and marijuana which has less to do with the imaginative energy of Naked Lunch than the "straight" attitude toward drugs. The "hallucinations" which make up the bulk of the book are not the futuristic and numinous visions reported by users of LSD, but are rather clarified visions of present reality made more terrible by what we have already described as the addict's absolute dependence on real things in their aspect of maximum power. (McConnell, p. 675.)
Out of the San Francisco Renaissance of 1956-1957, an existential vision of reality was shaped by writers such as Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Gold, Kerouac, and Trocchi. This is summarized most simply in The Connection, Jack Gelber's off-Broadway play which was both a harshly realistic experience and an allegory. Like characters in the developing Theatre of the Absurd, the junkies in this play and in the books of the era live a life of no exit; they exist in tight, self-contained worlds of their own creation, existential men carving a separate reality out of nothingness with the hypodermic needle. Or to put it in Burroughs' own words, from Junkie, "Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life." (Burroughs, p. 128.)
Summing up the image of the junkie from the literature of this era, Marcus Klein writes:
It is not the junkie but the junkie's fabulous shadow that is news. The life of the drug, retreat under discipline ("There is no more systematic nihilism than that of the junkie in America."—Trocchi), might be a metaphor that will tell us who we are (our own poisoned blood; waiters who wait for another round of waiting); where we are (Nowhere, man; Heaven, man); where we are going ("One is no longer grotesquely involved in the becoming. One simply is."—Trocchi. "Running out of veins and out of money."—Burroughs); how to live (a man has his freedom; you can be very cool man; you don't have to live). And these matters are important. In a time of confusions and staggering possibilities of treachery, of engineered ideas and disillusion in the areas of volition and purpose, these metaphysical matters are imperative. (Klein, p. 364.)
Yet as literature rounds the bend of the decade of the 'sixties, it finds itself already outdistanced by the emerging counter-culture. The experiential fascination of drug literature has turned into
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