Nova Express (2 page)

However, history is no more simply a “content” of
Nova Express
than it is a “context” for it. In part, this is because Burroughs mixed up levels of reality as deliberately as he mixed his genres, to make ontologically preposterous hybrids: “Not The Cancer Deal with The Venusians.” Lines that didn't make the final cut included: “President Kennedy virtually admitted that at least two known Venusian molluscs were sitting on his cabinet,” and “Ben Gurion denied yesterday that any connection exists between what he termed ‘the Jewish people' and the crab powers of Minraud.”
7
This is one reason the book has not dated and become domesticated as either “historical” or “allegorical”: the big picture is always bigger and weirder than any particular history. “The death dwarfs are weapons of the nova mob,” Burroughs explained in an interview with the
Paris Review
, two months after his book came out, “which in turn is calling the shots in the cold war.”
8
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson are accordingly named in
Nova Express
,
but they are not even bit-part players in the galactic conflict led by “Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin.” As Inspector Lee insists, “history is fiction,” a confidence trickster's “Big Store” operation, involving elaborate sets and a cast of millions. Once they are seen for what they are, however, all the false fronts of the received cultural texts, all the media myths, political theater, and advert
ising spin can be rewritten, chaotically scrambled, and subjected to ridicule until they lose their power to create solid “reality” and dictate the future.
Nova Express
is not “about” history; it treats history as paper and cuts it up.

If Burroughs' “Last Words” are not “too late,” there is “One hope left in the universe: Plan D”: “Plan D called for Total Exposure.” The title of the book's second section, “Prisoners, Come Out,” confirms that Burroughs updates the philosophy lesson of the cave in Plato's
Republic
, and at times readers surely feel like reacting in the same way to the man who says we're all chained in darkness and everything we know and love is an illusion. “Don't listen to Hassan i Sabbah”? Enforced liberation from our temporal existence is more than we bargained for, but it's what Burroughs is offering. In a 1961 typescript he identifies his writing as a war machine for time travel out of time itself: “This is war between those of us who want out and those who want to keep us all locked in time. The cut ups are not for artistic purposes. The cut ups are a weapon a sword. I bring not peace but pieces.”
9

“KUNST UND WISSENSCHAFT”

Before it was published in
book form,
Burroughs recorded a longer, utterly compelling performance of “Last Words,”
and I still recall the cold chill of discovering one of the original tapes in a room of the Special Collections Department at Kansas University one winter evening in Lawrence, November 1984. I was immediately mesmerized in my headphones, and have remained so ever since. Three decades later, anyone with access to the Internet can listen to “Last Words” anytime, and follow it by not just more audio tracks from the book but by watching Burroughs perform in
Towers Open Fire
, the 1963 short based on passages from
Nova Express
and
The Ticket That Exploded
directed by Antony Balch. Here his voice, intoning a curse over images of film canisters, is perfectly described as “icily malignant and metallic.”
10
Burroughs plays a dozen different roles—from secret agent in black gloves and a fedora hat to gun-toting guerrilla fighter in combat fatigues and a gas mask—and the fact that his gun fires Ping-Pong balls and was bought from Hamleys toy shop in London does nothing to undermine the force of the film or the conviction that Burroughs was anything other than deadly serious.

Our easy digital access to Burroughs' 1960s audiotape recordings and film performances has a double significance for how to read
Nova Express
in the twenty-first century. First, it confirms that his book cannot be confined to the category of the “literary” or its scenario contained within the fiction. In
Nova Express
, it is not the writer who acts out multiple roles in an imaginary war to save the planet. On the contrary: “One of our agents is posing as a writer.” What Burroughs was doing was much more than self-dramatization and may have been paranoid self-delusion, but it is categorically
not
postmodern literary self-reflexivity: “We all thought we were interplanetary agents involved in a deadly struggle,” he mused in his final novel,
The Western Lands
(1988), before insisting; “The danger and the fear were real enough.”
11
Burroughs' absolute immersion in the cut-up project, his evangelical promotion and daily living of it, had a dark side—­unleashing for a while an ugly megalomania, misogyny, and anti-Semitism—but it is integral to the power of his texts and our experience of them.

The availability of Burroughs' work in multiple media also establishes that
Nova Express
does not belong to the field of “experimental literature,” in the usual sense of formally innovative writing. Up until the publication of
Naked Lunch
in summer 1959, it was still possible to think of Burroughs as “a writer”; not so from that point on. Progressively developing his “third mind” with Brion Gysin, the painter who shared the original cut-up method with him in Paris in October 1959, Burroughs no longer “wrote” but carried out a series of ritualistic
activities
and empirical
operations
in one medium or another, from one technology to another. When Gregory Corso asked what “department” he worked for in a 1961 interview, Burroughs replied, “Kunst und Wissenschaft,”
12
and the Foreword Note to
Nova Express
accordingly frames the book in terms of both the arts and sciences. It's revealing that
Nova Express
not only refers to Gysin's paintings and Dreamachine (“flicker cylinders and projectors”) but cross-references them with experimental equipment such as Wilhelm Reich's orgone accumulator and the sensory isolation tanks built by John Lilly, correlating aesthetic and scientific means and ends.

Nova Express
is not so much “experimental writing” as a device for conducting experiments on the reader: learning to “read” cut-ups means not only experiencing textual time travel but living in a new medium, maybe to mutate and grow “purple fungoid gills” like the amphibious Fish People. Taking quite literally the scientific meaning of “experiment” and the military sense of “avant-garde,” and pushing both to the limits, Burroughs' cut-up project was a decade-long commitment to research and development across a broad range of techniques and technologies in which he collaborated directly with Antony Balch (on films), Ian Sommerville (on audiotapes and photomontages) and Brion Gysin (on the “third mind,” a concept and practice of collaboration in itsel
f
). The results—in writing, film, tape, photography and collage—were weapons in a war and as much by-products of a process as artistic objects in themselves.

The last decade has begun to catch up with Burroughs, and has
seen not only a mass of new scholarly and critical work but the
opening up of the enormous archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the curating of major artwork exhibitions around the world, the publication of catalogs, the release of films, tapes, letters, and the online digitization of some of the hundreds of texts he contributed to the little magazines of the 1960s mimeograph revolution. The result has been a complete transformation in the Burroughs oeuvre, putting center-stage his cut-up work in media beyond the book form. In 2004 it was still possible to argue that the easy commercial availability of
The Soft Machine,
The Ticket That Exploded,
and
Nova Express
, as well as the critical attention paid to them, had misrepresented the cut-up project and perpetuated Burroughs' reductive reception as a
novelist
: as marketed books, the Cut-Up Trilogy might even be seen as an extraordinary
exception
to the cut-up project, I myself argued.
13
With so much more of the larger project available, now is the time to make the counter­argument, and for a new generation to discover the trilogy and to see where it always belonged: not separate from but integrally connected to the full range of Burroughs' unique experiments with word and image.

This is the context for revising the three texts by drawing on archival resources of breathtaking richness, to establish for the first time their manuscript and publishing histories. It is also time to rethink such terms as
cut-up novel
and
cut-up trilogy
. New readers need new scholarship, the state of which has barely advanced since the 1980s, when the first serious but materially flawed academic studies appeared. Drawing on several thousand pages of archival ­materials—from first drafts and variant typescripts to final long galleys—the notes in this edition aim to reveal the unrecognized complexity of
Nova Express
: they are organized section-by-section
because every part has its own untold backstory. The notes therefore aim to make possible new lines of research and reading, and in what follows I offer one such reading, focused on the story that lies behind the book's title. But first, in order to piece together the writing of
Nova Express
we have to unpick the received wisdom about it, starting from the apparent truism that it was the third novel of the Cut-Up Trilogy.

“THE SOFT TICKE
T
”

The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded,
and
Nova Express
have been grouped together for fifty years. This is partly because they are so unlike anything else and partly because the identity of each book is blurred by Burroughs' recycling of material across and between them. Running the books together, however, and taking as read the term “Cut-Up Trilogy” (or its thematic alternative, “The Nova Trilogy”), has separated them from their larger context—the many related short texts, photo-collages, scrapbooks, films and tapes that Burroughs made in parallel—and downplayed the important differences between the books (including the almost total lack of sexual material in
Nova Express
). To some, confusion about the trilogy seems not so much inevitable as
intentional
, on the basis that the cut-up project attacked stable identities and linear chronology.

A certain confusion was indeed inherent in the method, since cutting up texts on the scale of Burroughs' project—involving literally thousands
of pages of source material, many of which were cut, retyped and cut over and over again—was a process incompatible with achieving a satisfactorily finished product, a definitive text. Burroughs didn't think that
Nova Express
was “in any sense a wholly successful book,” but he said the same of
The Soft Machine
and
The Ticket That Exploded
, and for the same reasons.
14
The cut-up method worked well with short texts for little mimeo magazines because the texts were immediate, rough and ephemeral, like the publications themselves: was Burroughs “satisfied” with “Where Flesh Circulates” in
Floating Bear
No. 24 (1962)?
The question wasn't relevant. In contrast, the commercially published novel had a fixed form that took time to produce and would last forever. To call
Nova Express
a “cut-up novel” is both inaccurate (it
wasn't a novel that was then cut up), and imprecise (how much of it is “cut-up” and how much a “novel”?), but Burroughs himself couldn't avoid calling the book
a “novel.” It was a contradiction in terms, which is one reason he ended up producing revised editions, so that over a seven-year period the “trilogy” materialized itself as no fewer than six different books: three versions of
The Soft Machine
(1961, 1966, 1968); two of
The Ticket That Exploded
(1962, 1967), and one of
Nova Express
(1964). And as we'll see, that “one” edition of
Nova Express
gives an entirely misleading impression of simplicity.

In the 1966 edition of
The Soft Machine
, Burroughs made a joke out of the resulting confusion (and of his books' lack of commercial success), referring to being paid for the film rights of “a novel I hadn't written called
The Soft Ticket
” and to selling “the Danish rights on my novel
Expense Account.
” But it's not so funny for anyone genuinely interested in the trilogy and how its parts relate one to another. What
is
“the trilogy” when the editions published in the 1960s make possible no fewer than six different permutations and when there's a trilogy alone of
Soft Machines
?

Ironically, “the trilogy” has by default always maintained a single order: first
The Soft Machine
, then
The Ticket That Exploded
, finally
Nova Express
. The sequence keeps faith with the chronology of the first publications of each title:
The Soft Machine
in 1961 (by Olympia Press in Paris);
The Ticket That Exploded
in 1962 (again, Olympia in Paris); and
Nova Express
in 1964 (by Grove Press in New York). The Olympia editions were never published in the United States and went out of print, however, and the available versions are not only different books but have an entirely different chronological order: in Grove editions, the last title,
Nova Express
, was the earliest edition (dating from 1964), while the revised middle title,
The Ticket That Exploded
,
became the last edition (published in 1967), and the revised first title,
The Soft Machine
,
became the middle volume (published in 1966). Confused? Sketching the development of Burroughs' trilogy over time and relating the books to his work in other media, critics have invariably muddled up the editions and got the history back-to-front. Far from being contra-indicated, an historical approach is long overdue.