XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

Resumo:927-1

Oral (Tema Livre)

927-1	Culture industry, intoxication and naturalization: the taming of Naked Lunch
Autores:	José Carlos Felix (UNEB - Universidade do Estado da BahiaUNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas)

Resumo

The notoriety of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) can be accounted both on its content and form: a) the book’s shocking depiction of all sorts obscenity and abjection; b) its experimentalism by an extensively use of a vigorous technique of rupture, known as the cut-up method, with formal and cohesive text syntax immediately associated with modernist transgressive writing. This paper intends to discuss Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991) film version by investigating a series of cinematic devices that favors an attainable meaning, promptly denied by Burroughs’ book, but fundamental to guarantee the circulation of any cultural product. The argument seeks to demonstrate that whereas Burroughs’ oeuvre is epitomized by the motto “nothing is true: everything is permitted”, Cronenberg’s film version departs from the author’s defense of intoxication in order to achieve a truly creative literary process, as a means to antagonize to all kinds of preconceived narrative forms (including film genres), which eventually engenders a narrative structure that inverts the conventional opposition valences between the categories of hallucination and soberness. The result then is a tension of two opposing realms in which the protagonist’s hallucinative state is framed by a narrative procedure akin to mainstream film formulas such as noir and conspiracy genres. Then, a detailed reading of the film’s structural components evinces that the realm of hallucination strives to forge a cohesive narrative pattern, creating “a sense of reality” (both in the protagonist and viewers alike), only to be destabilized by minor interferences that can be taken as technical flaws, which operate disguisedly against such structure. Finally, the paper concludes that the film’s hallucinative narrative structure effaces the book’s vanguardist potentiality for being against literary conventions and produces a coercive naturalization of images and film aesthetics analogous to the procedures of homogenization of reality perception pointed out in the critique of culture industry.

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