Perversion the Social Relation

22 Dennis Fosterarrival and given a gallon of rice water and a half a gram of opium. If hewas still alive twelve hours later, the dose of opium was repeated. Thesurvival rate was about twenty percent" (4). The opium cure also workswell to relieve Farnsworth of his erections. The conventional medicalprofessionals' fight against the enemy Death all too frequently workscounter to their aspirations to relieve suffering. We suffer, quite literally,from life and its ally, desire, both of which project us into a future wherewe will have evaded death. The wealth we accumulate, like the childrenwe have ("money in the bank," one new parent said of her recent deposit),stands as a symbolic screen against the Real, an investment in thepromise that with time we will increase and not simply waste away. Butof course, in the long run, the survival rate is zero percent, a point worthforgetting. Farnsworth's goal is to find what gives pleasure to the bodyindependent of the anxieties of the individual subject about death andfailure: he tries to relieve the patient of the fantasy that anyone is capableof any action that will evade death, that consciousness might transcendthe body. Opium is, in part at least, sometimes the mechanism, sometimesthe metaphor for this condition—sometimes it is merely a drug tosuppress desire, sometimes it represents a state free of time and hence ofdesire. Through Farnsworth, Burroughs both mocks the medical establishmentand suggests an alternative orientation for the practice.At the heart of all social practices in this book is the stage. WhenFarnsworth's opium is gone and he is recovering with his boy Ali, thisother alternative to conventional reality appears. In this theatrical performance,he becomes aroused in a sexual "dream tension," duringwhich he smells "a strange smell unlike anything he had ever smelledbefore, but familiar as smell itself" (11). He awakes to find that he isbecoming an alligator whose head is "squeezing the smell out from inside."Burroughs alludes here to the idea that the human brain containsthe "reptile brain," a formation that recalls and preserves our reptilianorigins. The reptile brain is rich in serotonin, opiate receptors, and dopamine,"a neural sap of vital importance for bringing the total energiesof the organism into play" (MacLean 406). For Farnsworth, this brainemerges as a smell connected to some ancient, reptilian sense of the Realthat displaces all human consciousness. Farnsworth the alligator, whosebody pops, boils, and scalds, ejaculates in an agony of enjoyment. Butthis apparent metamorphosis and literalization of the lizard brain turns