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.

The Wild Boys (1971)

Time now for the novel that is not part of any trilogy I know of but was packaged with the first two novels of a William S. Burroughs trilogy in a book called Three Novels. Go figure. This Grove Press edition, which I picked up somewhere along the line, does mention The Ticket That Exploded in an “other works” list, which is the third novel in the trilogy. But never mind, Jake. The Wild Boys, perhaps not surprisingly, is full of homoerotics, rectal mucus, and locker-room smells. And, maybe surprisingly, it’s more lucid than much of the so-called Nova (and/or Cut-Up) trilogy. I think I’m settling on the “damaged genius” narrative for Burroughs. There’s enough good writing in any one of his generally slim novels (and/or collections of stories and/or installments of larger works) that they are almost worth reading. His focus on sensory details—colors, smells, textures—makes some passages extraordinarily vivid. But many other long passages make very little sense at all. I read him in a way that I read little else: with a kind of free-floating disengagement, trying to look at every word and absorb its significance, imagining scenes when I can. If it’s not working I just take it as opaque and move along (nothing to see here, folks). I’m sure I’m missing things but I’m also sure some of these passages are merely inscrutable. They consist of words, or down to letters in some cases, but they don’t seem to mean anything. Or you fill in the gaps yourself somehow, with something, which can be interesting. I’m not saying reading Burroughs doesn’t have its pleasures but it’s often frustrating too. Tantalizing and portentous images and scenes evaporate into nothing, melting into a meaningless block of words and then the scene changes, or a new paragraph starts. Formal disengagement is almost self-protective. It’s possible that reading more closely would reveal more. It’s also possible the whole thing is a put-on. In places, The Wild Boys seems almost sentimental about its manifold sexual connections. There are some vague SF elements. Lots of scattered great paragraphs and sentences. David Bowie cited it as his favorite by Burroughs, but I would still be careful about jumping in.

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

Nova Express (1964)

This short novel by William S. Burroughs is approximately where things start to get weird, at least in terms of any supposed trilogy. It's confusing enough The Soft Machine was more like a sequel to Naked Lunch (whatever that means exactly). Now there's no agreement about what's next in the Nova trilogy (alternately called the Cut-Up trilogy). Most sources designate this the second, but Burroughs himself said the order didn't matter—didn't exist. Well, Nova Express was published second anyway and that's good enough for me, but note that some claim The Ticket That Exploded is second. As part of the "Nova" trilogy it makes more sense to me for Nova Express with its title to be either first or third. I guess that's another reason to make it second. To make matters more complicated, revisions to all three novels (and more) have occurred since my 1980s Grove Press mass market paperback. Do I dare hope for some—any—clarity in those "restored text" versions? I just wanted to read an old paperback before getting rid of it. The method of cut-up reportedly used for Nova Express is described as "fold-in." That makes me think it's a put-on based on the old Mad magazine feature by Al Jaffee, which started the same year Nova Express was published. It's also possible that Burroughs or some assistant literally folded pages in from his massive Word Hoard manuscript. Why not? Overall, I don't think it works as well as the cut-up in Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, which does not work that well except randomly in shards. But who's to say? Also, thinking of a later book, Exterminator!, there is a thin line in Burroughs between novel and short story collection. Nova Express improved for me when I started thinking of it as a collection of stories, though only the last of them, "PAY COLOR," stood out particularly. There is more science fiction concept here—something about viruses. As a result, Nova Express got a nomination for a Nebula award, which is kind of amazing all things considered. It's possible I could have got more out of this, but my engagement with Burroughs tends to happen in the immediacy at the granular level of the sentences and their nouns and verbs. Trying to get your arms around anything bigger, even paragraphs let alone true narrative threads (as opposed to rhythmic devices), feels a little like a fool's errand. I still see this title getting coughed up on lists of best SF, but beyond maybe 20 pages of good sentences scattered toward the front and back, you could fool me.

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

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.

Exterminator! (1973)

Zap, crackle, pop. Sizzle. For a whole bunch of reasons I bet you already know (and maybe have some more of your own) reading William Burroughs can get to be an unpredictable mix of tedium, annoyance, and exhilaration. I've made it through Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night, and sampled from a bunch of others. Exterminator! is the one I enjoy most. The usual elements are all here: dope fiends, a '50s refraction on "the homosexual lifestyle," secret agents, massive and complex conspiracies, the cut-up style of writing, no discernible narrative through-line ever, sentences and paragraphs you and I can only dream of creating, and Dr. Benway. Those sentences and paragraphs are the only reason for reading him, then as now. Here's one now (and never mind the context, essentially there is none):

A cry of strangled rage bursts from the crowd screaming clawing slipping on their spit to get at him as he drops on all fours smiling his back teeth bare and ejaculates canines tear through his bleeding gums stretching his face to a snout red hair ripples down his back into a bushy red tail laps his lean flanks leaner crinkles and shrinks his balls squeezing jets of sperm from his red pointed wolf phallus quivering teeth bare his eyes light up bright lemon yellow and nitrous fumes steam off his body a reek of burning film and animal musk. He leaps through an invisible window and disappears in the 1920 night with a distant sour train whistle.

I guess that's actually two sentences, but I hope you see what I mean. He breaks rules wantonly, but in this case the depiction of animal transformation is so thoroughly imagined and vividly rendered it's almost better than anything I've seen in a movie (well, The Howling, where director Joe Dante could well have been aware of this). Something so fantastic would seem a natural for a visual medium, but actually the darting compressions of language are amazingly effective, opening up psychological gaps we rush to fill. Burroughs might fairly be considered best-ever at this. Also, this particular set of fragments—marketed variously as a novel and as a collection of stories—has passages that are very funny, which doesn't happen often anywhere—wicked funny. This is also where you go to find the text of "The 'Priest' They Called Him." Sssss—bzzt.

In case it's not at the library.