SOURCE: “Trafficking in the Void: Burroughs, Kerouac, and the Consumption of Otherness,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, spring, 1997, pp. 53-92.

[In the following essay, Eburne analyzes the wider social implications of the Beat generation by examining subversiveness in The Subterraneans and William S. Burroughs's The Naked Lunch.]

Abjection—at the crossroads of phobia, obsession, and perversion. … In abjection, revolt is completely within being. Within the being of language.

—Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Divulging his latest platform as crime-and-commie-busting director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover claimed at the 1960 Republican National Convention that “beatniks” were, alongside communists and liberal “eggheads,” one of the three greatest menaces to U.S. National Security (Morgan 289). Using “beat-nik” rather than “beat” to describe the group of writers, poets, and bohemians known as the Beat Generation, Hoover's semantic slide—or push—seemed to implicate beat “niks” as petty communists who threatened to enervate America's welfare. Both a terrible menace and a crude joke, the Beat Generation elicited similar disdain across a vast cultural front—from Hoover, mainstream culture, and “eggheads” alike.

Notorious for its resistance to conventional sexual and moral practices, the Beats' literary solicitation of breaches and breakdowns within the social fabric garnered obscenity charges for much of their written work. What these charges signified, according to the Supreme Court, was that their work itself was “patently offensive because it affront[ed] contemporary community standards” and that “the material [was] utterly without redeeming social value” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch viii). At issue was the imputation that the Beats radically and deliberately affronted firmly installed notions of decency and thus threatened to undermine the basic integrity of a nation that was already nervous about its internal security.

The broad aim of the following paper will be to examine this subversive element in William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans (1958, written in 1952), both of which faced obscenity charges or censorship in some form.¹ These two works confront, and seek to disrupt, what their authors considered to be a cultural environment in which individual identity had become inexorably bound up within stifling artistic, societal, and existential norms. Keeping in mind Judith Butler's contention that “identity” itself operates not as a predeterminate ontological category but as a regulatory, and often oppressive, practice of cultural formation, I will argue that the two novels seek to “trouble” such regulatory practices within the context of the postwar U.S.² By casting the “self”—as the privileged signifier of narrative and cultural identity—into serious contention, they each attempt to drain identity of its fixity as a locus of coercive standards. In doing so, they also attempt to contest the very discursive practices of Cold War-era identity configuration themselves.

What troubles such efforts most immediately, however, is that the very idiom of dissent from these norms was prefabricated by a “liberal” intellegentsia with its own set of governing standards and expectations. Indeed, novels such as Naked Lunch and The Subterraneans were considered “obscene” by many of the “eggheads”—liberal intellectuals, literary critics, and scholars—in whose eyes their dissent was not formulated cogently enough to qualify their writing as truly “radical.” Both grotesque and stylistically discombobulated, this writing seemed so immersed in remonstrating the personal that it fell victim to a damning romance of the apolitical. Writers like Burroughs and Kerouac were little more than incoherent, and therefore obscene in the sense that they merely channeled the confusion of the society that distressed them (Jumonville 191).³ Their confusion deviated distinctly from the more lucidly formulated “pragmatism” of critics like Lionel Trilling, who argued that by introducing “alterity” and “conflict” as incorporable challenges to the mind of the individual, a true radical could be jostled free from the forces of conformity and repression which characterized Cold War normalcy. The Beats, however, scoured city streets in order to find alterity and conflict in the form of a racial, cultural, and ethnic minority, an anthropomorphized strategy of dissent by means of which incorporation and control became a calamitous impossibility.

However, any such means of evacuating a bankrupt subject position by identifying with the “otherness” of the American cultural margins ends up, as Burroughs and Kerouac realize with increasing distress, implicating themselves in the same process of normativity and containment that they attempt to leave behind. Since the identification with “otherness” operates as a power-play relying upon specifically conceived notions of what this “otherness” consists of, it proves to be an elaborate fantasy by which Burroughs and Kerouac themselves end up performing the coercive work of identity configuration. My specific aim in this paper, then, will be to examine how this latter instance of containment comes about and becomes yet another subject position to be evacuated. In other words, I aim to show how “making trouble” for identity becomes a fundamental and deeply complex problem in the two novels, a problem which necessitates not merely a rethinking of “identity” as a discursive concept but, in fact, a radical complication of notions of the process of identity refiguration that would rely upon the commodification of otherness as its fundamental mechanism of change.

1.

“I can feel the heat closing in. …”

—William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

This first line of Naked Lunch leaps out, in medias res, from a hardboiled melodrama which bears an acute sense of imminent constriction. For Burroughs's narrator/protagonist, this encroachment is not merely the legalistic menace of stalking detectives but, more broadly, the tightening grip of an entire network of heirarchized systems of containment and control. In the opening lines of The Subterraneans, Kerouac's narrator/protagonist exposes a similarly constricting (albeit less evidently “political”) web of limitations: his loss of youth, his obfuscatory need for “literary preambles,” and a perplexing trap of self, this being the story of “an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac” (1). What is most striking about the near-paranoiac sense of confinement and constraint at the opening moments of these novels is precisely their immediacy: the narrational “I” appears as already caught up within such strictures. The novels thus bear the traces of a complex drama of escape—not merely from “the heat” but from a notion of selfhood caught in a network of temporal, spatial, and narrative constraints: aging and the passage of time, the “literary preambles” of style, and the subject positions determined by U.S. culture and national policy in the post-World War II years.

Much of this evacuative work is attempted stylistically. The majority of critical work written about Naked Lunch addresses, in some fashion, Burroughs's full frontal assault on textual “control systems” (see Lydenberg and Ayers). As a brutal subversion of accepted notions of narrative unity, character cohesiveness, and linguistic propriety, Burroughs's writing slashes vertiginously through space and time. Thomas Hill Schaub, among others, reads this radical disruptiveness as a search “for some means of achieving ‘nakedness’ or immediacy without succumbing to the atrophy or imposition of form …” (77). Burroughs's solution is to distill a “language of consciousness” by zooming in on a first-person narrator's subjective relation to experience. Schaub maintains that the authority of Burroughs's work relies in part upon this subjective language's claim to immediacy, its reduction of rhetorical mediation.⁴ He cites a passage from Naked Lunch's “Atrophied Preface” which appears in the novel's final pages: “… I am a recording instrument. … I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ “‘continuity’. … Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function. … I am not an entertainer …” (200). While Schaub focuses on Burroughs's claim to impose as little structure and mediation as possible, any claim to “immediacy” here seems to be cut short—not just by the ambiguity of the passage, but by the very positioning of this claim: as an atrophied preface, its presence is suspect. Is this passage itself an attempt to impose structure and continuity by means of explanation? How structured, or how atrophied, is its own value? This suspicion is fed by the narrator's later claim that he has written many prefaces which atrophy and amputate spontaneously (203). As we'll see, the very idea of “stripping down” narrative to a naked prose-consciousness is itself a treacherous process; Schaub's argument that this has to do with immediacy assumes the presence of a subjective logos, some “naked” core of consciousness that can be served up to readers as the “naked lunch” itself.

Such a stripping down, though, is done only at the expense of the speaking subject: as noted above, any claim to immediacy threatens the narrator with the eradication of his authorial function. It is not merely the preface(s) that are at risk of atrophy and amputation, but the narrator—or even the writer—himself. Indeed, in Naked Lunch, the narrational “I”s clash and commingle to such a degree that the didactic voice of “William Burroughs” the author (or author-function), “William Lee” the protagonist/narrator, and the “Master Addict” of the appendix are conflated yet maintain specific relationships to the body of the text. These disjunctions open up a discursive space inside which the constructedness of the so-called narrative “self” can be scrutinized, thrown into disarray, subverted.

This “discursive space” to which I am referring is not a clean, open, locatable area made possible by a simple division of the narration into different voices, each relaying separate and differentiated subjective consciousnesses. Rather, the novel is a total disarray; it is more a recombination, a juxtapositioning of narrative selves than a stripping down to individual consciousness. Indeed, “William Lee” is not only Burroughs's protagonist but his own alter-ego—the name with which he closes many of his letters as well as, in fact, the pseudonym under which he published his first book, Junky, in 1953. Nor is William Lee, within the novel itself, an unflappable narrational presence: the text fades in and out of first-person and third-person narration, just as Lee himself drifts in and out of the book's mosaic fragments. Lee's function as a storyteller is also complicated, threatened by the suspicion that he is expendable. Many passages throughout the novel narrate him rather than vice versa; others are narrated in spite of his absence. Thus, rather than adopting a first-person narrative style as a direct mainline into the “language of consciousness” of the individual subject, Burroughs wreaks havoc upon the possibility of such a subject ever being an embraceable totality.

Kerouac effects a similar breach in the narrative subject's claim to immediacy and presence. As a fictionalized yet thinly veiled autobiographical novel, The Subterraneans unlocks a fictive space in which the primary identifications of the narrative “self” as author (or author-function), narrator, and protagonist are at once advertised and suspended, deferred and yet more or less immediately available.⁵ Commenting on the stylistic background of the novel, Kerouac writes that “the form is strictly confessional in accordance with the confessional form of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground” (“Letter” 80). But any claim to directness or emotional immediacy that his modeling of Leo Percepied after Dostoyevsky's nameless anti-hero bears is, as in the case of Burroughs's atrophy-prone storytellers, undermined by Kerouac's choice of literary model. Dostoyevsky's speaker is no simple “confessor”; ruthlessly self-effacing, frequently infuriating, never to be fully trusted, his presence in Kerouac's text speaks of more than merely assertion and disclosure.

Percepied's frequent self-depreciating slashes and rebuttals—as well as the shadowy intertextual presence of Dostoyevsky's madman himself—call a significant amount of attention to how much his narration is tied up, reflexive, mediated; this mediation becomes as conspicuous, and as necessary, to Kerouac's prose as the emotional unguardedness of its attempt at spontaneity. And yet, the novel's “spontaneous prose method” has often been read as an attempt to eliminate temporal and emotional distance between the writing of the novel and the experiences it narrates: The Subterraneans was written in three grueling, Benzedrine-compelled days almost immediately after the events described in the novel took place.⁶ The novel ends, too, narrating its own (fictionalized) conception: Percepied goes home to write “this book.” However, the deeply engaged, intricately entangled narrative that results only serves, conversely, to dramatize the distance between speaking and spoken subjects, a distance which Kerouac realized to be a function of “the limitations of time flying by as our mind flies by with it” (qtd. in Charters 185). Indeed, Kerouac's writing faces the broader problem of control involved in eliminating distance—embedding his narration within the mechanics of representation, the sticky limitations of expression, and the fracturing of the possibility of an omnipotent literary auteur able to convey successfully “the language of consciousness.” Instead of using fast work and fast language as a “way in” to the immediate experience it promises, Kerouac's prose cleaves apart the very fabric of the narrative “self” assumed by such a language's metaphysics of presence to be a coherent possibility.

I have deliberately simplified Schaub's notion of the “language of consciousness's” claim to immediacy here for the sake of highlighting an effect of Burroughs's and Kerouac's writing whereby “the way OUT is the way IN” (Naked Lunch 208). Their attempt to escape temporal and rhetorical limitations by zeroing in on an “immediate” language ironically, and traumatically, necessitates an evacuation of the “self” as a fixed narrational category. As we've seen, though, this effect is itself as much the result of limitation and entanglement as it is of efficient self-evacuation.

Schaub, however, argues otherwise: the conscious move of many post-World War II writers to “subjectivize” the novel was itself a “voice of resistance to general pressures, both popular and critical, for political conformity and controlled, crafted form. The discourse of resistance and reform was no longer dominated by the language of social and economic forces, giving way, instead, to explanatory models based in psychology—to a renewed focus upon the mind” (69). According to Schaub, the first-person affords a means for dramatizing a subjective view of experience, a focus on “the ongoing dialectic of consciousness” (81). Such points-of-view not only relieved the stifling artistic bane of conformity, but also had a more legitimate access to “reality” and “authenticity” within their highly individualized contexts. “The subject” thus became a highly motivated—and, it seems, highly fashionable—literary trope for a postwar novel in search of the voice of subversion “within the postwar discourse of ‘mass society,’ ‘conformity,’ and ‘totalitarianism,’ which governed thinking about society for writer and critic alike in the forties and fifties …” (69).

However, in Naked Lunch and The Subterraneans, this move fails to claim coherence or even authority; rather, the use of a first-person narrator in these two novels serves more to alienate the self from the self than to distance the “rebel” self from postwar society. As Schaub points out, both novels often dramatize the vicissitudes of the subjective voice. However, if the novels in some way approach the naked immediacy of consciousness, they expose a realm so turbulent as to rip apart the subjective voice altogether.

Nonetheless, both novels remain deeply committed to confronting the social and political modalities of the selfhood they subvert: namely, the images of U.S. postwar “normalcy” which privileged a virulently anticommunist white, middle-class, heterosexual male. Burroughs and Kerouac resisted, and attempted to evacuate, this position of artistic and experiential subjectivity which, in their eyes, had become a real drag. This evacuation implicated not merely the existential drudgery that conformity entailed but, in fact, the whole notion of “fitting in” altogether. In the discursive climate of the early postwar years, “fitting in” already carried an onerous amount of ideological baggage. As we will see below, conformity implied complicity with a U.S. social and political orthodoxy intent on stamping out difference and “deviance” by means of the Cold War politics of personal containment.

2.

Little Surrealist sketch. A woman in white uniform with a chrome-plated machine appears in J. E. Hoover's office: “I have come to give Mr. Hoover a sample high colonic wash courtesy of the Fox Massage Studios Inc.” She plants a time bomb up his ass. High up.

—William Burroughs, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, 24 Dec. 1952

Naked Lunch and The Subterraneans nosed their way into the literary market at a period—the Cold War 1950s—in which a remarkably hegemonic cultural and political body had fashioned a narrative of opposing internal and external forces, positioning “us” versus “them.” The national fixation upon internal security, operating not only within U.S. Government policy but, to an unprecedented degree, within the private sector, implemented an alarmingly pervasive political consensus which would define the affairs of the state in “human” terms (Baughman 6). Under this consensus, a mass of “anxieties” drawn from foreign and domestic policy alike—the fear of communism, the Bomb, homosexuality, sexual chaos and moral decrepitude, aliens (foreigners and extraterrestrials)—became condensed with a nightmarish lucidity upon a unifying rhetorical figure: a festering and highly contagious disease which threatened the national “body” with pollution. Andrew Ross aligns the widespread use of such rhetoric

to the chorus of similar hysterical discourses that contributed to the Cold War culture of germophobia, and the many fantasmatic health concerns directly linked to the Cold War—Is Fluoridation a Communist Plot? Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks? Cold War culture is rich with the demonology of the “alien,” especially in the genre of science fiction film, where a pan-social fear of the Other—communism, feminism and other egalitarianisms foreign to the American social body—is reproduced through images drawn from the popular fringe of biological or genetic engineering gone wrong.

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Implicit in Ross's explication of the language of germophobia is the work being done in the Cold War imagination to transform “egalitarianisms” into something “alien”; indeed, what is most interesting in such a transformation is that the most damning aspect of the “Other”—of “It,” “The Thing,” and other manifestations of alien presence—was not its sameness but its seemingly ineluctable difference. As Ross suggests, behind the figuration of this difference was the danger of usurpation, the systematic transformation of “us” into “them” which would, in fact, result in a perverse sort of egalitarianism whereby American self-identity would dissolve. More specifically, it was the fear of infection, of the infiltration of a foreign pollutant into the American social body, which figured as this demonization's fundamental rhetorical anxiety. Such invasive rhetoric was most visible in J. Edgar Hoover's massively publicized agenda as FBI director, which co-opted his antebellum campaign to stamp out “degenerates” for the sake of maintaining U.S. internal security against the “trojan horse of Communism” in the postwar years (Hoover, “How Communists Operate” 30; see also Hoover, “The Communist Threat in the U.S.”). Though more moderate, George Kennan's 1947 article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” makes a similar move, allegorizing the threatening spread of communism as a contaminating “fluid stream” (575). In face of this spreading ooze of Soviet expansionism, Kennan calls for a form of “containment” which would counterbalance its external threat by means of a reinforcement of the “integral integrity” of the country. It is by strong counterexample, by an American self-enclosure—that is, by “good health”—that the Communist danger could be kept at bay (575).⁷

The “integral integrity” or American social body at stake in this drama of corrupting influence formed the contrary figure upon which was condensed an equally astounding number of concentric structures of self-enclosure, from the most personal to the most public. Conflating the languages of physical, psychic, and public health with the language of national security, an American “self” was formulated as a dominant subject position designed to withstand the threat of outside pollution. This “self” was compound, a set of varying spatial boundaries and bulwarks, each protecting another's integrity. The versions of subjectivity at stake were liable to change and slide into multiple configurations; depending on the situation, depending on the concurring cultural and political contexts called upon for legitimacy, the “self” at stake could be private, public, national, or all at once.

The master metaphor of this struggle to preserve the “integrity” of the American subject position from the contamination by the Other was the drive to preserve the body from the corrupting influences of “unnatural” bodily acts: the advances of “loose” women, sexual perverts and deviates, and, most emphatically, homosexuals. To engage in such “unnatural” sexual practice was symptomatic of a transgression into pathological deviance. As Elaine Tyler May writes, unfettered female promiscuity figured as the “explosive issue” which plagued male sexual health with venereal diseases (165)—May's term “explosive issue” calling to mind both a Kennan-esque metaphor of communist infection as an “issue” or seminal fluid, as well as the notion of the “bombshell,” the pin-up siren registering atomic destruction in female form.⁸ An even more explosive issue in the immediate postwar years was the juridical linkage of sexual deviance to political deviance, a move which, Robert Corber attests, “not only politicized the sexual practices of an indeterminate group of gay men and women by linking them directly to the growing crisis over national security, but also coerced heterosexuals into policing their own behavior” (69). This implication of homosexuals as a communist threat to American integrity came scandalously at the heels of a full-blown investigation, launched by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Senate Appropriations Committee, which sought to confirm allegations that “sexual deviates” were employed by the federal government.⁹ This infiltration, or, in the Senate's terms, this “pollution” of the federal government (Hoover, too, would revise his own “trojan horse” metaphor to the suggestively phallic “trojan snake” [Hoover, “America” 199]) provoked a metaphor of anal penetration which, in turn, could be co-opted for the purposes of further hystericizing the Communist “pollution” of the United States as a national body (qtd. in D'Emilio 59).

Furthermore both the natal—and thus “natural”—origin of the individual body as well as its most intimate social milieu, the family, was posted as a version of the self similarly at risk on a national level. The family as a state apparatus—an image reiterated not just by the state itself but also by the popular media at least since World War II (see Westbrook)—existed not just as an endangered social unit but as a protective structure that was itself essential to national security.¹⁰ Such structural units were considered to be endangered as much from within as from without. Bad parenting, which threatened a family with the lurking danger of an “Oedipal complex”—or what Philip Wylie called “momism”¹¹—risked producing psychologically damaged “mother-lovers” destined to become criminals, drug addicts, or (worst of all) sissies. The latter were especially demonized since, as likely homosexuals, they thus became susceptible to suspicions of communistic subversion as well. Indeed, in his 1944 article entitled “Mothers … Our Only Hope,” J. Edgar Hoover posits “crime” and “perversion” as the consequences of “parental incompetence and neglect” (qtd. in May 74). It thus became the father's role—and the State's—to contain the mother's influence over her children, a further bulwark of internal security (Corber 143-45). This regulatory family structure was crucial to the rearing of “healthy” and “decent” children.

What is interesting here is that, in adopting developmental psychology as a means of describing domestic relations, there arose a widespread clinical prognostication of “deviance”—crime, drugs, perversion, homosexuality—as a psychological sickness. A “maladjusted” child could become Hoover's “degenerate” “afflicted with diseases which only recently have been discussed in public” (Hoover, “Combatting Lawlessness” 270). Psychoanalysts such as Edmund Bergler, too, lumped homosexuals in “among swindlers, pseudologues, forgers, lawbreakers of all sorts, drug purveyors, gamblers, pimps, spies, brothel owners, etc.,” as deviants with fundamental psychological problems (403).¹² Once again, we find what Andrew Ross called the “pan-social fear of the Other” condensed onto the figure of disease, this time with the aid and clinical authority of doctors, psychoanalysts, and other “experts.”¹³

In terms of this vision of the individual American subject as a body perpetually at risk of pollution, the enemies who posed this threat lurked not only outside of the various physical and psychic bulwarks (and fallout shelters) of the U.S. identity-structures, but often from within these boundaries. Yet what this rhetoric of disease (whether mental or physical) and vampiric infiltration provided within the ideology of containment was a way of locating “internal” difference as the result of outside influence. The demonology of the “alien” or “the Thing” as a generalized Other served as a strategy for abjecting integral difference within a U.S. national identity, projecting such difference upon all kinds of shadowy figures of negative influence. Such figures, whether the nuclear warhead or the covert homosexual, were recast in the dominant public eye not merely as “Others” but, it seems, as perversely phallic Others with the ability and will to penetrate into the national fabric and disrupt its integrity. More precisely, such figures became the symbolic repositories of what Julia Kristeva describes as the abject: the fundamental lack (in this case, of health, of normality, of “American-ness”) which is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4).¹⁴ In the shifting images of personal, familial, and national security, the discourse about such “dejects” of U.S. national culture provided a brilliant strategy for maintaining the rhetoric of containment. The importance of such demonized figures was due not to their fundamental positioning “outside” U.S. culture, but because of the ability of their essential “otherness” to be compounded into an “abject” which could be located as the source of internal differences within the U.S. self.

3.

“I always told you Trilling was a shit.”

—William Burroughs, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, 1956.

Foreshadowing Burroughs's and Kerouac's reactions to this national narrative were the counter-narratives of the “liberal” literary critics of the Cold War period who, though virulently anticommunist as well as homophobic, wished to distance themselves from the conservative preoccupation with rooting out subversives. However, for such intellectuals the conception of a society—and especially of an individual subject position—organized in response to traumatic difference nevertheless remained a key concept in their critical imagination.¹⁵ Rather than adhering so rigorously to the importance of the subject's “integral integrity,” though, the Cold War liberals redefined the subject to present a more “realistic” picture of U.S. culture. No longer at constant risk of penetration by an “abject,” the subject became, in a sense, always already polluted by the homeopathic strains of difference; “reality” was the perpetual struggle of the self with this trauma, and thus the “abject” became a fundamental, internal property of this reality.

Though indeed anticommunist, the Cold War intellectuals were emphatically critical of the “conservative” official and popular-media ideas of national security on the home front. The rigorously normative strategies of containment and defense represented, in their eyes, less security than “a shadow-world of political sectarianism and sheer obsession” as well as “an hysteria through which … foreign policy has been frozen into an inflexible rigidity” (Rahv 308). In other words, the conservative compulsion to attack communism on the home front had become a form of mass-manipulation, an ideological “false consciousness” which lured the U.S. population into a state of conformity which could drain individuals of the will to resistance necessary to free democracy. The national fixation with its own health was symptomatic of a broader fascination with the homogenizing appeal of “mass culture.”¹⁶ Indeed, the watershed Partisan Review symposium “Our Country and Our Culture” (1952) mobilized the majority of Cold War Intellectuals under Dwight Macdonald's argument that mass culture was the very “spreading ooze” of conformity and commodification which threatened to engulf the possibility of individualism altogether (qtd. in Ross 45). And yet, while Macdonald's “spreading ooze” certainly reiterates the germophobic language of anticommunist hysteria, rhetorically it represented a fear of mind control rather than of a physical penetration and a fear of sameness rather than the fear of “deviance” voiced by pundits such as Hoover and McCarthy.

What was at stake in the liberals' struggle against the “spreading ooze” of conformity was still the individual self which the fixation upon National Security wished to protect. Yet it was a “self” figured differently: on one hand, the language of hegemonic representations of individual subjectivity tended to conflate “self,” “Nation,” and “family” as allegories of each other, condensing geopolitical and psychoanalytical language under the master-signifier of the male body; the Cold War intellectuals, on the other hand, saw the self as an emphatically psychological entity. Indeed, the Cold War liberals mobilized psychic criteria to dramatize the susceptibility of an unconscious, mass-culture-desublimated populace to the deadly “false consciousness” of ideology. Controlled and manipulated by forces of social repression, an individual consciousness would lose its fundamental autonomy and capacity to think, since it no longer had access to “reality.”

The project foreseen by Cold War critics, such as Lionel Trilling, was to devise a critical methodology which could reinstall an essential complexity within the American intellectual milieu, emphasizing the power of “high” (complex) cultural artifacts to offset the dangerous repressions lurking beneath mass culture's simplicity. As he writes in the 1949 preface to The Liberal Imagination, “[t]he job of criticism would seem to be … to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty” (xv). For Trilling, the Cold War intellectual closest and most influential to the Beats in their early years, “reality,” as the first essential imagination of complexity, gains a transcendental potential for resistance.¹⁷ In rendering the struggle against conformity an essentially subjective project, Trilling locates reality in the individual mind's ability to internalize the conflict, or the dialectic, of culture. As he writes in “Reality in America,” the form of culture's existence is

struggle, or at least debate—it is nothing if not a dialectic. And in any culture there are likely to be certain artists who contain a large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions; they contain within themselves, it may be said, the very essence of the culture, and the sign of this is that they do not submit to serve the ends of any one ideological group or tendency.

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That Trilling lends to “reality” the power to transcend the ideological constraints of a given historical moment suggests a sublime quality: as simultaneously “really real” and beyond normal (mass) experience, Trilling's dialectical struggle possesses the power to remain precarious, to be an “essential core” which forever resists hardening into ideology.

As a kernel of reality which escapes resolution and thus possesses a destructive power over ideological tendencies, Trilling's “reality” appears, as Slavoj Žižek writes, as the Lacanian “rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles, the hard core which remains the same in all possible worlds” (Žižek 169). Fortunately for Trilling, such a notion of “reality” can never actually be identifiable as an actual material thing; rather “[a]ll its effectivity lies in the distortions it produces in the symbolic universe of the subject: the traumatic event is ultimately just a fantasy-construct filling out a certain void in a symbolic structure and, as such, the retroactive effect of that structure” (Žižek 169). The ability of this version of reality to cause trouble—that is, its sublime power to disrupt totalization—is precisely the concept Trilling is looking for. Indeed, the ability of dialectical reality's “sublime” nature to create distortions in the “symbolic universe” allows Trilling a mechanism for disrupting an American cultural “universe” at risk of stasis. As Žižek suggests, the “void” in the symbolic structure created by the Real fulfills the Cold War liberal fantasy of maintaining an essential complexity within U.S. culture.

Ironically, though, what Daniel O'Hara calls Trilling's “romance of reading” requires a forceful limitation of reality's disruptive potential (O'Hara 70). Ultimately, Trilling must reformulate the sublime effect of culture's dialectic as something assimilable; since he assumes reality to be something containable within literature, its effect must thus be capturable, expressible through writing. Connecting the “trauma” (or “trouble”) of remaining faithful to dialectic with Freud's concept of neurosis as the “conflict” facing “genius,” Trilling argues that neurosis—while indeed essential—is not, in fact, the source of genius at all. Rather, it becomes the material upon which a genius “exercises his powers” (173). What allows the genius to transcend ordinary madness is his ability, through struggle, to gain command over the trauma. In other words, the essential, disruptive nature of traumatic neurosis—its sublime effect—invokes, but must be mastered by, the “power” of genius. This mastery—Trilling even calls it “dominion,” citing Charles Lamb (174)—is a process of colonization which becomes a much different kind of “struggle” essential to his thinking.

I have opened the previous two sections with William Burroughs's opinions of both Trilling and Hoover to show, through his anal-izations of these two figures, how their respective models of identity are interconnected. If, in Burroughs's terms, Hoover's ass—an available synecdoche for the FBI as both the “head” and the “seat” of government (see Edelman 129-37)¹⁸—is clinically sodomized by the very fear it systematically locks out and pathologizes (the bomb, subversion, anal penetration), then Trilling's colonization of abjection gets, shall we say, colon-ized. As “a shit,” Trilling becomes the internalized abject which Hoover's time-bomb artificially supplants: Trilling's narratively contained dialectic represents an already digested, internalized “hard kernel,” an abject substance that is the evidence and essence of psychic/cultural production.¹⁹ In other words, the liberal response to anticommunist, homophobic, nuclear-age hysteria does not reverse that systematic rejection of invading substances (difference, the abject, disease, trauma), but, rather, positions “difference” as an essential but consumed, digested, and containable abject. But by calling Lionel Trilling “shit,” Burroughs allows me to voice the suspicion (both Burroughs's and my own) that any attempt to contain the “sublime” potency of the abject is destined to fail: it's got to come out sometime.

4.

Of course, it is much easier to look at Burroughs's attack on Trilling as “a shit” simply as a rejection of his criticism. But if my hyperbolic treatment of this attack suggests anything else at all, it is that the Beats did not reject Trilling's insistence upon the sublime effect of “reality” as the shock to the system U.S. culture desperately needed in order to transcend conformity, but found him rather hopelessly constipated. Moving “reality” from the University to the city, and from the mind to the body, as the sites of culture's essential conflict, the Beats developed a much more radical idea of what this reality—and the plural possibility it promised—meant.

Thrown into the context of postwar New York City, what this “reality” came to represent was not simply a deviance from standard cultural formations but a “discovery” of an American racial, ethnic, and cultural underclass who lived in a manner very much at odds with mainstream culture. That is, the Beats encountered a city loaded with all kinds of demographic “others”—down-and-outs, drug addicts, homosexuals, criminals, political subversives, and other such undesirables against whom the National Security State was protecting itself, as well as the jazz legends, hipsters, and African Americans whom the U.S. refused to recognize and had relegated to the ghetto. Such social “dejects” became the Beats' “secret heroes” whose access to social abjection was construed as a privilege which allowed them, it seemed, to contain the dialectic of culture within their minds as something immediate, powerful, and real.²⁰

For Burroughs and Kerouac, the refusal, or inability, of such figures to be assimilated into mainstream culture volunteered them as models of resistance able to disrupt the stylistic and existential rules of white, middle-class America. For the most part, the Beats' desire for the privileged experience such “secret heroes” supposedly possessed played itself out vicariously as a drive to plug into the lifestyles, imitate the speech and music, and inhabit the marginalized cultural realm of such figures.

This desire to identify sinks deeper, though: the desire for otherness figures in their texts not as identification with “secret heroes,” but as identification as “other”—a move which even relies on hegemonic stereotypes of who “dejects” were for the very sake of rejecting societal typecasting. Burroughs thematizes his own homosexuality and drug use; Kerouac writes in On the Road of “wishing I were a Negro” (180). The question of identification becomes, in their work, that of how to gain access to this paradoxically privileged experience of cultural subversion, how to modulate one's own subject position by means of it. One argument shows this romance of abjection playing itself out sexually, as if “the dialectic” experience were physically accessible. As Catharine Stimpson suggests, this took place as a sexual trafficking of “ethnic” women—or in Burroughs's case, of young boys from Tangiers, Mexico, and Peru. As she writes, “If a chick were black, Chicana, Native American, or Mexican, her grooving and swinging were all the more mythic because she was displaying a ‘primitive’ force that all those in flight from bourgeois society so wishfully craved” (379). Stimpson's take is particularly useful here in showing sexual co-optation as a mechanism for meeting a deeper desire to rebel against mainstream conventions. Such sexual appropriation points to a conflation of the “abjecting” effect of racial and ethnic otherness with the human object of desire herself, which charts this appropriation as a fantasy-identification by means of which the object—the “chick” or young boy—becomes the repository of what the subject lacks. This implication within Stimpson's criticism suggests an already deep difficulty, yet it does not fully realize the extraordinary degree of appropriation and romantization involved in this scenario.

Norman Mailer, however, does fully realize—and fully perpetuates—the deep implications of the consumption of otherness. In his 1959 essay “The White Negro,” Mailer's endorsement of the kind of racial cross-dressing suggested by the title posits “race”—figured as blackness—as a metaphor for the abject. In effect, Mailer's essay responds directly to Lionel Trilling's invocation of the sublime effect of “reality” as the way to subvert conformity; the difference is that Mailer—one of the youngest and most “hip” of the Cold War intellectuals—uses the Beats as his medium and blackness as his master trope. Indeed, in “The White Negro,” Catharine Stimpson's explication of the Beats' gender politics modulates to a full-blown narrative of miscegenation:

In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-à-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry.

(586)

The “the Negro” occupies the feminine position in this marriage typifies Mailer's double configuration of the black male at once as active—the locus of cultural and sexual potency—and as passive the courted object of desire. Both phallus and lack, the “Negro” appears homosexually available as capital; and yet, what is charging this configuration is not so much homoerotic desire but rather “what the Negro had to offer”: the “cultural dowry” offered in this “wedding.” This dowry—literally the object of exchange in this eroticized instance of homosexual/cross-racial desire appears as some essence intrinsic to race for which blackness is the synecdoche and whose power is the sublime. Moreover, the “sublime” registers as an inflated, accelerated version of Trilling's sublime effect: it has the power not merely to critique society but to evoke total removal of all social restraint. This makes Mailer's White Negro literally a psychopath whose sublime power—repositioned as “hip” and avant-garde—fulfills the role of the specter plaguing the National Security State: psychopath, sexual deviant, juvenile delinquent, drug user (594).

Indeed, for Mailer, the “White Negro” represents not merely a racial cross-identification but a whole reconfiguration of a “new white man” as a sort of bomb-era Nietzschean Dionysus, whereby, in Toni Morrison's words, onto the master trope of blackness is transferred “the power of illicit sexuality, chaos, madness, impropriety, anarchy, strangeness, and helpless, hapless desire” (80-81). The consumption of such romanticized attributes of racial otherness, which Mailer advertises as “Hip” or “Beat,” promises not only self-marginalization from the constraints of “square” mainstream culture but, as Eric Lott notes in his tremendous essay “White Like Me,” caters also to a “dream of freedom and play” beyond the rational constraints of Cold War society (478).²¹

As we can see, such an example of binarized “cross-identification,” though bound to Trilling's concept of reality, is not “real” at all but relies instead upon deeply mythologized constructions of “otherness” formed directly from the mainstream rhetoric of subjectivity. At the same time, these constructions are made to retain the privileged status of “reality” as well as its apparently sublime power to subvert the “false consciousness” of normalcy. Such disquieting strategies of “self-othering” run into very serious trouble in the mediated narratives of Naked Lunch and The Subterraneans. In these two texts “the void” of Otherness ceases to function merely as a commodity that exists (in the words of bell hooks) “solely to suggest new aesthetic and political directions white folks might move in” (21) and becomes a category as inadequate—and indeed as suspect—as that of the white, middle-class, heterosexual male “self” which Burroughs and Kerouac attempt to deconstruct.

5.

“… break the shell of body.”

—William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

At the obscenity trial for Naked Lunch, Norman Mailer testified (in defense of the novel) that its value springs from its ability to envision a bomb-era “descent into Hell” (qtd. in Lyndenberg 3). Calling Burroughs “essentially a religious writer,” Mailer attempted to get the book out of trouble by underwriting its “obscenity” as allegory, as something assimilable into the national literary imagination (qtd. in Lyndenberg 3). But in terms of its relationship to nationalized as well as “liberal” enforcements of subjectivity, Burroughs's book was not so easily digested. As Lydenberg argues, Naked Lunch adamantly resists such allegorization, stripping down writing to a “naked lunch, a revelation of what is really going on and not an allegorical evasion” (9). Such an argument is especially useful when we understand “naked” to refer to a radical divestment of the moral and rhetorical “dressing” of the National Security State—as well as from Mailer's own dressing up of the novel. However, Lydenberg's further argument, that such nakedness creates “a materiality of absence, a literal mysticism which opens up the possibility of a ‘non-body experience’” (3), disregards the extent to which Naked Lunch not only relies on the body to perform its subversive work, but in fact relies on the very “allegories” of self and subversion—the very tropological system—it wishes to destroy.²²

Continuing the character of William Lee from his two earlier and more personal novels, Junky (1953) and Queer (1985, written in 1953), Burroughs retains these two titular identifications as the two societal “Sicknesses,” as he (not uncritically) calls them, which not only act as primary contexts of identification for Lee himself but also enshroud the very writing process of Naked Lunch. As we have seen, the pathologization of drug use and homosexuality took place in the Cold War imagination as patently psychological ailments; ailments which, moreover, represented criminal breaches in the public health. Indeed, Allen Ginsberg himself was institutionalized for psychoanalytical treatment of his homosexuality in 1949. Burroughs met the notion of such a “cure” with ample sarcasm and hostility: “By the way what ever became of Als normality program? … I thought the nut croakers had fucked him up permanent and reconstructed him in their own dreary image” (Letters 115; see also 266, 369-70). His words on psychological treatments for junk addiction, though less charming, are just as harsh: “Morphine addiction is a metabolic illness brought about by the use of morphine. In my opinion psychological treatment is not only useless it is contraindicated” (Naked Lunch 232).²³ As this suggests, Burroughs vehemently resisted treating such “illnesses” as psychological, insisting instead that they be viewed as primarily physical, metabolic phenomena.

To do otherwise is to impose psychological tyranny; thus, in Naked Lunch, there are figures such as Dr. Benway, who, though he strikes away concentration camps and mass arrests in the name of democracy, is “a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control” (21). Benway's philosophy: “He [the subject] must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him” (21). As such, the “technological psychiatry” of Naked Lunch erupts in a form of violence that, ultimately, ends up being physical anyway.

Just as his anger at “Als normality program” soon shifts in his letters to a rhetorical arrogation of homosexuality-as-disease for his own satirical purposes, in Naked Lunch, Burroughs transforms what was considered an emphatically mental disease into a physical “sickness.” He retains the National Security trope of homosexuality figured as a physical penetration that would threaten the integrity of the subject with annihilation, breaking up the “shell of body.” This effect whereby “the way OUT is the way IN” (208) requires, as Lee Edelman writes, that homosexuality be figured as sodomy, thus producing this disruptive effect by “Confounding the distinction between coming in and going out, between consumption and expulsion, between the public and the private, and thereby transgressing the definitional boundaries that underwrite social identities …” (Edelman 132). Rather than a “non-body” experience, sodomy figures as a physical disruption that takes over the body and destabilizes it. Thus suspending the biological and social logic of “integral” identity, Burrough's sodomy flies in the face of hegemony, “washing away the human lines” of body, compulsory heterosexuality, family values, and other nationalized metaphors of identity (9-10). Naked Lunch's polymorphous perversity becomes, in fact, the platform of a political party—the Liquefactionists—which embodies decadence in all its senses: “Liquefaction involves protein cleavage and reduction to liquid which is absorbed into someone else's protoplasmic being” (75). Satirizing both Kennan's language and Hoover's, Burroughs's reduction of the human body to liquid and protoplasm offers a hedonistic subversion of the possibility of an “integral” social being.

Similarly, Burroughs retains the pathology of heroin intoxication as a sickness with a similarly profound potential for physical and ontological disruption. Lee describes one such “attack,” which results in a condition whereby: “… no organ is constant as regards wither function or position … sex organs sprout anywhere … rectums open, defecate and close … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments …”(10). An extreme example because it describes the first high after a long withdrawal, this passage nevertheless dramatizes junk's radical subversion of the metaphor of bodily integrity, compounding severe disruption with a kind of drastic, eroticized jouissance as the effects of the same act. Ironically, the “afflicted” member's attack transforms the symptomology of heroin withdrawal—which Burroughs describes in his early work as a transfigurative metabolic craving—into the pathology of intoxication.²⁴ Feeding and hunger, cellular production and consumption, are conflated in Naked Lunch in favor of a different “prescription”: a version of intoxication that rewrites the bodily script as a polymorphous entity.

The “act” which induces such alterations occurs, moreover, as a consumption—that is, as the result of an injection of “the junk virus” which produces an alternate version of experience in which “identity” is not evacuated but rather repossessed. The process of “in/toxication”—the internalization of an abject substance; a pollution conflating desire, pleasure, and violence—occurs not only in the intravenous injection of the needle into the skin but by multiple penetrating instruments (needles, droppers, jagged glass, morphine and heroin in any form, including anal suppositories) into multiple orifices. The performance of a self-othering process as both penetration and consumption reveals its subversive nature—it involves, as does sodomy, breaking into and disrupting the “integral integrity” of the body.

At the same time, though, this penetration into the body is not the sole cause of intoxication's altering effects, but rather the material exchange which catalyses this disruption. As Avital Ronell writes, “drugs” are only a material logos used only to catalyze, and signify, a chemical reaction that occurs inside the body. The injection only serves to activate a pathology that is already rooted in the human cellular structure: “Drugs are excentric. They are animated by an outside already inside. Endorphins relate internal secretion to the external chemical” (Ronell 29). As a pathologized form of bodily communication (between “inside” and “outside”), junk—which Burroughs tropes both as a virus and as a form of textuality²⁵—is, like sodomy, at once a penetration and an internal awakening. This intoxication presents a form of exchange, an intercourse, which changes the body both from within and from without.

But it is not this easy. Such a “way out” of the Cold War self confronts serious limitations in Burroughs's text. As a kind of consumption, sex results not only in the “absorption of liquid” but in the irreversible commodification of the (homo- or hetero-) sexual partner. Indeed, “going all the way” in Naked Lunch means literally killing, using up the sexual “object” in an ultimate ejaculatory moment (see 67-76). Rather than reverting to the homophobic Cold War ideology, imagining death as the end result of desire reveals the complicity of such a commodification of human life with systems of power and control. Desire, always ready to run out of control, threatens to become an automatic mechanism of domination.

The stakes of “junk” consumption, too, run the risk of conflating total excess with the perpetuation of control. As an addictive quantity, heroin is at once eminently consumable and all-consuming—Burroughs portrays it as a commodity of a heirarchized and violently repressive exchange structure. If it does somehow succeed in “evacuating” the self, its seduction of “being other” yields a state of addiction whereby, as Ronell writes, Being itself (Dasein) “has become blind, and puts all possibility into the service of the addiction” (38). Under the specter of addiction, junk's sublime promise of alterity, and thus transcendence, threatens always to end up as automatism, as subservience to an ethic of domination. What is at stake in the commodification of otherness, the trafficking of “ways out,” is a terrifying conflation of power with powerlessness: addiction produces not merely “sick people who cannot act other than they do” (xi), but, more precisely, people who are utterly controlled. Naked Lunch dramatizes how the sublime and the desublimating constantly threaten to merge into one another.²⁶

In order to realize fully the complexity and danger of this slippage, Burroughs extends the conflict outwards, configuring the transitivity of sublimity and addiction as a place he calls “the City of Interzone.” As he writes in letters to Kerouac and Ginsberg in 1955: “The meaning of Interzone, its space-time location is at a point where 3-dimensional fact merges into dreams, and dreams erupt into the real world. In Interzone dreams can kill … and solid objects and persons can be as unreal as dreams” (Letters 300). An ontologically transitive state as well as a city, Interzone creates a site at which Burroughs's “self-othering” problematic becomes racialized. He explains: as a space of racial and national transitivity “Interzone is very much modeled on Tangier in the old international days: it was an Inter-Zone, it was no country” (qtd. in Miles 98). Resisting total identification either as vision of a real city or as an allegory of a mental state, Interzone is neither an inner space nor an outer space. Rather, it is a between space, a crossroads at which textuality, alterity, and identity collide:

The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of body) across the pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market. …

. … Cooking smells of all countries hang over the City, a haze of opium, hashish, the resinous red smoke of Yage, smell of the jungle and salt water and the rotting river and dried excrement and sweat and genitals. …

The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets. Albinos blink in the sun. Boys sit in trees, languidly masturbate. People eaten by unknown diseases watch the passerby with evil, knowing eyes.

(96-98)²⁷

Much like the junk-virus and Burroughs's repathologization of homoerotic desire, this “Composite City” promises a market of human potential where identities—figured as the “blood and substance” of “race”—can be trafficked like opiates. The sublime quality of Trilling's “plural possibility” is offered in a vast carnal buffet of alterity, wherein “abject” identities are consumed, sacrificed, and used up. At the same time, while it would be inaccurate to conflate Interzone with junk and sodomy as direct allegories of each other, they each furiously insist that the consumption of otherness is not a simple capitalist exchange; rather it is a fantasy whose transitivity engenders confusion, violent conflict, and illness.

Burroughs suspends moral judgment of the commodification of otherness as a “starting point for white self-criticism” by representing racial cross-identification as an addiction: he terms it in the language of need, a consuming need that requires identification—“wouldn't you?” he asks in the introduction. “Yes, you would,” is the imposed, unspoken, response, his one absolute. For Burroughs, the state of being addicted to cross-identification is also a sickness, a virus, indicating its violence not only to the subjective carrier, but to those he comes in contact with, a violence at every intersection.

The injection/intersection point does not generate space of freedom and play immune to the violence of repressive cultural formations or of rebellions against them. The potentially deadly dream-state is, at best, a space of potential, fantasized play, the space of distant masturbation, of spectacle rather than true intercourse. This interzone, neither fully formed nor immaterial, is a crossroads whereby the attractions, the addictions, of either side of the binary are traffickable as commodities—indeed, the perfect commodities, since they require no advertising in order to be ferreted out by desperate consumers—but only at the price of deferral, violence, and the endless craving of metabolic addition.

6.

“I would have preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he's left us.”

—Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans

In Kerouac's more intimate and sentimental novel, The Subterraneans, Interzone's potentially deadly dream-state of endless deferral becomes instead an emotional crossroads which compounds loss, paranoia, obsession, and the lingering emotions of a relationship gone hopelessly awry. This traumatic juncture haunts the entire novel, since The Subterraneans consistently wrestles with failure and breakup; indeed, as a narrative of the broken love affair between Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox, a part-Cherokee, part-African American woman ten years his junior, the novel is less about a romance than about its failure. And as a broken-up book itself, it becomes increasingly aware of the breakdown of “romance” as a cultural and literary apparatus, the failure of the romance of abjection.

The Subterraneans, then, seems less directly concerned with consuming “otherness” for the sake of self-evacuation than with managing the interpersonal and narrative consequences of such a Romance of dissent. As if realizing the inadequacies of a Maileresque project—a project which includes several of Kerouac's earlier novels²⁸—The Subterraneans struggles to configure the relationship between Percepied and Fox in a way that doesn't merely involve “sucking her dry” of her othering power. Likewise, the “self” Kerouac wishes to evacuate here isn't merely the Maileresque “white man disillusioned” of On the Road, fleeing from the constraints of Cold War expectations. Rather, the trap of “self” in The Subterraneans expands beyond these constraints to include the sexually appropriative “White Negro” rebellion against them as well. Such reflexivity confounds the efficiency of the latter's romance of the racial sublime and, simultaneously, lodges their relationship at a perpetual scene of anxiety.

Ineffably confused as to what to do with his feelings of desire and sexuality towards Mardou other than being “crudely malely sexual” (3), Percepied interrogates his own motives for attraction: is his love for Mardou merely a romance of the other's abject power? This conster-nation and ambiguity toward the sources of his own desire plays itself out repeatedly in scenes of paradox and conflict wherein Percepied seems unable to come to grips with the possibility of racial and gender difference, whether to embrace it or to eradicate it. First making, then abnegating, horrified confessions of “male self-contained doubts” about Mardou and “doubts about her race,” Percepied asks himself if the reason for his attraction to her is, conversely, because of her race, because of her exotic otherness (43-46).

This anxiety in the face of the inevitable specter of difference continues to manifest itself throughout the novel; even in one of the most secure moments of their relationship, it arises as a paranoid attempt to deny their racial difference altogether. Kerouac tells of “my fear of communicating WHITE images to her in our telepathies for fear she'll be (in her fun) reminded of our racial difference, at that time making me feel guilty” (70). This guilt over racial difference, it seems, represents less Percepied's reluctance to dissolve a fantasy identification with blackness than it does his compulsion to perform for Mardou's love. Unlike Burroughs, who deploys “race” to connote difference, Kerouac struggles with an inability to conceptualize race as anything but difference, in a situation—the intimacies of telepathy and love—where the two people are presumably bound by similarity.

However, by casting Mardou as at risk of being “reminded” of difference, when it is Percepied himself who seems unable to forget it, the passage suggests that something further is in play. What seems to be Percepied's own fear of judgment retroactively casts Mardou as his judge, thus re-igniting the problem of agency and appropriation that the novel otherwise tries to leave behind: the question is not only about who is judging whom, but about who is narrating whom. This crisis in textual power arises as an immediate concern over how to “tell” Mardou: “But now let me tell Mardou herself (difficult to make a real confession and show what happened when you're such an egomaniac all you can do is take off on big paragraphs about minor details about yourself and the big soul details about others go sitting and waiting)” (3-4). Implicit in this struggle to sort out who should or should not be narrated lurks a deceptively forceful clash of complex subjectivities. Though he berates his own self-absorption, the very process of writing out an evacuation of this selfishness still amounts, narratively, to self-absorption. Moreover, lingering within this admonishment of his own selfishness is an indicative, albeit tender-hearted, trace of the romance of abjection as the “way out.” As he comes to grips with the differences between representation and forms of narrative domination, Kerouac seems to trip over his own internalized romances in an effort to avoid them—as with Naked Lunch, the attempt to evacuate a bankrupt subject-position becomes a further bind.

This kind of conflict occurs with greater severity once Percepied's initial attempts to deny difference fail, and he resorts to imposing textual control over the language which structures his relationship with Mardou. The explosion of contradictory exchanges resulting from this struggle with control and failure occurs not only within Kerouac's narrative discourse, but also at the intersections of this voice and Mardou's “own” words. The clash is twofold: it involves both Percepied's persistent drive to fashion his relationship into a mythological binary, as well as the secondary clash of subjectivities in which Mardou rejects this essentializing and deeply normative structuration. The normative value of such myths reverberates throughout the whole series of imposed configurations in which Percepied and Mardou are cast, respectively, as “jazz poet” and “child of bop,” phallus and womb, tower and well, and Adam and Eve—constructions whose motives swing back and forth between tenderness and panic, between desire and fear. Again, Percepied is critically aware of the artificial nature of such “big abstract constructions” (16) and attributes his tendency as a writer to “erect” these constructions as “the stupid neurotic nervousness of the phallic type, forever conscious of his phallus, his tower, of women as wells” (9). Yet these images, compounded by the gender-, race- and ethnicity-related power differential implicit in their polarity, recur throughout the novel as the conceptual apparatus for dealing with the difference that Kerouac cannot seem to avoid.

The result is a changing series of constructions all reiterating the same theme. Relegated to “womb” and “well,” Mardou is allegorized as an orifice whose primitive and generative nature is corroborated by her mythologization as Even, and made doubly disturbing by its racial and ethnic overtones of darkness and indigenousness. At the same time, this synecdochal orifice is invested with the abject power of the sublime: Mardou becomes the object upon whom Percepied projects not only the vitality and darkness of “bop” but a deep fear of being consumed and used up. At once beautiful and fearful. Mardou-as-womb suggests the power both to rebirth and to destroy. Like Burroughs's orifice, where identity becomes amorphous and volatile, Kerouac's neurotic figuration of Mardou as womb and as well hovers between the primordinacy of birth and the destructiveness of a vagina dentata.²⁹ This representation figures most paranoically in a passage where, borrowing roles from Tennessee Williams's “Desire and the Black Masseur,” Mardou becomes “the big buck nigger Turkish bath attendant, and I the little fag who's broken to bits in the love affair and carried to the bay in a burlap bag, there to be distributed piece by piece and broken bone by bone to the fish” (Subterraneans 49).³⁰ Percepied's fear of being used up by Mardou—of being chewed up and devoured by the vagina dentata—represents the flip side of the romance of blackness which seems most actively at work in Kerouac's acceptance of its promise of rebirth and self-evacuation in the first place. Furthermore, the terminologies at work in this example from Williams are charged with particular Cold War resonances: as we saw earlier, the “fag” dominated by a “phallic” maternal, or pre-oedipal, presence (Mardou-as-womb) was a favored iteration both of psychoanalysis in general, and of Hoover-era “experts” in particular; furthermore, “nigger” carries in this context an indelible brand of racism which simultaneously bows its head to the power-play at work in Williams's story. That Kerouac would position Percepied and Mardou in this manner not only suggests a deep anxiety over his own sexuality and desire, but intensifies the volatile ambiguity with which their relationship is represented.

Whether neurotic, well-intended, or self-pitying, such binary constructions are each painfully invalidated, either by the self-conscious paranoia and hyperbolic hatefulness of Percepied's language or by Mardou's “own” resistance to them. In another—though presumably tender—instance, Percepied tells Mardou: “‘because as part Negro somehow you are the first, the essential woman, and therefore the most, most originally most fully affectionate and maternal’—there now is the chagrin too, some lost American addition and mood with it—‘Eden's in Africa,’ I'd added one time—” (94). In response to which Mardou later adds, in a parenthetical aside: “‘Look man,’ she'd said only a week before when I'd suddenly started talking about Adam and Eve and referred to her as Eve, the woman who by her beauty is able to make the man do anything, ‘don't call me Eve’” (109). Mardou's blunt censure of this romanticized notion is, to some extent, echoed by the narration's own self-destructive reflexivity. Indeed, Percepied seems aware that his association is a loaded one; for in calling Mardou “Eve” he knows he is engendering it with “some lost American addition and mood,” by means of which Mardou is transmutted from lover to allegory. Mardou's aspersion is, furthermore, surrounded by the narrator's own reasons for the objectionability of the myth. He revises the “story” of Adam and Eve to fit this awareness: in the second passage what is of concern is not Eve's “original” nature but, again, her “sublime” power to manipulate and use up Adam. The breakdown of this myth is compound: effected most explicitly by Mardou, its artifices are also disclosed by Percepied's self-reflexive narration.

The disintegration of such essentialist myths in which women are symbolized as wells—or, as Mardou later argues, as prizes—do not only occur within this double context of dialogic confrontation, but also in the inability of the relationship to remain a private binary. Again dramatizing the possibility that their relationship may not just be about love but about Percepied's desire for self-evacuation, the novel's binarisms tend to evolve into threesomes. Indeed, throughout the text their relationship is framed as a shifting love-triangle, whereby Percepied's relationship with Mardou exists only in oppositional exchange with a third party.

Such imaginary triadic constructions—and Kerouac, each time, struggles in his indirect discourse with the suspicion that they are constructions—engender a homosocial rivalry between Percepied and a shifting series of male characters, even by the rumor and possibility of Percepied's own homosexuality.³¹ Most significantly, though, it is a young poet, Yuri Gligoric, who becomes Percepied's final obsession and thus the third-party rival whom he continually fantasizes to be sleeping with Mardou. The novel ends with a contemplation of this triadic obsession:

… I curled her on my lap, and she talked about the war between men—“They have a war, to them a woman is a prize. …”

“Yeah,” I say, sad, “but I should have paid more attention to the old junkey nevertheless, who said there's a lover on every corner—they're all the same, boy, don't get hung-up on one.”

“It isn't true, it isn't true, that's just what Yuri wants is for you to go down to Dante's now and the two of you'll laugh and talk me over and agree that women are good lays and there are a lot of them.—I think you're like me—you want one love-like, men have the essence in the woman, there's an essence” (“Yes,” I thought, “there's an essence and that is your womb”) “and the man has it in his hand, but rushes off to build big constructions.” (I'd just read her the first few pages of Finnegan's Wake and explained them and where Finnegan is always putting up “buildung supra buildung supra buildung” on the banks of the Liffey—dung!)

. … And I go home having lost her love.

And write this book.

(110-11)

Mardou's rejection of being trafficked as bounty in the war between men finally shuts down the long series of romances which have appropriated her as symbolic property. Appealing to essentialism as a version of reality preferable to Percepied's “big constructions,” Mardou attempts to focus Percepied's attention back on their relationship and to dislodge it from the coercive identifications his narrative attempts to impose.

Though it concludes with Mardou's resistance to commodification as a “prize,” this very resistance raises yet a further question: does “this book” itself become another construction, another monument of “the war between [white] men,” another figuration of Mardou as sublime object? Mardou's suspicion seems to introduce the question of how much her influence—her own voice and the way she resists symbolization throughout the text—is itself a textual consumption of her “sublime” ability to disrupt it. Does Kerouac use her merely in order to break up the unity of his prose and “make trouble” for his sense of identity as a nonconformist writer of “bop prosody”? Even if, as I suggested earlier, Mardou figures as an “ideal ego” and not as a mere object of consumption, she still serves narratively as the “object” to his “subject,” and her “voice” could seem to serve as the petit objet a of identification which Kerouac ultimately covets, the “sublime object” which breaks up totality and escapes symbolization. In a refrain of his intimations of rebirth through Mardou's sublime womb, Kerouac appears to ponder this latter possibility when he cites Joyce's revision of the Bildungsroman of personal development as “buildung supra buildung” (111). In this final image, juxtaposing textuality, construction, and dung, he questions the tractability of any such project of containment and control: is he just another Trilling, using Mardou to access a textual sublime is he, too, in Burroughs's words, merely “a shit”?

Kerouac's project diverges significantly from Trilling's, though. The Subterraneans is charged with a traumatic awareness of its own failure, acting out and disinheriting a vast array of identity strategies, myths, and structures whose coerciveness and propensity for damage become glaringly apparent. And unlike Trilling's idea of the “conflicted” artist who contains the dialectical essence of culture in his mind, Kerouac/Percepied cannot master that conflict, either in his head or in his prose: Percepied's relationship with Mardou disintegrates alongside the mythologies used to frame it.

Though it dramatizes Kerouac's discovery of the emotional violence and breakup forever imminent in imposed configurations of identity, the “failed romance” of The Subterraneans engenders a self-destructive poetics that does not, however, court the righteous possibility of “self-deconstruction” by castrating its own phallic tower of typological constructions. Gerald Nicosia writes that Kerouac somehow turns loss into gain through art, that “this book” feeds upon the sadness within it and assimilates the tragic outcome as an element of the master-narrative the book itself represents (446-50). However, the narrative control over events Nicosia implies is only ever lost, never gained: Kerouac is neither completely able to escape his own entangled illusions nor to identify with Mardou's “language of bop.” I am tempted, for sentimental reasons, to say that there lies in the structural dynamics of The Subterraneans an internalization of Mardou's subjective influence—that ultimately, the novel works as a true romance in a more spiritual sense by showing Kerouac to “really understand” Mardou's take on their relationship. Any such self-righteousness, though, is inevitably disqualified; the damage is done. The Subterraneans, like Naked Lunch, represents a crisis, a trafficking of the interzone between the traumatic inadequacy of identity impositions and the harsh narrative and emotional violence that comes in realizing this inadequacy.

The possibility that this latter notion of a “textual sublime”—which Kerouac broaches in order to transcend the constraints he seems unable to escape otherwise—would also play itself out as a commodification of otherness seems to have been lurking all along. Like Burroughs, who constructs a sublime, orifice-like textual space as an alternative to the limitations of Cold War existence, Kerouac attempts to co-opt Mardou's voice in order to sever—or at least to mediate—his ambivalent position “within” and “without” the dominant U.S. culture. Such an ambivalence, suggested in On the Road by Kerouac's use of the “Interstate” to allow him to leave and return home, cannot fully evolve into a space free of cultural determination without the disruption the sublime entails. As we've seen, though, in both Kerouac's and Burroughs's cases this very promise lands them in a further bind, a place no longer “on the road” or a utopian “outside,” but at a crossroads.

And despite Trilling's claims to the contrary, such a crossroads does not proffer transcendence. Burroughs and Kerouac do indeed “make trouble” for dominant Cold War constructions of “self”—that is, their attempts to forge a notion of identity, or at least subjectivity, as a volatile site of contested meanings were indeed disruptive—but the effectiveness of “trouble” must also take into account whom one makes trouble for. The “sublime” performs useful work in Burroughs's and Kerouac's fiction insofar as its power to disrupt is used to keep meanings and identities in a state of flux and contestation—that is, when it works toward the acceptance and generation of difference. However, implicit in locating the sublime as an inherent property of another person's being is a power-play which brings this very work of contestation and flux to a crashing halt. As Timothy Engström writes, “the subversive thrill of undermining identities with the help of the sublime may be itself the repetition—by inversion—of a rather classical philosophical project: to establish identities” (201). The risk of such an inversion, in the case of Naked Lunch and The Subterraneans, is of accidentally performing the containment work of the Cold War.

And yet, I have argued that Burroughs and Kerouac both become painfully aware of this inversion, aware that, as Lee Edelman writes, “producing different notions of subjectivity is not the same thing as occupying a different position as a subject” (111). In order to read their fiction outside of the repressive forces of consumption and containment that lurk within it, we must read the use of the sublime in a way that foregrounds its tendency to be the stumbling point of representation, a tendency which best expresses frustration rather than mastery or control. The rhetorical deployment of sublimity we've witnessed in Naked Lunch and The Subterraneans is most useful in its capacity to mediate relationships which, as Engstroöm argues, “reside for some time in an awkward orbit around the normalcy of any given narrative …” (196). As something always unassimilable into the narrative of mainstream culture, the sublime can be liberating if activated as a way of mediating the unknown and generating a familiarity with difference. Burroughs's and Kerouac's “interzones,” however, gain their volatility and propensity for violence at the moment when they try to “score”—and become addicted to—the myth of someone else's intransigence, and thus refuse to accept its conceptual value as something that cannot be fully abstracted as a commodified racial, ethnic, or gendered attribute. Such a transaction results in an inability to vacate the confines of the subject position with which they are most critically at odds, an inability which leaves indelible traces of an inherited rhetorical agenda of coercion and containment. Ill at ease with either situation, and thus neither ever truly “in” nor ever truly “out,” Kerouac and Burroughs find themselves instead—to use the Cold War idiom—painfully “out in the cold.”

Notes

1. Burroughs's Naked Lunch faced a long series of obscenity trials and potential censorship. For the minutes of the final trial, see “Attourney General vs. A Book Named ‘Naked Lunch’” in Naked Lunch. Similarly, Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans was rejected by American publishers for six years and faced obscenity charges in Italy. See Creeley 80-83.

2. In loosely applying Butler's concept of “trouble” to signify not merely subversion of gender identity, but a subversion of “identity” as a much wider cultural practice of signification, I wish especially to focus attention on her observation that in “trouble” the rebellion and the reprimand are caught up in the same terms (vii). Though I use it to intend the subversion of a hegemonically supported subject position and not a dominated one, this observation is especially true in the case of the Beats.

3. For another treatment of the Beats' critical reception by Cold War-era intellectuals such as Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, and Leslie Fielder, see Corber.

4. Robin Lydenberg forwards a similar reading when she writes, “… Burroughs is determined to create a language in Naked Lunch which will approach the literal, the concrete, the ‘real,’ which will dethrone allegory, metaphor, and symbol” (11). Though Lydenberg admits that Burroughs was aware that “there is no such thing as purely literal, scientific, or factual language,” like Schaub, she insists that Burroughs was attempting, in effect, to eliminate the “middleman” of rhetoric from his prose.

5. The shallowly concealed autobiographical sources of Kerouac's novels were so directly translated into pseudonyms that, although the character names differ from one book to another, the characters referred to are the same. The standard biographical sketch in the Penguin editions of Kerouac's work states that he considered his books to each form part of “one enormous comedy” which he called the Duluoz Legend. “In my old age,” he wrote in the frontispiece to On the Road, “I intended to collect all my work and re-insert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books, and die happy.”

6. See Nicosia 445 and Charters 185. For a treatment of Kerouac's “spontaneous prose method,” see Dardess, who also reprints Kerouac's own “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1957) and “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” (1959) at the end of his article.

7. The term “integral integrity” is borrowed from Kennan's discussion of the “X article” in his memoirs, cited in Ross 46. For a brief but illuminating treatment of Kennan's take on Communism and methods for its containment, see Nadel.

8. May writes that the term “bombshell” was given new significance in World War II, when fighter pilots would name bombers and adorn them with provocative images; moreover, the Bikini Island tests further literalized this image when a bomb, outfitted with a picture of Rita Hayworth clad in what would soon be known as the bikini bathing suit, was dropped on the atoll.

9. What sealed the conflation of sexual deviance and Communism was not merely a workaday conservative homophobia but, as Corber argues, the alarming “discovery” that sexual deviates could pass for straight employees (62).

10. Clifford Clark argues that the ideology of the suburban ranch home of the 1940s and 50s literally buttressed the Cold War crusades to halt the spread of communism as well as to stamp out germs with antibiotics; each, he writes, derived from the same impulse: a “one-dimensional frame of mind that stressed the possibility of creating the perfect society” (171).

11. Wylie pathologizes “mom”—a hard-drinking, sexless, overbearing maternal figure—as the castrating mother who overpowers, who “rapes” American men of their “urges and adventures” and instills the conformist morals which Wylie calls a “cancer of the soul” (8); “Mom,” in other words, becomes the historical embodiment of the symptoms of infantile neurosis.

12. For a nuanced overview of developments in the psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality in this period, see Lewes.

13. Even when the Kinsey Report of 1947 argued that the sexual identities of “normal” men were more fluid, and subject to same-sex experimentation, than had previously been known, this only served to heighten anxiety over a breakdown of male moral integrity and infiltration of homosexuals in the ranks (Corber 63-64).

14. Not surprisingly, the terms Kristeva uses to describe the deject are, once again, much like those Kennan ascribes to Soviet power. “For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. … the deject never stops demarcating his [sic] universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject—constantly question his solidity …” (8).

15. For one of the most comprehensive histories and analyses of the Cold War liberal intellectuals, see Jumonville. Ross, Schaub, and Corber also provide good treatments of this group.

16. The observation that Hoover and his FBI “G-Men” were deeply embedded in the mass media as celebrity figures corroborates their interconnectedness. Indeed, the heavily endorsed ideals of bodily health and “family values”—coupled with the aggressive consumerism of the middle class household—were precisely the ideals of normativity and inflexible mediocrity that the majority of Cold War liberals feared might wipe out individuality altogether.

17. Trilling was beginning his tenure as one of the U.S.'s most influential intellectuals while Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were students at Columbia University, where Trilling taught. Ginsberg was one of Trilling's prize students in the period when Trilling was publishing the essays which make up The Liberal Imagination; it is in the same period that Ginsberg was sharing an apartment near Columbia with Kerouac and Burroughs. See Schumacher 24-26.

18. In his chapter on sodomy and the U.S. government, Edelman begins by collapsing Washington, D.C., as “head” and as “seat” in order to dramatize the interrelations of “the body's politics” and “the body politic” that take place in the discourse of sodomy.

19. Kristeva makes explicit the connection between excrement and the (Hoover-esque) fear of pollution by societal abjects. She writes, “Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by outside, life by death” (71).

20. In particular, bebop, and especially Charlie Parker, epitomized such a subcultural position fundamentally at odds with the mainstream. As Erenberg argues, the sound and form of bebop seemed to fuse the subversive with the sublime, creating a sound that was at once beautiful, powerful, and dangerous. Injecting a radical instability within the jazz form, Parker's bebop not only expressed the traumatic but strove quite literally to put the listener on edge—bebop restlessly courted the unexpected (238). Bebop, like Parker's troubled genius itself, thus seemed to possess the sublime power of Kristevan “dejection” both stylistically and substantively; the medium certainly contained within it the abject's disruption of rules and borders.

21. Lott argues that the white “self” relies upon the racial “other” as a medium through whom he organizes his desire, pointing out that the “freedom and play” fantasized in this scenario is not merely pleasure but the more disturbing jouissance of abjection.

22. As I argue above, Burroughs's attempt to “strip down” prose to its naked immediacy cannot function as an actual evacuation of formalistic, allegorical, or symbolic systems, but rather, as he writes himself: “Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow down to a black turd or a pair of aging cajones …” (Naked Lunch 203). The crass physicality, in other words, is ineluctable.

23. For a brief but nuanced discussion of Burroughs's “opinion,” see Ronnel 54.

24. More accurately, Burroughs explains the conflation of “kick” and withdrawal in Junky as a dialectic: “Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junk time and junk metabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness any more than you can escape from junk kick after a shot” (97).

25. For the “junk-virus,” see Naked Lunch 15. For the textuality of junk, see most explicitly Junky xvi (as “information”) and 112 and 122 (as bodily “inscription”); also, the abbreviation for morphine sulphate (M.S.) is the same for manuscript—and morphine prescriptions are troped in Burroughs's jive as “scripts.”

26. Edelman shows how the popular discourse surrounding AIDS connects addiction (to “drugs”) and gay male sexuality “not only as practices through which the body suffers ‘improper’ penetration, but also, and more significantly, as practices that signify the renunciation of self-mastery and control” (257 n.). The question of whether this renunciation of self-mastery is active (and thereby, it would seem, controllable) or passive/coerced is precisely the issue at stake in Burroughs's text.

27. Though it is modeled on Tangiers, this passage is rewritten from a July 1953 letter to Ginsberg from and about Peru—a further testament to the interstitial nature of Interzone. For the original passage, see Letters 182-83.

28. As Catharine Stimpson has pointed out, throughout much of Kerouac's fiction “ethnic chicks” figure more as commodities for sexual and ethnic consumption than as active subjects themselves (48 n.; see also Kerouac, On the Road 84).

29. Kerouac corroborates this latter image in racialized descriptions of Mardou's actual vagina in which he expresses, then repudiates, his initial fear of it tearing off his penis (76).

30. In Williams's story, the quiet, effeminate Anthony Burns satisfies a long-repressed masochistic desire by offering himself to brutal “massages” and, as the ultimate act of willful submission, has the black masseur eat his body and dump his bones in the bay. Kerouac's addition of “big buck nigger” and “fag” to the telling of the story seem to play (in a way which is either contemptuously straightforward or cynical) upon Williams's curious reversal (or perversion) of the racialized master-slave narrative, which, by satisfying Burns's desire to be consumed, evolves “perfection” through “torture.”

31. Though overtly homophobic (see 101), Percepied figures his relationship with Mardou as a homosexual one and, elsewhere in the text, spends a night with some other men looking at gay pornography (38). Moreover, the notion that Percepied is his own rival emphasizes the self-defeating effects of his perpetual misrepresentation of Mardou.

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