Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted

What does atristic transgression look like in 2025?

The Japanese poster for David Cronenberg’s 1991 movie adaptation of Naked Lunch.

When I first read William Burroughs Naked Lunch in my early 20’s it had a profound effect on me. I was aware in theory that you could write whatever you wanted, but had not truly assimilated the fact that a creator could make something so free, so idiosyncratic, and so unmoored from morality and the normal patterns of fiction. It was thrilling and inspiring to read, and to contemplate it’s implicit message that you yourself - your mind, personality and experience - were the true artistic product, and that you could transmit that directly to the reader by cracking your skull like an egg and pouring the contents onto the page. In the case of Burroughs - who led an extreme life and was a very bad man - the transmission resulted in a book that was vulgar and obscene to the extent it was still the subject of obscenity trials and bans decades after publication. But revisiting the book for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, it has me thinking about what constitutes shocking art in 2025.

The plot of the book is impossible to synopsise but per wikipedia “it is structured as a series of non-chronological "routines". Many of which follow William Lee, an opiod addict who travels to the surreal city of Interzone and begins working for the organization "Islam Inc.””

Naked Lunch was written by someone who was a lifelong Heroin addict and dealer, someone who was gay when that had serious legal consequences. The setting is inspired by Burroughs' time living in the Tangier Interzone, a place which (for rich westerners at least, and through various accidents of geopolitics) had become a temporary paradise of libertarian lawlessness. All of this is mixed into the recipe of the book resulting in themes of body horror, ubiquitous and invasive medicalisation, prostitution, drug use, and the overlap between sexuality, government control of populations, and mass entertainment.

Many of its themes have become hyper-relevant in 2025. The novel features characters and creatures undergoing grotesque physical and sexual changes, transformations that often blur the lines between human, animal, and machine. Bodies are voluntarily and involuntarily altered through drug use, disease, or deliberate manipulation, all of which mirror the current use of surgeries and hormones, and tech billionaires biohacking their DNA to unnaturally expand lifespans.

The setting of the Interzone itself is a crucial element functioning as a kind of black market for all sorts of illicit goods and services, with sexuality as a key part of that economy; sexual acts, desires, and even bodies themselves are treated as objects to be bought, sold, and traded. In a world where all aspects of mass entertainment have been porno-fied to at least some small degree, porn stars are mainstream celebrities and platforms like Onlyfans provide the economic infrastructure to monetise sex work, the whole word can feel like a digitally coordinated Interzone.

One of Burrough’s key ideas was that language could be conceptualised as a disease, and one that could be weaponised to allow people to be unconsciously reprogrammed; all of which is reminiscent of debate in our own time about free speech, hate speech laws and the determination by governments to control language in a way that makes certain political concepts forbidden or compulsory.

But Naked Lunch was never intended to be a prophecy about where the world was headed, so much as to reflect Burrough’s life as a person whose every step was in a shadow of semi-legality. He wasn’t trying to say this is what society would or could look like in 60 years. He wanted to take the subterranean trends he saw at the time and for comic effect push them to their furthest extreme for the purpose of being funny, the source of humour being in part that real life wasn’t that extreme. In an era of the pornogrification of everyday life, where sexual expression was up until a moment ago an essential state-endorsed good in most western countries, the absurd and disgusting fantasy of Naked Lunch has come true but in the opposite way Burroughs perceived. Instead of being rejected, it’s the most transgressive elements which have been sanctified and given the institutional seal of approval, with the old hypocrisies the book lampooned has been suppressed or discarded.

I wrote a few years ago about the movie Videodrome, directed by David Cronenberg, who later made an adaptation of Naked Lunch. Videodrome covers much of the same territory as Naked Lunch in the same tone; and the unexpected passage of cultural change events has subtly altered its message in much the same way. What I said then of Videodrome is true of Naked Lunch (the book) as well:

Videodrome correctly predicted how depraved and crazy our future would be; that technology would lock us in a self-disguising prison from which there is no escape, which changes our minds an bodies as we live in it. What it didn’t predict is how corporate this future would be, how banal and how insufferably pompous.

We have discovered what the makers of Videodrome wouldn’t have guessed - that human beings have unlimited tolerance for being commodified in body and spirit as long as it’s easy; and as long as the commodification is sold to them as a luxury good, and a marker of upward social mobility. And unfortunately for us, this is no hallucination.

Although it wasn’t a prediction, Burroughs could conceive of a world as vulgar and absurd and grotesque as ours - but could not conceive of how boring such a world would be, how psychologically un-free, how prissy and how pious - and how the most forbidden currents described in Naked Lunch were the ones most easily co-opted by upwardly mobile squares, to make money from and for to boost their own social status.

What does that say for the value of the book itself as a piece of literature? Despite his often tiresome desires to be as obnoxious as possible, Burroughs has writerly qualities that are nothing to do with being shocking, but are in fact about an unerring ability to precisely capture universal human details. As a lifelong drug user the experiences in the book are filtered through a lens of junkie paranoia, mysticism and dissociation. At one point he describes his experiences going cold turkey and notes that-

During withdrawal, the addict is acutely aware of his surroundings. Sense impressions are sharpened to the point of hallucination. Familiar objects stir with a writhing furtive life…

I’ve never forgotten that last sentence since I read it maybe two decades ago, and think of it often when in an uncanny or paranoid frame of mind, or when I’ve woken from a nightmare and am already beginning to forget something that terrified me; a feeling that sentence captures perfectly. Controversy fades, and changes in society can make something shocking seem banal or at least pedestrian. But fortunately for us great writing is indestructible, and will be fresh, vivid and vital whether you revisit it in twenty years, or two hundred.