[gag]

Originally Posted by nosferatu42

I read Naked Lunch around the time the film came out, it's completely different, a random collection of vignettes, loosely following William Lee who is a version of Burroughs. It features characters that appear in the film like Dr Benway and involves Interzone and the black market, but is more of a stream of consciousness than a narrative novel.
I've also read Cities of the Red night by Burroughs which is fairly similar, he's a fascinating writer but you really have to just take in the style and imagery he throws on to the page, as some of his ideas and thoughts are pretty outrageous,violent,darkly sexual and scatalogical. As such the novel could never be filmed as it reads.

I'm pretty sure Cronenberg has cited Burroughs as a major influence on him, with parasitical organs and psychic organisations featuring in Burroughs work, so the film is like a hybrid crossbreeding of their styles.

The film is kind of Cronenberg taking the essence and ideas in the novel and combining it with Burroughs own life. The "William Tell routine" is directly based on an incident where he killed his wife in a drunken party game.
Burroughs was addicted to heroin most of his adult life, so the bug powder directly reflects this, he also experimented with the cut up technique of writing, where he would cut up words and sentences and reassemble them as a way to open up abstract thought and a kind of automatic writing.

I'm pretty sure i read he said he couldn't recollect writing the novel.

Yes I'm sure I heard that as well and when he went to read it he had no idea wtf it was all about and struggle to understand it. Or something along those lines, cos like stated he wrote when on drugs.