Simon Stravitz
10/7/2015
Dr. Brandi Granett
ENG-340 Final Project Milestone Two: Outline
This paper will assess the impact that William S Burroughs as an author had on current writing trends and modern English literature as a 20th century Postmodernist writer. Burroughs became a leading Postmodernist author and literary figure of the sixties counterculture movement, due to his refinement of the cutup literary technique as invented by Brion Gysin. The cut up technique involves cutting and splicing text to rearrange it into new source material (Robinson 21-22). Burroughs favored controversial subject matter in his novels, including addiction, child murder, pedophilia and anarchism. These topics were heavily discussed in Burroughs most famous novel Naked Lunch, leading to the novel being initially banned in Boston and Los Angeles in 1962 due to charges of obscenity (Murphy 67). The charges against Burroughs novel were later dropped in 1966 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, because the court deemed Burroughs work to have literary and societal value, as a Postmodernist commentary on the human condition.
The failed attempt to ban Burroughs controversial novel Naked Lunch, marked the last trial attempting to censor a literary work in American history. The popularity of Naked Lunch, and the evolving societal values that embraced new ideologies, perspectives, and philosophies on life, opened the floodgates to further postmodernist innovations in writing because previously deemed unacceptable material could now be used as subject matter (Whiting 145). Due to an increased audience demand for controversy, modern writing trends favored more controversial material and subjective context to reflect changing societal values. This was because content that had previously been deemed unacceptable to print in American society before Burroughs’s trial was now mainstream material.
Burroughs’s first became known as an author affiliated with the artistic Beat movement of the 1950’s. The term “Beatnik”, was coined by writers Jack Kerouac and Herbert Huncke (Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable 1). Kerouac originally defined the phrase “Beat” as referring to someone down and out, borrowing his lingo from criminal street language (Johnston 166). Despite the Beat generation being viewed as antireligious, many Beat writers practiced the Buddhist faith, yet mainstream society struggled to accept Burroughs and other Beat generation writers for years because they saw the Beat generation and their philosophy as an affront to cherished societal values (Johnston 166-167).
Beat generation authors were frequently characterized through their rejection of Western traditions, use of drugs, living in communes and adopting an anarchic attitude towards society in general (Rahn 1-2) . Burroughs first novel Junkie was written as a self-confessional novel in 1953. The novel described Burroughs struggles with opiate addiction and drug experimentation, as urged to do so by Burroughs friend and companion Beat author Allen Ginsberg, himself no stranger to producing controversial work, as his poem Howl was also placed on trial for obscenities due to its frequent references to sexual promiscuity and resisting conformity (San Francisco's Digital Archive 1), (Rahn 2) (Biography.com). The material struggled to find a publisher despite Ginsberg’s urgings; until a fellow publisher in touch with Ginsberg by the name of Carl Solomon, persuaded his uncle to publish Burroughs memoirs to the public by including an anti-narcotics statement in a double bound book by a former drug agent for “balance” (Grauerholz 43).
During the years between 1950 and 1957, in which Burroughs would write his first three novels Junkie, Queer, and eventually Naked Lunch while refining the cut up technique, his life was already surrounded in controversy. This was due to Burroughs having shot his wife Joan Vollmer, during a six week trip to Africa with Adelbert Lewis Marker, a discharged American Navy soldier who had befriended Burroughs during his years living in Mexico City (Grauerholz et al 41). Burroughs marriage was failing to Vollmer, because she felt abandoned by Burroughs homosexual pursuits with Marker, and her drinking accelerated out of control. Vollmer’s physical condition deteriorated, and around the incident of the shooting had been known to openly mock Burroughs in public (Grauerholz 41). The incident was deemed an accident by the courts, but psychologically scared Burroughs and marked his work for the rest of his life. Burroughs would go on to note Vollmer’s death as a large inspiration for his decision to write, believing the incident had awoken an evil spirit inside of his soul, where his only defense was to, in his own words: “I had no choice except to write my way out” (Burroughs 22).Burroughs had started a relationship with Lewis Marker in 1951 that lasted until 1952 (Grauerholz et al 42), when Marker agreed to follow Burroughs into the jungles of Ecuador to find Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant, which users believed temporarily gave them telepathic abilities that Burroughs hoped would remove his craving for opiates (Grauerholz et al 41-42). Burroughs and Lewis had failed to find Ayahuasca, returning separately to Mexico City (Grauerholz et al 41).
On September 6th 1951 Burroughs made arrangements to sell a firearm in the apartment of John Healy, an American who co-owned the weapon, where Marker and another ex-Navy serviceman Eddie Woods were drinking heavily (Grauerholz et al 41). Burroughs in an attempt to impress his former partner, told them his family would live off the land, which his wife who struggled with her own substance abuse issues chastised him for. Burroughs then challenged his wife to let Burroughs demonstrate his skill with a firearm by balancing her gin glass on her head, and she complied (Grauerholz 42). Burroughs missed, and his wife slumped over, dying soon after at a nearby Red Cross station. Burroughs went to jail, and was initially convicted of manslaughter. The incident made front page news for three days in Mexico City, but Burroughs lawyer Bernabé Jurado got Burroughs out on bail when the courts deemed the incident an accidental shooting
The cut up technique, which Burroughs would refine in novels such as Queer and Naked Lunch involved cutting out sections of text to repackage the text in new forms of sentences (Robinson 21-22). Its inventor was a close personal friend of Burroughs named Brion Gysin. Gysin’s intention with the cut up, was to apply montage techniques he had already practiced with visual art as applied to text (Robinson 21).Burroughs became fascinated with the technique, and crediting Gysin with the inspiration he began to apply the cut up technique to his own work.
The cut up technique was highly influential to post-modernist writers such as Burroughs who desired to write outside of traditional narratives. The theme of fragmentation is a central philosophy of both postmodernism and the cut up technique Gysin desired throughout his career to create artwork that stimulated multiple senses at once, in a way that could alter thought processes and perception in some fashion (Robinson 22). Burroughs’s defined Gysin’s work as “space art”, believing that the effect Gysin’s work had on audiences was due to Gysin presenting pieces in Burroughs’s words in which: “time is seen spatially, that is, as a series of images or fragments of images past, present, and future” (Robinson 22). Gysin was also well known as a surrealist and a member of the Beat generation, although he preferred to work as an independent or avant-garde artist who created work on his own terms (Robinson 22). Gysin’s primary goal with his work was to produce in his words “a derangement of the senses”, which he achieved through presenting sound bites, mixed with still and moving imagery (Robinson 23).
Burroughs’s would continue to refine the cut up technique in Naked Lunch and future sixties novels, such as Burroughs Nova trilogy, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express (Walsh 13). Naked Lunch utilized the cut up technique as a form of social commentary. The book recycles characters, routines and plot descriptions to give the entire piece a fragmented feel. Because Burroughs himself was in and out of heroin addiction at the time he penned Naked Lunch, the book reads as a sequence of blocks of prose, rather than a chronological arrangement of text (Indiana 2). Burroughs moved away from the traditional cut up technique by the seventies when he judged his work as interesting from an experimental perspective but not solid as readable material. The open references to drug use in Naked Lunch and explicitly sexual cutaways in the novel set off a moral outrage that would lead to the last formal trial in America to attempt to censor a work of literature. The subsequent failure to ban Burroughs’s work, changed the modern publishing landscape permanently as previously taboo subject material could now be used by authors in mainstream content (Murphy 67) (Whiting 145-146).
By January 12th, 1965, the Boston Superior Court had charged William S Burroughs with obscenity unfit for print in Naked Lunch. The charges brought against the author were based on Burroughs language containing frequent use of slang, and foul language throughout.
In Burroughs defense were authors Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, John Ciardi, Paul Hollander, Gabriele B. Jackson, Norman Holland, Stanley E. Eldred, John B. Sturrock, and Thomas H. Jackson (Ferreira 1-2). The court questioned Mailer immediately on whether his own writing was experienced in dealing with moral concerns. Mailer answered that authors try to deal with such concerns as best as they could, but whether they dealt with them correctly was another matter (Ferreira 2). Mailer believed Naked Lunch to have artistic value, because he believed Burroughs’s had captured in Mailer’s words, “gutter language” like no other author. Norman Mailer asserted his claim on the basis that he believed that sentimentality in religious matters, approaches as a rule as a kind of bitter piety which revolts any thought of religious supposition in such individuals who are touchy, discriminating, or easily get their feelings hurt (Ferreira 3-4). Mailer went even further, stating that Burroughs’s work avoids all such sentimental language and is instead a raw account using stringent vocabulary to describe horrific events, with a gallows humor of a defeated man who still clings to bitterness even as it destroys him (Ferreira 3-4). Mailer described the book as an accurate psychological and existential view of hell, but used this to cite the novels artistic integrity and value to society as an example of a man who had climbed out of the abyss (Ferreira 3-5).
Allen Ginsberg was questioned next by the Boston Superior Court on whether he believed Burroughs work to be obscene in nature, because the author cited the necessity of such extremes on page twelve of the Introduction (Ferreira 4-5). Ginsberg disagreed, believing that the subject matter is very real, basic and frightening at the human level, therefore such an account had to be portrayed as such. Ginsberg said the roughness of the novel works to its advantage, and that its sexual references through its prose, suggest a larger commentary on Divisionism that had grown in 20th century contemporary American society, and was intended to reveal the horrid nature of capital punishment (Ferreira 8) (Judson 2).
Ginsberg believed Burroughs work to have influenced his own to a great extent, saying that he believed the author bore his soul to the world in Naked Lunch holding no truths back. He believed Burroughs’s use of experimental language and courage in displaying heavily controversial subject matter with economic, unflinching and precise language was the source of Naked Lunch and its literary value to society (Ferreira 8-10). The Boston Supreme Court in the end, exonerated Burroughs and Naked Lunch of the obscenity label. Two weeks later, another obscenity trial was held in Los Angeles, but the work was deemed not obscene by Municipal Judge Allen G. Campbell (Ferreira 10).
The results of these two trials liberated the publishing world, because literary censorship was deemed unconstitutional in that artists and authors were now seen in America as accurate portrayers of the real world, not through reporting outward events but by processing the perceptions, emotions and appreciation of reality that humans feel in a multicultural world (Ferreira 10). Despite the Boston Superior Court finding Naked Lunch obscene, they believed they could not ignore the praise the work was receiving by so many authors in the literary community, therefore to say the work had no redeeming social value was false (Judson 3). This ruling in effect, gave the literary industry a newfound freedom to write more uncensored and controversial material. By 1966, Americans could now read whatever subject material they desired, thanks in large part to the life and struggles of one Postmodernist author.
The sixties counterculture and its literary following may not have gained the same foothold in mainstream American culture without the influence of Burroughs or the Beat movement they drew inspiration from. Both movements flourished in San Francisco, where more subjective and controversial literary work could now be published because the value of artistic expression removed from a mainstream perspective was in higher demand by a new generation of younger readers in the sixties (Jameson 17). In conclusion, Burroughs influence as a Post-modernist author, his refinement of Gysin’s cut up technique and the cultural ripple effect of the Naked Lunch obscenity trial cannot be denied. The right of freedom of speech I hold to be a sacred liberty for all writers. Without the ability to challenge convention and tradition in literature, progress becomes stale overtime. Burroughs work by the context of his life as a junkie was bound to be deemed obscene or even unnatural by mainstream society, but truth is often stranger than fiction. What is deemed worthless by one reader is proclaimed as art by another, for the subjectivity of art and literature is the same unpredictable and chaotic nature of life and the human condition. Life cannot be censored; therefore work that informs the world of such realities cannot be without societal merit because literature gives different reactions people, depending on their past experience.
Burroughs portrayal of a section of society the mainstream wished to ignore and repress the knowledge of, forced underground issues into mainstream relevancy, advancing freedom of speech, political activism and eliminated literary censorship, giving us as writers much of the freedoms we hold dear today. A society that tells individuals what they can or cannot express through writing is not free, nor interested in literary cultural progression, but in maintaining the status quo. No advances in literature by authors have ever been achieved strictly through following tradition, but through breaking tradition to construct a new language more representative of the realities of modern society.
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