Powell

Kimberly Powell
LIT 515: 20th Century American Literature
Dr. Amy Green
14 August 2015
Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs:
Beat Impact on the 1960s Counterculture Movement
The period after World War II facilitated an important cultural revolution and sparked
what would become a radical literary and social movement in American history. Subsequently,
post-war American society produced an undercurrent of self-expression that opposed the culture,
idealizing the reality of what occurred during the war and at the beginning of the Cold War.
Many individuals felt society willingly submitted to a socially conformed and restrictive way of
life. The individuals that forfeited conformity by rebelling against the social norms of that
particular period began expressing a new consciousness through their evolving literary mediums.
This shift began with the 1950s Beat movement, whereby the core figures submerged into an
underground sub-culture and the fundamental ideals of Beat came to life through powerful
poetic prose and spontaneously written narratives. These new concepts began transforming
societys approach, reaction, and expression concerning individual rights to alternative lifestyles.
The Beat movement created a wave of new visionaries and a portal of new consciousness
that can be examined in Jack Kerouacs On the Road, Allen Ginsbergs Howl, and William
Burroughs Naked Lunch which solidified a generations philosophical perspective and social
response spanning from the San Francisco poetry movement of the 1950s and evolving
throughout the 1960s counterculture sect.

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The aftermath of World War II left Europe in near complete economic collapse, much of
Japan a nuclear wasteland, and America in a position to rise to power in both the global and
domestic economic market. The post-war economic boom provided Americans the means to
submerge the weight of war into a new wave of materialism and consumerism that attempted to
transcend Americas nuclear transgressions. Allan Johnson describes in his article,
Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the
Writings of the Beat Generation, how:
the economy was dominated by an oligopoly rather than the competitive freemarket system on which classical Capitalist theory was based[A]long with
and perhaps also because ofthis trend, the Cold War worked to fuel
metanarrativescalled containment culture encouraging an atmosphere of
general tension and impelling social and consumerist conformity. (105)
This containment culture established a social construction where upper- and middle-class white
suburbia exploded in a faade of white picket fences and exponentially grew Sunday church
attendance while turning a blind eye to the continued segregation of race and gender. In her
article, Nuclear Families: (Re)Producing 1950s Suburban America in the Marshall Islands,
Lauren Hirshberg discusses how the suburban home came to embody a sense of security as a
domestic refuge amid threats of Cold War nuclear insecurity and fears about racial integration
(40). While most of America yielded quietly to consumerist ideology and isolated domesticity,
others became concerned with the emphasis that was placed upon both societies growing
interdependence of governmental policies and segregation.
America epitomized the advertising machine to fuel an evolution of American Capitalism
which created a unified sanction of freedom and choice for those willing to loyally commit

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to political, religious, and social arenas of brand names, consumer credit, and religious
affiliations. Johnson continues that the Beat movementinvolved a desired escape from
socioeconomic conditions that the Beats felt subordinated the person to a world of consumer
objects, while also suggesting a broader critique of sociocultural developments that were
generating an increasingly totalitarian, commodity-driven world (107). The intensity of this
reaction would come to a head and begin asserting individuality and equality through a triangular
union of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs during the 1940s in New York.
Jack Kerouac is considered to be the face of the Beat movement. He was the son of a
middle-class working family in the small Massachusetts mill town of Lowell where he spent
much of his adolescence adhering to the typical conformities of the period. Blanche Gelfant
discusses Ann Charters biography in Review: Jack Kerouac, which factors led to his arrival in
New York, stating, He was dreamy but conforming, when in high school sports, and won
himself a football scholarship to Columbia University (416). His arrival to the city drew him
into a rebellious and outlandish underground culture which resulted in his meeting a group of
individuals that would have a tremendous influence on his life. After an injury displaced his
football scholarship, Kerouac, known to have an aversion to any authority, found himself
discharged from the Navy as psychologically unfit to serve, (416). He found himself
randomly adrift where he was able to spend more time with a poet, Allen Ginsberg, a novelist,
William Burroughs and several other figures, who would soon become the Beat Generation.
During his time with the Beats in New York City, Kerouac battled to maintain a
balance between the conventional family he remained eager to please and the wild life he was
experiencing in a growing sub-culture. He began writing stories that captured the torment he
faced and what Gelant describes as, constant confusion inherent in his wild cross-country

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circuitsfutile except for their ultimate conversion into fictionhis depression, dependence,
and self-destruction [would] reach pathological intensity (416). Kerouac wrote numerous
exploits that would manifest in his most popular work, On the Road. The story accounts for over
seven years of cross-country travels with a number of Beat characters, and expresses what would
be recognized as an articulation of ideals and concepts the Beats philosophized during those
trips concerning their dissatisfaction with mainstream limitations, practices of conformity, and
the consumerist machine. Kerouac inadvertently became the face of the Beats during an
interview in 1948. Peter Tamony explains in his article, Beat Generation: Beat: Beatniks, that,
[I]n a conversation with John Clellon Holmes in 1948, Jack Kerouac said, You know, this is
really a Beat generation[T]he origins of the word Beat are obscure, but the meaning is only
too clear to most AmericansIt invokes a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately of soul; a
feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness (274). Kerouac, who published
numerous works, would gain full literary notoriety with the 1957 publication of On the Road that
earmarked the reemergence of a freer writing style known as spontaneous composition and
stream-of-consciousness.
Another central figure to the Beat movement was the poet, Allen Ginsberg. He grew up in
Newark, New Jersey, as the son of an English teacher and poet, and a mentally-ill mother who
continually battled epileptic seizures and extreme paranoia. Shortly before meeting Kerouac and
Burroughs in New York, Ginsbergs mother had asked him to take her to a therapist where she
would spend the rest of her life enduring electroshock therapy and a lobotomy before her
untimely death in 1956. His mothers deteriorating mental illness and subsequent treatments
greatly influenced his work and are evident in his 1955 debut poem, Howl. In addition, Ginsberg
found inspiration in Walt Whitmans poetry, even mentioning his desire to work in government

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and practicing labor law as career aspirations when he graduated from high school in 1943. He
found himself at Columbia University on a scholarship where he met and befriended Jack
Kerouac, hustler Herbert Huncke , and William Burroughs, who, like Ginsberg, was homosexual.
Robert Genter demonstrates in his article, Im Not His Father: Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg,
and the Contours of Literary Modernism, how Ginsberg had always maintained some interest
in poetry, particularly because his father, Louis Ginsberg, was an accomplished poet in his own
right[Ginsbergs father]feared [Allens] attempt to philosophize abnormality into
normality and to rationalize some inner tendency into a moral callinghas fallen in with some
undesirable friends (27). Ginsberg found difficulty gaining any accreditation or publication for
his early poetry, ultimately finding himself suspended from Columbia after, trac[ing] the
words Butler has no balls (a reference to the university president) and Fuck the Jews onto his
dormitory window (Genter 27). After a brief stay in an institution, Ginsberg would later head
for San Francisco to see Neal Cassidy, a lover of his that also influenced much of his work
through the tumultuousness of their sexual encounters. It was this trip that brought Beat from
underground into the spotlight.
William Burroughs was born in 1914 and the senior member of the central Beats. He
came from a prominent St. Louis family, and at the time he met Kerouac and Ginsberg, was
living on a two-hundred-dollar-a-month allowance in New York. In his essay, Scenes for the
Early Life of William Burroughs, James Campbell states, Growing up in St. Louis, in a
wealthy family, with a name made famous in another century for a contraption which had since
been superseded, Burroughs's invisibility was an inherited lack (10). Burroughs affluent
background afforded him the time and means to work on writing, which hed been doing since
adolescence. His first publication was in an essay in high school called Personal Magnetism,

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interestingly on the subject of control. Burroughs, like Kerouac, enjoyed, and was also
influenced by, the mainstreaming of jazz and jive talk that Campbell describes, moved out of
black societyas jazz [became] more widely broadcast (11). Burroughs was always attracted to
the underbelly, the carnal, a gravitational pull of low lifeThe tone of the Beat world, as
Burroughs first perceived it, chimed with the world of one of his favorite characters, Jack Black
in You Cant Win (1929), a hobo-crook[s] memoir of larceny and fugitiveness and had been
influential to him (Campbell 11). It was upon his return to New York from St. Louis, after a
brush with the law, that Burroughs first heard the term Beat when he crossed paths with Kerouac
and Ginsberg at the Lower East Side apartment of Herbert Huncke. The relationship between the
three men, especially Ginsberg, who Burroughs would later have a relationship with, would help
facilitate Burroughs work, despite a debilitating heroin addiction, and garner the novel Naked
Lunch a critical literary work in the scope of Beat and counterculture movements.
Allen Ginsbergs Howl (1955) was the first Beat literature to actually be published at
the dawn of the Beat movement and gain any mainstream attention. He debuted the poem in
1955 at a poetry reading in San Francisco. Johnson asserts, that the idiomatic verse he and
others of the San Francisco West Coast Bohemian-Anarchist-Modernist tradition, as well as the
New York impulse or energyKerouacs obvious genius(111) brought forth the Gallery Six
coming out reading of the Beats (111). Encouraged by Kerouac, who at the time was
experimenting with spontaneous composition, Ginsberg sat at a typewriter one night, thinking
about the long sax lines played by jazz musicians, attempt[ing] a work that summoned forth a
rush of thoughts and sympathies for all his friends or acquaintances whose unorthodox thinking
and behavior had been trampled by an unsparing society, (Lawler 123). Initially, he felt the
subject matter and content of the poem were far too personal to share publicly; however, one

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October night, Ginsberg took the stage and delivered the first part of Howl, igniting the audience
into a positively charged response. The first line strikes at the very chord of what Beats wanted
to escape, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving,/hysterical
naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for/an angry fix
(Ginsberg 62). Howl opens with a poetic protest against the maddening effects conformity had
and would continue to have on people starving the body and mind. Ginsbergs delivery is one
that combined the free verse of Whitman and fused the syncopation of jazz creating a
conversation with the audience. The power and message of this line fueled a movement into
action and has remained a popular quote in American literature for decades. The philosophies
and practices that would define Beat ideologies included a self-conscious ethos, bohemian
enclaves, recreational drug use, sexual experimentation, and interest in Orientalism and Eastern
mysticism, which would later evolve into counterculture principles clearly illustrated in Howl.
The poem touches on many aspects that he and other Beats battled and opposed with mainstream
society. Ginsberg addresses the Beats disenchantment with Americas consumerism stating:
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison/Avenue amid
blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter/of the iron regiments of fashion &
the nitroglycerine shrieks/of fairies of advertising & mustard gas of
sinister/intelligent editors, or were run down by drunken taxicabs of Absolute
Reality (Ginsberg 66)
This juxtaposing of Americans reliance on materialism against language like burning,
blasts, iron regiments, and nitroglycerine prompted the strong emotions felt by the Beats
facilitating its publication and leading to the first censorship trial over Beat literature. Jed
Skinner describes, Howl was the first time in the American twentieth century that poetry read

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aloud became a public act that changed lives [and]in 1957, a year after publication, the
work was the focus of an obscenity trial (The Beatdom). This obscenity trial would be the
first to bring nationwide attention both the publication and, more importantly, the message that
Ginsberg and the Beats were exuberantly and candidly expressing. In an article, Beat Literature
and the American Teen Cult, James Scott states that, [A]dmriable in its compassionate
perception of postwar frustration and disenchantment, Howl probably contains the stuff of
greatness (157). Through their opposition to all things mainstream and forthright literary
expressions, the Beat voice brought forth public scrutiny and backlash from mainstream society
which simply saw them as rebellious.
The same year of Ginsbergs obscenity trial, Kerouacs On the Road was published,
further feeding the publics awareness of the Beat movement. Gelfant explains how, he
zeroed in on spontaneity and speed, typical American values, as literary ideals[H]e wanted
prose improvised like jazzflowing spontaneously and unbroken except for pauses of breath
Kerouac revised and rewrote On the Road countless times before its final publication, though he
wanted his readers to believe it a product of spontaneous combustion (418-419). It would be
considered the Bible of the Beat Generation because of the many Beat figures that are
represented throughout the novels spontaneous flow. Kerouac introduced underground America
to mainstream society through a sordid cast and the mystic travels, sexual promiscuity, druginduced episodes of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty that were the living epitome of Beat.
Kerouac introduces the primary characters based on himself and Neal Cassidy, who was an
important figure to both Ginsberg and Kerouac: [W]ith the coming of Dean Moriarty began the
part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that Id often dreamed of going West to
see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the

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road because he actually was born on the road (3). The autobiographical nature of On the Road
brings readers into the reality of how the Beat sub-culture operated. Cassidys arrival to New
York prompted a great deal of inspiration to Kerouac and Ginsberg. They each artistically drew
from the well of reality in which he lived. When Sal travels to Denver to see Dean he describes:
Dean and I [Carlo Marx] are embarked on a tremendous season together. We are
trying to communicate with absolute honesty and absolute completeness
everything in our minds. Weve had to take Benzedrine. We sit on the bed,
crosslegged, facing each other. I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything
he wants.But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races. (42)
Erik Mortensen asserts in his article, Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack
Kerouac's "On the Road," how Kerouac's novel has long been considered subversive in its
questioning of America's booming post-war economy[and] an attack on the corruption of time
by capitalism (53). Once Sal questions Carlo about Deans schedule, the reader sees an entirely
different context:
Whats the schedule? I said. There was always a schedule in Deans life. The
schedule is this: I came off work a half-hour ago. In that time Dean is balling
Marylou at the hotel and gives me time to change and dress. At one sharp he
rushes from Marylou to Camilleof course neither of them knows whats going
onand bangs her once, giving me time to arrive at one-thirty. (42)
Much like Ginsberg juxtaposed the horrific images against consumerism, Kerouac utilizes a very
similar approach using satire. The comedic way he discusses Deans sexual indiscretions against
specific time mocks the restriction capitalist conformity placed upon society. Mortensen
continues, Deans time is hyper-realizedOf course by taking capitalist rationalization to the

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next stepDeans antagonism to reification resides not so much in the increasing mechanization
of time, but rather in how that time is employed (54). Throughout the novel, Dean is cast in the
role to incapacitate all traditions and conformity of society. The language used and spontaneous
stream of consciousness fuel the movement in which the characters remain as they journey
across the vast landscape of America. Lawler describes, The character of Dean Moriarty depicts
this American archetype, just as On the Road celebrates a new kind of hero, one who embodies
IT[while]Paradise admired a character like the jazzman in the moment of creation, wrested
from the rules, strictures, and confines of straight society, for whom the perpetual NOW is all
(175). A great deal of Kerouacs personal demons shadow the narrator Sal Paradise, who acts as
the embodiment of a continuously swinging pendulum between Beat and mainstream. Regardless
of these personal struggles, Kerouac was a beckoning light between the opposing cultures. His
charismatic style and notoriety helped distinguish a place for the Beat movement to thrive.
It would be another two years in 1959 before William Burroughs Naked Lunch would
overwhelm the public with its jarring delusions, loathing details of homosexual escapades, and
archetypal characters, each set in place to represent social and political aspects occurring at the
time. Richard Kostelanetz discusses in his article, From Nightmare to Serendipity: A
Retrospective Look at William Burroughs how Naked Lunch is a report of the hallucinatory
madness Burroughs experienced during withdrawal from heroin addiction; and in structure, the
book is a collection of scenes, gathered from notes he jotted down while undergoing withdrawal
shock (123). The novel contains no real plot; rather, the reader is tossed into a place with the
drug-addicted narrator that is neither real nor imaginary shifting between New York City,
Tangiers, and a delusional wasteland called the Interzone. Burroughs shocks readers with
characters stating, Give me two cunts and a prick of steel and keep your dirty finger out of my

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sugar bum what you think I am a purple-assed reception already fugitive from Gibraltar? Male
and female he castrated them (35). Burroughs explores the French Surrealist concepts with his
novel recreating phantasmal, foreign images to a society staunchly opposed to anything other
than what is considered proper. He dares the reader to embark with him into what he believes is
societies dark, decaying reality: All the streets of the City slope down between deepening
canyons to a vast, kidney shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated
by dwelling cubicles and cafes, some a few feet deep, othersout of sight in a network of rooms
and corridors (45).
In A Compact Guide to Sources for Teaching the Beats, Lawler asserts:
In the writings of Burroughs, the descriptions of fantasies and the bizarre taste
that characterizes some passages are pleasingly wacky and humorous for some,
distressingly vulgar and abhorrent for others. Though Burroughs's style is often
direct and standard in presentation, in many cases an experimental mode
predominates, and in this mode, the lack of conventional narratives and character
development makes the writing too remote for undedicated readers. (238)
The backlash that quickly culminated upon the novels publication brought forth a second
obscenity trial which would ultimately change total literary censorship in the United States.
The Beat communities of the 1950s were rapidly growing into bohemian communes as time
progressed into the 1960s, during which Burroughs novel was in appeal. The alternative
concepts that Ginsberg, Kerouac, and now Burroughs were gaining massive amounts of public
attention and catapulting the youth of America into a frenzied defiance of the previous
conventions of 1950s American culture. Fredrick Whiting reports in his essay, Monstrosity of
Trial: The Case of Naked Lunch, how, the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that

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finally cleared Naked Lunch of obscenity charges on appeal in 1966 was a license to speak[so
that]the unspeakable had become speakablethe ruling reflected a change of official opinion
about whether Naked Lunch was speakable (145). At this juncture, the trials and mass attention
Burroughs Naked Lunch, and the rest of the Beats had received, began to initiate even greater
changes to the subtle voices of the movement expanding their ideologies into a political realm.
The individuals at the very center of the Beat movement provided an entirely new
outlook outside of the mainstream social values that defined the 1950s era. The literature of
Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs directly reflected fundamental concepts the Beats were
actively living and expressing in written form. Ginsberg would proclaim this spiritual quest in
Howl, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision/ or you had a
vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity (66). The distribution of their poetic free form and
lucid narratives also garnered attention toward the sexual, spiritual, and drug-induced
experimentation occurring within the sub-culture. Michael Masatsugu describes in his article,
Beyond This World of Transiency and Impermanence: Japanese Americans, Dharma Bums,
and the Making of American Buddhism during the Early Cold War Years, that Kerouacs vision
of Buddhism and its future in America were framed around the elevation of rucksack
wanderers, Beatnik oriental monk figures who rejected Cold War materialism and likened
cycles of production and consumption to samsaraa Buddhist view of the endless cycle of birth
and death from which nirvana was an escape (441). The Beats like Kerouac and Ginsberg who
converted to practicing Buddhism sought an alternative to the idealization of domesticity that
had taken over the social institutions of Cold War America. Magatsugu continues, Beats drew
upon racialized figures at the margins of white, heterosexual, middle-class America for
inspiration: the junkie, the street hustler, the jazz musician, and the migrant laborer (439). The

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language within Beat literature centers around these radical figures while introducing the reader
to something Other than what conformity is preventing them from seeing or experiencing.
Kerouacs Dharma Bums would be considered one of the strongest examples of Buddhism
observed in Beat literature. Based upon Beat, Gary Snyder, Kerouac crafts a Zen lunatic
character type who is of Oriental authenticity, knowing Asian language, culture, even dawning a
small goatee and slanted eyes. The depiction provided converts to Buddhism and dharma bums
a critical perspective from which to view Cold War America (Magatsgu 441). These
characteristics would also become prominent components during the rift between beatniks and
the Beat movement, evolving into something greater during the counterculture shift.
In addition to the Zen practices of many Beats, there would also be a great deal of
transcendence through the use of mind-altering drugs. Kerouac and Ginsberg considered the use
of drugs and alcohol as a means to discover experiences outside the lines of conformity. Kerouac
wrote much, if not all, of On the Road in a Benzedrine charged state. Erik Mortensen confirms in
his article, High Off the Page: Representing the Drug Experience in the Work of Jack Kerouac
and Allen Ginsberg, how Drug-induced writing thus works through the body to inscribe the
sensation of the drug state onto paper in order to deliver the telepathic shock and meaningexcitement of this state to the reader (64). American literature gained a concrete record of what
effects drugs actually had on the mind when Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs created their
work while intoxicated. The initial effect was their drug writings relate[d] their own personal
experiences, but they likewise [sought] to explore the interstice between the drugged state and
the Other who stands outside that experience (Mortensen 55). They achieved numerous
successes by escaping what they believed was holding society back and conveyed their prose in a
style where language altered not only literary traditions, but also the impact it had on the

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everyday reader. In On the Road, Sal and Dean smoke a tremendous Corona cigar of tea (283),
then proceed to dig their newly-acquired Mexican friends. Dean exclaims, Will you d-i-g that
weird brother in the back . . . . And theyre talking and wondering about us, like see? Just like we
are but with a difference of their own (283-84). Mortensen explains that, [D]espite the barriers
of language and culture, marijuana use builds a bridge from one self to another. Slowing the
world down so that a moment may be taken in more fully, marijuana-inspired digging allows
for a leisurely contemplation of the world around the digger (62). Kerouac describes the fury
of Benzedrine by stating, Bull himself only got fifty dollars a week from his own family, which
wasnt bad except that he spent almost that much per week on his drug habitand his wife
gobbling up about ten dollars worth of benny tubes a week (143). He illustrates the fine line
between mind alteration breaking down the walls of conformity and/or the subsequent force of
addiction.
These mind-altered states could also present difficulty in these authors attempts to
communicate between a transcended mind and a sober reality. Burroughs is definitely a classic
example and the reaction of many at the time. The lurid and grotesque imagery of Naked Lunch
makes it even more difficult for the reader to associate any of the events that are take place with
no chronological order. Ginsberg explains in an interview with Jennie Skerl, Ginsberg on
Burroughs: An Interview:
it reads like the development of the mind and the development of the
outrageousness, and then theres a certain point that comes when he detaches
himself from me and detaches himself from his fixTheres a kind of interchange
when he becomes one with the artist and cuts off from me and cuts off from the
world. The imaginative artist takes over like the talking asshole took over. (276)

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Despite the confusion Naked Lunch causes many readers, it is still considered to be an incredible
novel within the scope of American literary history. Naked Lunch, along with the work Kerouac
and Ginsberg closely contributed, provided the American culture a new avenue to travel through
their unwavering dedication so that they may transcend conformity and journey into the realm of
self-enlightenment and expression. By doing so, these figures and their literature ensured the
reshaping of the American voice that would come alive during the 1960s counterculture
movement.
The sexual revolution boldly expressed during the counterculture movement was yet
another element of the Beat movement that was explored within their writing. Each of these men
experienced a variety a sexual encounters and was expressed via experimentation that litters the
pages of their poetry and narratives. The heterosexual escapades of Beats would be depicted by
Kerouac through the narrator Sal Paradise, and his reconstruction of Cassidy, a bisexual in real
life, as the protagonist Dean Morarity in On the Road. During a visit to in New York, Sal takes
Dean and Marylou looking for my New York gang of friendsDean was having his kicks
Then Marylou began making love to me; she said Dean was going to stay with Camille and she
wanted me to go back with her. Come live with us. Well all live together (125). Sals
conformed and mainstream girlfriend, Lucille, represents societys staunch opposition to this
behavior. This community way of life and sexual freedom would become true facets of the
counterculture communes that would arise in the mid- and latter part of the 1960s.
Both Ginsberg and Burroughs were outright homosexuals that expressed a great deal of
their love affairs and homoerotic encounters in Howl and Naked Lunch. In his poem, Ginsberg
aims the focus toward those who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,

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and/ screamed with joy/ who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the
sailors,/caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love (64). He explores his own sexuality and reveals
desires which society expects him to suppress while identifying those within the mainstream who
are in denial. Ginsberg again addresses to Skerl, Burroughs and I were lovers and he was
excessively attached to meHe sent me routines of Dr. Benway, the partiesthe Factualists, the
Liquidationists, and Divisionistswhich were either part of the letters or appended letters to me
many of which were love letters. The whole point of sending the letters was the enactment of
different fantasiesaddictionsnot only to drugs but also to sexand a self-parodyof his
relation to me (274). A great deal of Naked Lunch harbors illicit and extreme descriptions of
sexual acts such as, Johnny extracts a candiru from Marys cunt with his calipersHe gives her
a douche of jungle-bone softener, her vaginal teeth flow out mixed with blood and cystsHer
cunt shines fresh and sweet as spring grassJohnny licks Marys cunt, slow at first (84).
Societys reaction to this was just another attempt at containment culture, but concluded with a
judge ruling in favor of the publication of Naked Lunch, as well as the subject matter becoming
infused into a society brewing into action. Whiting suggests: [T]he anxieties about sexual
pathology, language and authorship that came to a head in the Naked Lunch trial [becoming a]
part of postwar conceptual transformations that ran far deeper than issues of free speech (146).
The enclaves of Beat bohemians had long been established and began merging with communities
of political groups that accelerated radical liberations in racial segregation, homophobia, and
womens rights, continuing to evolve into a fresh counterculture movement.
Although the Beats had submerged into an underground sub-culture, their ever-evolving
ideologies and drug-induced transcendence still reached far and wide through the impact of their
literature and societys public opposition. Allan Johnston asserts that, Beat culture, by its very

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nature, lacked the theoretical and social underpinnings to develop the clarified economic or
political oppositional stances that appeared in the 1960s countercultureOnly in retrospect
did the Beats see their lifestyle as a reaction against a seemingly aggressive and stifling social
ethos (104). The concepts and philosophies that kept the movement progressing had begun
transforming societys approach, reaction, and expression concerning individual rights to
alternative ways of life. The apolitical nature of the Beat sub-culture failed to complete a full
social transition to the American social landscape as seen today. The foundation for the
counterculture movement was stiffly in place. However, it would take the political rallies and the
active counterculture voice to fulfill radical diplomatic evolution. Stephen Prothero maintains in
On the Holy Road: Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest, that the beats were liminal figures
who expressed their cultural marginality by living spontaneously, dressing like bums, sharing
their property, celebrating nakedness and sexuality, seeking mystical awareness through drugs
and meditation, acting like Zen lunaticsstressing the chaotic sacrality of human
interrelatedness (210-211). The obscenity trials from Howl and Naked Lunch also
repositioned and shifted literary censorship allowing the voice on the page to ignite in a vocal
protest. Johnson continues, These trends very possibly encouraged the development of a
common pool of ideas, including ideas about economic realities that cleared the ground for the
more efficiently publicized ideas of the 1960s (104). The social and political changes drifting
through the country encountered a new generation of individuals ready to express new dialectic
stemming from the Beat movement. Many of the original Beats remained active participants,
notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement. Kerouac had vanished
from the Beat scene unable to fully recover from the fame he received from On the Road for its
key to understanding what it means to be Beat rather than gaining notoriety for his writing

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genius. Burroughs, however, would find his place within the counterculture movement, fathering
a later Punk movement.
In conclusion, the prevailing climate of conventionality that grew from the 1950s
consumer machine became instrumental in facilitating a movement that would ultimately spark a
revolution for social change. The social climate of America during this period generated growing
opposition within a sub-culture that began sharing new philosophies which challenged
uniformity and sought enlightenment through transit lifestyles, through both sexual and drug
experimentations. The literary works of three prominent figures, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,
and William Burroughs provided the Beat label this way of life. They instilled their philosophies
into the public through the publication of On the Road and the obscenity trials of both Howl
and Naked Lunch. The censorship trials virtually wiped out limitations of speaking and
expressing the self freely. The social and cultural turmoil that had been brewing with civil rights
and womens liberation factions had fused with the radical philosophies of Beat and the freedom
to express something other than the norm in a public fashion. Although the Beat movement
leaned toward the side of apolitical, these important figures paved the way for cultural revolution
by living the most unrestricted lives imaginable and solidifying their ideals through works of On
the Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch . Collectively, this literature, along with the Beat movement,
established a foundation that the counterculture movement used to break down the rest of
American conformity.
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Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch. Ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles. Grove Press: New
York, 2001. Print.

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