SOURCE: Ahearn, Edward J. “The Sordid Sublime: Burroughs's Naked Lunch.” In Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age, pp. 117-35. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Ahearn places Burroughs in the tradition of apocalyptic writing that includes William Blake and Lautréamont.

Aragon and Breton reveal much about the visionary impulse in the twentieth-century setting. The notion(s) of the surreal itself, passionate and controversial stances on love, insanity, and history, premonitions of decentered écriture, have a relevance beyond the subsequent manifestations of French literature. This is the case for the work that might be considered the most disturbing realization of the visionary later in the twentieth century, William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, completed in 1959.¹ Despite important differences, this book is linked in many ways not only to the surrealists but to a number of the writers treated earlier, from Blake to Lautr...