Monstrosity on trial: the case of Naked Lunch

  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 of American life that which
  was once unspeakable.
  --Michael Barry Goodman (1)

  A final glossary, therefore, cannot be made of words whose intentions
  are fugitive.
  --William Lee [William S. Burroughs], final line of Junkie

Taking the word unspeakable to mean that which it is forbidden to say, the epigraph above by Michael Barry Goodman is representative of the reception framework within which Naked Lunch and its trial has been understood. Indeed, the initial public response to the US publication of Naked Lunch in 1962 was an almost unanimous interdiction. Interests and authorities as diverse as US Customs, the trustees of the University of Chicago, (1) the US Postal Service, the City of Los Angeles, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a host of journalists and literary critics were all in agreement that what Burroughs had to say should not be said. Thus the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that finally cleared Naked Lunch of obscenity charges on appeal in 1966 was a license to speak. In the space of three and a half years the unspeakable had become speakable. (2) Moreover, the ruling reflected a change of official opinion about more than whether Naked Lunch was speakable. The controversy surrounding the novel's publication was the last instance of complete literary censorship in the US--the end of the unspeakable per se. (3)

Viewed purely as the lifting of an interdiction within the framework of US censorship history, the primary significance of this demise of the unspeakable was that it curtailed the regulation of literary speech by the state. It was the culmination of a sequence of skirmishes as old as the republic about the place of literary production with respect to First Amendment protections. A somewhat different history emerges, however, when we consider the other meanings of the term unspeakable mobilized by Goodman's remark. The unspeakable refers not only to what should not be said but also to what cannot be said--the unnamable, that which cannot be specified because it cannot be accommodated by existing conceptual categories or has no proper place in the order of things. This semantic shift produces a corresponding shift in the dynamics of utterance: the unspeakable describes aposiopesis, an incapacity in the speaking subject due to affective responses such as horror, disgust, revulsion, or fascination produced by unnameable phenomena. These additional senses of the unspeakable, attaching respectively to the object and its viewing subject, constitute the field of teratology. At issue in the Naked Lunch trial was not the indecently frank depiction of licit sex; the novel's representations of aberrant sexuality and violence were viewed as not merely indecent but inhuman. Likewise, its author was from the outset inculpated in the allegations of monstrosity. If the perverse desires that engendered literary monsters had always raised questions about their authors' humanity, this was especially the case with Burroughs because of the explicit connections between his life and work--his own homosexuality, drug use, and predilection for sex with youths. Indeed, Burroughs himself insisted on these connections. As he tells the reader in the prefatory "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness," the material in Naked Lunch had its provenance in his own real-life addiction: "I apparently took detailed notes on sickness and delirium" (xxxvii). Perhaps more than any other postwar publication, Naked Lunch problematized the relation between literary imagination and actual conduct, spheres that criticism of the period labored to keep separate. (4)

The anxieties about sexual pathology, language, and authorship that came to a head in the Naked Lunch trial, then, were part of postwar conceptual transformations that ran far deeper than issues of free speech. At the very least, we might expect that the novel's vindication would herald a change in the set of phenomena that the period designated as monstrous. This would encompass not only the objects (desires, behaviors, and, above all, their agents) taken as instances of monstrosity, but also the affective structure of ordinary humans in response to these objects. Insofar as the trial involved the last instance of the unspeakable per se, we might further expect to see a revaluation of the concept of the monstrous itself. Such a transformation would portend, among other things, a significant revision in the politics of sexual identity, if not a revision in our understanding of identity more broadly construed.

In what follows, however, I'll argue that although Naked Lunch did amount to a radical attempt to disrupt the signifying practices that produced the period's definitions of licit and illicit forms of sexuality, Burroughs's advocates at the time of the novel's trial misunderstood the conceptual and political implications of this endeavor. Despite their conviction that Burroughs should be permitted to speak the unspeakable, humanist critics at the time of publication displaced his concern with the monstrous by metaphorizing it, and thus fell into the very process of linguistic abstraction that Burroughs was criticizing. In this way, their advocacy and the novel's vindication became features in the reproduction and reinforcement of the monstrous rather than an affirmation of the critique Burroughs intended. The real issue negotiated at the trial was not whether the monstrous should be spoken but rather what circumscriptions were necessary to its maintenance as monstrous--what, in effect, were the rules of its iterability. (5) Thus the trial is instructive for what it reveals about the relation between the period's ideal of artistic freedom and the knowledge of the human that criticism of the period viewed as its aim. Burroughs's novel found legal and cultural vindication not because authorial freedom of expression, regardless of the challenges it posed to the normative order, was sacrosanct, but because its advocates were able to assimilate it to a discourse of psychopathology that was crucial to the maintenance of the normative order.