Summary:

My essay will focus mainly on the critical analyses of Michael Goodman, Thomas Main, and Frederick Whiting’s take on the censorship of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. By briefly tracing the censorship history of Naked Lunch in Massachusetts and connecting it to the various cultural movements occurring in the U.S. at the time of its publication in 1959, especially “beat generation” and counter-culture, I will examine why government censorship was heavily implicated on Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and what the social implications of the book banning were. My analysis will hone in on Burroughs’ (and the beatniks) goal of trying to break down literary censorship in order to open the audiences’ mind up to alternate modes of reality and the inner workings of the beat generation and counter-culture. First, I will explain America’s reaction to the obscene language and content matter of the novel, later linking it to the government’s reception of the novel. Furthermore, there will be a great deal of focus on the prominence of “obscenity” and rebellion in the media through popular culture movements and how these youth culture movements shaped the censorship case history of Naked Lunch. In doing so, I will analyze the differences between the Grove Press 1962 complete version from the original 1959 Olympia Press censored version. My essay will further Michael Goodman’s brief case study on the various instances of censorship in America from US Customs, University of Chicago, the US Postal Service, the city of Los Angeles, Massachusetts state, as he simply present the cases without further explanation and implication, in order to uncover the underlying causes of censorship. I will spend a few paragraphs explaining why Naked Lunch was censored and banned while other Burroughs’ novels were not and what the differences were; this will bring me to a discussion about the salience of perverse sexuality in Naked Lunch and how it was received by the public, further urging the censorship of the novel. Taking excerpts from a 1980’s interview with William Burroughs, in which he states that “the function of art or, in fact, of any creative though is to make people aware of what they know and don’t know”, I will demonstrate what Burroughs believed the purpose of his own literature was and why he pushed the envelope with Naked Lunch. In doing so, I will go into detail about Burroughs reasons and decision not to allow censorship of Naked Lunch after 1962. Finally, I will analyse the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision to clear Naked Lunch of obscenity charges in 1966 and how popular cultural movements of the 1960s might have aided in allowing the original manuscript of Naked Lunch to circulate in Massachusetts. In doing so, I will demonstrate why Naked Lunch might be considered the “end” to obscenity charges and censorship in literature in America, and later, present the implications of Miller v California, a court case dealt with obscenity in pamphlets, etc., which ruled that obscenity would be allowed only if they held some sort of literary, artistic, political, and scientific value for society.

Overall, my essay will be a concise case history of the censorship of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in lieu of the social implications of beat culture and the new fad of rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s, and how censorship in literature came to end with the beatnik generation, as desired.

Parenthetical Citations:

“[…] on request, copies of Henry Miller’s Tropic books or Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, they must have been advised that these are relatively “safe” at the moment” (Rolph 11).

“This made it clear that obscenity and social value could not coexist, but did it mean that obscenity robbed a work of any social value it might otherwise have, or that the presence of social value cleansed a work of obscenity?” (Lacy 473-474).

“the constitutional guarantees of a freedom to write and publish by no means automatically guarantee the freedom of a teacher or librarian to exercise a free professional choice among available materials” (Lacy 475).

“the experience of Naked Lunch . . . signals an end to the censorship of literature in the United States” (Goodman 243).

“We were trying to get a breakdown of censorship – that is, that the words that people actually use would be used on the printed page, and that was very important at the time. Of course, now it’s taken for granted” (Skerl 17).

“Goodman would have been better off to consider Naked Lunch not as the last work of literature to be censored in America, but as one of the first works that obviously lacked traditional literary merit to be embraced by the intellectual community” (Main 83).

“Burroughs’ novel attracted attention because it presented itself as a work of art yet refused to take a clear moral stand on the barbarous actions it described” (Main 83).

“The question Naked Lunch raised was never whether, as Goodman says, authors have ‘the right to discuss sex openly and explicitly in a work of literature’; it was, rather, whether literature could successfully treat sex (or any other subject) outside any moral framework” (Main 83).

“[t]he basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest. . . (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (Miller v California)

“The court trials and other actions against Naked Lunch provide a moral benchmark.We cannot fail to recognize, in retrospect, the speed with which we assimilate into the mainstream ofAmeri can life that which was once unspeakable” (Goodman 1).

“The controversy surrounding the novel’s publication was the last instance of complete literary censor ship in the US-the end of the unspeakable per se” (Whiting 3).

Works Cited

Bartlett, Lee. The Beats: Essays in Criticism. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1981. Print.

Goodman, Michael B. Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1981. Print.

“An Interview with William Burroughs.” Interview by Jennie Skerl. Modern Language Studies July 1982: 3-17. Print.

Jackson, Holbrook. The Fear of Books. London: Soncino, 1932. Print.

Karolides, Nicholas J., Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova. 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature. New York: Checkmark, 1999. Print.

Lacy, Dan. “Censorship and Obscenity.” ALA Bulletin 59.6 (1965): 471-76. JSTOR. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25697214>.

Main, Thomas J. “On “Naked Lunch” and Just Desserts.” Chicago Review 33.3 (1983): 81-83. JSTOR. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25305164>.

Marler, Regina. Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex. San Francisco: Cleis, 2004. Print.

“Miller v. California (1972).” Boston College. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. <http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/miller.html>.

New York Public Library. Censorship: 500 Years of Conflict. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1984. Print.

Paxton, Mark. Censorship. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008. Print.

Pincus-Witten, Robert. “Naked Lunches.” October 3 (1977): 102-18. JSTOR. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/778440>.

Rolph, C. H. “The Literary Censorship in England.” The Kenyon Review 29.3 (1967): 401-22. JSTOR. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4334740 .>.

Whiting, Frederick. “Monstrosity on Trial: The Case of Naked Lunch.” Twentieth Century Literature 52.2 (2006): 145-74. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/pdfplus/20479763.pdf?acceptTC=true>.