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 examines the influence of the Cold War-era ideological construct of "otherness" in Naked Lunch and in Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans, comparing its effect on the subjectivity of each novel.]

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. 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...