successful guerilla resistance and anti-imperialism, while the cultural revolution is a youth uprising, an anti-establishment and anti-intellectual movement that appeals to Burroughs’ radicalism.

Burroughs’ representations of Chinese characters and culture are not the “travestying world-images derived from British or French colonialism, or Fu Manchu, or Charlie Chan and China Doll stereotype, or anti-Red China prejudice, or the race-inflected lens of Hollywood” outlined by A. Robert Lee, but are necessarily ambivalent because of their parodic destabilization.[85] Such representations can be read as challenging and/or reinforcing existing stereotypes and notions of otherness. The creation of such a site refocuses critical attention on the author, with the key problem laid bare; despite giving Chinese characters a voice, white American writers cannot speak authentically for the Chinese Other. Indeed, to make matters worse Burroughs’ parodies reinscribe and reinforce stereotypes, despite being a response to the apparent rejection of multiculturalism and hybridity by the US government seen during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War, prior to the rise of the model minority myth.[86]

While Burroughs’ nuanced use of race in relation to the Chinese is arguably not racism per se it is clear that elsewhere and at different times in his life he held racist and misogynist beliefs. As Harris states, the defining statement of Burroughs’ entire cut-up project of the 1960s, “RUB OUT THE WORD” was originally the anti-semitic “RUB OUT THE WORD JEW”[87] Burroughs does not identify with women and the Jewish community as outsiders, and his texts reflect on those groups, often with hostility, such as with the statement “CUNT CON JEW DEAL” from the recently published text BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS (2020). While such statements can be cast as placed parodically in the mouths of literary characters, innocent explorations of the language of discrimination in practice, as he states in a letter to Bill Belli, he is concerned with appearances: “I have in fact almost deleted the word Jew. Making it quite clear that I am only concerned with what they represent. … Is that Anti-Semitism? I don’t think so.”[88] So why the often overtly negative view of Jews and women, and mostly positive views of the Chinese?

Combining authorial disclaimers, “I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch”, with parodic characters spouting racism does not seem a way out of such fixed ways of thinking.[89] The broadly ambivalent representations in the texts do, nevertheless, destabilize notions of fixed and stable ethnic-national identities. They attack models of social control based on the construction of an Other, against which the dominant can posit a fixed and powerful white American national identity and its expanding cultural hegemony, and his message seems curiously to be one of unity. This can be seen in this statement from BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS:

WHAT I SAY IS FOR ALL MEN WOMEN CREATURES EVERYWHERE NOW OR EVER. WHAT SCARED YOU JEWS INTO SHIT??? THE WORD JEW. RUB OUT THE WORD JEW AND YOU RUB OUT THE WORD HITLER. THE ANSWER COMES BEFORE THE QUESTION…—… ALL OF YOU ALL OF YOU OF ALL PLACE AND CONDITION. RUS­SIANS AMERICAN ENGLISH CHINESE NEGROES JEWS [90]

Removing the classificatory concept of difference and othering, embedded in language, seems to be the aim here, unifying all “MEN WOMEN CREATURES”. Whether Burroughs is in any way successful, or even employing the right tools remains open to question.

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Notes

[1]. Jimmy Fazzino, World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature, Re-Mapping the Transnational (Dartmouth College Press, 2016), 203–4.

[2]. Paul Giles, American World Literature: An Introduction, First edition (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2019), 7.. Paul Giles, American World Literature: An Introduction, First edition (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2019), 7.

[3]. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Nachdr., Asian American History and Culture (Temple University Press, 1999).

[4]. Robert, G. Lee, Orientals: Asian-Americans in Popular Culture, Temple University Press, 1999, 145.

[5]. Lee, Orientals, 146.

[6]. For more on this topic see: Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, Harvard University Press, 2021.

[7]. David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America, (Harvard University Press, 2001), 84-85.

[8]. Although these were aimed at the Japanese, to some extent the negative typing stuck to all East Asians, remaining for the Korean and Vietnam wars. See: John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (Brooklyn: Verso, 2014).

[9]. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3.

[10]. I note the racially loaded terms expatriate and immigrant, with the former being a largely used to describe white westerner, immigrant for other races. Burroughs lived outside the United States for long periods, particularly between 1953-1974.

[11]. William S. Burroughs, Nova Express: The Restored Text, ed. Oliver Harris, Revised (New York: Grove Press, 2014), xi. It is likely the references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inspired by Burroughs having watched the Alain Resnais movie Hiroshima mon Amor, a non-linear movie about a mixed-race love affair,see: Burroughs, Nova Express, 217.

[12]. William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, The Yage Letters Redux, ed. Oliver Harris, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006), 13.

[13]. Tomasz Stompor, ‘“I Spent Months in the Morgue”: William S. Burroughs’ Appropriation of Time Magazine’ in Gontarski, S. E., ed. Burroughs Unbound: William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 267.

[14]. See: S. E. Gontarski. “The “Limits of Control”: Burroughs through Deleuze.” Symploke, 28.1-2 (2020): 65-81, 81.

[15]. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Arts and Politics of the Everyday (Indiana University Press, 1993), 18.

[16]. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. (Cornell University Press, 1994), 137.

[17]. Lowe, 138.

[18]. William S. Burroughs, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” ed. Oliver Harris, (London: Penguin Books, 2003), xii.

[19]. See: William S. Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded: The Restored Text, ed. Oliver Harris, (New York: Grove Press, 2014), 16.

[20]. In the 2000 census “Lee” was the most common surname for Asian Americans. See Word, David L. et al, “Demographic Aspects of Surnames from Census 2000”, U.S. Census Bureau, https://www2.census.gov/topics/genealogy/2000surnames/surnames.pdf; Opium smoking was banned in San Francisco between 1877 and 1900, while leaflets were distributed that presented the Chinese as “assiduous opium smokers” who had “spread a mortal habit among thousands of children in the United States”. Gabreiela Recio, “Drugs and Alcohol: U.S. Prohibition and the Origins of the Drug Trade in Mexico, 1910-1930.” Journal of Latin American Studies no. 34 (1) 2002, 21-42, 24.

[21]. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 68.

[22]. Qtd. In Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 70.

[23]. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 73.

[24]. The novel sold as a lurid, true-crime 35-cent pulp novel, not marketed to a high-brow‘literary’ audience. Burroughs, Junky, xx-xxi.

[25]. Burroughs, Junky, xxxii.

[26]. Lee, Orientals, 13.

[27]. Burroughs, xiii.

[28]. Burroughs, xiii.

[29]. Kathleen J. Frydl, The Drug Wars in America, 1940–1973, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 59.

[30]. William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (New York: Viking, 1978), 97.

[31]. Robin Lydenberg, Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 124.

[32]. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, 1st ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 89-91.

[33]. Frydl, The Drug Wars in America, 1940–1973, 56.

[34]. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 89.

[35]. Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters Redux, 48; William S. Burroughs, The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959, edited by Oliver Harris, (London: Picador, 1993), 183.

[36]. Burroughs and Ginsberg, xxxi.

[37]. Jonathan Paul Eburne, “Trafficking in the Void: Burroughs, Kerouac, and the Consumption of Otherness,” Modern Fiction Studies, 43, no. 1 (1997): 77.

[38]. Homi Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (Oxford: Routledge, 1988), 38.

[39]. This line of questioning is followed by Robert Sean Wilson as a concept which essentially unites the downtrodden peoples of the world, see: Rob Wilson, “Masters of Adaptation: Paul Bowles, the Beats, and ‘Fellaheen Orientalism,’” Cultural Politics 8, no. 2 (2012): 193–206, https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-1575120.

[40]. Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference. (Duke University Press, 1999), 364.

[41]. Daniel Punday, “Word Dust: William Burroughs’s Multimedia Aesthetic,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, no. 40 (3), 2007, 33-49, 46.

[42]. Burroughs, Junky, 92.

[43]. William B. Helmreich, The Things They Say behind Your Back, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), 122–23.

[44]. Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, ed. Tom Jaine, 2nd ed (Oxford University Press, 2006), 182.

[45]. Burroughs, Junky, 11; David Ingram discusses Burroughs’ interest in pictographic languages in his essay “William Burroughs and Language”: David Ingram, “William Burroughs and Language.” In The Beat Generation Writers, edited by A. Robert Lee, 95-113. London: Pluto Press. 1996.

[46]. Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture”, in Toward the African Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 34–35.

[47]. Burroughs, Nova Express, 178.

[48]. Burroughs, Junky, xi.

[49]. Paul C. P. Siu and John Kuo Wei Tchen, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation (New York University Press, 1987).

[50]. Burroughs makes direct reference to a Chinese laundry, as a site where drugs are available, in the “Hauser & O’Brien” section of Naked Lunch, “you can score for yen pox in the Chink laundry of Sioux Falls…’ Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 181, 196; ‘“No glot …C’lom Fliday”’ is the final line of the most common editions of the text, however, the original 1959 Olympia press edition ended with the line ‘THE END.’ William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch, 1st ed., Traveller’s Companion Series (Paris: Olympia Press, 1959), 226; Yet as Harris notes, “Hauser & O’Brien could easily have been the first chapter of the novel. Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen, eds., Naked Lunch at 50: Anniversary Essays (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 23–24.

[51]. Wolfgang Mieder, “’No Tickee, No Washee’ : Subtleties of a Proverbial Slur,” Western Folklore, 55, no. 1 (January 1996): 1–40.

[52]. Terry Abraham, “‘No Tickee No Washee’: Sympathetic Representations of the Chinese in American Humor,” 2003.

[53]. Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas, (Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 47.

[54]. Michael Barry Goodman, Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1981), 219.

[55] . Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, 51.

[56]. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 5.

[57]. Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) discusses logocentrism as an essentialism that asserts writing as a substitute for speech. He also argues that because of the dominance of the largely non-phonetic Chinese script, Chinese civilization developed ‘outside of all logocentrism’. See: Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016 [1967). 98.

[58]. ‘C’lom Fliday’ is also used to conclude that chapter. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 121.

[59]. Burroughs, 121.

[60]. Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, New Americanists (Duke University Press, 2005), 174.

[61]. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 43.

[62]. Ricoeur, 44.

[63]. Ricoeur, 46.

[64]. Simon Dentith defines parody as follows: ‘By the mere repetition of another’s words, their intonation exaggerated but their substance remaining the same, one utterance, […] is transformed by another, held up to public gaze, and subjected to ridicule.’ Simon Dentith, Parody. London: Routledge. 2000, 1.

[65]. Allen Hibbard explores the concept of fluidity in Burroughs’ works in a recent essay, “Fluidity and Fixity in William S. Burroughs’ Writing” in S. E. Gontarski, ed., Burroughs Unbound.

[66]. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 93.

[67]. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, 161.

[68]. Edwards, 161; Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 165.

[69]. Harris and MacFadyen, Naked Lunch at 50: Anniversary Essays, 40.

[70]. Jack Adrian, “Sax Rohmer,” in St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, ed. David Pringle (London: St. James Press, 1998), 483.

[71]. Burroughs’ enduring character “Dr. Benway” may well be a parody of Dr. Fu Manchu, albeit without the racial stereotyping.

[72]. David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, (Harvard University Press, 2001), 1474 of 4538. Kindle.

[73]. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 207.

[74]. There is certainly more to be made here of the connections between colonial desire and the construction of homosexuality. This has been explored to some extent by Greg Mullins, see Greg Mullins, Colonial Affairs, (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).

[75]. Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters Redux, 48. The original letter, containing verbatim the same story, also appears in William S. Burroughs, The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959, edited by Oliver Harris, (London: Picador, 1993), 175.

[76]. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East, Theory and History of Literature, v. 75 (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 4.

[77]. Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton University Press, 2011), 262.

[78]. Jonathan Paul Eburne, “Trafficking in the Void: Burroughs, Kerouac, and the Consumption of Otherness,” 71.

[79]. For a full discussion of this see: Paul R. Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. New York: Routledge. 2007.

[80]. William Burroughs, “On China” The William S. Burroughs Papers 1951 – 1972, Box 62, Folder 63, (New York Public Library, Berg Collection, 1969).

[81]. Tomasz Stompor, ‘“I Spent Months in the Morgue”: William S. Burroughs’ Appropriation of Time Magazine’ in S. E. Gontarski, ed. Burroughs Unbound, 269.

[82]. William S. Burroughs, William S. Burroughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution, ed. Geoffrey D. Smith and John M. Bennett, (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2018), 68.

[83]. See: William S. Burroughs, Electronic Revolution, (Expanded Media Editions, 1976), 6.

[84]. Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference, 360.

[85]. A. Robert Lee, China Fictions, English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story, Textxet 54 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 11.

[86]. Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 186–283.

[87]. William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, ed. Oliver Harris (Anzing: Moloko Print, 2020), xlvii-xlviii.

[88]. Burroughs to Bill [Belli] June 11, 1960, MS63C, C.1, Burroughs-Hardiment Collection, University of Kansas, Qtd. In Burroughs, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, xlviii.

[89]. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 199.

[90]. Burroughs, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, 18.

Published: November, 2024

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