The Soft Machine Read online

  THE SOFT MACHINE

  Other Works by William S. Burroughs Published by Grove Press

  Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk”

  Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

  The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text

  Nova Express: The Restored Text

  The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

  The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead

  Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

  Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs

  THE SOFT

  MACHINE

  The Restored Text

  William S. Burroughs

  Edited and with an Introduction by

  Oliver Harris

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 1961, 1966 by William S. Burroughs

  Copyright © 2014 by the Estate of William S. Burroughs

  Introduction copyright © 2014 Oliver Harris

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Third revised edition published by Grove Press in 2014.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-0-8021-2211-7

  eISBN: 978-0-8021-9721-4

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Dead On Arrival

  Who Am I To Be Critical?

  Public Agent

  Trak Trak Trak

  Early Answer

  Case Of The Celluloid Kali

  The Mayan Caper

  I Sekuin

  Pretend An Interest

  Last Hints

  Where The Awning Flaps

  1920 Movies

  Where You Belong

  Uranian Willy

  Gongs Of Violence

  Male Image Back In

  Dead Fingers Talk

  Cross The Wounded Galaxies

  Appendices

  1 From The Soft Machine (1961)

  2 “Operation Soft Machine/Cut” (1961)

  3 From The Soft Machine (1968)

  4 Appendix to The Soft Machine (1968)

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  It is a privilege to edit works by William Burroughs, and a pleasure to thank James Grauerholz for making it possible and for all the support he has given. It is also a pleasure to thank the following for their expert help: Jed Birmingham for assistance with little magazines; Nicole Dittrich at Syracuse University; Ella Harris for typing out the 1961 edition; Bill McArthur, Stewart Smith, and Brian Schottlander; and above all, Véronique Lane, for working with me from start to finish, being by my side in the archival vaults, sharing ideas, reading every word I wrote, and for living with the Centipede People and the Crab Boys for the last two years.

  For the great archival assistance they have provided, I also want to thank John Bennett of the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Ohio State University, Columbus; Rob Spindler of the Archives and Special Collections at Arizona State University, Tempe; Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and his staff; the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries; Cath Tierney of Green Library, Stanford University; Elspeth Healey, Special Collections Librarian at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, Universtiy of Kansas, Lawrence; and Michael Ryan and all his staff at the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Research Institute for the Humanities at Keele University. Thanks finally to Jeff Posternak of the Wylie Agency, a great guy to have on your side, and to Peter Blackstock at Grove Press.

  Introduction

  SOLA ESPERANZA DEL MUNDO

  “THIS BAD PLACE, MEESTER”

  One of The Soft Machine’s recurrent characters is The Guide, modeled after the local young hustlers who picked William Burroughs up as he explored the jungles of South America in the early 1950s, and any reader entering the book’s alien territory would take the advice of a guide: “This bad place Meester. You crazy or something walk around alone?” The Soft Machine is not only a bad place, it’s an impossible one that mutates before your very eyes: “This bad place you write, Meester. You win something like jelly fish.” In this uniquely queer textual zone styles and genres switch in mid-sentence and incompatible realities mix in a single phrase. “Rubbed Moscow up me with a corkscrew motion of his limestones”? “orgasm crackled with electric afternoon”? “Zero eaten by crab”? Is this science fiction or avant-garde poetry? Drug literature or homosexual pornography? Political satire? All, and yet none of the above, because no labels stick and it doesn’t matter how often you read the text, it will seem new every time. As Joan Didion said, to imagine you can put The Soft Machine down when the phone rings and find your place a few minutes later “is sheer bravura.”1

  Not knowing where we are or where we’re going is the disorientating and yet desired experience, so anyone looking for a guide to reading The Soft Machine had better follow the perverse example set by Burroughs himself back in 1953, when solicited by a smiling Colombian street boy: “He looked like the most inefficient guide in the Upper Amazon but I said, ‘Yes.’”2 An efficient guide would only have taken Burroughs where he already knew to go, so following his desire by falling for a hustler was the right choice for someone committed to the difficult path of discovering the unknown. You crazy or something read The Soft Machine alone? Yes, indeed; but that’s the best way to do it because what you find there will be your business. Since the text itself resists mapping, all this Introduction can promise, therefore, is a map of where we are right now, offering for the first time the material history of a book about which so much has remained untold—even the origins of its title, a suitably paradoxical phrase that begins with an utterly misleading definite article, since the book in your hand is not The but A Soft Machine.

  “I WISH TO MAKE MYSELF AS CLEAR

  AS POSSIBLE”

  The Soft Machine is usually described as the first novel in the Cut-Up Trilogy—a straightforward enough place to begin, and yet more false than true. For in the 1960s Burroughs published no less than three entirely distinct versions, so that there is quite literally a trilogy of just Soft Machines and to talk about the book always demands specifying which book. Produced by three different publishers in three different countries, the three editions hold three different positions in three different trilogies, marking a beginning, middle, and end: the first edition of The Soft Machine published in June 1961 by the Olympia Press in Paris—never reprinted, a collector’s item nowadays—was i
ndeed the first book, preceding The Ticket That Exploded in 1962 and Nova Express in 1964; the revised second edition of The Soft Machine published in March 1966 by Grove Press in New York—the only text most readers know—can be placed second, since it followed Nova Express in 1964 and came before Grove’s revised edition of The Ticket That Exploded in 1967; and the third edition of The Soft Machine published in July 1968 by John Calder in London—kept in print in the UK—was the final version of any title and so claims third place. Preposterously, there have been enough Soft Machines for a trilogy of trilogies, and the textual history of Burroughs’ book has been almost as baffling as anything between its covers. Clearing a path through that bibliographical jungle is one aim of this new, fourth edition.

  Like most remakes or sequels, as Burroughs produced new editions of the title it could be said he ended up losing the plot, and that despite the brilliance of some of its new material, the second edition is structurally a mess, the third even more so. While that’s true, it again misses the point. The original Soft Machine was the most extreme of all Burroughs’ cut-up books, the most uncompromising, but his revisions over time were not merely a series of compromises or mistakes since the “original” was itself a messy hybrid of materials, impossible to read in any conventional sense. There was therefore no plot to lose, only experiments to try again, and again. Equally, while the history of publication is confusing, it’s the mere tip of a huge archival iceberg that reveals both the messiness and the great care in Burroughs’ working practices. Instinctively as much as ideologically, contradiction was part of his method: when Burroughs cut up his writing he introduced the magical chance factor, an experimental random element, and his writing desk resembled a Ouija board in a science lab; whereas when he edited the results, he could be as rigorous as the most traditional nineteenth-century novelist.

  But while they’re always called “cut-up novels,” the term tells us very little: how much is “cut-up” and how much is a “novel”? How does The Soft Machine differ from Nova Express or The Ticket That Exploded? How do the three editions of The Soft Machine differ from each other, when were the changes made, and why did Burroughs make them? To answer the first questions and clear up some of the myths about the last one, a precise history is difficult but necessary and long overdue. As well as narrating The Soft Machine’s perplexing story, this introduction explains why an archival manuscript from 1962 with a unique place in that history has been used to make further restorations and revisions for this fourth edition. More precise details of texts and manuscripts are given in the Notes section, supplemented by appendices that include material from the first and third editions as a gesture towards the multiple textual identities of Burroughs’ Soft Machines.

  As for the book’s title—an oxymoron which evokes the Pop Art “soft sculptures” of Claes Oldenburg and that directly inspired a series of other Soft Machines, from the 1960s psychedelic rock band to a 1980s analysis of “cybernetic fiction” and a 21st century study of nanotechnology—the received wisdom is that “the soft machine is the human body.”3 In other words, the phrase sums up Burroughs’ urgent warning against genetic and cultural determinism, his bleak vision that we’re automata manipulated by inner and outer forces, from sexual desires to media brainwashing. The received wisdom comes from Burroughs himself but is misleading nonetheless. Significantly, he offered this definition at the very last possible opportunity, in an Appendix added to the third edition of The Soft Machine: the two previous editions not only lacked a definition, astonishingly they never used the phrase “soft machine” except in their titles. But Burroughs didn’t come up with a meaning just for the 1968 edition; even before choosing it as the title for his book, he had already made the term central to the political scenario of his trilogy’s Nova Conspiracy. Burroughs withheld any clear meaning and, as the manuscript draft of his Appendix to the third edition reveals, in the end he defined the term out of sheer frustration: “I have been accused of being unintelligible. At this point I wish to make myself as clear as possible.”4 By “this point”—December 1965, when he wrote the Appendix—­Burroughs had been working on The Soft Machine for over six years, and from the origins of the first edition in summer 1959, making himself clear was always the issue.

  “I HAVE BECOME A MEGALOMANIAC”

  It was in the very week Naked Lunch appeared that Burroughs first referred to writing the book that would be published two years later as The Soft Machine. Having moved from Tangier to the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris eighteen months earlier, Burroughs already had a shadowy, underground notoriety and a fame-by-association through the media attention given the Beat Generation. He would soon share with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac sensationalized treatment in Life magazine, followed by a series of outraged and hostile book reviews. But he was still unknown in July 1959 when Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, seeking to exploit the censorship controversy provoked by the appearance of episodes in a little magazine, rushed out The Naked Lunch in Paris (the definite article was dropped for the American edition in 1962). It was in this context that Burroughs mailed Ginsberg a “sample beginning of sequel to Naked Lunch,” and framed his new writing in the most dramatic terms (Letters, 420).5

  “Complete power and confidence has broken through,” Burroughs declared, announcing that after years of failure he had “become a megalomaniac” and was making “incredible discoveries in the line of psychic exploration”: “What I am putting down on paper now is literally what is happening to me as I move forward,” he wrote, insisting it was “no land of the imagination” but real and “dangerous in a most literal sense” (420). Burroughs had been through messianic periods before—in 1956 mocking himself as “Pop Lee Your Friendly Prophet”—and would do again—“the time to be messianic is now,” he declared a decade later, in absolute earnest this time, just after publication of his final edition of The Soft Machine (ROW, 286).6 He was serious too in July 1959, when the impact of living and working alongside Brion Gysin encouraged in him the self-belief for a mission to discover the unknown through his “sequel to Naked Lunch”: “I don’t know where it is going or what will happen. It is straight exploration like Gysin’s paintings, to which it is intimately connected” (Letters, 420). Such total conviction was what he needed in early October when Gysin showed Burroughs the first accidental slicings of newspapers he had made while cutting a mount for a drawing with his Stanley knife. Gysin’s knife fell into waiting hands, and led to Burroughs’ decade-long commitment to cut-up experiments in multiple media from film to photography, scrapbooks to tape recorders. More immediately, the question prompted by the origins of The Soft Machine is what “straight exploration” meant in the context of writing a “sequel.”

  “EXPLODED LUNCH”

  Over the next eighteen months Burroughs tried out three alternative titles and the content of his new work changed considerably, but he kept referring to it as a sequel to Naked Lunch. The connection was spelled out in the unimaginative first title he considered in September 1959: “Maybe Naked Free Lunch” (Letters, 427). That month he confirmed the material connection between the two books, asking Ginsberg to look for manuscripts not used in the recently-published Naked Lunch “on mythical South American places featuring Carl” and “Scandinavian (Trak) material” (425). This particular material, which indeed ended up in The Soft Machine, dated back two years and was written after and quite separately from “Interzone,” the manuscript completed in June 1957 that was the basis for three quarters of Naked Lunch. Such precision helps move beyond the long-circulated but always vague standard version, according to which the Cut-Up Trilogy was drawn from a “thousand page” Naked Lunch “Word Hoard.”

  What was the “Word Hoard”? A mixture of mythology and confusion (even in its title, sometimes given as “Word Horde” or, as if it referred to an actual book, Word Hoard). Kerouac and Ginsberg used the phrase in spring 1957 when retyping Burroughs’ mass of rough manuscripts in Tangier, and
it appears a couple of times in Naked Lunch. But Burroughs himself used the phrase only briefly as an alternative for “Word,” the 60-page final section of his 200-page “Interzone” manuscript. A good deal of his “sequel to Naked Lunch” did come out of what he wrote between fall 1957 and fall 1959, but that material has a separate history to the loose “thousand page” myth. The mythology matters because it has had the effect of mixing up the chronologies of writing and blurring distinctions between books. Burroughs even made a gag out of the confusion of his trilogy, referring in the second edition of The Soft Machine to one “novel I hadn’t written called The Soft Ticket” and another called “Expense Account” that in draft was originally titled “Exploded Lunch”—which begs the question; if the myth was so confusing and if the result has been a historiographic nightmare, why did Burroughs himself promote it?

  It was more than convenience, having an easy answer on tap for interviewers, and not entirely a philosophical position, a decision to refute fixed identities and epistemological certainty. There were also strategic reasons why Burroughs promoted the connection between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, and then Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. He worked on the cut-up books while helping Grove Press release an American edition of Naked Lunch, well aware of the censorship battle to be fought, and he recognized the publishing advantages of a common approach, especially involving Nova Express. That was why in the January 1962 issue of Evergreen Review, the house magazine of Grove Press, he prefaced early episodes of Novia Express (as it was then titled) with “Introduction to Naked Lunch The Soft Machine Novia Express”—making a trilogy out of those three titles. The following year Burroughs created another surprising trilogy in Dead Fingers Talk, a book made out of sections from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. Before it became the first of the Cut-Up Trilogy, The Soft Machine therefore appeared as the middle volume of two different trilogies starting from Naked Lunch.