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 analyzes the wider social implications of the Beat generation by examining subversiveness in The Subterraneans and William S. Burroughs's The Naked Lunch.

Abjection—at the crossroads of phobia, obsession, and perversion. … In abjection, revolt is completely within being. Within the being of language.

—Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

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 (Morgan 289). 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...