[In the following essay, Skerl discusses common elements in Burroughs's novels from Junkie to Nova Express.]

In the writing of Naked Lunch, Burroughs discovered the style that best conveyed his vision, and its publication released a great deal of creative energy. In quick succession thereafter, Burroughs produced three important novels: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express (published in 1961, 1962, and 1964, respectively).¹ All three of these works were drawn from the same mass of notes that was the source of Naked Lunch,² and they continue to develop the themes and techniques of that seminal book.

But although the three subsequent novels grow out of Naked Lunch, the latter stands alone as a self-contained work while The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express form a closely knit, continuously evolving trilogy.³ Both technique and content separate the trilogy from Naked Lunch and bind the three subsequent novels together. The trilogy introduces the radical experimental technique of the cutup and can be seen as an exhaustive exploration of that method of creating nonnarrative prose fiction. The trilogy also makes use of a more comprehensive mythology that is consistently developed throughout all three novels.

All of Burroughs's novels from Junkie to Nova Express constitute a major series of novels based on his experience as an addict. These works tell the story of an artistic career that combined a dangerous personal quest through drugs and a radical experimentation with the forms of fiction. With the completion of the trilogy, Burroughs had exhausted this particular path of exploration and decided to turn in a new direction as a writer. The trilogy, then, is the artistic culmination of Burroughs's early literary career and, taken as a whole, is a significant achievement. The entire series of works from Junkie to Nova Express permanently establishes Burroughs as an important postwar American novelist.

THE CUTUP TECHNIQUE

Burroughs discovered the cutup in 1959 in Paris through his friend Brion Gysin, a painter. When Gysin began experimenting with cutups in his own work, Burroughs immediately saw the similarity to the juxtaposition technique he had used in Naked Lunch and began extensive experiments with text, often with the collaboration of other writers. (Although Burroughs has credited Gysin with discovering the cutup, he has also acknowledged similar literary experiments in the works of Tzara, Stein, Eliot, and Dos Passos.) In 1960 Burroughs published his initial cutup experiments in Paris in Minutes To Go (with Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Gregory Corso) and in San Francisco in The Exterminator (with Brion Gysin), works that were partially intended to introduce the technique to the public. Throughout the 1960s Burroughs and Gysin collaborated on cutup experiments in many media, the most significant collaborations being three films done in 1965 with English filmmaker Antony Balch (Towers Open Fire, Cut-Ups, and Bill and Tony) and The Third Mind, a book first completed in 1965 but not published in English until 1978. The final version of The Third Mind is both a historical collection of cutup experiments from 1960 to 1978 and a manifesto that sums up the cutup's significance for Burroughs and Gysin.

The cutup is a mechanical method of juxtaposition in which Burroughs literally cuts up passages of prose by himself and other writers and then pastes them back together at random. This literary version of the collage technique is also supplemented by literary use of other media. Burroughs transcribes taped cutups (several tapes spliced into each other), film cutups (montage), and mixed media experiments (results of combining tapes with television, movies, or actual events). Thus Burroughs's use of cutups develops his juxtaposition technique to its logical conclusion as an experimental prose method, and he also makes use of all contemporary media, expanding his use of popular culture.

As Burroughs experimented with the technique, he began to develop a theory of the cutup, and this theory was incorporated into his pseudoscience of addiction. In addition to drugs, sex, and power as aspects of man's addictive nature, Burroughs adds an analysis of control over human beings exercised by language (“the Word”), time, and space (i.e., man's physical existence and the mental constructs he uses to survive and adapt). Drugs, sex, and power control the body, but “word and image locks” control the mind, that is, “lock” us into conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking, and speaking that determine our interactions with environment and society. The cutup is a way of exposing word and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness that occurs in both the writer and the reader of the text. For Burroughs as an artist, the cutup is an impersonal method of inspiration, invention, and an arrangement that redefines the work of art as a process that occurs in collaboration with others and is not the sole property of artists. Thus Burroughs's cutup texts are comparable to similar contemporary experiments in other arts, such as action painting, happenings, and aleatory music. His theory of the cutup also parallels avant-garde literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction.⁴

Burroughs's trilogy is based on the cutup and the theory of language and art that the cutup produced. Through the direct incorporation of cut-up material, Burroughs also introduces into the trilogy important new material from popular science and popular literature: the Nova Mob, Nova Police and their training, Reich's orgone accumulators, Scientology's Emeter, sense withdrawal tanks, infrasound, reality as a film, popular evolutionary theories, more use of space/time travel motifs, the spy novel of international conspiracies, the idealized past of the western, and Burroughs's analysis of Mayan civilization and Hassan I Sabbah's legendary assassins. The most important addition from popular culture is the science-fiction material, which Burroughs finds most appropriate to express his analysis of word and image controls and their destruction by the cutup technique. Cutup is equated with space/time, travel, silence, and freedom from the body. Burroughs also incorporates cutups from many literary authors: T. S. Eliot, Kafka, Shakespeare, Conrad, Graham Greene, and Coleridge are the most prominent in the trilogy, and their juxtaposition with banal popular materials is another example of Burroughs's pop-art technique, which integrates high and low culture.

THE NOVA MYTHOLOGY

The cutup technique and additional materials from popular culture are combined with Burroughs's montage form to create a “mythology for the space age,”⁵ on which the trilogy is based. The plot and characters of this myth provide underlying unity and continuity to a series of novels whose narrative is fragmented. The plot postulates a group of superhuman forces from outer space (the Nova Mob) who control human beings by assuming the form of a parasitic virus. These forces have been in control of the earth for 3,000 years, having come to earth in a space ship after causing the supernova, or star explosion, that produced the Crab Nebula. The Mob has controlled life on earth through the addiction of human beings to word and image, junk, sex, and power. They become viruses, which are two-dimensional, to gain access to the three-dimensional human body through the body's weakness for addiction—pleasure and pain—and infect by making the human a replica of the controller, that is, either an exploiter or victim of word and image, drugs, sex, or power. The goal of the Nova Mob is to produce a Nova on earth as they did in the case of the Crab Nebula.

The Nova Mob is led by Mr. and Mrs. D, alias Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, alias the Ugly Spirit, who is the controller of word and image (hence the double name). Some members of the Mob, known as Venusians, operate through sexual needs. They are associated with the color green and vegetable life; sexual addiction can reduce men to vegetables or even to primal slime—“green goo.” The Venusians are Burroughs's final mythic adaptation of Reich's theory of sexual repression. The criminals who operate through drug addiction are the Uranians, associated with heavy metal, the color blue, coolness, ozone, and a “hifi blue note.” In his last metaphorical analysis of addiction, Burroughs says that junk reduces the addict to nonliving material, more metallic than vegetable. The viruses that operate through power addiction are the Crab People, from “the white hot skies of Minraud,” somewhere in the Crab Nebula. They are associated with the color white, heat, and ovens, and can turn their addicts into insects. This part of the Mob has evolved from Burroughs's study of Mayan civilization, which he calls the most totalitarian control system known to man, combined with contemporary images of concentration camps and Hiroshima, as well as the behavioristic techniques of mind control taught by Scientology. Thus the popular sciences of Wilhelm Reich, Burroughs and Ron Hubbard merge with the forms of popular science fiction into an original astrology that encompasses the universe and man's place in it. The astrological element adds yet another dimension drawn from popular culture and broadens the scope of the mythic land of Interzone described in Naked Lunch.

The Nova Police are not highly individualized. The District Supervisor, technicians, Agent K9, a cadet, and Agent or Inspector Lee are mentioned. The last three, at one time or another, all seem to be alter egos of William S. Burroughs. The Nova Police use technology to combat the Nova criminals. Technology can create apomorphine to regulate addiction and silence to destroy word and image control. Arrests are made by blocking the coordinate points by which the virus invades the human body. Cadets are trained to do this by learning to think and write in association blocks and to avoid being trapped by pleasure, pain, or emotion. Nova Police are associated with silver flashes, flakes, the color gray, panpipes, melting, fading, and wind. These images are also associated with the destruction of word and image and the invasion of silence—what the Nova Police are supposed to accomplish.

The mythology in the trilogy is not superimposed in a mechanical manner, but is an immanent and evolving metaphor within the three novels. The myth is not complete until the end of the trilogy and, in a sense, is never complete because of the open, fragmented nature of Burroughs's fiction. For example, some elements appear only once or in only one of the novels and are never developed further. Repeated elements gain new significance in new contexts but are never fixed in form or meaning. Yet, even though Burroughs's presentation of the mythology is not systematic, thematic emphases give each novel its own subjects and limits. The Soft Machine focuses primarily on the historical control of mankind through bodily needs. The Ticket That Exploded focuses on the present and on control of the mind through word and image. Nova Express predicts a future apocalypse and recapitulates the entire mythology. Thus the trilogy encompasses a total cosmology of past, present, and future.

TIME TRAVEL IN THE SOFT MACHINE

The Soft Machine consists of seventeen relatively brief chapters, or routines. (Most are fewer than ten pages: the longest is a little over twenty pages.) Each routine contains both improvisational narrative episodes similar in style to the satirical fantasies of Naked Lunch and cutup material. The narrative episodes within routines, however, are usually much briefer than those in Naked Lunch. The shorter narrative passages in combination with cutup collage passages make up a highly fragmented work in which the juxtaposition technique dominates the consciousness of the reader. The book must be read slowly and carefully, like a poem, and one must focus on imagery, theme, and associative relationships, rather than on chronological-causal structures. Much more than Naked Lunch, the effect of The Soft Machine is kaleidoscopic, and the order of the routines seems even more arbitrary.

The Soft Machine, however, is not entirely a random collection of fragments. Each routine does have general thematic unity, and each is related to the book's major theme: the social control of mankind throughout human history by the manipulation of bodily needs. The novel's thesis is conveyed in two ways: through image clusters that create thematic emphasis and through specific fantasies that receive emphasis because of narrative coherence and length. As in Naked Lunch, sexuality, drugs, and power are the three types of control, but The Soft Machine gives different emphasis to these themes and also adds the theme of revolt.

Sexuality as a means of social control is the major theme of The Soft Machine, leading to a predominance of sexual scenes and Burroughs's repertoire of sexual imagery: memories and fantasies of adolescent homosexual and autoerotic experiences, travel South, South American people and places, tropical climate (warmth, humidity, steaminess), plant life (especially jungles, vines, plant juice and slime), primitive and amorphous life forms (jelly, slime, protoplasm, tissue), water (rivers, mud, showers), refuse (mud, sewage, garbage, slime, compost heaps), odors of decomposition, the carnival (penny arcades, Interzone-like carnival cities of sexual activity), the withdrawal orgasm, and the orgasm-death of hanging or other torture. This imagery is drawn from personal experience, popular cultural stereotypes, and literary tradition (in particular, Burroughs includes in cutup form the city and water imagery from The Waste Land). Characterization in The Soft Machine is so minimal that characters become motifs rather than persons. Characters associated with the sexual theme are drawn from autobiography (memories and personal fantasies), anthropological fantasy (imaginary South American tribes with unusual sexual practices; Carl the traveler), historical fantasy (Johnny Yen—the transsexual Survival Artist of the ages, the Countess de Vile—the decadent jetsetter, ancient priests serving the Corn God and the Earth Mother), the science-fiction Nova mythology (the Venus Mob, the Vegetable People, the Green Boys), and other literature (Danny Deever, Melville's Billy Budd, the hanged god of T. S. Eliot).

Control through drugs receives less emphasis than sexuality, but the imagery of the addict world and the metaphor of addiction are important secondary motifs. The Soft Machine includes the familiar imagery of junk neighborhoods, possession by an evil force, downward metamorphosis, versions of the Algebra of Need, and various addict-hustlers (Lee, the Sailor, Johnny, Bill, Bill Gains, Benway, Green Tony). The color blue, heavy metal, the smell of ozone, coldness, and a “blue” note are junk images that link the theme of addiction to the Uranians of the Nova mythology. Finally, the narrator of The Soft Machine consistently assumes the persona of the hustler-storyteller of the carny world, whether he plays the role of conman, Nova criminal, or Nova agent. Thus the vision and the voice of the carny world permeate the novel even though drug addiction is not its major subject, and this persona has the same reductive and satirical effect as in Naked Lunch.

The theme of power is primarily conveyed through narrative fantasy. The Soft Machine contains five relatively sustained fantasies, which, because of their length and coherence as narratives amid so much cutup material, dominate the reader's interpretation of the text. All five of these narratives are dystopian fantasies, each one taking place in a different period of human history. It is these dystopias that give The Soft Machine its historical emphasis, and the following analysis will discuss them chronologically although they do not appear in chronological order in the text. In fact, the fantasy that is earliest in time is actually placed at the end of the book.

In “Cross the Wounded Galaxies,” the last routine of The Soft Machine, Burroughs invents a story of how mankind began: his creation myth. Burroughs imagines the beginning of humanity as a biological disaster story. Apes become human as a result of a virus infection that kills most of the species and mutates the rest. The survivors feel a painful invasion of their bodies by an external force that gradually produces human behavior. Humanity develops from language (“the talk sickness”), eating flesh and excrement (cannibalism is implied), and sexuality. Clearly, this episode portrays the invasion of the Nova Mob on earth, but it is told from the point of view of the ignorant victims, who must adapt to painful mutations as they become “soft machines.” The soft machine is the human body controlled by physical needs, which can be manipulated through language. The body itself is not evil, but the psychophysical control mechanisms are, and it is these that make bodily existence a trap. Characteristically, Burroughs's metaphysical view is conveyed in a fiction that draws from pseudoscientific and science-fiction sources. His prose, however, is more poignantly poetic than in any other section of the novel as he describes the dawn of consciousness.

The fantasy of Puerto Joselito in “Pretend an Interest” (ninth routine) is an anthropological fantasy on preliterate societies based on Burroughs's South American travels and his anthropological studies. This fantasy portrays primitive man as wholly enslaved by psychosexual control systems. Puerto Joselito, a carnival-city on the mudflats of a river in the middle of a South American jungle, is described entirely through Burroughs's sexual imagery. The fantastic inhabitants are always engaged in sadistic sexual activity, and many have the form of sex organs. The city is ruled by priests of various cults who conduct ritual executions. Orgasm-death is described over and over as the fundamental religious ritual, which is the basis of all religious and political control. The priest-rulers are associated with the power imagery Burroughs uses for his Mayan and Minraud fantasies. Puerto Joselito is Burroughs's reinterpretation of Frazier's The Golden Bough and a critique of religion in Reichian terms. It is both an homage to and a reinterpretation of The Waste Land.

The theme of power is given its most detailed treatment in “The Mayan Caper,” a historical fantasy on Mayan civilization (seventh routine). “The Mayan Caper” is the single most significant section of The Soft Machine because of its central placement in the text, because it is the longest sustained narrative, and because it gives the most straightforward exposition of how a control system works and how it can be dismantled. The Mayans are presented both as the historical beginning and the epitome of “civilization”: a social order in which a few control the many through manipulation of word and image. Literacy only makes the control system more sophisticated. The Mayan priest-ruler class controls the mass of peasants through their calendar, a word-and-image system that orders time, space, and human behavior. The calendar is the basis for the Mayans' agricultural economy, their hierarchical system of classes, and their religion. The priests exert total mind control and thus have total mastery over the peasants' bodies. The power imagery associated with the Mayans is the same as that of the Minraud people in the Nova mythology: religious sacrifice, insects, ants, centipedes, scorpions, crabs, lobsters, claws, white heat, and the city. The first part of the “I Sekuin” routine, which immediately follows “The Mayan Caper,” makes the link to Minraud explicit and again emphasizes the importance of the Mayan fantasy as the classic type of all control systems.

The Trak fantasy in “Trak Trak Trak” (fourth routine) is a satire on contemporary capitalist-consumer societies. Trak is an international corporation that sells junk-like products producing total dependency on “Trak servicing.” Trak advertises and sells products like a corporation, controls unconscious thinking through advertising (“Trak Sex and Dream Utilities”), controls conscious thinking through the news media (“Trak News Agency” specifically refers to the Hearst and Luce empires), and runs a totalitarian state called the Trak Reservation in Freelandt (an allusion to Sweden's welfare state). Trak is a total modern control system based on the economics of junk as described in Naked Lunch. Trak is thus linked to the Nova mythology by junk imagery and is associated with the Uranian Mob.

The final important narrative in The Soft Machine appears in “Gongs of Violence” (fifteenth routine). Slotless City is a futuristic fantasy of violence and chaos produced by sexual conflict. Through insoluble conflict the Nova Mob seeks to destroy the earth, and the Slotless City fantasy envisions sexual conflict as the cause of a future apocalypse. This narrative portrays science-fiction methods of reproduction in a society in which men and women are at war, leading to the creation of fantastic new life forms fighting with each other for existence, and ending with the destruction of all life on earth. The final apocalypse is conveyed in ambiguous cutup imagery. It is unclear whether the destruction is positive or negative, a victory for the Mob or for the Police, for the disintegration of present reality structures is a form of liberation from control.

Gradually, a thesis emerges from The Soft Machine's thematic focus on sexuality and power within a historical framework. For Burroughs, the history of sexuality is the history of power, and his analysis of sexual repression is essentially Reichian.⁶ All control systems are based on the repression and manipulation of sexuality for the benefit of a ruling class, and all power structures are essentially the same since they are all built upon biological necessity. Thus for Burroughs, history is a process of repetitions, not a progression: a “penny arcade peep show long process in different forms.” As long as “human nature” (or—more accurately—our concept of human nature) remains the same, history is but a series of permutations in which specific forms may change, but not the underlying system of relationships. And, by implication, if history is simply a repetitive series of fixed relationships, the writer can create fictions that are just as true as history. Thus, Burroughs's fictional narratives in The Soft Machine are history. Later in the trilogy, Burroughs illustrates the corollary that history is fiction.

Within this thematic context, the image of orgasm-death takes on an expanded meaning. The orgasm-death of the hanged man in Naked Lunch was the symbol of a predatory social order based on human need. In The Soft Machine it is the symbol of religious power, the moral authority that legitimizes political systems of control. Burroughs points out that the ritual of human sacrifice lies behind every mythology, and that a sadistic god of death authorizes traditional social and economic hierarchies.

Revolt is the fourth major theme of The Soft Machine and is portrayed both through narrative fantasy and in cutup collage passages. In fantasy, revolt is achieved through time-travel and identity change, which is accomplished by the subversive use of orgasm-death and the drug yage. The individual in fantasy can control sex, drugs, and time in order to be free of his body. He can choose a particular body and identity to inhabit instead of submitting to the manipulation of external forces. This autonomous individual can sabotage the “control machine” from within the power system. But he can only do so with the help of technicians or by learning the techniques of control himself. The “machine” of the narrative fantasy is a word-and-image system: reality is a film, identity a script, and the body is behavioristically programmed through visual and auditory stimuli. Revolt is achieved by turning the machine against itself through newspaper cutups, film cutups, photomontage, and synaesthesia. The writer, then, is the chief technician, often understanding the machine better than the rulers who use it for their personal benefit.

“The Mayan Caper” narrates most clearly the process of time travel, identity change, and sabotage; but revolt is portrayed numerous times in The Soft Machine in briefer narrative and cutup passages. Imagery associated with revolt is the same as the imagery of the Nova Police: winds, waves, silver, gray, panpipes, dust, silence, and images of disintegration (melting, fading, falling, explosions). Revolt is also associated with the characters of Nova technicians and agents: the Technical Sergeant, Technical Tillie, Iam, the Subliminal Kid, Agent K9, Lee, Clem Snide. Calls to revolt by “partisans” in the fight against the Mob become repeated motifs and metaphors for freedom: “wise up the marks,” “storm the reality studio,” “smash the machine,” “seize the Board Books,” and “Word falling—Photo falling—Breakthrough in the Grey Room.”

The Nova mythology is not yet fully developed in The Soft Machine, and the theme of revolt is limited by the ambiguity of the novel's narrators and of the apocalyptic passages produced by revolt. The “I” of The Soft Machine is constantly changing identity, sometimes playing conman and controller, sometimes playing victim or guerrilla. Only the hustler's voice remains fairly constant, but that is a voice that stands for no stable identity or point of view. The writer-persona does not dominate the narrative, and when he does appear, he is more often a passive observer than a rebel, striking out at the controllers only in “The Mayan Caper.” As observer, the writer voyeuristically partakes of the evil he condemns: he is the amoral technician who can serve both rulers and rebels. The collage passages of apocalyptic disintegration produced by the writer-technician are also ambiguous: the random action of cutups destroys the current structures of reality and ends history, but the ensuing chaos seems to be a Götterdämmerung that liberates no one. The Soft Machine is a first experiment with the cutup as the basis for a novel: the cutup analyzes existing structures and breaks them up but does not produce a new order.

SPACE TRAVEL IN THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED

The Ticket That Exploded continues the basic montage/collage form of The Soft Machine, but carries the experiments with cutup and mythology much further. This second novel of the trilogy makes more extensive use of cut-ups and develops the Nova mythology more explicitly and at greater length, leading to the inclusion of expository passages that were not present in The Soft Machine. In The Ticket That Exploded Burroughs exhibits a technical control that is not attained in the previous novel. The cutups are often effective and moving prose poems, and the increased prominence of the Nova mythology gives the work a coherence and structure that balances the fragmentation of the cutups. Cutups also become meaningful as narrative elements since they play a part in the plot of the myth.

The Ticket That Exploded evolves from The Soft Machine and contains much of the same materials, but creates its own fictional world through different thematic emphasis. Whereas The Soft Machine concentrates on an analysis of past control of mankind through sexuality, The Ticket That Exploded concentrates on mind control in the present through word and image systems. The Soft Machine is dominated by South American imagery and anthropological approaches to myth, while The Ticket That Exploded is dominated by Moroccan and outer-space imagery and the creation of new myths in science-fiction forms. In Ticket Burroughs makes use of the science-fiction convention of portraying the present in a fiction about the future, a purpose clearly announced in the very first routine: “I am reading a science fiction book called The Ticket That Exploded [hereafter abbreviated as TTE]. The story is close enough to what is going on here …” (TTE, p. 5).⁷

Mind control through language (“word and image locks”) is the dominant theme of The Ticket That Exploded, and this theme is associated primarily with imagery of machinery, technology, science, and space travel. A secondary cluster of Moroccan images is also associated with the language theme. Since control by the word and image “machine” and liberation from that control both depend upon “technology” (understanding and manipulating the symbol system) some of the same images represent both control and liberation. Interpretation depends upon the context. For example, a “camera gun” may be used by either “force.”

The most prominent technological and scientific images are the following: space travel, encounters with fantastic new beings and environments on other planets, the film and its script, the tape recorder and its tape, the camera, the radio and radio static, the electronic switchboard, electrical charges, the pinball machine, the typewriter (which types or punches the script-ticket), laboratory experiments and operations on human subjects, viruses and immunization, addiction and apomorphine. Character-images associated with the language control machine are the Nova Mob characters, Bradly and Lykin—the twin astronauts, a film producer and his sycophant, and the old doctor. The Nova police are associated with dismantling the machine; and aggressive partisans, patrols, and combat troops are added to the more passive agents, inspectors, supervisors, and technicians. Moroccan characters—Hassan I Sabbah and Arab street boys—are associated with liberation from word and image control and are linked to space travel fantasies of fish boys and frog boys. Imagery of the Moroccan landscape (panpipes, mountains, blue sky, wind, and mist) is often linked to the liberation imagery of the Nova Police (flutes, tornadoes, blue mist, silence, disintegration) and sometimes to the power imagery of Minraud (Minraud is a hot, desert place). For Burroughs, the body is associated with time and the mind with space, so the mind control theme dictates futuristic space travel imagery in Ticket, in contrast to the earthbound time travel of Soft Machine.

Sexuality remains an important secondary theme in Ticket, and the vegetable-Venusian sexual imagery is present. Some of this imagery is used to create outer-space fantasies of the carnival city of sexual victimization, portrayed as the garden of delights (GOD), the exhibition, and the amusement park. Brief narratives portray explorers on earth and in space being taken over by diseases of sexual control: Ward Island disease, the Sex Skin habit, the Happy Cloak, the Other Half. Three extensive cutup collages are devoted to the sexual theme. The outer-space exhibition and amusement park are the basis for extensive collage in the seventh and eighth routines, “writing machine” and “substitute flesh.” A collage of lyrics from popular love songs forms the fourth routine, “do you love me?” The latter cutup of love lyrics is a pop-art tour de force using the cutup technique and a form of popular art to criticize the concept of romantic love. The most prominent characters associated with the sexual theme are Bradly as traveler-victim and the predatory seducers, Johnny Yen and the Orchid Girl.

Like The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded conveys its meaning through a combination of image clusters and narrative episodes. In Ticket, one narrative dominates the whole work, appearing in fragments of action and exposition: the Nova mythology. The focus on mind control in this novel and its association with space and technology imagery make possible a further development and use of the Nova narrative. And, through the Nova mythology, Burroughs is able to subordinate the themes of sex, addiction, and power to the theme of language, giving the second novel greater unity. Thus writing and cutups become more important than in The Soft Machine, and Lee the agent-writer plays a larger role. Furthermore, as Burroughs develops his theory of the cutup and its role in the Nova myth, cutups point toward something beyond chaotic destruction. The theme of revolt becomes the more positive theme of liberation, and sheer anarchy is replaced by the ideal of autonomy.

The Ticket That Exploded explicitly narrates the plot of the Nova Mob and the Nova Police, with particular emphasis on the Venusian plot called Operation Other Half, in which the Word (language) is used to define and control sexuality (the body). The story is of the invasion of planet earth by the Mobsters and their mechanism of vampirelike possession, transformation, and control. Ticket, however, minimizes the gangster and vampire metaphors and develops the virus and film metaphors—which are in keeping with the science and technology theme of the novel. The double metaphor of virus and film provides the controlling imagery for the Nova plot in Ticket. Operation Other Half is defined as a double virus invasion: “There were at least two parasites one sexual the other cerebral working together the way parasites will” (TTE, p. 144). The replication of a virus is equated with the linear repetition of the same image. Thus the Other Half is a “disease of the image track” in which human victims are forced to participate in “the reality film,” a linear repetition of the same scripts, images, and sounds with no alternative allowed—indeed no alternative is conceivable. The Word virus controls our concept of reality and imposes a dualism that makes it impossible to change reality. Burroughs attacks all either-or thinking, especially the separation and opposition of mind and body, word and world, birth and death, pleasure and pain, male and female. It is these concepts, according to Burroughs, that trap us into bodies that can be manipulated by power elites. The primary form of control is a sexuality in which the Other Half is a yearning for another body to assuage the feeling of separation caused by dualism:

The human organism is literally consisting of two halves from the beginning word and all human sex is this unsanitary arrangement whereby two entities attempt to occupy the same three-dimensional coordinate points giving rise to the sordid latrine brawls which have characterized a planet based on ‘the Word,’ that is, on separate flesh engaged in endless sexual conflict—The Venusian Boy-Girls under Johnny Yen took over the Other Half, imposing a sexual blockade on the planet—(It will be readily understandable that a program of systematic frustration was necessary in order to sell this crock of sewage as Immortality, the Garden of Delights, and love—

(TTE, p. 52)

To Burroughs, the Other Half we yearn for—whether seen as the physical pleasure of orgasm, the sentimental feeling of love, the opposite sex, or another body—is an illusion, an image created by Word that is part of a repetitious reality film controlled by external forces. Thus, says Burroughs, Word is the Other Half.

Dualistic thinking sets up a desire for unity that can never be fulfilled because opposites can never become one; at the same time, it creates and aggravates conficts through polarization. The only unity possible in such a mental universe is the victory of one “half” over another, but this is death or Nova. A universe of irreconcilable opposites in conflict is the Nova plot:

The basic nova technique is very simple: Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts—This is done by dumping on the same planet life forms with incompatible conditions of existence—There is of course nothing “wrong” about any given life form since “wrong” only has reference to conflicts with other life forms—The point is these life forms should not be on the same planet—Their conditions of life are basically incompatible in present time form and it is precisely the work of the nova mob to see that they remain in present time form, to create and aggravate the conflicts that lead to the explosion of a planet, that is to nova—

(TTE, pp. 54-55)

The Nova Police combat this plot through a double metaphorical action: exposure, which produces immunization to deception (the virus-apomorphine metaphor), and cutups which produce a wordless silence (the technology metaphor of film and tape). When the Nova plot is seen as a virus, seeing and understanding the evil are sufficient to free oneself from it with the understanding that regulation of a physical need is the goal, not eradication: “Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it” (TTE, p. 51). The Nova Policeman combats the virus as an “agent” who trains himself through exposure, tracks down Nova criminals like a private eye, and “arrests” them by exposing their identity and techniques. The Biologic Courts attempt to control the arrested virus-criminals.

When the Nova plot is seen as a reality film and individuals as controlled by a pre-recorded tape, the Nova Policeman becomes a guerrilla fighter who aggressively destroys control “lines,” “locks,” “molds,” and “habits” through cutups with film, tape, and text. Many do-it-yourself passages in Ticket instruct the reader in specific cutup techniques in these three media. (The “invisible generation,” a previously published essay, appears at the end of the book as an appendix on technique.⁸) Control by word and image is paradoxically destroyed by new arrangements of word and image, the random method of cutups ensuring freedom from external control.⁹ From this revolt comes a vision that goes beyond destruction. A new autonomous consciousness is born from the realization that reality is an illusion created by word and image locks: “What is word?—Maya—Maya—Illusion—Rub out the word and the image track goes with it—” (TTE, p. 145). Knowledge of the illusion and how to break it leds to the creation of new realities in the Rewrite Department: “Alternatively Johnny Yen can be written back to a green fish boy—There are always alternative solutions” (TTE, p. 54). The narrative of the fish boy, in particular, is Burroughs's metaphor for metamorphosis into a new state of being based on new mental constructs.

But Nova Police do not attempt to set up a new world order based on one truth (one Word); they “do their work and go” (like apomorphine¹⁰), providing a model of resistance and autonomy for others. They are identified with Hassan I Sabbah, founder of the secret assassin cult of the eleventh century, and with Prospero of Shakespeare's The Tempest, a magician who voluntarily gives us his power. They produce a “silence” in which words and images exist in a random field or space, uncontrolled by linear concepts (the sentence, plot, time, cause and effect). In this silence all forms and identities disappear, the Police and the Mob included. Burroughs the author becomes identified with this activity, and the novel is his silent space, its form a metaphor for the alternative consciousness the work itself creates. In the final routine, “silence to say goodbye,” the disappearance of forms is illustrated as the Nova characters say goodbye, and the text itself disappears into the calligraphy of Brion Gysin.

The Nova mythology allows a great proliferation of narrative fragments since the myth acts as a master metaphor that includes and interprets all of the narratives as secondary metaphors. Even narrative fragments that do not explicitly refer to the Nova plot can be seen as versions or transformations of the basic conflict. Astronaut narratives featuring Bradly and Lykin signify exploration of the symbolic field of consciousness and the possibilities of enslavement, rebellion, or metamorphosis. Explorers taken over by the Sex Skin, Happy Cloak, Ward Island disease, or the Orchid Girl are versions of the Venusian Operation Other Half. The adventures of Arab street boys lead to apocalypse and rescue through transformation. The autobiographical John and Bill, experimenting with their 1920s crystal radio set, are technicians producing cutups. The Board and their Board Books are a three-dimensional, realistic version of the Nova Mob and the Word virus. There is no end to the possible transformations or elaborations, making the myth an open construct. The novel is thus a form open to endless elaboration: its present text is but an arbitrary fragment that can be altered in subsequent editions.¹¹

Cutups also proliferate in Ticket, opening up narrative “lines” to new associations and transformations beyond the capacity of improvisational fantasy by one author. Juxtaposition through cutup exposes hidden relationships and creates new ones, increasing the number and speed of transformations. Cutups break down conventional boundaries (“lines”), thus creating the possibility of alternative forms and alternative realities. And cutups represent the alternative of a new consciousness, that of a self-regulating autonomous individual free of external social and psychological controls. In Ticket Burroughs incorporates into his theory of cutups some of the vocabulary and techniques of Scientology, which he investigated in the early 1960s in London, contemporaneously with the writing of the trilogy.¹² Thus Scientology is added to Reich's orgone theory as a major metaphor for and analysis of control.

Burroughs's exploration and analysis of mind control in The Ticket That Exploded reveals a theory of language that is structuralist in orientation, although his method of analysis is metaphorical rather than theoretical or scientific. Like the structuralists, Burroughs sees language as a synchronic system of relationships that is suprapersonal. The subject is a creation of language rather than vice versa. And, in subordinating all other behavior to language, Burroughs parallels the structuralist idea that all aspects of culture can be identified linguistically as symbol systems having the same structure as language. Like the structuralists, Burroughs attacks conventional bourgeois concepts of the self and society, and the belief that these concepts are natural, self-evident, or real. He shows that they are linguistic-social constructs linked to particular economic and political structures, and that a structuralist analysis can free one from unconscious victimization through total awareness and self-consciousness.¹³ Burroughs's literary expression of structuralist theory goes a step further than the critical analyses of Lévi-Strauss or Barthes or their followers. Burroughs, through his art, attempts to act upon the linguistic system and change it, thereby acting upon and changing the reader's consciousness. He acknowledges the paradoxical nature of his task (fighting words with words), but maintains a belief in the possibility of individual autonomy.

APOCALYPSE NOW: NOVA EXPRESS

Nova Express, the last novel in Burroughs's experimental trilogy, presents the Nova mythology in its final, most fully developed and coherent form and also focuses on that mythology more strongly through its simplified and condensed structure. Nova Express continues to use the montage/collage structure of The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, but reduces the number of routines to eight carefully selected groups of narrative and cutup passages. Much of the material had been previously published, and it is apparent that Burroughs chose some of his most successful fragments. The eight routines are further subdivided by subtitles, which usually distinguish different narrative episodes and which separate narratives from cutups, thus providing the reader with thematic and transitional guidelines not present in the two previous novels.

Fewer routines selected from among Burroughs's best work and more explicit organization within routines make Nova Express a more concise and more easily comprehensible work, but Burroughs goes further in clarifying his fiction for the reader. Nova Express begins with a long exposition that immediately presents and explains the central myth, orienting the reader at the beginning to basic metaphors and conflicts. Expository passages throughout the text explain the mythology and other esoteric references (apomorphine, Reich's orgone theory, Hubbard's Scientology, Burroughs's theory of junk, sense withdrawal tanks, and so forth). The function of cutup material from literary sources is also clarified since three major works receive the most emphasis: The Waste Land, The Trial, and The Tempest. Thus Nova Express is more self-explanatory than the previous novels.

Also, for the first time, Burroughs arranges his routines in a linear sequence, following the plot of the Nova conflict. This plot proceeds from “wising up the marks” and attempted escape by Nova criminals, to the intervention of the Nova Police and taking the case to the Biologic Court, to a deadlock between opposing forces and Burroughs's final warning. The routines are also arranged in an order of increasing complexity: the first routine is a direct exposition of thesis and plot while the last contains nine cutups, more than any other in the book. As Eric Mottram has said, “Nova Express … is openly didactic and takes the form of a series of warning scenes, proceeding from Burroughs's understanding of his earlier work and the misunderstanding and rejection of it at the hands of the public and the critics.”¹⁴ Also, as Mottram's statement indicates, Burroughs seems to be clarifying his mythology in his own mind as well as the reader's.

In his final version of the Nova myth, Burroughs focuses on the cosmic conflict between the Mob and the Police as the dominating metaphor, giving the conflict a metaphysical emphasis, as opposed to the social and psychological emphasis of the two preceding novels. He returns to the gangster-vampire imagery, the addiction metaphor, and the carny world of Naked Lunch for the dominant motifs of Nova Express, subordinating his previous analyses of body and mind control, their pseudosciences drawn from Reich and Hubbard, and their image clusters to his own pseudoscience of addiction and the accompanying junk imagery. All of the characters assume carny-world identities and voices, and all are versions of Burroughs's actual identities, past and present. For example, Uranian Willy (the reformed addict), the Subliminal Kid (the rebel technician of the cutup), Inspector Lee (the observer who exposes the truth), Hassan I Sabbah (the prophet whose vision comes from drug and linguistic experiments), and Mob members (Burroughs as addict-hustler and creator of his own victimization) are all roles that Burroughs has played in real life. Thus Nova Express is based on a merger of autobiographical experience and a cosmic mythology created out of cultural materials (both popular and literary) external to the self. The implication is, of course, that the self is the source of all mythologies; that the cosmic is personal, history is fiction, life is art, autobiography is legend. In Nova Express, the continuing themes of the trilogy coalesce into their most powerful expression, probably because Burroughs returns to the carny world of Naked Lunch for the controlling vision.

This last novel in the trilogy also reveals most clearly a system of values that the metaphors represent. In his mythic conflict between good and evil, Burroughs maps out a system of equations and oppositions. Virus is equated with addiction, and addiction equals word, equals linearity, equals cause-effect, equals control, equals reality/fact, equals time, equals order, equals repetition, equals form, equals boundaries, equals convention. And the following values are equated with each other and opposed to the preceding list: immunization, apomorphine, silence, cutups/juxtaposition/field, randomness/spontaneity, regulation/autonomy/liberation, space, chaos, innovation, disintegration, merger, improvisation. (Additional values can be added to this list; these are some of the major concepts found in Burroughs's fiction.) In this value system, based on similarities and differences, Burroughs again shows the structuralist tendency of this thought. Burroughs's mythmaking is also an analysis of myth as a system of regulations, as a second-order language that communicates values, and as a mediation between irreconcilable opposites. His analysis of myth parallels that of Lévi-Strauss,¹⁵ but Burroughs applies his analysis to contemporary Western culture, whereas Lévi-Strauss confines himself to the myths of American Indian tribes.

Because of its brevity and the linear arrangement of routines, Nova Express [hereafter abbreviated as NE] lends itself to a chapter-by-chapter analysis. The first routine, “Last Words,” opens with a statement of the essential conflict. Hassan I Sabbah and Inspector Lee of the Nova Police directly address the reader in prophetic tones. Hassan tells us that we have been conned into ignorance and victimization by language itself: “What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: ‘the word’” (NE, p. 12).¹⁶ Inspector Lee explains the strategy of the Nova Mob and the only defense: total resistance with apomorphine and silence. “And what does my program of total austerity and total resistance offer you? I offer you nothing. I am not a politician. These are conditions of total emergency. … I would like to sound a word of warning—To speak is to lie—To live is to collaborate. … It is precisely a question of regulation …” (NE, pp. 14-15). The routine then switches to a monologue by a member of the Mob who describes Mob activities, the Nova plot as outlined in the Board Books, and the Mob's plan to escape when the earth blows up. In this monologue, the character of the Intolerable Kid, or I&I (Immovable and Irresistible), another version of the dualistic Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, tries to produce a Nova by aggravating existing conflicts. But the narrator feels the heat closing in and the marks wising up, and soon the entire Mob is confronted with the possibility of arrest through “total exposure” by the Nova Police.

“So Pack Your Ermines,” the second routine, describes the “capers” of a number of Nova criminals, usually ending in intersection and arrest. These capers are cutup with time travel based on Burroughs's autobiographical memories of St. Louis, South America, and Morocco. The routine ends with a “breakthrough in the grey room,” both forces trying to seize control of the reality film governing the earth. Nova Express again uses the repeated refrain “Word falling—Photo falling—Breakthrough in the Grey Room” to signal the disintegration of present reality. The deadlock results in silence: “The silence fell heavy and blue in mountain villages—Pulsing mineral silence as word dust falls from demagnetized patterns” (NE, p. 40). In the milieu of silence, Agent K9 is transported in time to the past—St. Louis and Dr. Benway. Benway is involved in one of his infamous experiments and explains why junk is blue rather than green (metallic rather than vegetable). He is intersected by the Nova Police, a force in the present. In silence, the past, present, and future merge into one moment; and, when the Nova Police arrest Nova criminals of one time, the criminals of all times are affected.

“Chinese Laundry” increases the suspense of the conflict between the deadlocked forces. “Breakthrough in the grey room” means that Nova is imminent; and, in order to prevent it, the police must discover the apomorphine formula, which will “deactivate all verbal units and blanket the earth in silence” (NE, p. 47), thus counteracting the Nova formula. Once verbal units are disintegrated, Nova cannot take place because the structure that produces Nova will no longer exist. Apomorphine is defined as “no word and no image” and “anti-virus.” A Nova Policeman and the District Supervisor interrogate a technician who, under the pressure of interrogation, metamorphizes into Dr. Benway, then into a Death Dwarf. These criminals maintain that the police will never get the formula in time, that “the nova formulae cannot be broken, that the process is irreversible once set in motion” (NE, p. 48). But the defection of Uranian Willy tips the scales in favor of the police. The routine ends with a pitched battle (“Towers, open fire”) between Nova Police, aided by partisans, and the Nova Mob. The section in this routine called “Coordinate Points” explains mechanisms and techniques of Nova, the function of the Nova Police, and their techniques.

The fourth routine, “Crab Nebula,” describes continuing combat on many fronts, again ending without victory for either side. This routine concentrates on analyzing the virus powers and their source, the Crab Nebula. Agent K9 visits the Insect People of Minraud, whose planet is a totalitarian society controlled by pain and fear. Everything is controlled by the Elders, described as bodiless brains: an intricate bureaucracy wired to the control brains direct all movement like a living computer. Great ovens standing at the center of the cities dispose of offenders. Associated with Burroughs's power imagery, the Insect people are the forces responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nazi concentration camps, and the Stalinist purges. They have occupied earth by forming an alliance with the Virus Power of the Vegetable People (i.e., the sexual control of the Venusians). K9 explains the double virus infecting the soft machine (the body) and the dualistic universe of the Word. He shows how to fight the virus or redirect the machine with various kinds of cutups (called “juxtaposition formulae”).

In the fifth routine, “From a Land of Grass without Mirrors,” the combat continues, and the human body's weakness for addiction is presented as the corollary of the virus powers' invasion of earth. Several narrative fantasies explore the theme of sexual control throughout history, and the counteraction of Nova agents through identity change. The routine ends with a collage passage, “Remember I Was Carbon Dioxide,” on the theme of disappearing identity, which is dominated by cutup material from The Waste Land.¹⁷ Whereas Eliot's poem laments the loss of myth, Burroughs's cutup celebrates freedom from illusion while acknowledging the pathos of memories of past attachments. In the section called “A Distant Thank You,” Burroughs introduces a new metaphor for a new consciousness that would produce a different human nature: the Lemur People. One of man's evolutionary ancestors, the Lemur People are “all affect” and without aggressive instincts. They are what man has rejected in himself in the course of evolution and civilization: “They are of such a delicacy you understand the least attempt-thought of holding or possessing and they are back in the branches where they wait the master who knew not hold and possess—They have waited a long time—Five hundred thousand years more or less I think” (NE, p. 121).

“Gave Proof through the Night” takes the conflict off the battlefield—earth—and into the Biologic Courts for mediation. All of the virus powers are called before a judge who cancels their permits. The decision is appealed to a higher court, but the superior judge is “The Man at the Typewriter” (Burroughs as writer), who refuses to alter the cancellations, and the virus forces disintegrate. Each section of this routine is built around the theme of disintegration, beginning with the sinking of SS America¹⁸ and ending with the death of the gods of time-money-junk. Cutups destory control and create a timeless, bodiless realm. The final sentence indicates that man has himself created the virus power of his addition: “Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, disaster to my blood whom I created” (NE, p. 140).

“This Horrible Case” describes the legal conflict in terms of two incompatible life forms, A and B, and the procedure of the Biologic Courts. Each side has a Biologic Counselor, a writer who prepares briefs by creating facts. Two cutups of The Trial and the case of life form A are presented as examples of how a brief is written. The cutups emphasize the theme of the biological trap, an unsolvable dilemma. Within the context of Nova Express, The Trial is a parallel example of man's victimization by forces beyond his control or understanding. Burroughs's homage to Kafka also emphasizes the increased importance of the writer in this final version of the Nova myth.

The final routine, “Pay Color,” begins with the Subliminal Kid, the rebel technician, destroying current reality through exposing the world's population to film and tape cutups of all past and present cultures. The City, a composite of all human civilizations, dissolves, as do human bodies when reality is perceived as an illusion that is one of many ways of organizing experience, but not a privileged one. All that remains is a “silent” world of sensory perception. The transformation to a timeless, bodiless state illustrates the “last words” of Hassan I Sabbah: “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” (These are his last words because, once they are truly understood, no further words are possible.) The prophet who had exposed evil at the opening of the book announces his cure at the end: freedom through awareness and alteration of consciousness. Subsequent sections portray disintegration and mental freedom over and over through various narrative episodes and image clusters based on liberation motifs. The most prominent allusions to earlier writings are to Eliot's The Waste Land, The Tempest, Reich's orgone theory, and Hubbard's Scientology. Shakespeare's play, especially, establishes a poignant tone for the novel's conclusion with Burrough's use of repeated fragments of the following lines:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. …

(4.1, 148-58)

Burroughs identifies the Nova police and himself as writer with Prospero, a godlike artist who uses his magical powers to destroy evil but then gives up the power to control others. Prospero's words also reinforce Burroughs's theme of reality as an illusion. The merger of Prospero's farewell and Burroughs's farewell at the end of the novel is an example of Burroughs's poetic power with cutups:

Nothing here now but the recordings may not refuse vision in setting forth—Silence—Don't answer—That hospital melted into air—The great wind revolving turrents towers palaces—Insubstantial sound and image flakes fall—Through all the streets time for him to forbear—Blest be he on walls and windows people and sky—On every part of your dust falling softly—falling in the dark mutinous “No more”—My writing arm is paralyzed on this green land—Dead Hand, no more flesh scripts—Last door—Shut off Mr. Bradly Mr.—He heard your summons—Melted into air—You are yourself “Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin—”all the living and the dead—You are yourself—There be—

Well that's about the closest way I know to tell you and papers rustling across city desks … fresh southerly winds a long time ago.

(NE, pp. 186-87)

It is obvious by the end of the novel that the order of the routines is illusory since the plot does not progress. Linear sequence implied by the existence of a unified plot is undercut by the fact that the conflict between Nova Mob and Nova Police is escalated to higher and higher levels but never really concluded. Upon examination, it becomes clear that Nova Express describes a situation, not an action: the criminal conspiracy is but a metaphor for the human condition. Nova Express is a prophecy presenting intense visions of what is, not predictions of what will be. Although the warning about an inevitable world holocaust and social collapse is real enough,¹⁹ the novel's apocalyptic tone does not stem from Burroughs's social criticism, but from a spiritual message. The world of conflict and suffering that is our present reality is a fallen world that can be redeemed and transformed by truth, i.e., a correct vision of things as they are.

Burroughs is a radical thinker who challenges the basic concepts upon which Western civilization is built, but he is not a political thinker with a practical program. Therefore, it is not accurate to interpret Burroughs in solely political or social terms and thus to criticize him for proposing no valid political alternative.²⁰ On the other hand, part of Burroughs's message is the insistence that political and social changes will not bring greater justice or freedom as long as humanity retains the same conceptual framework.²¹

COSMONAUT OF INNER SPACE

Burroughs's trilogy, taken as one work, is an important contribution to the form and theory of fiction. In the trilogy Burroughs develops the experimental techniques he had first introduced in Naked Lunch: juxtaposition, collaboration, and pop mythology. The trilogy experiments with these techniques in more extreme form, leading to a radically new kind of fiction and to a new view of artistic creation.

The juxtaposition technique is used not only between short narratives and between sentences, but within narratives and within sentences. Juxtaposition replaces narrative as the dominant form of the novel, and the cutup becomes an important new form of inspiration along with improvisational fantasy. The exhaustive use of juxtaposition through cutups expands the definition of fiction to include nonnarative prose fragments and sentence fragments, thus challenging the conventions of the novel and the conventions of the prose text. Like Naked Lunch, the trilogy is an antinovel and an antibook even on the level of punctuation, dots and dashes replacing the periods of the sentence.²² Burroughs has frequently quoted Brion Gysin's statement that “writing is fifty years behind painting,”²³ and the trilogy does indeed seem to be an attempt to create the literary equivalent of the painter's collage. It is not possible to do exactly the same thing with words, of course, but Burroughs does succeed in creating new techniques of fiction writing, thus increasing the range and potential of the art, and, in the process, challenging our conventional concepts and forcing a redefinition of the genre.

Increased use of juxtaposition also allows for greater collaboration with other artists, for Burroughs can easily cut up the work of others, both living and dead, into his own texts; and the fragmentary form of his montage/collage novel structure is always open to additional material. Burroughs had remarked upon the organizational and editorial help he received from others in preparing the final text of Naked Lunch, but the text itself had been his own composition. In the trilogy, he appropriates the texts of other published writers and actively collaborates with others in creating texts. Collaborations with Michael Portman, Ian Sommerville, Antony Balch, Brion Gysin, and Kells Elvins are duly noted within the novels. Collaboration is another technique that challenges our conventional concepts of the book, the novel, and the literary artist, for we usually regard a novel as the sole product of one shaping and gifted personality.

In the trilogy Burroughs also perfects his use of pop mythology, which becomes not only a form of social criticism but a criticism of the structures of reality (as a form of consciousness that can be altered). Burroughs's mythmaking can be compared to that of many other postromantic artists, but Burroughs's myth is strikingly different from the usual use of a personal mythology to replace outworn traditional beliefs and to give order and informing vision to art. Burroughs's Nova myth is parodic, for, at the same time that it orders experience and creates a world, it satirizes those very functions and negates itself in the very process of creation. Burroughs's myth is not invested with belief; it is not a symbol of transcendent reality. Rather, it is an analysis and criticism of myth whose aim is to destroy the power of myth, leaving the reader free of its linguistic control. Burroughs's desire to destroy myth is the reason his Nova mythology is never really completed or “filled in” with inner detail and final boundaries. It is a fragment that shows how myth is created and how it works without the desire to impose its system upon the reader.

The informing vision of the trilogy is the same hipster mentality that gave Naked Lunch its iconoclastic power. The difference is that art (especially the artistic technique of juxtaposition) replaces drugs as the source of vision, and Burroughs becomes more explicit about the fact that he is writing about forms of consciousness rather than the adventures of a particular personality. A theory of consciousness that was implicit in Naked Lunch is explicit in the trilogy. For Burroughs, consciousness constructs reality, and no particular system of ordering and comprehending experience is more valid than any other. Every system of thought is a metaphor or myth based on man's linguistic capacity, and every myth is an ephemeral attempt to give form to the formless field of phenomena. Burroughs's novels both illustrate and analyze this human process of structuring and myth-making. He attacks those who claim a special authority for one vision of reality and celebrates the ability of every person to create his own world. Whereas Hassan I Sabbah's maxim, “Nothing is real: everything is permitted,” may strike terror in those who fear the chaos it implies, Burroughs delights in the freedom it gives to play with forms and to create alternative realities.

Burroughs's theory of consciousness is not solipsistic because he acknowledges the prior existence of language and the body and the fact that they shape consciousness rather than vice versa. They are also the means of social interaction and thus the opportunity for evil in Burroughs's world. Linguistic structures and bodily needs can be used to control the consciousness of others. Although Burroughs often expresses in fantasy the desire to be free of both language and the body, his actual position is that mental and physical structures cannot be eliminated but can be beneficially regulated by a consciousness free of external controls.

Burroughs's theory of consciousness and his radical experimentation with form in the trilogy led him to develop his own theory of art as the process of consciousness, and the articulation of this theory in and through the trilogy is probably that work's most significant achievement—both for Burroughs's continuing artistic career and for the history of the avant-garde. The trilogy proposes and illustrates a concept of the artwork²⁴ as a process and asserts that the goal of art is action rather than contemplation. The art-process, as defined by Burroughs's fiction, begins with the direct apprehension of reality, defined as a conscious mental state. Thus the first task of the artist is to explore psychic territory, a quest undertaken by Burroughs first through drugs, then through note-taking; and, throughout his career, Burroughs has compiled notes on dreams, fantasies, drug-travel-sex experiences, and various social milieus, as well as on his literary experiments. Burroughs himself has defined his purpose as psychic exploration, dubbing himself “cosmonaut of inner space.”²⁵ An individual work is created by selecting, organizing, and editing the notes, which consist not only of current writings by Burroughs but also his past work and that of other artists as well. Using the texts of others and collaborating with contemporaries are part of the process because Burroughs does not see the creating consciousness as separate from other consciousnesses: all art is collaboration.

Publication does not produce the fixed and final form of a particular piece, but a fragment of the continually open and ongoing process of Burroughs's artwork. The process is not complete with publication, and Burroughs's theory does not focus on the art-object as its end. Rather, the goal is the creation of an experience in the reader. Burroughs explicitly states in the trilogy that he wishes to re-create in the reader's mind the experience that his fictions record and embody. The artwork, then, for Burroughs is the lifelong process of consciousness, and individual publications are but fragments of one continuous work. As Burroughs remarked in an interview with Gerard Malanga, “all my books are one book, it's just a continual book.”²⁶ Within this context, Burroughs can and does reuse and revise previously published pieces. Since each work is a fragment of the total artistic process, no work is ever a finished masterpiece immune to change. A publication is an index to the artist's consciousness at that time, but the same work can be revised and placed in a new context later on.

The actual Burroughs artwork is generated by the reader's interaction with the text. A work by Burroughs demands the reader's active participation in the creative process by interpreting a fragmentary text that requires a new way of reading not only the text, but our world. Then the reader becomes one of Burroughs's collaborators in the creation of the artwork, just as we are all collaborators in the creation of reality. Thus Burroughs's insistence that everyone is an artist and that techniques like the cutup can make everyone a poet. Consciousness makes us all creators: Burroughs's artwork is an attempt to reveal this truth.

Burroughs's radical experimentation in the trilogy confirmed his reputation as an important avant-garde artist, and many academic critics of contemporary fiction began to acknowledge his significance in the latter part of the 1960s and in the 1970s. Burroughs was often placed in a 1960s context of existentialism, absurdism, black humor, the antinovel, and radical social protest. Nevertheless, in spite of attempts to see Burroughs as part of contemporary intellectual currents and thus as a serious artist in the modern tradition, his work remained highly controversial. The critical controversy focused on Burroughs's central innovations as a prose writer: the images of sex and violence (what is narrated), the use of random structures and repetition (how it is narrated), and the ambivalent or contradictory tone (stance of the narrator). Adherents to traditional critical principles tended to reject Burroughs's innovations as morally or artistically reprehensible, whereas critics who were themselves committed to avant-garde art tended to see these very same elements in Burroughs's fiction as the source of his strength and importance as an artist. This clear-cut division of critical response makes Burroughs's work almost a litmus test of a critic's attitude toward the avant-garde.

Reviews of the trilogy were also mixed and often as extreme as those for Naked Lunch. Reviewers such as Joan Didion, Theodore Solotaroff, and Terry Southern praised the novels for their insight and technique,²⁷ while many other reviewers were repelled by the cutup method and by the obscene images that convey Burroughs's analysis of control systems. It is probably true that the average reader has difficulty with the experimentalism of the novels, confining their readership to a special group of admirers (academics, other writers and artists, Burroughs fans). Posterity will decide whether Burroughs's trilogy will be more accessible to future readers, who may find that what was once difficult or eccentric has become yet another familiar convention.

Notes

1. Burroughs also compiled Dead Fingers Talk (London, 1963), a novel that incorporates routines from Naked Lunch and the other three novels in order to introduce his work to the British public. Dead Fingers Talk is not discussed in this chapter because it contains so little new material and because it has not been published in the United States.

2. Palmer, “William Burroughs,” p. 52.

3. In the Palmer interview, p. 52, Burroughs carefully points out that the use of the cutup technique separates the trilogy from Naked Lunch and gives the three later novels a formal unity. In The Job, p. 13, he also separates Naked Lunch from the following novels on the basis of the cutup technique.

4. See Robin Lydenberg, “Cut-Up: Negative Poetics in William Burroughs and Roland Barthes,” Comparative Literature Studies 15 (1978):414-30; and Gérard-Georges Lemaire, “23 Stitches Taken,” in The Third Mind, by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, pp. 9-24.

5. Burroughs has used this term many times to describe his work. The earliest reference is in Pierre Dommergues, “Rencontre avec William Burroughs,” Les Langues Modernes 59 (January-February 1965): 79-83. This interview is actually a translation of part of the transcript of an interview Eric Mottram conducted with Burroughs for the BBC in 1965.

6. Burroughs had begun reading Reich in the 1930s, kept up with his work, and owned an orgone box. “Emotional plague,” “regulation,” and “immunization” are Reichian terms that are echoed in Burroughs's work. Reich's discussion of the emotional plague in Character Analysis is relevant to Burroughs: “It [the emotional plague] made an inroad into human society with the mass suppression of genital sexuality; it became an endemic disease which has been tormenting people the world over for thousands of years. There are no grounds for assuming that the emotional plague is passed on from mother to child in a hereditary way. According to our knowledge, it is an endemic illness, like schizophrenia or cancer, with one notable difference, i.e., it is essentially manifested in social life.” Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, tr. Vincent Carfagno, 3d ed. (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1972), p. 504. Reich's The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (1931) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) are also relevant to Burroughs's work.

7. The Ticket That Exploded (New York, 1967). Page references in the text are from this edition.

8. “The Invisible Generation” was first published in two parts in International Times, 14 November 1966, p. 6, and 16 January 1967, p. 6.

9. Burroughs acknowledges the paradox of fighting the control of words with words in the Knickerbocker interview, p. 154.

10. The same words are applied to apomorphine in “Kicking Drugs,” p. 41.

11. The American Grove Press editions of The Ticket That Exploded and The Soft Machine are different from the original Paris Olympia Press editions. There are omissions and additions, different typography.

12. Burroughs's most detailed discussion of Scientology appears in The Job, pp. 24-39.

13. The parallels between Burroughs's thinking about language in the trilogy and Roland Barthes's structuralist analysis in Mythologies and Barthes's other work of the 1950s and early 1960s are striking. Although Burroughs was living in Paris during this period, he has never mentioned any direct contact with structuralist theorists. He seems to have arrived at similar conclusions independently, perhaps through his own anthropological studies. At any rate, Burroughs's mode of thought is always metaphorical and expressed in artistic form, making it difficult to transpose his concepts into abstract, theoretical arguments and critique them as such.

14. Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (London, 1977), p. 102.

15. Compare Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Study of Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955):428-43.

16. Nova Express (New York, 1964). Page numbers in the text are from this edition.

17. Called “the first great cutup collage” by Burroughs in the Knickerbocker interview, p. 153.

18. This satirical fantasy is the piece Burroughs wrote with Kells Elvins in 1938. Its inclusion here is typical of Burroughs's mixture of old and new material and his desire to create a unified body of work.

19. Burroughs told Knickerbocker, “I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up the marks. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable” (p. 174).

20. Mottram, for example, calls Burroughs an elitist who rejects all group action in favor of individual anarchic subversion (William Burroughs, pp. 112-13).

21. See Burroughs's comments on the similarities between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Knickerbocker interview, p. 173.

22. Céline set a precedent for this style of punctuation, and Burroughs is one of his admirers.

23. Burroughs has repeated this statement in different forms many times over the years. The first published appearance is probably “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin,” A Casebook on the Beat, ed. Thomas Parkinson (New York: Crowell, 1961), pp. 105-6. See also Odier, The Job, p. 13; The Third Mind, p. 34; and Bockris, With Burroughs, p. 6.

24. “Artwork” is my own coinage to express the idea of process and to contrast with the concept of a work of art as a finished product.

25. “Censorship,” Transatlantic Review, No. 11 (Winter 1962): p. 6.

26. Malanga interview, p. 94.

27. Joan Didion, “Wired for Shock Treatments,” Book Week, 27 March 1966, pp. 2-3; Theodore Solotaroff, “The Algebra of Need,” New Republic, 5 August 1967, pp. 29-34; Terry Southern, “Rolling Over our Nerve-endings,” Book Week, 8 November 1964, pp. 5, 31.