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177 Still Dirty after All These Years: The Continuing Trials of Naked Lunch loren GLASS I n the early 1970s, William Burroughs’ career was stalled. Although Naked Lunch was acknowledged as a masterpiece and a landmark of literary freedom, his more recent cut-up texts had been skeptically received , and he himself was beginning to feel that the experiments were a dead end. Already in his sixties, bored and lonely in London, he decided to return to the United States. Within days, Allen Ginsberg introduced him to a young Kansan named James Grauerholz, who would become his secretary, business manager, editor, and adviser for the remainder of his life. In order to kick-start Burroughs’ career, Grauerholz arranged a series of readings on college campuses and at music clubs across the United States. The dissonant combination of Burroughs’ laconic Midwestern nasal twang with the outrageous explicitness of his subject matter was a huge hit; the readings revitalized his career and helped inject his voice and image into the popular imaginary. Although he had done some readings in the 1960s, Burroughs had seen relatively little point in reading from his work and had famously insisted in the pages of Naked Lunch that he wasn’t an entertainer, but in the 1970s and 1980s, he found both joy and profit in becoming a traveling performer. The familiarity of his voice and image began to supplement, if not replace, the fame of his prose, and he got involved in a number of collaborative projects with musicians, including an album, not long before H_M Ch21.indd 177 3/30/09 12:37:47 PM 178 loren GLASS his death, with musician/activist Michael Franti, then of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, a sonic collage of voice and music featuring Burroughs reading, mostly from texts published much earlier, features a parental advisory warning of “Explicit Lyrics.” As printed texts, Burroughs’ words have long been free of censorship; a half century later, as recorded lyrics, they have again become the subject of official scrutiny. Over the last fifty years, Naked Lunch has traveled the now-familiar trajectory from outlaw to classic; however, unlike its modernist predecessors , its outlaw status has been sustained by new generations of artists and critics. We can understand Naked Lunch and Burroughs’ career more generally as a point of historical mediation between modernist writing and postmodern performance as the locus for that notoriously overdetermined exception to our First Amendment rights: obscenity. The battles over literary obscenity that generated a series of landmark Supreme Court cases in the late 1950s and early 1960s began with Ginsberg’s Howl and ended with Burroughs ’ Naked Lunch; between the two were sandwiched the famous cases of the long-suppressed underground classics Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer. The Beats, then, helped bring to a close a period of literary censorship coincident with the modernist enterprise, and this overlap has contributed to a critical tendency to understand their work in terms of modernist paradigms that emphasize the aesthetic integrity of the text and the solitary genius of the author. But the Beats diverged from their modernist predecessors in their emphasis on the performative and collaborative nature of literary art. Thus, their work anticipated and partly enabled the larger shift in the focus of censorship to broadcast radio, recorded music, and performance art. This significantly transitional location is well illustrated by the ambiguity of one of the more famous lines in Naked Lunch, where Burroughs speculates upon “the sex that passes the censor” (112); as Oliver Harris has recently shown, it’s not at all clear to what these lines refer.1 Do they refer to “The Talking Asshole” anecdote that precedes them or to the references to popular songs and Grade B movies that follow? Although Harris convincingly proves that, in its original epistolary form, the anecdote was a digression from Burroughs’ condemnation of “America’s putrefying unconscious ,” I would like to suggest that, proleptically, these oft-quoted lines anticipate the fate of “The Talking Asshole” and Naked Lunch itself as instrumental in altering the very protocols of censorship in the United States and the United Kingdom. When these lines were written, the only possible market for Naked Lunch would have been underground, but Grove Press changed all that, not only enabling it to pass the censor but also leveraging H_M Ch21.indd 178 3/30/09 12:37:47 PM [3.138.113.188] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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