Book Review

Book Review

Troubled Sleep

by Jean-Paul Sartre

     The final book in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy mostly continues the story of Mathieu Delarue, the wishy-washy philosophy professor preoccupied with the pursuit of freedom. Troubled Sleep takes up his story after World War II has begun, Germany has invaded France, and Mathieu has been deployed to serve in a second-line unit that sees no action. Stylistically, it is a return to the form employed by Sartre in The Age of Reason. The story of Brunet, a minor character from the first two volumes, gets taken up along with some brief explorations of other people from the previous books. Troubled Sleep is an uneven novel, a combination of finished and unfinished narratives that soars at times and seems half-baked and incomplete at others.

     When we left Mathieu in the previous novel, The Reprieve, he had decided against committing suicide and was heading off to the war. As his story begins in this book, he is waiting with a bunch of bored soldiers on a farm; they have not been called on to fight and are waiting for the armistice so they can go back to doing something, anything, with their lives other than loitering. They move on to a farming village and Mathieu struggles to fit in with them. His profession as an educator sets him apart; he has a sense of higher purpose in life even though he really has no idea what that means but they, on the other hand, care mostly about getting blind drunk and talking about their genitals. When they receive word that France has surrendered to Germany and the invading troops are coming to seize the village, Mathieu and another soldier decide to fight.

     This is a big turning point in his life. For the first time he decides to take action rather than allowing his life to just happen. Mathieu and the other man meet up with four soldiers from another battalion and they go up to the top of a church tower to shoot at the Germans as they arrive. Mathieu takes delight in killing the soldiers and every time he shoots at one he thinks about something that has gone wrong in life. At that moment he becomes transformed from a mild-mannered intellectual into a psychopathic killer. But in the act of killing Germans he frees himself from his past. He does not die a hero’s death because France has lost the war and the Germans have seized the town but he wants to take some sort of action that will create his freedom, even if the ultimate freedom means his own death.

     After that, the story of Brunet takes over. Brunet is a dedicated member of the Communist Party. Before the war, he wrote ideological propaganda articles for a newspaper. In Troubled Sleep he is imprisoned in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. He strikes up an awkward friendship with an intellectual soldier named Schneider. Brunet sees himself as being on a mission and starts building a clandestine cell of communist prisoners. Like other characters in the Roads to Freedom trilogy, Brunet is too close to himself to see himself clearly and this is where Schneider comes into the narrative. Schneider wonders why Brunet wants to build his cell when he is so cut off from the Communist Party itself. Stalin, the Comintern, the Politburo, and the locals in the French party do not know where he is and are probably too busy to care. But Brunet realizes that he has to do something while imprisoned. He can not let his life go to waste even if his actions are ultimately inconsequential. He is like a priest who builds a church to honor God even though he knows in his heart that God does not exist; he needs something to do with his time and it does not really matter what it is as long as he does it well.

     The narratives of Mathieu and Brunet are the strongest parts of the novel. The other narratives that restart the stories of characters from the previous books do not deliver quite as well. Mathieu’s friend Gomez, a general from the Spanish Civil War, has escaped to New York City where he gets employed as an art critic. His abandoned wife Sarah and their son Pedro have to flee Paris on foot as the German troops begin to arrive. Ivich has gotten married and lives unhappily with her inlaws while her brother Boris can not decide if he should stay and marry Lola or take off for England to continue fighting the Nazis. All of these stories start and end without going very far or saying very much. Sartre probably intended to finish them in the fourth book of Raods to Freedom but he never got around to writing it.

     The story of Mathieu’s friend Daniel gets restarted and continues on a little more successfully. In all his hatred, he wanders around an abandoned Paris, happy the Nazis have shown up to destroy the society that he dislikes so strongly. He sees Philippe, the upper-class pacifist from The Reprieve, trying to commit suicide by jumping into the Seine. Daniel prevents him and takes him back to his apartment to seduce him. He wants to build Philippe up for the purpose of tearing him down. This passage is psychologically intense and complex but does not reach its full potential because it too is incomplete. We never find out what happens between these two men. (Incidentally, this is written to completion as a short story in Jean-Paul Sartre’s collection The Wall).

     Troubled Sleep is a mixed bag. The completed stories are brilliant while the incomplete ones are rather pointless and read as if Sartre was getting tired and running out of ideas. There is also less philosophy involved. We know that all the characters are searching for freedom in one way or another and their actions show how they pursue those paths but we do not actually learn a whole lot about them that we did not already know. If you have read the first two books of the trilogy, it is worth reading to get a sense as to where this is all going but it really is the weakest of the three novels. Sartre’s writing here is still good though, even when it does not reach its full potential. 

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Troubled Sleep. Bantam Books, New York: 1968.

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Cat Inside

by William S. Burroughs

     Shortly before he died, William S. Burroughs put together The Cat Inside, probably a last ditch attempt to capitalize off his enduring fame to make enough money to keep his heroin habit going until the end. He might not have actually written it; rumor has it that he dictated it to James Grauerholz. There are two categories of people who will get something out this: William Burroughs admirers and people who love cats. I am one of the former, not the latter but that does not influence my opinion much that those in the former group will get the most out of The Cat Inside because of the insights it offers into the character of William S. Burroughs himself.

     The reading is simple. Written in short, simple descriptive prose, most passages are less than half a page long. It almost has the feel of Buddhist or Taoist allegories in its direct and brief delivery, albeit without a whole lot of goofy morals tacked on at the end. Cats, for Burroughs, are like the familiar spirits of witches and magicians; quiet and mysterious, they appear to be inhabiting more than one world at the same time. He covers the relationship between cats and humans throughout history and contrasts them with dogs who he does not actually dislike. What Burroughs does dislike is the way humans have taken the nature out of dogs and made them more like humans whereas cats have always maintained their independent nature.

     Aside from his love of cats, Burroughs comments extensively on the human capacity for brutality towards the natural world. He is deeply critical of the way people have destroyed animal habitations for pleasure and for the progressian of an increasingly stupid, authoritarian, and oafish movement away from our free and natural selves. The presence of Burroughs the environmentalist is heavily felt throughout the book.

     Most of the rest of the passages are about Burroughs and his cats. They play, they hunt, they wrestle, eat, and cuddle with him in bed at night. One insightful passage tells the story of how one of his cats ran away and was later found in the animal shelter. He asked the police what the cat was doing when he got picked up and they answered that cats must be on a leash when outside a home. But Burroughs wanted to know what the cat was actually doing; the idea of a dopey cop busting cats on vagrancy and loitering charges looked a little too pathetic to this writer who had a lifelong hatred of the police.

     Overall, a clear picture of William Burroughs emerges as he describes his relationship with cats. He comes off as quiet, humble, soft spoken, and downright gentle. This is a sharp contrast to such novels as Junky, Naked Lunch, and the Nova Trilogy with their excessive filth and violence. But looked at from a distance this makes sense; the world could seem extremely harsh and cruel in the eyes of a rather calm and introspective man.

     This is certainly not a work of great literature. Descriptions of the things cats ordinarily do are not novel or unique and reading about them is not the most exciting thing in the world. If The Cat Inside had been any longer it would not be worth reading at all. There are a few moments of dark humor that keep it going along though.

     For cat lovers, The Cat Inside will not cover any new territory. What makes it worth reading once is the candid account of William S. Burroughs. This is the only literature where he sheds his grotesque armor and shows the world who he really is. For a lot of the people who love his works, this is the best gift and final chapter to his life that he could give.

Burroughs, William S. The Cat Inside. Viking, New York: 1992. 

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Reprieve

by Jean-Paul Sartre

     Most human beings spend their lives pursuing freedom in one way or another. The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his trilogy Roads to Freedom to portray French society and how his philosophy applies to such a pursuit. In The Reprieve, the second volume of the series, he depicts the lives of people from the full spectrum of the social strata as the threat of war with Germany looms over their heads. The uncertainty of their lives in the face of probable death and disaster is compellingly described and the anxieties of people with the horrific memory of World War I in their near past is well-articulated. It is a grim picture of a society on the brink of atrocity.

     A lot has been said about the style Sartre chose to write this novel. The narrative switches between people, location, and situations unpredictably. Sometimes the transition is from scene to scene, sometimes it takes place over a paragraph or two, and sometimes it even happens mid-paragraph or mid-sentence. Some transitions are abrupt while others overlap or hinge on minor details that two or more characters have in common. This method is effectively done and creates depth and literary textures that may not have been possible otherwise. It blends the lives of all the characters and shows how they are all part of an organic whole, even if their connections to each other are only tenuous or remote. Sometimes they even cross paths at random, making the reader see how we are all connected without even knowing it.

     Some people really love this writing style while others hate it but very few people comment on the themes throughout the story. A full range of people are portrayed. At the top is Hitler, Chamberlain, and Daladier meeting in secret council to discuss negotiations for peace and the German annexation of Sudetenland, the western rim of Czechoslovakia. A step or two down there is Mathieu, the protagonist of the first book in Roads to Freedom. While visiting his brother Jacques and his wife Odette who secretly loves Mathieu, the two brothers debate the pros and cons of defending Czechoslovakia while Mathieu wonders whether he should commit suicide or go fight in the war. Philippe is the stepson of an upper-class army general; he has embraced the ideology of pacifism, admires the life of Arthur Rimbaud, wishes to be a poet, and gets himself into trouble by publicly announcing his opposition to the war. Lower down the social scale are Maurice and Zezette, a working class proletarian couple who must break up as Maurice gets called up to fight. Zezette does not like the idea of war but Maurice is a committed communist and he sees it as a chance to end poverty. At the lowest end are a good natured but illiterate shepherd who arrives in Marseilles to find work but ends up, to his disappointment, getting deployed. And there is Charles, a physically disabled veteran of World War I who lives at the mercy of nurses who manage a home for invalids. When the war is about to start, the patients are transferred by boxcar to another location to keep them safe from the invading German troops. The characters of Sarah, Ivich, Boris, Daniel, and Marcelle from The Age of Reason also reappear and there is a whole host of other people with their own subplots throughout the book. Each is faced with the freedom to make choices despite the seeming inevitability of an unwanted war. They still have freedoms even if they are not the freedoms they want.

     All the characters have their reasons for being for or against the war. For some it means liberation in the long run, for most it appears to be an unwanted obstruction to the pursuit of the lives they were already living. For Mathieu it is both. Most of the characters think of the war as a means of defending Czechoslovakia against the German aggressors and most of them do not care about that issue. Most of them do not think much about the Holocaust or the concentration camps and ethnic cleansing of Jews. They know about the atrocities but their reasons for wanting to prevent the war are mostly selfish as if the issue of Sudetenland is used as a smokescreen and distraction to prevent them from thinking about the Holocaust. The issue is discussed by some Jewish characters in the novel but Sartre made this such a small issue to show how willfully ignorant the French populace was to the injustice of fascism. He is also throwing a punch at the anti-war people who can not see that peace would guarantee the slaughter of millions of innocent people. That is what happened anyways but reusing to engage with that issue proves that their pacifism is well-intentioned but an act of bad faith.

     If you are wondering what the French people get a reprieve from, you have to read the novel to its conclusion to find out. But it can be said here that their reprieve is an illusion. Sartre shows how the people are too close to their situation to be able to see it with clarity while, at the same time, they are myopic and can not see beyond their own noses well enough to comprehend the bigger picture. The consequences of their naivete is examined in the third installment, Troubled Sleep.

     The Reprieve is worth reading both for the smooth complexity of its narrative stylization and the nervous ambiguity of its themes. It is a deeply detailed and believable portrait a society’s collective mind when faced with the uncertainty of an unwanted disaster that is too close for comfort.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Reprieve. Vintage Books/Random House, New York: 1973

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Ticket That Exploded

by William S. Burroughs

     William S. Burrough’s Nova Trilogy is a set of experimental novels that use his cut-up technique of text creation and non-linear narrative to portray an inter-galactic war between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police. To say the trilogy has a narrative is actually misleading. There is no beginning to end story line, no character development, and often no cohesive themes to make it all mesh together. It is more like looking into the back of a garbage truck as it churns and mashes recognizable objects into a mush or rotting filth. These books contain vignettes, situations, moods, sex scenes, explanatory passages, and mind-altering word collages. The Ticket That Exploded is the second book of the trilogy, though in a non-linear work of fiction like this, it really doesn’t matter if you read the novels in sequence or even if you read all of them in their entirety. This book is possibly the most accessible of the three and stand up well on its own.

     It is difficult to summarize exactly what happens. There are heavy metal boys made of blue steel from Uranus and green fish boys with purple gills from Venus. There is space travel and unusual sexual experiences with space creatures that are surprisingly well-described. A man gets a bed in a sperm-harvesting factory where people get absorbed into new skins and sodomized by dummies. Members of the Nova Mob are introduced. Dr. Benway gets called in to fix up the mess they made. A pair of gay lovers wander around a post-apocalyptic suburb of a city with metal streets. The pages are saturated with ejaculating cocks, soft blue lights, vampires from outer space, vomit, anal mucus, pubic hairs, drug addicts, and all kinds of other nasty things.

     One major theme throughout the books is experimentation with splicing. In one passage, men are put together in a sensory deprivation chamber so they can not tell where one body begins and another ends. Human body halves are spliced together to make a third person out of two. The cut-up method is explained where two texts are cut in half and then randomly put back together again to disrupt the linear lines of communication. There are lots of tape recorder experiments too; voices are recorded onto tape and then randomly spliced together or sounds of riots are recorded and then played back in various locations to wreak havoc and cause chaos.

     The idea of language is also examined. Burroughs’ claim is that language is an entity that once had a symbiotic relationship with humans but language took over the brain and the relationship became parasitical. Now people and what they see are controlled by it. The disruption of linear linguistic patterns and the erasure of words can liberate us from the damaging vampire spirits of the Nova Mob that inhabit our bodies. The techniques of Scientology are mentioned since their cultish form of therapy involves tape recordings that constantly run in our heads and by erasing them we can free ourselves from control. Wilhelm Reich’s theory of orgone and orgasm is given some time too and that would explain the abundance of references to soft blue light throughout this book.

     A lot of this novel is descriptive. Often Burroughs will present us with a passage and then transition into a part where another text is cut into what has just been read. The resulting effect is like sliding along a spectrum of clarity and confusion. If you can get your mind thinking in multiple dimensions simultaneously then it is like reading two or three chapters of a book at the same time with varying levels of transparency, chaos, and noise. In other places it is similar to watching two films being projected onto one screen at the same time so that your brain mixes the images as the overlap transparently. Some of the explanatory passages, particularly the ones explaining the Nova Mob’s actions and intentions, also appear word for word in Nova Express. If you have read that book then this might be a little redundant.

     The Ticket That Exploded is like a short novel that was chapped into pieces which were put into a bag and then picked out randomly to be re-assembled in a new form. The conscious crafting of the language is minimal and the end product is just whatever happens to come out. In the process of the writing, the technique of composition explains itself. Burroughs believed it is necessary to liberate the human mind and the straitjacket formula of the novel from linear, rational structure that makes life boring, repetitive, and predictable. He literally believed that creating these cut-up texts were acts of magic that disrupted lines of communication between the spirits that control us and the entity they take orders from. To what extent Burroughs has succeeded is a matter of what you can tolerate. The Ticket That Exploded might work better than the other books in the Nova Trilogy because the mix of cut-ups, vignettes, and explanations just happened to fall into the right places by chance. Or did they? 

Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded. Grove Press Inc., New York: 1978.

 

R.I.P. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

R.I.P. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

American Supreme Court Justice

1933 - 2020

 

Huey

Huey

short documentary film about the Black Panthers

directed by Sally Pugh (1968)

 

BACHIR ATTAR AND THE MASTER MUSICIANS OF JAJOUKA

Though Brian Jones brought world-wide notice to these Moroccan master musicians in the early 1970s, their tradition goes back a millennium. Beyond Jones and the Stones, they’ve influenced Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Bill Laswell, Steve Lacy, Peter Gabriel and Sonic Youth, among many others. Musician John Kruth contacted Bachir Attar, their current leader, to find out how they were riding out the worldwide pandemic and about the future of their world-healing music.

Read the full article on Please Kill Me here

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Age of Reason

by Jean-Paul Sartre

     Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason is a soap opera. It follows the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy professor whose main preoccupation in life is freedom. But he is enmeshed in the lives of other people and this causes him to confront himself in a way he never thought he would need to.

     First off there is Boris, one of Mathieu’s students at the university and his friend. Boris comes from a family of Russian emigres who fled to France after the Bolshevik Revolution. He also has his own concept of freedom and his passion in life is stealing things that he really does not need. For example, he has a collection of twenty-four toothbrushes that he never uses. His crowning achievement is stealing an antiquarian book that has no relevance to his life. Boris steals to prove to himself that he is above and outside ordinary humanity; it makes him feel unique and liberated but he fails to see how pointless this freedom is. His big dilemma though is his relationship with Lola, an older woman and an aging nightclub singer and drug addict who clings to Boris because she can not handle the pressures of getting old. Boris and Lola are a shadow of Mathieu and his relationship with his girlfriend Marcelle.

     Mathieu is also pursuing the affections of Boris’s sister Ivich, though it is not exactly clear why. She is not in love with him and she isn’t exactly a great catch. Ivich spends a lot of time with him and Boris but she takes very little interest in him. Mathieu appears to be more like a big brother to her than a possible romantic partner. His fasciantion for Ivich is probably more interesting than Ivich herself. She is unobtainable to him and he knows it but his fawning over her is like a flight from his advancing years. His belief in freedom entails a turning away from maturity and the responsibilities that go with it.

     Another character is Daniel, a financially secure stockbroker who is secretly gay. He fantasizes about ruining and destroying other people’s lives. He desires to turn his envy, self-loathing, and malice outwards but ultimately can not do it. He acts as though he fears causing harm to others and suppresses his cruelty, holding it inside where it eats away at him, causing him to contemplate suicide. When first introduced into the story, he sets out to drown his cats in a basket but he can not bring himself to murder them. Throughout the novel he thinks about wounding everybody he meets up with, all except for Mathieu’s lover Marcelle. Secretly, he has a relationship with her and Mathieu does not know about it. The climax of the story involves Daniel’s calculations to hurt Mathieu who he envies for his calmness and self-composure.

     Then there is Marcelle herself. Boris is sleeping with the elder woman Lola and Mathieu is sleeping with the elder woman Marcelle. The two pairs play off each other because both involve a young man in a relationship with an older woman who they like but do not actually love. Neither of the younger men have what it takes to end the relationship even though the possibility of it working out in long run is obviously not in the women’s favor. This is further complicated because Marcelle is pregnant with Mathieu’s baby. Mathieu insists on having her abort the fetus and the plot of the novel revolves around him wandering around Paris trying to borrow money for the procedure. Then Marcelle decides she wants to keep the baby.

     Mathieu is the central character and it is to him that we look to find Sartre’s philosophical illuminations. Mathieu has a strong belief in freedom but what that means in reality is not revealed to him until the end. Until that point he is entangled in the lives of everyone he knows. When he goes to visit his brother Jacques to borrow money, Jacques explains Mathieu’s life to him. After all, as Sartre would say, the eye can not see itself and an individual is too close to themselves to clearly see who they are. Other people are needed for that. Jacques explains that Mathieu has reached the age of reason. In the younger years a man develops himself ideologically and then reaches a liminal point where he has to stop thinking and starting acting according to the reality that surrounds him. This is the age of reason and that is where Mathieu is. Before that point, he avoided decisions and responsibilities, letting life take him where it would. His play-acting at living a free-spirited bohemian life was nothing but an escape from his bourgeois origins. Mathieu is living a lie, a life of bad faith, refusing to see or be what he really is. Now the time has come for him to make an existential choice and start to grow up. What he decides to do with Marcelle will be a significant turning point that will effect him for the rest of his life. Mathieu’s dilemma is that he is not ready to make that choice or accept full responsibility for who he will become. The circumstances have thrown him into an existential crisis.

     It is common for people who don’t like philosophy to say that it does not apply to real life. Sartre wrote this novel to show how his existentialist philosophy does apply to people and the internal struggles they face. Ironically, Mathieu’s philosophy of freedom appears to be detached his own life and unfortunately we see how his mentoring is causing Boris to avoid making good decisions as well. This is one strength of The Age of Reason. Another is the way in which Mathieu and the other characters are so well-written. The reader gets to know them inside and out. By the end of the book, the reader feels as though they are as real as people they know in their own lives. The only exception to this is Marcelle who plays such a marginal role in the narrative which seems wrong since she is such an important component of Mathieu’s problems. Maybe Sartre, the husband of Simone de Beauvoir, was making a statement about the marginal status of women in French society but somehow this really seems more like an oversight.

     This near masterpiece is a soap opera but it is a soap opera for intelligent people. The plot is simple but that is significant because too complicated a story could distract the reader from the more important points being addressed. The characters embody the ideas of existentialist philosophy: freedom, the importance of choice, emotions, rationality, and the examination of morals in the absence of religion.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Age of Reason. Bantam Books, New York: 1959.

 

Fragments of Sol Chaneles’ Lost Manuscript on CIA Book Publishing Operations

 One of the alternative press’s most significant scoops of the 1960s was Sol Stern’s February 1967 Ramparts magazine’s exposé revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had long secretly funded and controlled the National Student Association (NSA). The story was significant because it revealed the NSA was a CIA front, but its greater significance came with the many derivative investigative journalistic pieces published in the months that followed. This later wave of stories used Stern’s methods of tracing CIA funding fronts to reveal a hidden world of CIA infiltrations of organizations. Once Ramparts published the names of the funding fronts the CIA had used, others followed Stern’s methods and in the months that followed, dozens of news stories revealed CIA front operations. These ranged from the funding of labor unions, judicial organizations, professional associations, to publishers and organizations like the International Conference of the Boy Scouts Movement.

Read the full article on CounterPunch here

Book Review

Book Review

Three Novels: The Soft Machine/Nova Express/The Wild Boys

by William S. Burroughs

   Grove Press put together this volume of three novels by William S. Burroughs soon after the time he toured America to give readings, a tour that culminated in The Nova Convention festival celebrating his work. For readers who are fascinated by his most famous books, Junky and Naked Lunch, this trio is the obvious next step for exploring the wilderness of this Beat Generation author’s mind. What we get here are The Soft Machine and Nova Express, the first and third books of The Nova Trilogy, and The Wild Boys, another short novel written in a similar style and addressing similar themes. The experience of reading these three novellas together is not just hallucinatory and disorienting but also disturbing, disgusting, sometimes beautiful, and often phantasmagorical. It is a dirty and entrancing nightmare, a subversive attack on the modern human condition that could possibly cause harm to your sanity.

      The title The Soft Machine is a metaphor for the human body. In a sense this first book examines the fluid boundaries of the human flesh as a vehicle for consciousness. It starts in familiar Burroughs territory, the criminal underground of junkies and dealers and the shady cops who pursue them. But the descriptive narrative gets interrupted by his use of the cut-up technique; the story becomes jumbled and confusing and the reader starts to feel lost. There is lots of stuff about movies of men being hung and ejaculating when their necks snap amongst a whole heap of other vile images. When it comes back into sharper focus, the narrator is visiting a shaman in Panama. The shaman performs a ceremony that transports him back in time to an ancient Mayan village to inhabit the body of a field-working slave. The Mayan priests control the society until the narrator sneaks into their temple and alters their calendar so that crops get planted at the wrong time. The priests get killed and then all hell breaks loose. The village is subjected to a deadly heat ray, a giant centipede, green fish boys with purple gills and anything else you might expect to encounter when a calendar gets altered and the crops get planted at the wrong time. Then we are back in the confusion of cut-up territory with lots of gay sex scenes involving Central and South American young men.

     Nova Express is a little more focused at times. There are plenty of cut-ups but the conflict between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police gets explained. There is also a giant corporation that controls the Earth. The Nova Mob are criminal vampire-type spirits that originate in other planets and enter peoples’ bodies at times when their consciousness is disrupted like when taking drugs or having orgasms. The abundant instances when men ejaculate while being hung from a gallows pole is an especially powerful time, making it easier for them to enter our planet. So basically the nameless corporate syndicate manipulates the minds of humans by using film and sound recordings. Notice these are the most significant components of television, the media, and nowadays the internet. Cut-ups are used to disrupt their lines of communication with the people they control. The Nova Mob creates chaos by disrupting these recordings and the Nova Police are trying to stop them. All this happens at a molecular level; recorded images, sounds, and language are shrunk to miniscule size and implanted into human cells where they later emerge in peoples’ mind screens in order to control them. Wait a minute...did William S. Burroughs, in the early 1960s predict digital technology? Isn’t that similar to the way microprocessors and microchips operate? Anyhow, the Nova Police try to apprehend the Nova Mob by administering apomorphine and restraining them with antibiotic handcuffs because the Nova Mob’s plan is to heighten all the social and political conflicts to incite a global nuclear holocaust, the ultimate planetary orgasm. It’s hard to tell what side Burroughs is on; he doesn’t appear to have any particular fondness for any of the characters involved in this mess with the exception of the young Latino boys who are constantly having sex with each other. And Burroughs dedicates more literary space to the subject of anal mucus than any other known author in history. OK take a breath; it’s a lot to take in but its fascinating all the same.

     The Wild Boys is the odd story out. While some cut-ups are used, the narrative is more descriptive and sometimes more clear and easy to follow. Or do you just get more used to the literary technique by the time you get his far? The Wild Boys are a renegade gang of homosexuals in Morocco who indulge in heavy drug use and sexual orgies. They have expanded to a worldwide underground network and criminal cabal. The puritanical and hypocritical American establishment of rich WASPish evangelicals, military commanders, CIA agents, and politicians have set out on a mission to capture and exterminate them. Of course, the Wild Boys are too smart to allow that to happen. If gore and gay sex are things that bother you, this is not a book you should be reading.

     William S. Burroughs may seem incomprehensible if looked at in the wrong light. Knowing the details of his unusual life may be a key to it all. Aside from being a gay heroin addict, he also wrote these books while he was a member of The Church of Scientology. The passages about time travel and the movement from one human body to another are direct references to the times he spent traveling in Central and South America in search of the hallucinogenic drug yage. But most importantly, knowing he was the grandson of William Seward Burroughs, the inventor of the adding machine and founder of The Burroughs Corporation says a lot about what is going on here. Burroughs had a contentious relationship with his family who rejected his lifestyle. Notice all the references to the bedroom with roses on the wallpaper in the suburbs of St. Louis; that is a direct reference to where he grew up. His corporate syndicate that controls the world could easily be seen as The Burroughs Corporation, a company that played a major role in the mechanization of American society during the Industrial Revolution. The adding machine was one of the first computers but they also invented the time clock and punch cards used in factories as well as being a major contributor to the industrialization of the military during World War II. IBM started as as one of their divisions and eventually splintered off. Burroughs use of non-linear narratives, psychological dissociation through the use of drugs, and randomly inserted elements from his use of the cut-up technique might be read as an attack on his family’s legacy and the role they played in the routinization and control of modern society. It is as if he wanted to tear this cybernetic society to shreds and see what comes next.

      Another way of looking at this writing is that it may be a solopsistic fantasy of a man coming to terms with his drug addiction and homosexuality played out on a universal scale. The vampire spirits of the Nova Mob that control people at a biological level can easily be a metaphor for a heroin habit. The gay sex is a magical act that allows to bodies to inhabit the same space simultaneously while disrupting the boundaries of a rigidly gendered society. Like the poetry of William Blake or the painting of Hieronymus Bosch, his personal vision of cosmic conflict is both outside the understanding of ordinary thought but still close enough that we can see how it all works even if we don’t know what it all means. And all this is expressed by a highly articulate writer who just happened to have one of the most bizarre minds of the 20^th century.

     Whatever the case may be, this is not easy literature to approach. The plot of these books does not really hold the narrative together. Rather it hangs over the text like a blob of slimy eviscerated guts mixed with gallons of sperm, raw sewage, and vomit. Even those who are familiar and experienced with this literature might find these books to be abrasive and bewildering. The cut-ups do wear a little thin at times and the narrative isn’t even really a narrative. It is more like an altered state of consciousness where comprehension fades in and out as if you are watching a film reel that has been double exposed in some places or a movie on tv getting interference from another channel so that you can only understand bits and pieces of what is going on. Sometimes this writing degenerates into the literary equivalent of white noise or the static on the radio between stations.

     Again, this is not easy or even pleasant reading but it is great art. You will not come away from it feeling the same as you did before reading it. Your mind may actually never be the same again. 

Burroughs, William S. Three Novels: The Soft Machine/Nova Express/The Wild Boys. Grove Weidenfeld, New York: 1988.