The Ticket That Exploded (1967)

This concludes the Nova (and/or Cut-Up) trilogy by William S. Burroughs. Or actually “concludes” is the wrong word as The Ticket That Exploded may be read first, second, or third in the trilogy, per Burroughs, with The Soft Machine and Nova Express. Your choice. A Grove paperback edition I’ve had lying around for years implies that The Wild Boys fits in somehow too. The vague air of put-on that suffuses all this is of a piece with many of Burroughs’s adventures in publishing and his career as a bad-boy beat, including a star turn in the movie Drugstore Cowboy. There are many tantalizing clues, within and across the novels associated with this trilogy, of a greater, grander scheme. They are all—and Naked Lunch too—sourced at least in part to a massive so-called “Word Hoard” manuscript—circa 2,000 pages of text—from which the language was spindled, folded, and mutilated. The Ticket That Exploded, unlike the others, has no table of contents and the chapter separations are not as distinct. That blows my theory that the novels in the trilogy are actually collections of stories. But you can still read Ticket that way if you want, because it makes no sense as a novel and even less as an anti-novel pretending to be a novel. Sooner or later reading Burroughs I glaze over, which leads me to saying such things. My patience is tried. It’s like meditating, trying to observe thoughts without participating in them. Somehow, through all the murk (not to mention the gay porn), it can be very funny, surprising and cunning. But nuggets are all there is to it as far as I can see.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.