Comparing the three beat writers

My experience with William Burroughs before this class had been limited to reading Naked Lunch back in middle school (which didn’t pan out well as I had almost no idea what was happening in the novel the entire time) and hearing mentions of him in Patti Smith’s memoir. From what we’ve read I like his prose style and that Burroughs is the most straight-forward out of the three authors we’ve read.

                There was one subject however that I noticed that Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs all briefly touch on: underage sex. As distasteful as I find the subject, it is there in all the texts. I started thinking about it more when our class started discussing each of the author’s views of freedom. I believe that the treatment of underage sex in each of the works is indicative and enforces the ideas we came up with in class about each of their mentalities.

                On the Road starts with Neal marrying Louanne when she’s 16, and near the end Kerouac and Neal are in a Mexican brothel, where most of the girls are around 14. While the latter especially may be cringe worthy, it’s never really commended in the work. It is simply what happened, and to be fair those two examples are actually legal.  Kerouac was the most conservative out of the three, wanting to be different and searching for something more out of life, but found comfort in middle class sensibilities.

                Ginsberg on the other hand celebrated marginalized people, outcasts, and being an individual. Howl even has a stanza explicitly mentioning pederasty: “who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication.” Ginsberg’s view of freedom was more spiritual and involved anything that was outside of mainstream ideals and conformity. Ginsberg himself was a member of NAMBLA: “Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance” (http://nambla.org/ginsberg.html). I’m fairly certain that Ginsberg himself was not actually a pedophile though, and people who knew him insist that he was only advocating for the right to free speech. 

Lastly, Burroughs has the most explicit act of underage sex in Queer, with Lee and the boys in Mexico. Burroughs thought freedom should have no moral boundaries and was rather dark. He believed that in all of us where animalistic urges that were only held at bay by societal conventions. To be truly free is to give yourself over to all your desires, though you can never know what you ultimately want out of life.

Burroughs’s writing reflects that. It’s very clinical in a sense, even when he’s talking about a subject like heroin use or sex. He does not hold back on gritty details and creates a seedy and unpleasant world around him. Even his most Hallmark-esque story “A Junky’s Christmas” involves drug use and finding a woman’s severed legs in a suitcase. Unlike the other beat writers Burroughs isn’t interested in idealism.