The Soft Machine (1961)

I had some work trying to sort what's intended by William S. Burroughs and his publishers with this novel and a group of others associated with it. I'm reading a 1988 mass market Grove Press collection of three short novels—The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Wild Boys. The first two are cited with a fourth, The Ticket That Exploded, as a trilogy. Burroughs later said this trilogy was in no particular order and could be read all six ways possible and it was all the same to him. Most discussions of it go chronologically by publication, starting here, so I will do that too, pausing for a look at The Wild Boys before finishing up. The real unifying element, I suspect, is that all (including Naked Lunch before them and possibly The Wild Boys too) are drawn from a 1,000-page manuscript called The Word Hoard that Burroughs assembled as a source for his cut-up style. I approached this so-called Nova Trilogy carefully, having struggled with Naked Lunch in the past. In a way it's like meditation. You have to keep resisting the impulse to impose narrative coherence. It feels like it should be there, because you're holding a book and reading, but it isn't there. It can get frustrating. But passages absurdly sing and when he's lucid Burroughs shows a lot of ability to be vividly crisp and to the point. It's quite welcome, in fact, when it lasts for the majority of a single page. But wrestling through, sentence by sentence, clause by clause, actually can be enjoyable for the language itself, abstracted. The fragments are a barrage, preposterous, an affront: hustling sex, scoring dope, getting off in a murky world of danger and paranoia. Burroughs comes on like a literary aesthete, which he is, and in the best sense of the idea, but he serves up these coarse turds of the underground life, e.g., the redundancy of the recurring phrase "rectal mucus." I expected no narrative coherence and I got none, which somehow made it more enjoyable. As I would see, however, it grows more tiresome across four novels even if they are very short. What is perhaps most amazing to me is that Burroughs worked and reworked all of them—I think my 1988 book has about the second or third version of The Soft Machine, and there is now a "restored text" version published in 2014. A lot of monkeying around for something that doesn't really add up except as pure abstracted reading experience. But it's possible the revisions really were constant improvements.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.