『벌거벗은 점심』에 나타난 고딕 장르의 변용과 그 한계

Reading Naked Lunch in the American Gothic Tradition

This article aims to postulate Burroughs’ Naked Lunch within the American Gothic tradition. Faithfully representing Fiedler’s definition of American Gothic as a form of critical historiography, Naked Lunch challenges the pervasive Enemies Within discourse in 1950s by employing various Gothic elements of monstrosity in both content and form. Against the ideologically constructed idea of American subject with autonomous integrity, the text displays an array of distorted and broken bodies marred by sexual and racial otherness, which indicate fluid and porous (and thus so-called “polluted”) subjectivity. On another level, however, Naked Lunch paradoxically reveals another impulse of pursuing autonomous subjectivity – that is, the white male self. By distancing himself from the oppressing society and identities it entails, the author strives to acquire a new kind of genuine identity incorruptible by social order. As a result, Naked Lunch turns into a truly fragmented text. Its language and form are intentionally fragmented so as to create narrative with monstrosity, but the impulse to find an imagined solution to white male’s eroding identity leads the text to the conflict between two incompatible subjectivities – the abject body unable to incorporate into social order, and the white male body faithfully incarnating the fantasy of escape.