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 20th 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.
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