ASSIGNMENT ON OBSCENITY

Student: Anindita Biswas Roll No.:11COM6503 M.S., Communications Studies, St. Josephs College, Bangalore Guide: Topic: Danish Sheikh

Obscenity (Case Study)

Obscenity can be defined as the violation of an expressionistic taboo that does not necessarily have to correspond with a behavioral one. It is inherently linked to the concept of free speech and expression that comes under the fundamental rights available to citizens in any democratic social setup. It is also associated with the prevalent moral (quite often confused with religious) and social mores of a society, as qualifying anything as obscene indicates a moral judgment. Most societies tend to adopt for censorship measures to curtail obscene expression that can cater to lascivious/ prurient interests or have such effect on unlikely audiences. The distinction between obscenity and indecency is not clearly demarcated, but obscenity is generally understood to be a more serious offence and is the accepted coinage in legal circles. The line between obscene and erotic content was drawn by the 1965 John Clelands Memoirs case that categorized obscene as giving rise to shameful or morbid interests. The problem is that while most often outright lurid material are accepted in society as profane expressions that cater to likewise interests, charges of obscenity can also be used against any cultural expression that serves some sort of a dissenting purpose in culture or society. A case in point can be the seminal trial of William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch. The case against Burroughs's novel still remains the last of obscenity trials against any literary work that consisted only of words and did not include any visual representation that could be deemed as obscene prosecuted in the United States. The 1966 verdict delivered by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has been considered to be one of the landmark judgments for the victory of free speech in the United States of America and featured prominent controversial figures from the 60s counterculture movement like Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Brian Gysin etc. Naked Lunch proved to be controversial even before its publication. Since Burroughs was unable to find a source of publication even from publications like Olympia Press and City Lights Books who were already known for their subjective views and of sexual content; it was published in a series of excerpts in a newbie literary journals Chicago Review and Big

Table No. 1. The student editor of the former, Irving Rosenthal, was fired after the first excerpt was published and the latter was accused by the United States Post Master General that it was using the post service to mail obscene material. Post-publication, the novel garnered notoriety across Europe and America. Naked Lunch was prosecuted on charges of obscenity by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and was soon followed by many other states. Judge Eugene Hudson commented that the book needed to be taken as a whole given the constitutional requirements and contended if the author had the poetic license to escape responsibility in his writing by simply describing hard-core pornography as hallucination. Burroughs found a spirited defender in Norman Mailer who defended that Burroughs was essentially a religious writer and that Naked Lunch primarily dealt with the destruction of the soul without any scope for salvation. It hit readers hard due to the utter lack of sentimentality in the writers approach. The severe, caustic style used in describing a series of unpalatable events narrated in the story was only necessary to bring out the dark humor inherent in the work. Burroughs work was acerbic in the livid wit that can only be palpable in the bitterness expressed without any moral reservations. This was especially relevant in a post- world war society and a dissenting movement like the counterculture decade. According to Mailer, So it is the sort of humor which flourishes in prisons, in the Army, among junkies, race tracks and pool halls, a graffiti of cool, even livid wit, based on bodily functions and the frailties of the body, the slights, humiliations and tortures a body can undergo. It is a wild and deadly humor, as even and implacable as a sales tax; it is the small coin of communication in every one of those worlds. Bitter as alkali, it pickles every serious subject in the caustic of the harshest experience; what is left untouched is as dry and silver as a bone. It is this sort of fine, dry residue which is the emotional substance of Burroughs work for me. Since the book explicitly deals with the topic of addiction, most readers including prominent critics found the graphic descriptions objectionable. But that is what stands out with a superfluous or surface reading with the book. If one was to look at the temporal and sociological context of the work, apart from the raw style of the authors expression it is evident that the voluntary exaggeration in the description of drug(s) and their purported impact(s) on the individual and his/ her psyche hinted at something beyond the lackluster process of substance abuse. The process depicted in the book is merely a metaphor to suggest the spiritual location of man in the post-war American society and apparently getting into a consumerist culture that was addicted to the processes of relentless expenditure in a feeble gratification of power aspirations. Finally, on July 7, 1966, Naked Lunch was judged to be not obscene by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the instance was a moment of victory for the fight for freedom of expression in the United States. But, to conclude with a comment by Norman Mailer, Every gain of freedom carries its price. There's a wonderful moment when you go from oppression to freedom, there in the middle, when one's still oppressed but one's achieved the first

freedoms. There's an extraordinary period that goes from there until the freedoms begin to outweigh the oppression. By the time you get over to complete freedom you begin to look back almost nostalgically on the days of oppression, because in those days you were ready to become a martyr, you had a sense of importance, you could take yourself seriously, and you were fighting the good fight. Now, you get to the point where people don't even know what these freedoms are worth, are using them and abusing them. You've gotten older. You've gotten more conservative. You're not using your freedoms. And there's a comedy in it, in the long swing of the pendulum ....

Bibliography
Whiting, F. (Summer, 2006). Monstrosity on Trial: The Case of Na e! "un#h. JSTOR , $ol. %2, No. 2.

&ra'ia, (!)ar! (Fall, *++,). -""(N &.NS/(0&, N10M-N M-."(0, /-0N(2 01SS(T: Their Struggles -gainst Censorshi3 0e#alle!. Cardozo Life.

Minutes: /oston Trial of Na e! "un#h (Court 3ro#ee!ings e4#er3ts)