GÉRARD CORDESSE

In the main Burroughs is faithful to [the theme he expressed in both The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express]: a coalition of three life-forms infiltrated Earth three thousand years ago, after ruining another planet. Their strategy is to take advantage of human weaknesses and conflicts, exacerbate them and feed on the energy thus released. The soft spots manipulated by these alien agents disguised as human beings (the nova mob), are sex, drugs and power; in this we see Burroughs' obsessions take shape. The Venus Vegetable People crave sex energies, the Uranian Heavy Metal People drugs, and the Minraud Insect People control….

[The three-fold plot is] nowhere to be found in straightforward linear form. The reader must piece [the story lines] together from flashes, obsessive phrases, and incomplete scenes, struggling through disjointed chronology and abrupt changes of narrators, or cryptic cut-ups. The difficulty and sophistication of the narrative technique stands thus in striking contrast to the naiveté of the popular science-fiction outline. Although Burroughs enjoys toying with the science-fiction panoply (space and time travel, immortality, telepathy and mindscreens) he spurns the suspense and adventure element … or he depends on the connotations of these magical words to conjure up the illusion of roaring action. He is more attracted to the oneiric poetry of imaginary worlds…. (p. 34)

The use of science-fiction becomes … passionate when it features Burroughs' perennial themes: addiction, the enslavement of man, resistance, liberation…. [The] distance between fiction and reality varies with passion. Burroughs, for instance, defeated his addiction to hard drugs thanks to an apomorphine cure, so in Nova Express apomorphine is a key weapon…. While the science-fiction rhetoric hides the earnestness of the declaration, the fictional mask is sometimes all-too transparent…. Even the science-fiction conventions cannot hide the deeply personal character of Burroughs' fiction, but is the science-fiction element, which dominates The Ticket That Exploded (1961), Nova Express (1964) and The Wild Boys (1971), simply a façade stuck on the original vision of Naked Lunch (1959) and The Soft Machine (1960)?

In The Soft Machine, allusions to the science-fiction theme that will only be complete in The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express keep floating up enigmatically…. These strange echoes, reverberating back from Burroughs' later work reveal his non-linear, illogical composition, in which time seems to play no part, as if the reader's glance could encompass the whole of his production spread out like a landscape. As a matter of fact, The Soft Machine can only be read after the later novels, which illuminate so many tantalizing clues.

The bulk of the book is devoted to successive variations on a lost Mayan civilization, a theme seemingly unrelated to science-fiction. The hero reaches the Mayan world through various techniques; some belong to fantastic literature (magic, drugs, body exchange), others lie in the province of science-fiction: surgery to build a composite body, time travel through fold-in techniques. The civilization described is not unfamiliar,… [for it has] all the features of the wider science-fiction world…. (pp. 35-7)

Burroughs' Mayan theme is … on the border between fantastic literature and modern science-fiction: Burroughs has moved towards science-fiction by following the historical evolution of the genre. Let us note that just as the science-fiction theme grows from The Soft Machine to Nova Express, the Mayan theme symmetrically dwindles to mere allusions and flashes without disappearing altogether.

Although Naked Lunch, Burroughs' first important novel, is not primarily science-fiction,… [we can find] seeds of what was to be developed.

First of all, the "ars poetica" at work in Naked Lunch is nonrealistic. It never aims at giving a photographic image of our world…. Reality is still recognizable but warped out of shape, caricatured and outrageous; or is it that reality is not what it is taken to be? One look behind the veil of appearances is enough to make your flesh crawl. (p. 37)

In [Burroughs'] works science-fiction is not an intellectual construction, it is rooted in obsessive metaphors. What is ironical is that science-fiction in order to repudiate its low-brow origins tends to pride itself on its conceptual, speculative character: it has taken an avant-garde artist to reactivate the affective charge of its motifs. We are tempted to identify the different stages of the metaphor with the successive books: Naked Lunch would start with grotesque distortion, The Soft Machine would move to the fantastic stage, and The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express would develop the final science-fiction version. In fact this chronological sequence is misleading…. [In] Naked Lunch already, the three stages of the metaphor were present simultaneously…. [The] three stages coexist, fit together and complement each other; Burroughs himself suggests that the modification is not one-way but reversible: "Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book …," [and] the movement is from direct perception to the abstractions of science-fiction and back.

Although it is clear that the science-fiction element gradually eliminates the other versions until it reigns supreme over Nova Express, its function remains ambiguous. The first hypothesis is that, whereas the hallucinations explode like fireworks and threaten to destroy the unity of the book …, the nova conspiracy brings together the different elements; the Mayan theme had the same unifying value but was too remote in time and space from modern experience. In fact, contrary to most science-fiction, the nova theme is not set in the future, it is contemporary but we had not seen through it because we were blindfolded.

Secondly, from an ideological and psychological viewpoint, this all-powerful conspiracy answers Burroughs' needs perfectly: it accounts for addictions, degradations and sufferings; above all, it provides a rationale for successful revolt and liberation, by fictionalizing Burroughs' own apomorphine cure; isn't the nova police its science-fiction metaphor? The sheer size of the conspiracy, its super-human character is a boon for Burroughs' self-esteem: it alleviates his guilt feelings; from a perverted addict he graduates to the status of helpless victim first, then resister, prophet and revolutionary leader, issuing manifestoes and routing evil…. (pp. 39-40)

The growth of the conspiracy theme suggests that Burroughs was gradually seduced and carried away by his poetic vision. There are signs that he did not draw a clear line between reality and speculation. (p. 40)

Both in vision and technique The Wild Boys is less extreme than Nova Express. No more cut-ups and no more alien monsters …; there are enemies and even fierce commitment …, but the enemies are now simply human and refreshingly ridiculous. The ponderous, righteous, middle-aged American Crusade of 1976 is hilarious. Burroughs rediscovers humour, which had disappeared after Naked Lunch, not because science-fiction is not favourable to humour but because the paranoiac conspiracy theme was not. As a matter of fact The Wild Boys is science-fiction…. The nova conspiracy was vaguely contemporary, in fact almost a-temporal, whereas The Wild Boys introduces history by sketching the thirty years to come, not to predict the future but to dramatize Burroughs' hypothesis…. [Burroughs uses frightening metaphors to reveal] that the tide has turned: language that was the instrument of nova oppression has become a weapon of liberation in The Wild Boys. (p. 41)

However topical, Burroughs' Wild Boys remains unmistakably rooted in his previous work…. [But the nova conspiracy] has been totally excised; the fact that, after developing the nova theme over four books, Burroughs was able to suppress it entirely, when it was no longer needed, reveals the degree of his artistic control, masked by apparent confusion.

The nova conspiracy had to disappear because Burroughs seems to have reconciled himself to his past. The degrading slavery of addiction is no longer a central theme. The previous self-hate has disappeared: the wild boys are homosexual and use hallucinogenic drugs freely (but not hard drugs) and these features are now accepted as a liberation from narrow everyday vision, and from woman, that is from the family and organized society. So the disappearance of the science-fiction motif of the nova conspiracy is the result of this change of outlook. The Wild Boys is a less strident, less defensive book, which comes as near tenderness as Burroughs has ever come and it could not be built around the conspiracy motif. (p. 42)

The Wild Boys proposes an alternate vision of our world by projecting it into a near future and effecting some significant changes, which dramatize Burroughs' values and take us off guard…. No other literary device could have allowed him to suspend our preconceptions (rather than our disbelief, for Burroughs does not aim at verisimilitude).

Burroughs does not use science-fiction exclusively (except in Nova Express), he alternates science-fiction with other techniques of dramatizing, rather than reproducing, reality. He has recognized that science-fiction adds excellent tools to his literary panoply. (p. 43)