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.
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