Politics, Power, and Control Theme Analysis

When William S. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, he was living in Morocco in the Tangiers International Zone, an area governed by a complex international system involving several nations with competing interests. The terms of governance were frequently renegotiated there, and it was often unclear who was in charge or what any of the ruling parties were after. As a result, Tangiers earned a reputation as a lawless and hedonistic place where citizens, especially Americans, were free to do as they please. While Burroughs’s observations and experience living there informed his depictions of an unrestrained lifestyle fueled by drugs and sex, they also inspired his often-satirical depictions of power, especially the complex and convoluted relationship between power, politics, and control.

On the one hand, Naked Lunch highlights how governments use indirect means to enact control over citizens. In Annexia, for example, Doctor Benway’s project of “Total Demoralization” succeeds thanks to an “arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy.” Not only does this bureaucracy serve as a cover for “the naked need of the control addicts,” but by inventing needs and policies and procedures, it also hides the governments’ mistreatment of citizens from the citizens themselves, revealing how seemingly harmless governmental entities can ultimately serve more nefarious ends. In the Freeland Republic, meanwhile, rather than inventing needs, the government fulfills all of its citizens’ desires and more. This benevolence has a more sinister side, however, in that it functions as a veiled “threat” that ensures a docile and compliant population. As Benway puts it, “A functioning police state needs no police.”

Naked Lunch also reflects on the relationship between politics and control. For instance, in Interzone, the setting that is most directly based on Tangier’s International Zone, each of the Political Parties has its own desired outcome. For Liquefactionists, for instance, the goal is the absorption of the entire population into one being. For Divisionists, on the other hand, the goal is infinite division until only one person exists in the form of millions of separate replicas. But there is no ideological or philosophical backing to these undertakings. What matters, rather, is conformity—whether it takes the form of reproducing unified thoughts and actions (as with the Senders) or replicating a single form (as with the Divisionists). What this illustrates is that no matter how they appear from the outside, all political parties (according to Burroughs) seek the same end: the control of citizens’ bodies and minds.