Naked Lunch

Many experiments take place on human beings throughout Naked Lunch. Some are conducted on just the body. For example, Dr. Benway uses a woman, Iris, to test whether “the human body can run on sugar alone” (161). Similarly, the doctors Schafer and Benway discuss the possibility of “simplifying” the human digestive system. As Schafer says, “Why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct in the lungs” (110). However, as bizarre and unethical as these experiments are, the more disturbing ones are on the human brain and psyche. Schafer is central again here. Just as he wanted to test whether the digestive system could be simplified, he seeks to show that “the human nervous system can be reduced to a compact and abbreviated spinal column” (87). This is effectively a test to determine if a human being with consciousness requires a properly operating brain. It results in the creation of a hideous “monster black centipede” (87).

The point of these experiments is difficult to fathom. On one level, they’re simply another part of Lee’s drug-inspired fantasies. Like the sexual revels at A.J.’s annual party or in Hassan’s rumpus room, they’re an expression of imaginative association unhinged from morality or reason. On another level, they represent a critique of social control and oppression under the guise of science—most obviously in Benway’s experiments in his Freeland Reconditioning Center, which are explicitly designed to see how far a subject can be broken down and then subjected to the will of another. This is especially evident in Benway’s experiments with sexual humiliation and the reversal of a subject’s sexuality. Likewise, it’s evident at the novel’s end, when Lee expresses the sentiment that he needed to kill the police officers and escape because it was “better than being a subject for experiments with ST” (shock therapy) (178). A real sense and fear in the US at the time was that “undesirables,” such as drug users and gay men, were fair game for medical and psychological experiments.

However, experimentation is significant in the novel for another reason too. Experimentation is not just something that one person inflicts on another. It’s often, as in the case of drug use, inflicted by the individual on themselves. The drug user, whether knowingly or not, experiments with what the body and brain can endure—and the effects of certain substances on them. This is evident when Lee talks about taking a drug “dihydro-oxy-heroin” that is “six times stronger than heroin” (55). Just one shot of such a potent drug can cause lifelong addiction. In this way, Benway’s and Schaffer’s “experiments” are metaphors for what drug users do to themselves. In simple terms, as with Schafer’s “compact nervous system” or Benway’s subjects with “Irreversible Neural Damage” (28), this is the destruction of consciousness and the brain—and Lee indicates its endpoint when he describes how “a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon […] Complete silence—their speech centers are destroyed—except for the crackle of sparks […] as they apply electrodes up and down the spine” (22).