Book Review: The Process by Brion Gysin

     Brion Gysin is somewhat notable for being the inventor of the cut up method and the dream machine and his close friendship with William S. Burroughs. It is unfortunate that never got to be more well known as a writer. His novel The Process is an exhilarating reading experience that can make you wish his literary output had been larger.

     The main character of The Process is Ulys O. Hanson, a retired African-American history professor and compulsive keef smoker who sets out from Morocco to travel the slave trading routes in the Sahara desert. Hanson, often called Hassan throughout the novel, sets off into Algeria but gets stuck in the city of Tam. It is there where he meets up with a secret society of musicians who put members into trances and seizures that induce out-of-body experiences. The Muslim police learn about his involvement with them and revoke his visa, commanding him to remain captive in Tam. He escapes and makes his way back to Tanj in Morocco to reacquaint himself with Hamid, the Moroccan friend who initiated him into the secret society’s rituals in the hill town of Jajouka.

     Back in Tanj, Ulys listens to a tape recording of Hamid telling his life story. The friend, a wild and untamed boy, grew up to be a smuggler and thief. The musicians of Jajouka initiate him into their rites by having him dress as the bou jaloud, another name for the Pagan god Pan. Hamid becomes possessed by the spirit of bou jaloud and leaves Jajouka to work as a painter in the red light district where he uses his “paintbrush” to “paint all the whores”. Later in the same chapter, Hamid transforms into a whale that seduces a prostitute named Tanj and wrecks all the alleys and roads that lead to the central market before destroying that too. Thus, Hamid embodies the creative and destructive aspects of the phallus.

     Thay Himmer is the next character to record his story for Ulys. After introducing himself in the Cafe de Paris, the famed Beat Generation hangout, he gives Ulys an emerald stone and tells him that the attempt to trap him in Tam was part pf a plot that gets explained more and more as the novel goes on. Thay Himmer, in an attempt to escape his white American identity, also got initiated into a secret society called Hamadcha; they initiated him during a pilgrimage where they beat him over the head with a board, made him dance until his feet bled, and nailed him to the wall of a saint’s tomb in a cave. Himmer later learned to suppress his orgasms, enabling him to have sex with his wife for several hours at a time which in turn gave him magical powers. These powers were strengthened when he received the emerald scarab from a teacher and took a vow of silence. The connection between the scarab and language is revealed near the end of the book.

     Thay Himmer’s wife, Mya, is a Canadian Native American billionaire who receives a vision of ruling over the Sahara desert during a psylocibin trip in which she foresees her meeting with Ulys. Mya invests heavily in the psychotropic drug industry and begins stockpiling human pituitary glands in a stainless steel fortress built by Chinese communists and shaped like a star. It is located in the town of Tam which also happens to be a research center for the development of nuclear bombs. Mya’s plan is to possess Ulys O. Hanson with the Ghoul, a monstrous black spirit that rules as the king of the Sahara; once Ulys is possessed she can control him and reign over Africa first and then the entire world later.

     If this all sounds bewildering at this point, that is because it is. But strangely, the narrative remains lucid throughout the whole book. It is may be a little heavier than Robert Anton Wilson but not as exasperating as Thomas Pynchon. The Process works on many levels at once; the story can be taken literally and symbolically at the same time. There are veiled references to real people like Francis X. Fard who embodies the ideals of the Nation of Islam with the life story of Frantz Fanon; the practice of Grammatology is an obvious reference to the Church of Scientology. If you read carefully, many of the characters are written with similar details, almost as if they are all the same people inhabiting different bodies simultaneously. There are recurring themes and images of slavery and servitude woven through the narrative and these get balanced out by accounts of telepathy, dreams, shifting planes of consciousness, alternate realities, and out of body travel which seem to embody the ideal of absolute freedom. There are so many minute threads of details and re-occurring themes that it can be like looking at a finely woven rug that spins quickly in front of flickering lights, making you hallucinate as all the colors and patterns emerge and merge into your soul. Like the works of James Joyce, The Process turns inwards on itself like a kaleidoscopic mirror that reflects back and forth to infinity.

     But simply put, the whole book is about a regular person, Ulys O. Hanson, the man whose name is not Hassan; he smokes endless amounts of keef while traveling in the Sahara because he wants to find himself and become absolutely free.

     And who can not relate to that?

Gysin, Brion. The Process. Quarter Books, 1985.