Burroughs Unbound: William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing 9781501362187, 9781501362217, 9781501362200

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Burroughs Unbound: An Atrophied Introduction
Part I: Theory
Chapter 1: Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism: Cut-ups, Playbacks, Pick-ups, and the “Limits of Control” from Burroughs to Deleuze
Chapter 2: Pay It All Back: Paranoid Writing/Writing Paranoia
Chapter 3: The Tension of Possibility: Reading Closure in Ah Pook is Here through the Multiframe
Chapter 4: Fluidity and Fixity in William S. Burroughs’ Writing: The Text Will Not Hold
Part II: Texts
Chapter 5: Making Dead Fingers Talk
Chapter 6: *Whale Drek: The Lost Footnotes of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch
Chapter 7: “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition”: Burroughs’ Textual Infection of the New York School
Chapter 8: “I Spent Months in the Morgue”: William S. Burroughs’ Appropriation of Time Magazine
Chapter 9: Digitizing the Word Hoard: Remediating Countercultural Archives after the American Century
Chapter 10: Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism: Digesting Naked Lunch
Part III: Performance
Chapter 11: Performance in the Work of William S. Burroughs
Chapter 12: Burroughs, Bowie, and the Reshaping of the Counterculture: William S. Burroughs Meets “Ziggy Stardust”
Chapter 13: All the News Not Fit to Print
Appendix A: Evergreen on the Air: Barney Rosset on Censorship and Publishing Naked Lunch1
Appendix B: Lectures on the Virus, May 3–8, 1974, Burroughs Archive at Ohio State University 
Appendix C: Burroughs Manifest, Burroughs Archive at Florida State University, September 12, 1980, purchase
Appendix D: Supplemental Bucher Burroughs Purchases, December 12, 1990
Appendix E: Burroughs and Bucher, Correspondence and Notes 1978–9, 1984
Appendix F: “A 30-Year Wait. A 16-Mile Journey.” The Story of the “Lost” Burroughs Archive at Florida State University
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Burroughs Unbound

ii

Burroughs Unbound William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing Edited by S. E. Gontarski

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © S. E. Gontarski, 2022 Each chapter copyright © of the contributor, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Namkwan Cho Cover photo: Disappearing Author by Marsha Gontarski All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6218-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6220-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-6219-4 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Burroughs Unbound: An Atrophied Introduction  S. E. Gontarski Part I  Theory

vii ix 1 43

1

Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism: Cut-ups, Playbacks, Pick-ups, and the “Limits of Control” from Burroughs to Deleuze  S. E. Gontarski 45

2

Pay It All Back: Paranoid Writing/Writing Paranoia  Nathan Moore 71

3

The Tension of Possibility: Reading Closure in Ah Pook is Here through the Multiframe  Ash Connell-Gonzalez 89

4

Fluidity and Fixity in William S. Burroughs’ Writing: The Text Will Not Hold  Allen Hibbard 105

Part II  Texts

119

5 Making Dead Fingers Talk  Oliver Harris

121

6

*Whale Drek: The Lost Footnotes of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch  Jed Birmingham

166

7

“There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition”: Burroughs’ Textual Infection of the New York School  Nick Sturm 229

8

“I Spent Months in the Morgue”: William S. Burroughs’ Appropriation of Time Magazine  Tomasz Stompor 259

9

Digitizing the Word Hoard: Remediating Countercultural Archives after the American Century  Alex Wermer-Colan 280

10 Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism: Digesting Naked Lunch  Rona Cran

291

Contents

vi Part III  Performance

305

11 Performance in the Work of William S. Burroughs  John M. Bennett 307 12 Burroughs, Bowie, and the Reshaping of the Counterculture: William S. Burroughs Meets “Ziggy Stardust”  Barry J. Faulk 311

13 All the News Not Fit to Print  Blake Stricklin 327 Appendix A: Evergreen on the Air: Barney Rosset on Censorship and Publishing Naked Lunch Appendix B: Lectures on the Virus, May 3–8, 1974, Burroughs Archive at Ohio State University Appendix C: Burroughs Manifest, Burroughs Archive at Florida State University, September 12, 1980, purchase Appendix D: Supplemental Bucher Burroughs Purchases, December 12, 1990 Appendix E: Burroughs and Bucher, Correspondence and Notes 1978–9, 1984 Appendix F: “A 30-Year Wait. A 16-Mile Journey.” The Story of the “Lost” Burroughs Archive at Florida State University List of Contributors Index

343 356 370 391 392 418 424 428

Figures The Ticket That Exploded, 1967 Bucher letter to FSU Library Acquisitions Committee, November 1978 (FSU MSS2015_10_B2_F7) I.3 Double-file folders I.4 Dust jacket to 1959 Olympia Press edition of The Naked Lunch. This covers the green paper cover to the Olympia Traveller’s Companion series, No. 76. Calligraphy by William S. Burroughs. (Courtesy FSU, S.E. Gontarski Grove Press Collection.) 5.1 The 1966 Tandem Books edition of Dead Fingers Talk 5.2 The 1969 New English Library edition of Junkie 5.3 The 1970 Tandem Books edition of Dead Fingers Talk 5.4 The 1977 Star Books edition of Dead Fingers Talk 5.5 The 1963 John Calder edition of Dead Fingers Talk (front cover) 5.6 The 1963 John Calder edition of Dead Fingers Talk (back cover) 5.7 The 1964 John Calder edition of The Naked Lunch 5.8 Burroughs, typescript, in Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs, edited by Colin Fallows and Synne Genzmer (Kunsthalle Wien, 2012), 85 5.9 Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk typescript (William S. Burroughs Collection, Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; 1.1-4) 5.10 Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk draft contents list 1; William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–72, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 39.1 5.11 Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk draft contents list 2; William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–72, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 39.1 5.12 Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk draft contents list 3; William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–72, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 3.18 5.13 William Burroughs reading Dead Fingers Talk (William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951-1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 26.29) 7.1 Page one from Burroughs’ TIME featuring the three-column cut-up arrangement used in most of the first half of the text I.1 I.2

9 19 28

29 126 126 127 127 128 137 138

146

147

148

148

148

152 240

Figures 8.1 8.2

Burroughs, William S. TIME. New York: “C” Press, 1965. re​​ality​​studi​​ o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​​r​/tim​​e/. (Images courtesy Demi Raven and Reality Studio.) Burroughs’ modification of the Johns-Manville advertisement in his cut-up pamphlet TIME. New York: “C” Press, 1965. [unpaginated] 9. reali​​tystu​​dio​.o​​rg​/bi​​bliog​​raphi​​c​-bun​​​ker​/t​​ime/ (Images courtesy Demi Raven and Reality Studio.)

268

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Acknowledgments In memory of François C. Bucher (1927–99): polymath, polyglot, professor, raconteur, pack rat, radical archivist, reuser of paper (particularly versos of correspondence), visionary, survivalist, general eccentric, and friend—who got us into all this.

In February of 1992, François invited me to lecture at his Nautilus Foundation in Lloyd, Florida, on his newly acquired and exhibited series of paintings by William S. Burroughs called The Seven Deadly Sins, which Bucher had personally purchased. During the festivities surrounding this event, François showed me a sheaf of photocopies of Burroughs manuscript and cut-up material he had acquired. He subsequently sent me copies of those copies, which I still have. They are referenced in the volume’s “Introduction.” And with special thanks to John M. Bennett and Eric C. Shoaf (1957–2019). Scholarship, by definition, incurs debts, immense and often unrepayable. We can at best acknowledge such indebtedness to our Virgils, guides, in this case, through the daunting morass of Burroughs’ archives, his “word hoard.” Many of the contributors herein have benefited substantially from their guidance. (See Bennett’s “Guide and Inventory” to The Ohio State University Burroughs Papers, WSB97: https​:/​/li​​brary​​.osu.​​edu​/f​​i ndin​​g​-aid​​s​/rar​​ebook​​s​/bur​​​rough​​s87​.p​​hp) Box 2, folder 26, contains the following: WSB’s Comments on Francois Bucher A typescript abstract and passage from a novel by Bucher, Ein Strablendes Ende, with marginal notes and comments by WSB. Includes some related correspondence. 26 sheets pc ts or cc ts with pc or orig. holog. editing and note. See also, Burroughs, William S. (2018). “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution. Edited by. Geoffrey D. Smith and John M. Bennett. Columbus: Ohio State University Press; and Shoaf, Eric C. (2014). William S. Burroughs: A Collectors Guide. Providence, RI: Inkblot Books. https​:/​/ti​​gerpr​​ints.​​clems​​on​.ed​​u​/cgi​​/view​​conte​​nt​.cg​​i​?art​​ icle=​​1044&​​c​onte​​xt​=li​​b​_pub​s. Special thanks as well to James Grauerholz, acting as and for the estate of William S. Burroughs, for his support not only of this essay collection but of the François C. Bucher legacy and Bucher’s relationship with William S. Burroughs, particularly in Florida. In his summary of the William Burroughs project, he thanks “FSU and your team of grad students and your good self. With, I presume, the aims of (1) stopping the

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Acknowledgments

dispersal of Bucher's personal property, and inventorying what remains; (2) arranging donation of the Collections—and the 58 Acres of Nautilus, with buildings—by the dissolving Collins Center for Public Policy, to the State of Florida (FSU).” The Burroughs material, the “inventory of what remains,” as Grauerholz put it, is now housed in Florida State University Special Collections, although the “58 Acres of Nautilus” Foundation property, which would have been a turn-key Humanities Center, was lost to public sale. What remained and was rescued was, then, some, but not all, of the Burroughs material that Bucher personally collected. Much of the other material, books and artworks, including Einstein’s famed sofa from Princeton, was sold off by the Collins Center, to which Bucher had, finally, to donate his property after FSU’s rejection of his gift. The remainder is now catalogued at Florida State, but as part of the François C. Bucher Papers: https​:/​/ar​​chive​​s​.fal​​sc​.ly​​rtech​​.org/​​catal​​og​/oa​​i​:fsu%​​2F​%2F​​ repos​​itori​​es​%2F​​10​%​2F​​resou​​rces%​​2F117​3 The rejection of Bucher’s donation of his Nautilus Foundation by Florida State University forced Bucher to find another recipient. He settled on the Collins Center for Public Policy, which finally sold off the Foundation’s most valuable and portable assets. Much of the revenue from those sales was used to finance property renovation, enhancement, and maintenance, the need for which was the basis of the university’s rejection of the gift. The following summary was published in Tallahassee Magazine: In February 1996, the Board of Trustees agreed to transfer the Nautilus Foundation to Florida State University. Bucher signed a gift commitment to FSU in June. At an estimated worth of more than $3.1 million, FSU announced the bequest as one of the largest gifts to its Capital Campaign. But the deal ultimately fell apart. By March 1998, Bucher realized that the university was unable to commit the funds needed to finish, repair, and maintain his buildings. (See full article at: https​:/​/ww​​ w​.tal​​lahas​​seema​​gazin​​e​.com​​/all-​​​is​-fl​​ux/)

Much of long-term intellectual and scholarly value was lost with the university’s shortsighted rejection, but not all. What was recovered and reclaimed after a decade-long search is detailed in “A Thirty-year Wait, A Sixteen Mile Journey,” Across the Spectrum: The Florida State University College of Arts and Sciences, spring/summer 2013, pp. 15–20 (see Appendices C and F). With additional thanks for diligent editorial assistance from Raymond Blake Stricklin, Christopher Michaels, Barry Faulk, Thomas Cowan, and Nick Sturm, all of whom read and critiqued portions of this manuscript. Errors that remain are, of course, the sole responsibility of the volume editor. The editorial team at Bloomsbury Academic, especially during the very difficult pandemic years of 2020–1, has been exemplary, particularly the visionary Haaris Naqvi, his staff assistant, Rachel Moore, and the rest of the Bloomsbury editorial and production team.

 Acknowledgments xi Earlier versions of some of the material herein have appeared as follows: A preliminary version of S. E. Gontarski, “Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism: Cut-ups, Playbacks, Pick-ups and the ‘Limits of Control’ from Burroughs to Deleuze” has appeared in Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 14.4 (November 2020): 555–84. Thanks to editor Ian Buchanan, his reviewers, and editorial team, all of whom brought their keen philosophical eyes to its assessment. Parts of Oliver Harris, “Making Dead Fingers Talk” have appeared in Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text (London: Calder, 2020).

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Burroughs Unbound An Atrophied Introduction S. E. Gontarski

Naked Lunch is a blueprint . . . a How-To Book. —WSB (“Atrophied Preface,” NL 224) Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word hoard.

—WSB (NL 116)

Part I: “A Shot Heard Round the World” This collection of essays is designed to punctuate, to underscore, to reemphasize William S. Burroughs’ (WSB) significance as a creative force, as a writer in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly through his anticipation of and resistance to what we now regularly call “a society of control” or “a surveillance culture,” and, moreover, in parallel, his emergence as a textual embodiment. That is, Burroughs was as much a media and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we have generally called a writer, or a novelist, although he lauded those latter categories as he offered critiques of “thought control” and more generally of a “control society.” As a writer, Burroughs comes to the fore with the obscenity trial of Naked Lunch in Boston. The novel was banned on its US publication in 1962,1 a ruling that was subsequently overturned by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in January of 1965.2 Concurrently, Burroughs came into his own as a performer, not, that is, just a performing writer but a performance artist, as a textual embodiment and a public figure, at the Edinburgh Writers’ Festival in August of 1962. At the behest of Burroughs’ American publisher, Grove Press, Norman Mailer would extol Burroughs in the now-famous 1962 blurb to the effect that “Naked Lunch is a work of great beauty, great difficulty, and manically exquisite insight. I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” The praise was included in the little handbook or prospectus that Grove Press distributed in 19623 to publicize the forthcoming novel to booksellers and perhaps to develop an academic or classroom interest in this radical literary work, all in anticipation of what was sure to be a court challenge. The pamphlet opens with an eight-page preview of the novel and includes a series of appreciations, one of which, by Terry Southern, retains a contemporary ring as he notes that Naked Lunch “is an

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absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy. No one, for example, has written with such eloquent disgust about capital punishment.” Southern concludes his tribute as follows: No one writing in English, with the exception of Henry Miller, has done so much towards freeing the reader of the superstitions surrounding the use of certain words and certain attitudes. And it is safe to add that for the new generation of American writers the work of William Burroughs is by far the most seriously influential being done today.

In a letter accompanying the promotional pamphlet, publisher Barney Rosset would conclude that “We believe the American public will be eager to read and own this American classic” (letter scanned on Reality Studio). Rosset would go on to make a similar argument in a monologue delivered on his 1962 radio show, the transcript for which is here published for the first time. Testifying for the defense in the January 1965 appeal, Mailer would go on to say (under oath this time): “The man has extraordinary talent. Possibly he is the most talented writer in America. As a professional writer, I don’t like to go about bestowing credit on any other writers.” Burroughs would finally recalibrate, if not correct, Mailer’s comments as follows: Norman Mailer said I might be possessed by genius. Well, that’s the point. You don’t possess it. You aren’t a genius, but you’re lucky when you’re possessed by it. The more you’re thinking about your individuality, or your me, the less you’re going to be contacting anything of the slightest bit of interest. You become the tool. Exactly. Henry Miller said, “Who writes the great books? Not we who have our names on the covers.” The writer is simply someone who has an antenna of which he tunes into certain currents. Of times, when he is lucky. A medium, as it were. (Burroughs cited in McNeil 2017)

The novel was heavily promoted through both Grove’s house journal, Evergreen Review,4 excerpts from which first appeared in Vol. 4, No. 11, January/February 1960, and Vol. 5, No. 16, January/February 1961, and the publisher followed up with full-page ads for the novel in the New York Times (see Wilson [2012], whose essay reproduces many of those advertisements). In addition to such a burst of publicity and the development of detailed promotional study guides like that cited earlier, in 1966 Grove Press’s editor in chief, Barney Rosset, also founded a book and film club with its own monthly publication, Evergreen Club News, which he used to promote some of his most controversial material, particularly his republication of a cache of late Victorian pornography that he discovered in a Times Square purveyor of such then going out of business. To Rosset, Burroughs, too, would be a perfect complement to what became the Grove Press Venus Library, and, to entice subscribers to his new book club, Rosset offered three free books with each new subscription, one of which,

 An Atrophied Introduction 3 in the first round of offers, was Naked Lunch, now fresh from its Massachusetts legal victory.5 Reviewing Naked Lunch (under its British title, The Naked Lunch) for the first issue of The New York Review of Books in February of 1963, that is, before the successful appeal of the ruling that banned the novel in Boston, Mary McCarthy would compare Burroughs’ humor and satire to that of Jonathan Swift: “There is a great deal of Laputa in the countries Burroughs calls Interzone and Freeland.” Changing her metaphor, McCarthy goes on to say that “The Naked Lunch is a musical comedy inferno” (rpt. in McCarthy 1970). Anthony Burgess would concur in a 1964 review for The Guardian: I suppose there is a sense in which Swift’s “Modest Proposal” may be regarded as obscene, or perhaps the final book of “Gulliver’s Travels.” But only a corrupt world will be disgusted by saeva indignatio [i.e., savage indignation]. Swift’s startingpoint was a sense of outrage with the world that the corrupt may still regard as insane. Burroughs’s vision is that of a man who has escaped from the agony of drug-addiction and regards the inferno with the cleansed eyes of the remembering artist. (Burgess, 1964)

McCarthy’s NYRB review was generated by and a follow-up to her participation in the 1962 Edinburgh Writers’ Festival.6 She details the response to her participation in a revision of the book review collected in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays, where she chides those who misrepresented her Festival comments: I said that in thinking over the novels of the last few years, I was struck by the fact that the only ones that have not simply given me pleasure but had interested me had been those by Burroughs and Nabokov. . . . This statement, to judge by the British Press, was a shot heard round the world. I still pick up its reverberations in Paris and read about them in the American press. I am quoted as saying that The Naked Lunch is the most important novel of the age, of the epoch, of the century. The only truthful report of what I said about Burroughs was given by Stephen Spender in Encounter, October 1962. But nobody has seemed to pay any attention to Spender. . . . The result, of course, is disparagement of Burroughs, because if The Naked Lunch is proclaimed as the masterpiece of the century, then it is easily found wanting. (McCarthy 1970: 43)

Such confusion and embarrassment that McCarthy cites was the impetus for her New York Review of Books essay in the first place, the aforementioned comments something of a preamble to the reprinting of that review in The Writing on the Wall. The general opinion that survives and continues to circulate, however, is that “In her [Edinburgh] speech, Mary McCarthy gives public support for William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Burroughs later acknowledges that this support [as a writer], and his participation in the Writers’ Conference [as a performer], helped to launch his career” (Bartie and Bell 2013). In his “Introduction” to the 2013 Grove Press reissue of The Adding Machine: Selected Essays,7 furthermore, James Grauerholz calls the 1962 Calder-organized

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festival Burroughs’ “first critical apotheosis” (viii). His American and English editors, Grauerholz continues, “bravely and successfully fought state censorship of the printed word in the 1960s in America and England, with Naked Lunch as one of their battering rams” (viii). The headline to Anthony Burgess’ Guardian review (November 20, 1964) was that “The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs demands to be read,” and Burgess would likewise celebrate the innovations of Burroughs’ novels, calling them “important . . . literature,” and he would call Naked Lunch, “Mr Burroughs’ masterpiece.” “Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium,” he continues, “a medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through the bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat” (Burgess 1964). As important as the testimony of these distinguished writers who embraced Burroughs was, critics risked little economic consequences for their advocacy. The publishers who fought the legal battles to bring Burroughs’ work to a public, on the other hand, risked degraded reputations and economic ruin. As it turns out, these same publishers would be those who fought and advocated for Samuel Beckett, the nouveau romanciers, absurdist playwrights, and other non-traditional avant-garde writers: Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press in Paris who first published The Naked Lunch and copublished Dead Fingers Talk, along with other work by Burroughs, Nabokov’s Lolita, Beckett’s most experimental novel, Watt, and his much lauded three novels in French, often called “The Trilogy”; Barney Rosset of Grove Press in New York not only published Naked Lunch but fought the legal battles in communities across the nation as individual booksellers were being arrested for selling the book, the Boston trial the most famous of them, and Rosset celebrated the book on his educational radio show in 1962 (a transcript of which is included in this collection). John Calder, Publisher, Ltd., furthermore, not only would publish and defend Burroughs’ writing in UK courts but would organize high-profile public readings of his work, the most important of which was the 1962 Edinburgh Writers’ Festival, where Burroughs’ presence was electric. As she spoke about the current state of the novel at that 1962 Festival, McCarthy would single out Burroughs as a writer worthy of serious attention: This conference attracted a huge audience that filled the 2300-capacity McEwan Hall every day and was reported widely in the media, both at home and abroad. Each of the five days explored a different theme: Differences of Approach, Scottish Writing Today, Is Commitment Necessary?, Censorship Today, and the Future of the Novel. The week before the conference, Calder told the press “we are imposing no prohibitions on the free expression of opinion, however controversial or unusual.” The frank discussions of love, sex and homosexuality (as well as drugtaking) at both the Conference and its daily press conferences were certainly shocking. Its impact was felt in many other ways too; not least in the way it effectively launched the career of William Burroughs, who was largely unknown at the time. . . .

 An Atrophied Introduction 5 In September 1962, John Calder told the Herald that “the conference was an experience in adult education. The gamble was to see if we could interest an average public in ideas, the combination of observation and philosophy that compose the writer’s tool-kit. We succeeded because there is a great hunger for education and for an understanding of the world we inhabit” (Bartie and Bell 2013).

“All Censorship is Essentially Thought Control” The Human Being are strung lines of word associates that control ‘thoughts feelings and apparent sensory impressions.’ Quote from Encephalographic Research Chicago Written in TIME. See Page 156 Naked Lunch Burroughs. See and hear what they expect to see and hear because the Word Lines keep Thee In Slots. (The Exterminator, 1960) The fourth day of the conference was devoted to censorship under the chairmanship of McCarthy, who opened by stating her belief that most writers and audience will be against censorship, and that it is much harder to argue the case for censorship than against. William Burroughs comments that all censorship is essentially thought control, but that the main reason usually given for censorship is “the necessity of protecting children”; yet they are “already subjected to a daily barrage of word and image, much of it deliberately calculated to arouse personal desires without satisfying them. That is what advertising is all about.” (Bartie and Bell 2013)

More broadly, Burroughs would attack language and the pervasiveness of media as he outlined strategies of resistance to control. This then was what Anthony Burgess called a “new medium” as Burroughs moved beyond print into photography, film, magnetic tape, and performance, developing strategies against what we might call his vision of a Dystopic Modernism and outlining his strategies to unsettle, subvert, and even destroy what he called “a society of control”: Censorship is the presumed right of governmental agencies to decide what words and images the citizen is permitted to see: that is thought control since thought consists largely of word and image—What is considered harmful and therefore censored will of course depend on the government exercising censorship—In The Middle Ages, when the church controlled censoring agencies, the emphasis was on heretical doctrines—In Communist countries censorship is close in the area of politics—In English-speaking countries the weight of censorship falls on sexual word and image as dangerous to an economic system depending on mass production and a large public of more or less uncritical consumers—In any form censorship presupposes the right of the government to decide what people will think, what thought material of word and image will be presented to their

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Burroughs moves from “Censorship” to “The Future of the Novel,” to a demonstration of the “fold in method,” a variant of cut-ups and so a mode of resistance to “control”: To show “the fold in method” in operation i [sic] have taken the two texts i [sic] read at The Writer’s Conference and folded them into newspaper articles on The Conference, The Conference Folder, typed out selections from various writers, some of whom were present and some of whom were not, to form a composite of many writers living and dead: Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Golding, Alexander Trocchi, Norman Mailer, Colin MacInnes, Hugh Macdiarmid. (Burroughs 1962b: 7–8)8

Fifty years after the event, The Guardian looked back to suggest that among the topics that outraged the Scots public was not only discussions of drugs, homosexuality, and resistance to censorship but Burroughs’ discussion of his creative strategies: there was . . . outrage when William Burroughs described his new “cut up” and “fold in” method, where pages from different books were collaged together to form new works. “Are you serious?” asked one delegate. “Yes, of course,” replied Burroughs, “crisply, not even affronted,” as [Scots journalist] Magnus Magnusson reported, “as if a preacher were being asked whether he believed in God”. Against the traditional humanism of the novel and its celebration of the individual, Burroughs claimed this new mode would create “composite” authors, allowing “internal space-age experiments.” The future of the novel lay in space, not time. (Kelly 2012)

Some of the source material for Burroughs’ splicings were, in fact, the work of other writers, a strategy consistent with notes he took on the issue in August of 1962 preparing for the Writers’ Festival (documents now on deposit at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library). In Box 1, Folio 4, Items 11–18, Item 15 contains the following: This [cut-up] method could also lead to collaboration between writers on an unprecedented scale to produce works that were the composite effort of any number of writers living and dead—This happens in fact as soon as any writer starts using the fold in method [a modification of his cut-up methodology]— That is I have made and use fold ins from Shakespeare Rimbaud fro, newspapers magasines and conversations letter and so forth—so that the novel I have written using this method are in fact composites of many writers—[sic].

For Burroughs, then, words are haptic, physical entities, and the various “cut-up” and “fold-in” techniques which he devised with tape recorders, celluloid film, and

 An Atrophied Introduction 7 with printed text, his own texts and those of others, were intended in part to give the writer a kind of plastic, elastic, haptic contact with his medium: “These techniques can show the writer what words are and put him in tactile communication with his medium,” as Burroughs has said (Burroughs 1970, 12). One such project dealt with “a disembodied voice recorded on three cassette tapes in 1970” (Smith and Bennett 2018: x); this then became “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution. A partial print version first appeared in RE/search in 1982, but a full, if composite, codex only appeared from The Ohio State UP in 2018. Editors Geoffrey D. Smith and John H. Bennett deem the volume a missing link between The Job, Burroughs’ interviews with Daniel Odier (1970, NY 1974), and The Electronic Revolution (1970), and they describe it thus: “Textually, the multimodal combination unsettles the borders of the ‘book’ concept, precluding the possibility of any final draft” (Smith and Bennett 2018: x–xi). But “book,” as Smith and Bennett’s quotation marks suggests, seems suspect with Burroughs. These are gatherings, assemblages, compilations, composites, mashups so that “book” never seems quite the right word for the material object in one’s hand. As Jed Birmingham praises rogue publisher Roy Penningtom—who pirated not a book but the Burroughs cut-up of Time magazine as “The Urgency [Press] Rip-off edition of Time” using an “anarchist duplicator” for the Bickershaw Festival in May of 1972—he also suggests of The Job: Roy’s taste is impeccable. He rightly saw The Job as a con perpetrated on the public and the publishers. As for the charge of padding, Burroughs is guilty and not just in The Job. In addition, Roy was one of the few who understood that The Soft Machine was a work of poetry. (Birmingham 2016b)

But even before Burroughs developed his overt cut-up and fold-in methods, he worked through an archive, fragments of text, a hoard of words, through which he developed separate, often unconnected “routines” of archival material: “The composition of Naked Lunch,” writes James Campbell in June of 2009 for The Guardian, “has its origins in what Burroughs called ‘routines,’ surreal sketches which were included in letters to Allen Ginsberg. As the pages piled up on the floor around his desk, some soiled by footprints, Burroughs saw a book taking shape. ‘Horrible mess of longhand notes to straighten out,’ he told Ginsberg, ‘plus all those letters to go through’” (Campbell 2009). Several years later, reviewing the second volume of Burroughs’ letters, Campbell focused on Burroughs’ post-Naked Lunch methodologies: “Now Burroughs is in London . . . experimenting with cut-ups, fold-in texts, spliced tapes, collage photographs and other technical adventures. Burroughs’s idea was that hidden meanings and foretellings were released when segments of different text or tape were alchemised by these means” (Campbell 2012). Shortly after the Edinburgh Writers’ Festival, John Calder persuaded Burroughs to create a “new” novel using these techniques. The result was the until-recently neglected 1963 novel, Dead Fingers Talk, which is a recombinant, pastiche-like cut-up narrative. Its publisher claimed that the “novel” contained fresh material. That “new” narrative,

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Burroughs Unbound

however, appears to be fundamentally a remix, fold-in, or cut-up of portions from Burroughs’ earlier novels, The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. But such an experiment readdressed the issue of what exactly constitutes the “new” (see Oliver Harris for further details). Nova Express, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded are considered part of what is generally termed Burroughs’ “cut-up trilogy” and characterized as such in the new, 2014 “restored texts” where the cover of each proclaims, “A book of the cut-up trilogy.” Such a designation omits Dead Fingers Talk, however, another missing link, central to but a heretofore ignored element of the series and among the clearest examples of Burroughs’ strategies, methodologies, and aesthetics. The book is even slighted in Barry Miles’ 2014 biography, Call Me Burroughs: A Life, where he undervalues the work by devoting only a single sentence to it, calling it “compiled” and treating it like an anthology or a reader: “He also compiled a book of selections from The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded to be published by John Calder in England under the title Dead Fingers Talk” (Miles 2014: 407). The indispensable Maynard and Miles bibliography, on the other hand, which Burroughs had a hand in compiling and annotating, features Dead Fingers Talk as A7a (Maynard and Miles 1978: 38–9), and the jacket blurb of the Calder edition announces, on the inside cover, “Dead Fingers Talk is not a book of selections [and thus NOT merely “compiled”] but a new novel constructed out of these three earlier books [cited earlier] together with some new material” (emphasis added). Burroughs himself considered it a “new novel,” “by rearranging the material and adding some new sections I have endeavored to create a new novel rather than miscellaneous selections” (cited in Miles 2014: 407). What “new material” exists in the volume is dominantly that which will subsequently appear (or reappear) in Nova Express in 1964. The new, revised texts, which are more recensions than revisions, use the quotation from Burroughs’ sometime London drinking buddy, Anthony Burgess, to celebrate the innovations of these texts: “Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium.” As McCarthy suggests, William Burroughs’ work at root is bitingly, if not ruthlessly, comic and satiric, its techniques repetitive, recombinant, and performative from the first, his themes social control (racial, sexual, chemical) and resistance to it, his mode of expression neither the novel per se, nor even the book, but the cut-up, the “routine,” the fragment and their performance as writing and through the body. Those pieces, those fragments were often collaboratively edited by others into wholes like Naked Lunch. Allen Ginsberg, French publisher Maurice Girodias, American publisher Barney Rosset, Chicago Review (spring 1958) and Big Table 1 (spring 1959) (that reprinted the entire contents of the suppressed Chicago Review issue including “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch”) editors Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal respectively, the latter of whom became a Grove Press editor, all had a hand in various versions, excerpting, stitching together something like a “final” versions of Naked Lunch, which as a farrago suggested a need for a “Restored Text,” produced finally in 2004 by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, now as acknowledged editors, or uneditors since some of their work of restoration was to unedit earlier edits.9 The Acknowledgment to The Ticket That Exploded (Paris 1962; NY, 1967) reads as follows: 

 An Atrophied Introduction 9

Figure I.1  The Ticket That Exploded, 1967. That is, most of the published volumes are both self- and collaborations with others; they could, indeed should be read, rather reread in alternate versions, as multiple takes, and in any order a particular reader chooses. This, generally, then is the justification for calling works like Dead Fingers Talk “a new novel.” McCarthy opens her NYRB essay on Burroughs with a quote from “The Atrophied Preface” to Naked Lunch: “‘You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point’ says Burroughs, suiting the action to the word, in ‘an atrophied preface’ he appends as a tailpiece” (McCarthy 1970, 44; Burroughs 2004, 224), the suggested reading strategy undercutting, thereby, a linear order of texts that might better be thought of as layered, multiple, viral, a mosaic, another of Burroughs’ favorite words, or to use the terminology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, rhizomatic; traditional publication, that is, binding pages into groups, signatures or codices, constricts, constitutes a substantial restriction, one that has hampered other seminal works of the twentieth century as well, like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari’s A Thousand Plateaus, among others. In this regard, Burroughs is better read, heard, or viewed unbound.

Part II: An Anarchic Archivist Burroughs did not just show me what was possible (or impossible) in the world of literature; he led the way to what could be done in building an archive. If you appreciate the work of Burroughs, nothing is more in the spirit of his work and its revolutionary message than collecting it. Any fan of Burroughs should also become a Burroughs collector and seek to become a complete man in the industry. (Jed Birmingham) Some of the essays in this volume feature new and previously unknown primary documents, archival material from the Florida State University (FSU) William

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Burroughs Unbound

Burroughs material (among other archives), to suggest the full textual and performative innovation and potential of Burroughs’ art and to provide access points for subsequent scholarly research into other archive material (his columns for Crawdaddy magazine, for instance). In so doing we are following through and realizing not only Burroughs’ multimodal interests but foregrounding the symbiotic relationship between archive, what he called, in a letter to Jack Kerouac, his “word horde,” and printed texts, thereby thematically laying bare the powers of syntactical control, interrogating the nature and limits of texts, textuality and language itself, and enhancing our understanding of the history of textual technologies, enterprises acutely central to Burroughs’ creative endeavors, highlighting his relationship to current strains of critical and media theory and to critiquing our dystopic contemporary culture. Burroughs’ biographer Barry Miles notes how all his texts are “fugitive,” where “no fixed text seems possible.” Burroughs was constantly rewriting his published work. Thus, the traditional genetic model that moves progressively, linearly from notes, to manuscript to final sales product, the commodity, becomes complicated, if not subverted, as Burroughs continued to return, play back, rewrite, cut-up, fold-in, and generally reconfigure these ostensible finished works, collapsing the differences among archived notes and scraps, manuscript versions, and published texts. He exasperated his American publisher, Barney Rosset, with his requests for rewrites even after a text was set in type and ready for printing. “I remember a problem over The Soft Machine in late 1965,” writes Rosset; “At the last moment Burroughs wanted a vast amount of changes to his text, after the novel had been typeset. We acceded to his request but under protest.” Rosset goes on to cite his chief editor, Richard Seaver, responding to Burroughs: “there comes a point at which you have to write finis to the writing of a book. Before you left America, you did re-write this novel extensively and went over all our questions prior to its being sent for setting. Then, when you received galleys your changes were so extensive (especially in your decision to lower case hundreds of words that had been upper case in your manuscript) that we had to junk your entire first typesetting and reset the book completely a second time.”10 The press had essentially the same textual issues with the follow-up novel: “When we sent him galleys for The Ticket That Exploded in 1966 he asked us to put a hold on the book because of revisions he was working on.” Rosset goes on to cite Burroughs’ defense: “I think you will agree that the original Olympia edition of The Soft Machine would have sold very badly indeed and that the corrections and changes made all the difference” (Rosset 2016: 237–8). Miles accepts such process as Burroughs’ method and concludes that Burroughs’ writings “have to be seen as one giant multivolume book including all the different versions” (Miles 2014: 542). Such an aesthetics of tentativity, of text as soft machine, and textuality as impermanent is taken up by critic Oliver Harris, who details the creation of the neglected 1963 novel, Dead Fingers Talk, a recombinant, pastichelike, cut-up novel. Original British readers were, however, less than amused by the shaking that Dead Fingers Talk offered, and the “novel” was subjected to a series of scathing critical assessments followed by a protracted and acrimonious exchange of letters in the TLS under the general title “Ugh!” Many of those letters were reprinted in subsequent paperback editions of the novel as something of a badge of honor.11 This

 An Atrophied Introduction 11 publication is, then, we are suggesting and as the bibliographers and publisher assert, not only a “new narrative,” but a new form of novel, a new form of text [see Harris, Chapter 5 for full details]. One principal focus of the following essays, then, is on what genetic and source study of archival documents can tell us about Burroughs’ processes of composition, his methods of cut-up and fold-in, the revision, rearrangement, performance, and at times cut-up and/or fold-in again, the tie-ins, and overlaps with his other works and with those of other writers to establish the principle that the archive, the cache of papers itself, remains the principal, active, regenerative Burroughs text from which static example are periodically detached as publishable commercial entities we call books. Burroughs, one might say, never actually wrote a book per se, at least from Naked Lunch onward, and Dead Fingers Talk is among the most dramatic of those compilations or recirculations, yet it stands currently as its most neglected example. Publishable entities, that is collections of words have been detached or extracted from Burroughs’ Uber text and arranged, then, often, rearranged, recomposed, remixed, republished, often with or through the intercession of others. Such a process gives to art, to writing and composing, to creation, a decided, overt materiality, less theorized than practiced, making his work what Michel Serres calls a hard (opposed to a soft) process, like the collages of Picasso and Braque or Henri Matisse’s paper cutouts as Matisse physically cut into and shaped colored paper or color itself. We are foregrounding the aleatory nature of that process, and so are here calling it “stochastic materiality” since Burroughs is often physically cutting into and manipulating print, groupings of words, irrespective of traditional authorship, meaning, or sense. That is, for Matisse, his objects were colored paper which he sliced into (see, for instance, The Swimming Pool at MoMA); for Burroughs, they were texts, published or in typescript, his own and those of others, which he then cut up, or later folded in, which process untethered language from source and correspondence. These techniques, these processes were later transferred to new technologies, magnetic recording tape and film as well. The impact of Burroughs’ cut-up experiments has, unsurprisingly, reached the crossover world of visual street and gallery art of JeanMichel Basquiat. As Johanna Laub notes in “Basquiat and the Beats”: Basquiat made equal use of history books, the Bible and even Cornflakes packaging he had to hand; he broke down any hierarchy among his sources and brought them together in new, surprising constellations.12

And Burroughs’ techniques and dystopian vision had considerable impact on the performance and pop culture world of musical sampling and remix, including such direct cut-up experiments as David Bowie’s “Sweet Thing” (1974).13 As Barry Faulk argues in this volume: Meeting Burroughs also facilitated a major change in Bowie’s songwriting practice. He is seen demonstrating the cut-up in the 1975 television documentary on Bowie, directed by Alan Yentrob for the BBC’s Omnibus program. Bowie would continue to use the cut-up technique for the rest of his career; the cut-ups he used

12

Burroughs Unbound to create the lyrics for “Blackout” (1977) were on display in the 2018 “David Bowie Is” exhibit.14 Diamond Dogs [which includes “Sweet Thing”] not only draws on the subject matter of youth gangs and images of urban chaos featured in The Wild Boys, it also contains fragmented forms, both musical and lyrical, characteristic of Burroughs’ earlier cut-up fiction.

One musical group has adopted the name of the “novel” under discussion earlier, “Dead Fingers Talk,” and the development of what Andrez Bergen calls “industrial music,” the pre-Punk of the 1970s, was “a genre of sound based around eclectic cut-ups and tape loops and a mentality just as inspired by William S. Burroughs as it was by Stockhausen and Dadaist ideals.” As writer and musician Stephen Mallinder of the group “Cabaret Voltaire” (among others) has admitted (to Bergen): “I do think the manipulation of sound in our early days—the physical act of cutting up tapes, creating tape loops and all that—has a strong reference to Burroughs and Gysin.”15 As Campbell further suggests, such processes (if indeed Burroughs’ work habits could be deemed a “process” at all) accelerated after Naked Lunch, the “routines” developing into the cut-up methodologies particularly evident throughout the FSU collection of previously lost and apparently unknown (i.e., unmentioned in the most recent biography and scholarship) Burroughs’ documents that center (mostly) on his writings from the 1970s, and that include drafts of his “Time of the Assassins,” cut-ups of Cities of the Red Night and Naked Lunch (among other novels), and all extant early drafts of his remix novella Blade-Runner: A Movie (itself a reimagining of Alan Nourse’s science fiction novel The Blade Runner and partial namesake of the later Ridley Scott film). Also included are early drafts of a short essay about the tragedy at Jonestown, the original drafts that became Burroughs’ columns in Crawdaddy magazine. This overwhelming series of experiments in art recombinant suggest something of a series of neo-Dadaist experiments; as Burroughs’ assistant, editor, and executor, James Grauerholz, put it, “Working not only in writing per se, but also in art, performance, and multi-media collaborations, he developed a recombinant art method” (Grauerholz and Silberberg 1998: 529). A cache of these “cut-ups,” and later “fold-ins,” appears in the Florida State collection as a series of envelopes each containing four fragments of typescript, each fragment an equal portion, one quarter of an 8 ½ X 11 sheet of unlined typing paper, many of them part of a viral project or a late dream project (see, for instance, From My Education: A Book of Dreams [Penguin, 1996]). The cut-ups were originally discovered, rather recovered, in their sealed, unopened envelopes. While the cut-ups show that Burroughs was still experimenting with this neo-Dadaist, regenerative, recombinant method into the 1980s, his Crawdaddy column drafts and his “screenplay” for Blade Runner suggests a writer interested in the cinematic image and so are part of the cinematic experiments of the London years of the 1970s. The Crawdaddy drafts also continue a critique of images or systems of control, which overlaps with Naked Lunch and the cut-up, Nova Trilogy of novels. The missing link in this compositional genealogy is the neglected Dead Fingers Talk. When Burroughs spoke of his aesthetic evolution, he focused on the change between Naked

 An Atrophied Introduction 13 Lunch and Nova Express: “I would say that the introduction of the cut-up and fold-in between Naked Lunch and Nova Express is undoubtedly the most important evolution between these books. In Nova Express I think I get further from the conventional novel form than I did in Naked Lunch” (Burroughs 1970: 39). But even Burroughs’ genealogy omits a stage, the “novel” he published in 1963 with British publisher John Calder in collaboration with Paris publisher Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press and called Dead Fingers Talk. Oliver Harris, arguably the preeminent material, archival, and genetic scholar in Burroughs Studies, takes us through the methodical process, or at least the machinery of what is arguably the least known of Burroughs’ cut-up novels, Dead Fingers Talk. In Harris’ essays, then, he continues to develop the image of an artist as archivist and thereby demonstrating the relationship, the interchange, the perpetual recirculation between archival material and printed texts whereby the archive is not simply a textual prototype, a stagnant reservoir, but the principal text, an enterprise acutely central to Burroughs’ lifelong creative enterprise. As Ken Lopez has pointed out: As rich as Burroughs’ novels are ... they pale beside the archive, which is his actual work. As spinoffs or byproducts of that work, the books themselves seem almost desiccated in comparison to the main body of his work—this archive—like tree branches broken off of the main living, growing trunk. (Lopez 2005: 4)

Similarly, Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, which now holds the largest collection of particularly early Burroughs material in existence, is quoted in the New York Times on March 1, 2006, as follows, “The archive is particularly interesting because Burroughs clearly intended it to be read and absorbed as a work of art” (Wyatt 2006). Oliver Harris describes the Burroughs archive in particular, not only as a vital secondary resource, a mother lode of raw materials that can be picked over to underpin the production of new texts and new understandings, but itself, as a totality, the Real Thing, the true creative product and therefore the true object of study and interpretation. (http:​/​/rea​​litys​​tudio​​.org/​​schol​​arshi​​p​/cut​​ting-​​up​th​​e​-arc​​hive-​​willi​​am​-bu​​rroug​​hs​-an​​d​-​the​​-comp​​osite​​-text​/)

In “Making Dead Fingers Talk,” Harris takes us through that process step-by-step for a novel, as he says, “. . . had been specifically commissioned by [publisher] John Calder as an expurgated ‘reader’ of three real books—Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded—in order to smooth the way to publish Naked Lunch in Britain without the charges of obscenity then facing the novel in the United States.” Harris goes on to note: By reconstructing its manuscript genesis to reveal the making of Dead Fingers Talk, this chapter aims to reclaim the long-neglected minor work as in fact definitive of Burroughs’ cut-up project. It does so by establishing that its assembly was not

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Burroughs Unbound so different from the composition of its supposedly more “original” source texts, and by thinking through the radical challenges to textual identity (and editorial practice) posed by what should now be recognized as the first remix—which makes Dead Fingers Talk a revolutionary textual innovation on a par with the Mellotron synthesizer, another essential precursor of digital and sampling culture made in Britain in 1963.

With “Whale Drek: The Lost Footnotes of Naked Lunch,” Jed Birmingham, another of the top-tier, material Burroughs scholars (and collectors), takes us through the Olympia Press original edition (or version) of what in Europe is called The Naked Lunch and its popular culture allusions and their elimination in subsequent iterations. This is material scholarship at its most significant.

Part III: A Florida Flirtation I understand you as a writer for hermits outside the buddy buddy world which talks at each other just to keep warm. —François C. Bucher to WSB, 8/77 The massive Burroughs/Gysin archive, now housed in New York Public Library purchased in 2010 through dealer Richard Aaron, remains a central archive for Burroughs Studies, at least for material up to 1972. Bookseller Ken Lopez extents the Burroughs “word horde” further: When William Burroughs sold his literary archive to Roberto Altmann of Lichtenstein in 1973 (the so-called “Vaduz archive”),16 it comprised his complete archive up to that point—minus whatever he had previously sold or lost and what he kept as his active, working papers. This group of manuscript materials [his offering of “Word-hoard 2.0”] includes much that Burroughs produced after the Vaduz sale and also a substantial amount from the years that were covered in that archive. Some had been sold by Burroughs in small batches in the years between the publication of Naked Lunch and the 1973 archive sale; and some Burroughs had just held on to, like the dream journal that he gave to Bob Jackson as a "thank you" for his later purchasing the Vaduz archive from Altmann and thereby "rescuing" it for posterity. (Lopez 2005)17

But another potential “rescue” was in the works before the Robert Jackson purchase. Twice in a ten-year period, much of that massive “Vaduz archive” might have made its way to Florida State University through the active agency of eclectic professor of art history, François C. Bucher (1927–99), who remains a ghost amid the mass of Burroughs commentary currently available, even in the redrafted biography by Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life (2014). After attending sessions at the Jack Kerouac Center for Disembodied Poetics (now Naropa University) in Denver, Colorado in the

 An Atrophied Introduction 15 summer of 1978, where Burroughs was lecturing and reading as part of the institute’s short, summer “writers workshops,” the two continued a correspondence. Bucher moved quickly thereafter to arranged for Burroughs to give a reading, sponsored by the department of English, at Florida State University, on November 20, 1978. Burroughs would remain in Tallahassee, Florida, between November 19 and 21, where he received what he would later describe as “gracious hospitality,” before heading back to New York for the Nova Convention, a massive, landmark celebration of his work in December of that year. Bucher would, moreover, also contribute some financial support to that convention, and he would attend the New York events as something of a V. I. P. as detailed in his itinerary. In addition to reading from his fiction, Burroughs doubtless reprised some of his Naropa/CCNY lectures on creativity and creative writing, since one of the pieces amid Bucher’s papers, but not listed in the catalog of his 1990 purchases, is a Xerox copy of an annotated and rearranged lecture that begins, “After teaching a class in creative writing [“a few years back” added—a refence probably to the 1974 CCNY lectures since he complains about his students] my own creative powers fell to an all-time low. I really had a case of writer’s block.” “In all, a disheartening experience,” he adds, as he discouraged students from becoming writers, “Be a plumber instead—I felt like screaming out.” “Why am I here at all?” he muses, and answers, “Because frankly I need the money.” Burroughs would resume his lectures on “creative reading” at Naropa in the summer of 1979, however, where he was free from the grind of grading, administrative, and other noxious duties that he experienced at CCNY and came to despise.18 During his stay in Tallahassee, Burroughs, with James Grauerholz, whom Burroughs would cite in the aforementioned lecture as “my idealistic young secretary,” the last revised to “assistant,” and Bucher, would meet with director of Libraries, Charles Miller, to begin negotiations for the purchase of the “Vaduz archive,” but by January 29, 1979, Miller wrote to Bucher declining the opportunity citing financial reasons, noting further that “Perhaps a day will come when libraries have ‘angels’ who could arrange such acquisitions.” But, of course, libraries do maintain lists of just such “angels,” donors, supporters, Friends of the Library, who are often called upon when extraordinary and unique opportunities present themselves. This material, for which Bucher was functioning as an unpaid middleman, was just such an opportunity that Burroughs scholar (and volume contributor) Oliver Harris has called “the Holy Grail of scholars of the Beat generation.” The material was fully detailed and described in Barry Miles’ Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive (1973), a copy of which Grauerholz sent to Miller in anticipation of the sale.19 The rare, limited edition catalogue was originally created in preparation for a proposed sale of the archive to Columbia University’s Butler Rare Book Library, which sale was never effected.20 As the New York Public’s website has it: “The collection, sometimes referred to as the ‘Vaduz’ archive, was assembled during two different time periods, in 1965, by Burroughs himself, and again in 1972, by Burroughs, Barry Miles, and Brion Gysin, in answer to a purchase offer from the Liechtenstein financier Roberto Altmann, who resided in the small town of Vaduz.” The sale to Florida State University would have moved the archive out of restricted private hands into a University setting and

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Burroughs Unbound

thereby, it was hoped, increase access to the material. The value of the “Vaduz” material catalogued by Maynard and Miles is difficult to overestimate. Jed Birmingham refers to it as “The Mausoleum”: William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953-1973, compiled by Joe Maynard and Barry Miles. Eric Shoaf and [Brian E. C.] Schottlaender are appreciated but Maynard & Miles is the bibliography that matters; these are the works that merit memorialization and preservation. In addition, Burroughs’ foreword to M&M is more important and insightful to me in understanding Burroughs as a writer than the introduction to Queer. It is in the works listed here that Burroughs lives and will live on. (Birmingham 2016a)

The Tallahassee reading generated two further connections. Bucher piqued Burroughs’ interest in an artist colony/think tank he was developing, and Burroughs would eventually purchase a plot of land symbolically called “Junction B,” that is, the conjunction of Burroughs and Bucher on contiguous plots of land in Lloyd, Florida. Burroughs agreed to purchase a plot, Lot 11, on January 22, 1980, and as a “binder” he pinned a $1 bill to the agreement. A month later, in a letter from Grauerholz dated January 30, Bucher received a check for the “Junction B” property with a note on the envelope (in an unidentified hand), “Not to be cashed.” The check, with Burroughs’ signature, remains in the envelope, uncashed to this day. Part of the payment for the real estate seems also to have been manuscripts and typescripts. A letter from Grauerholz to Bucher of September 15, 1980, discusses a manuscript sale and the real estate transaction. By November 5, Bucher would write Burroughs and Grauerholz that the manuscripts had arrived, and on November 8 Grauerholz would send a check for the remainder of the purchase, finalizing the real estate transaction; this check was cashed. Bucher would eventually call his new and growing community, after Buckminster Fuller, the Nautilus Foundation. Secondly, on July 10, 1983, editor and publisher, John O’Brien wrote to Bucher about a special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction that would be devoted to Burroughs, and O’Brien added that Burroughs “has suggested that you would be willing to contribute a piece on him for the issue.” O’Brien set an October 1 deadline. Bucher agreed but appealed for a short delay to his submission, which would be called “Burroughs’ Tree” after a feature of the Junction B property, until after the inaugural “Caravan of Dreams” festival at the new Fort Worth, Texas, Performing Arts Center, what became a yearly festival of music, spoken-word performance, and theater. Burroughs would perform with longtime collaborator Brion Gysin at the scheduled grand opening of the Center on October 10, 1983, and Bucher would attend. The festival, designed for “audiences who enjoy the creation of new forms of music, theater, dance, poetry and film,” in fact, took its inspiration from the Burroughs/Gysin early dream experiments. Bucher thought that some of that performance might find its way into his short essay, and he further suggested that O’Brien attend this landmark event. Bucher’s essay would finally only contain the following: “Note: Completed at the ‘Caravan of Dreams,’ Fort Worth, Texas, 7 October

 An Atrophied Introduction 17 1983, where William Burroughs and Brion Gysin opened the ‘Live Performance Series’” (IV.1 [spring 1984]: 134). In 1989, amid its musical recordings, and in part to commemorate the death of Gysin in July 1986, the festival produced some of Burroughs’ Fort Worth performances as Uncommon Quotes: William S. Burroughs (catalogue number CDP 85011).21 In August of 1985, Bucher resumed his attempts to have Florida State University acquire the “Vaduz” Burroughs “Mausoleum,” “Word Horde.” The Florida State University Bucher Papers contain a significant amount of correspondence between Bucher and Roberto Altmann, often including Grauerholz and continuing through most of 1984, concerning the possible purchase. Bucher’s goal now was similar to that of Altmann, who, according to Miles, “wanted to create a cultural center where the [Burroughs] archive, and others like it, could be studied” (Miles 2014: 500). Altmann’s version was to be called the International Center of Arts and Communication, but, as Burroughs told Philippe Mikriammos on July 4,1974, “they had a landslide which destroyed part of the building, and they haven’t opened it yet” (Mikriammos 1984: 13). Bucher in turn would pour all his available funds into such an artist’s colony, retreat, and think tank that he would call the Nautilus Foundation and of which Burroughs would become a part, owning a parcel of land in Lloyd, Florida, and, presumably, building his own retreat there as part of this artist and survivalist community. Working again directly with Burroughs and James Grauerholz, who are copied on his letter, Bucher laid out the plan to bring the 19,000-piece collection of Burroughs archival material, which had remained unopened in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, since Altmann purchased the cache in 1973 for some $60,000, to his home institution for a price only slightly higher than that paid by Altmann. Bucher began the formal process of acquisition with a letter to the FSU Library Purchase Committee in August of 1984 in which he notes, “I would assume that a request to become guardians of this culturally important collection covering the period from 1956-1971 has a chance.” Once again, it did not, even as Bucher had prepared for a Burroughs intellectual presence at Florida State University some six years earlier with a gala reading in November of 1978 in conjunction with and in anticipation of the forthcoming Nova Convention later that December. The material offered to Florida State was massive, some 11,000 manuscript and typescript pages, 3,000 pages of correspondence, calendars, and diaries, and some fifty hours of tape recordings. The New York Times summary of the NY Public’s acquisition of the Vaduz material omits the failed purchases by Columbia and Florida State Universities, both of which, of course, never became “owners”: “The archive has had two previous owners besides the author: Roberto Altmann, a collector from Liechtenstein who bought it from Burroughs and who apparently never opened most of the cartons of material, and Robert H. Jackson of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who with his wife, Donna L. Jackson, is a noted book and art collector but who has allowed only limited access to the archive” (Wyatt 2006). Florida State might have been the permanent “owner” or guardian of the material directly after Roberto Altmann. Jed Birmingham’s take on the “Vaduz” sale is perhaps unique among Burroughs scholars, but it stresses the significance of the material:

18

Burroughs Unbound The sale was not just fatal for Burroughs as a creative artist. It set back Burroughs scholarship forty years. The critical reception of Burroughs has yet to recover or really to even fully develop. Again this can be blamed on Gysin. The original plan was to sell the archive to Columbia University. Gysin fucked that up by helping orchestrate the sale to Altmann. The Vaduz material remained in its original packaging decades after Altmann’s original purchase on through to its sale to Robert Jackson until its eventual “liberation” by the NYPL in 2010 [sic]. Even at the NYPL it is far from free; it is currently under the lock and key of academic protocol, which is totally understandable. (Birmingham 2016a)

Bucher was certainly more the visionary than the library’s administration and its Purchase Committee, however, which, in a letter from FSU Director of Libraries, Charles Miller, rejected such proposed guardianship. The loss is perhaps measured by the characterization of the material by Edward Wyatt writing in the New York Times on March 1, 2006, when the Berg Collection announced the cache, although acquisition date in its catalogue is 2005:22  The New York Public Library is expected to announce today that it has purchased the Burroughs archive for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The acquisition will make the Berg Collection, which also includes Kerouac's literary and personal archive, perhaps the premier institution for the study of the Beats. . . . The library purchased the collection from Mr. Jackson for an undisclosed amount. The contents will most likely be available to researchers beginning early next year. Though scholars have never seen most of the material, they were made tantalizingly aware of its existence by Burroughs himself, who published a descriptive catalog of the archive in 1973 [for a proposed Columbia University sale]. Oliver C. G. Harris, a professor of American literature at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, who edited a collection of Burroughs's letters published by Viking in 1993, said the material was the Holy Grail of scholars of the Beat generation. (Wyatt 2006)

As Burroughs told Mikriammos, “The catalog’s a very long book; it’s over three hundred pages. And I wrote about a hundred pages of introductory material to the different files, and where this was produced and so on and so forth. Literary periods, what I wrote, where, and all that, is in the catalog, and the material itself, including the manuscript Queer, is in the archives” (Mikriammos 1984: 13). Sometimes, however, one fails to see a holy grail even when one is staring at it; that is, Columbia University, too, had passed on the “Vaduz archive,” and the Berg itself had passed on the Allen Ginsberg archive in 1994 (Ginsberg subsequently died in 1997). Sometimes those decisions are based less on intrinsic value of the individual collection than on available funds and how the material fits into or complements the library’s other holdings and the university’s academic programs. Unlike The

 An Atrophied Introduction 19

Figure I.2  Bucher letter to FSU Library Acquisitions Committee, November 1978. Ohio State University, Florida State had no John Bennett,23 although letter-recipient Jerome Stern of the Department of English might have served in such a capacity, but little experimental or avant-garde American writing was held in the library’s collections. The Ginsberg collection eventually went to Stanford University. The Burroughs material would stay in Vaduz for a time, where it remained essentially unopened.

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Even as the “Vaduz” archive went to Shaker Heights rather than to Tallahassee, Bucher was developing his own, personal Burroughs archive as early as September 12, 1980, when he purchased a cache of Burroughs papers from Michael G. Petree of Ant Opera Bookworks of Lawrence, Kansas, for $1,800 (see Appendix C). Each cluster of these cut-up texts was sealed in an envelope, and had been so at least since the 1980 sale, and the envelopes were all labeled and sequenced; that is, these documents have been examined previously neither by critic nor by scholar other than the bookseller who catalogued them. Some of the interaction between Burroughs and Bucher is documented in the quirky essay Bucher wrote for the William Burroughs number of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. The Bucher contribution, called “Burroughs’ Tree” (131–4), notes of Burroughs’ Florida fantasy, “He chose a four-acre plot adjoining a small brook which will feed a fish pond. At the bottom of his property stands a huge trunk of a southern oak, perhaps two centuries old. The tree was hit by lightning” (133)—that is, it was a “blasted” oak, what at other times Bucher called the “chimney tree,” inhabited by its “benevolent Uroburroughs,” which, as he says, “we compare to Burroughs” (133). In Bucher’s vision, Burroughs would become the feature, the central figure, of the art colony Bucher called the Nautilus Foundation. And Bucher continued to expand the Foundation’s research material. He received an invoice from Jeffrey H. Weinberg of Water Row Books of Sundbury, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1990, that included purchases of a copy of Tornado Alley ($9), something called “Carbon Typescript” but not further identified ($50), and an “Academy Archives”24 folder ($25) (see Appendix D). The Bucher Papers hold several catalogues from Water Row Books with various notes by Bucher. Most notable is the catalogue of June 26, 199025 with notations made alongside of an entry for a carbon transcript of WSB cut-ups and, more intriguing, a Cities of the Red Night bound manuscript, which apparently Bucher bought. In the letter from bookseller Weinberg, the “Bound Manuscript” is offered at $450. These items are known but were never recovered in the 2010 expeditions to the Nautilus Foundation (Appendix G), and are presumed lost or, more probably, sold off. When Bucher approached the Library Purchase Committee and the director of Libraries for a second time in August of 1984, he had thus already bought and held personally a substantial archive of Burroughs papers. The “Vaduz archive” would have dovetailed with it nicely and to which it would have been a considerable enhancement. Bucher would continue to purchase archival material. He bought from Robert Lococo on January 16, 1992, a complete suite of Seven Deadly Sins graphics and began planning a public exhibition of them in the Nautilus Foundation art gallery. I lectured on the paintings and Burroughs as a visual artist at the opening of that exhibition on February 12, 1992. As preparation for that lecture and to preview the paintings, I met with Bucher at Nautilus, and during those conversations, he pulled from a closet some of his Burroughs archive. He provided me with copies of that material that included not cut-ups per se but duplicates of typescript drafts of publications including a photocopy of an untitled, nine-page piece (plus two inserts) on discouraging students from becoming “creative writers” that begins, “After teaching a class in creative writing,” and ends with a more worthy occupation of becoming a

 An Atrophied Introduction 21 Commissioner of Sewers. It is published in The Adding Machine as “A Word to the Wise Guy” (Burroughs 1986b: 28–31). The piece also incorporates part of the “What would you do if you were President?” “routine” in which Burroughs confesses his “humble ambition to be Commissioner of Sewers,” “for St. Louis” added as an autograph emendation in Bucher’s copy. That “routine” became part of the hour-long, 1991, Klaus Maeck film, Commissioner of Sewers. It is also related to an earlier Harper’s commission to answer the question, “When did you stop wanting to be President,” for which, instead, the narrator “imagines a soft sinecure, cooked sewer-piping deals.” The material was also part of the mimeographed publication, Roosevelt After Inauguration, published by Fuck You Press in 1964. Other items in Bucher’s folder included “Text for Screening of Robert Fulton’s ‘Street Film’ art 1’, 3rd Aug 76.” The Ohio State Burroughs archive finding guide lists the following in Box 9, #75: Contains correspondence between Robert Fulton and WSB/JG from 3/12/7610/21/77 (14 letters) re Fulton's film, STREET FILM, and possibility of filming WSB's JUNKY; of interest is letter from JG to Tom Luddy which refers to WSB's commentary on this film as the essay, “Take Nirvana” (mind as analogue of multiple projectors; Buddhist meditation).

Among the several versions of the Robert Fulton introduction that Bucher held is the one cited earlier, “Take Nirvana.” According to the Schottlaender bibliography (item C415), the piece was written to accompany a screening of Street Scene Part Zero, which was then published as a Time of the Assassins column in Crawdaddy, November 1976,26 and reprinted in Lightworks, No. 8/9 (January 1, 1977).27 These items were part of Bucher’s September 12, 1980, purchase (see Appendix C), items L 1-4. Bucher also had a substantially edited, draft version of the Time of the Assassins column on Frank Olsen, CIA civilian biochemist, who committed suicide in 1953 under questionable circumstances (Crawdaddy, November 1975). The piece was reprinted as “In the National Interest” in The Adding Machine (1986b: 153–6). Most of these items, including material from Sinclair Beils, were among the papers that Bucher purchased from Michael G. Petree on September 12, 1980, and so among the cache of Burroughs papers recovered from the Nautilus Foundation in 2010. Following the Seven Deadly Sins exhibition, Bucher would open another exhibition of Burroughs’ artworks on March 8, which ran until April 12, 1992. In addition to his manuscript and typescript purchases and land for manuscript barters, Bucher also held a number of other paintings by Burroughs and Gysin, but only one Burroughs and one water-damaged Gysin painting were retrieved during the recovery project at the Nautilus Foundation in 2010 (see Appendix F). By then, the Seven Deadly Sins suite had already been sold off, along with some 11,000 volumes of Bucher’s personal library, as part of the Collins Center’s deaccessioning and disbursement. The catalogue alone for the Seven Deadly Sins suite, published by Lococo-Mulder, New York (1991), sells for prices north of $200 these days in its trade edition of 2,000 copies. Bucher had several, but they do not appear through a Florida State University library catalogue search. The

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only copy in the State of Florida system comes up as part of Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Campus, Special Collections, Arthur and Mata Jaffe Collection. On August 30, 2010, however, Roderick Petrey, president of the Collins Center, wrote: The Collins Center continues to be interested in pursuing a relationship with FSU on the materials collected by Dr. Bucher. . . . . a few of the books that are in good condition, have been relocated to our Miami office where they are displayed. Christie’s, the auction house, has looked at a number of items and given us an appraisal for some of them (not for sale or auction by us; only for more adequate financial documentation required by our accountants). One of my colleagues, Jon DeVries, and I visited the curator of the Burroughs collection at the New York Public Library and showed him what we think is the ‘Burroughs manuscript.’ He gave us Mr. Grauerholz’s name and contact information but we have not followed up on that.

The gracious gesture of the Collins Center in 2010 to turn over to Florida State University what remained of the Bucher-Burroughs legacy was much appreciated by those involved in its retrieval since the items were legally the property of the Collins Foundation. What was retrieved from the heaps of unclassified papers the recovery team sorted through amid piles of unlabeled cartons at the Nautilus Foundation was essentially Bucher’s purchase of September 12, 1980, from Ant Opera Bookworks and other incidental material (see Appendix C). Those of Bucher’s books that were assessed by Christie’s (for whatever purpose) were not part of the offer, apparently. Those books that remained in Lloyd were assessed separately by a team of Medievalists and book historians from the Florida State University Department of English, which compiled a bibliography of the most notable of those that remained. On December 15, 2009, that group submitted a list of fifteen sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century books they thought would be central to their teaching and noteworthy additions to Florida State Library’s Special Collections. These included a 1752 edition of La Divinia Commedia, with commentary, aviso, and paratexts; Biblia, a German, foliosized Bible dated 1736, “Red/black ptd title page, woodcuts (see especially the unusual cut of Babel on p. 12, which I would like to reproduce and study), tooled (stamped?) leather binding, metal clasp, amazing book.” These, however, were apparently not part of the “relationship” offer, since they were removed soon after that local assessment. Writing for Tallahassee Magazine in October of 2017, Erin Hoover noted that “most of his collection [was] sold . . . 87 lots were sold at an estate auction in Philadelphia in 2012, including the famous (in Bucher lore, at least) mahogany-frame yellow sofa purchased from Albert Einstein’s estate. Not included in the sale were a painting given to Bucher by Josef Albers, his collections of French Impressionist lithographs and Picasso prints, or his illuminated manuscripts, presumably sold separately.”28 That is, the earlier-cited sale was effected some two years after the Petrey offer of cooperation, which apparently referred to what remained unclassified in Lloyd and not to that which had been relocated to Miami. The Petrey notification was, moreover, the last

 An Atrophied Introduction 23 reference available to the fugitive “Burroughs manuscript,” what almost certainly was the “Bound Manuscript” of Cities of the Red Night offered to Bucher in the letter from Water Row Books, Inc., of September 12, 1990, the provenance for which was the Antony Balch estate. Moreover, no further reference to the “Academy Folder,” also part of the Balch estate, has been found. Developing a research archive as a central component of his Nautilus Foundation with its own 11,000-book research library, and having Burroughs in residence as a featured presence, was Bucher’s heroic vision, but such a mega-archive and plans for a futuristic, humanities-focused think tank in Lloyd, Florida, under the guardianship of Florida State University, and with Burroughs’ presence, were never to be realized. Much of that vision and Bucher’s efforts to secure the “Vaduz” archive for Florida State University were driven by a desire to increase scholarly and public access to materials of central literary and cultural significance. As a Foundation resident, Burroughs might have offered regular readings and seminars at Nautilus but also at Florida State University, classes in writing, visual art, and their intersection as he was doing at Naropa. The Nautilus Foundation would then have served as a research center to complement and interact with archives at Florida State University, which, as it turns out, had serially rejected Bucher’s previous initiatives. How successful the current home for what is left of Bucher’s Burroughs material is in honoring Bucher’s overriding principle of access and for advancing Burroughs scholarship is for current users of the Burroughs material to determine.29

Part IV: A Burroughsian Century “The 21st century has turned out so explicitly Burroughsian it’s downright uncomfortable.” —Peter Murphy (October 1, 2020, Irish Times) The Burroughs Century. —Indiana University Burroughs Centenary celebration 2014 The chapters gathered in Burroughs Unbound, then, constitute a loosening of the constrictions we use to describe, evaluate, and categorize Burroughs’ art, an unbinding of his texts, and thereby a repositioning, a reconfiguration of his artistic achievement, a reappraisal of his aesthetics, and, what I tend to call a “weaponizing” of those aesthetics directed against particular establishments that or people who irked him. As early as on June 30, 1964, Burroughs wrote to Brion Gysin from Tangier that “I am most anxious to discuss with you a plan to publish a magazine about the length of Time in the Time format with your drawings and my text.” The project had an aesthetic aim: “to find precise intersection points between text and drawing” (Morgan 1988: 103, 372). The deeper purpose, however, was retaliation, a weaponizing of his new aesthetics, to cut up Time in retaliation for the unfavorable “King of the YADS” review of Naked Lunch, published in the November 30, 1962, issue of the magazine (p. 96, see also Sturm and Stompor, Chapters 7 & 8).30 In London, Burroughs attacked the Moka Bar (1972)

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and Scientology offices with his developing electronic methods in the 1970s (see also Gontarski). He saw Scientology at first as an ally against the society of control, but, finally, he came to the conclusion that Scientology was itself an agent of control.31 Burroughs reprised the “playback” weapon in Boulder, Colorado, while teaching at Naropa, when two friends were barred from the deli at the Boulder Mall for suspected use of opium. Burroughs was incensed at the treatment of his friends and returned with them shortly thereafter; after replaying his altered tape recording, pandemonium seemed to break out. When the female friend, Poppy, asked a waitress what was going on, all she could say was that “the owner has suddenly gone crazy” (Miles 2014: 532). More notorious, perhaps, because it was more public, was his open “hex” letter to Truman Capote of July 23, 1970, his target the growing American police state he witnessed in the Chicago protests of August 1968, that has either continued into the twenty-first century or has had a profound resurgence.32 Most broadly, then, Burroughs’ strategies were directed against what he deemed “thought control.” The quotation that McCarthy features in her review of Naked Lunch is that “Control can never be a means to anything but more control—like drugs,” revised to “like Junk” in Burroughs (McCarthy 1970: 46; Burroughs 2004: 164), all of which suggests a culture where there are no real gatekeepers to safeguard things like veracity, common notions of truth. That looks a lot like Burroughs’s most terrifying notions of control, that tiny units of information, memes, nuggets of tailored persuasion, communicated electronically, can be weaponised by nefarious shadowy forces [or counter forces, we might add]. And so that’s the queasy feeling that we have when we read Burroughs’s books in the West at this time [2020]. (Casey Rae cited in Murphy 2020)

The volume begins by setting up the terms of unbinding Burroughs amid a simultaneous cultural unraveling, for Burroughs both a breaking of the constrictive bindings of books and a loosening of the constraints that criticism and discourse tend to impose, unbinding as an attempt to break out of, to change the metaphor—what some critics have deemed the critical echo chamber where analysts seem to be each other’s echo, restating what quickly becomes “conventional wisdom.” Burroughs Unbound begins, then, by first repositioning Burroughs amid the discourse of critical theory, particularly among those continental theorists who have embraced him in the 1970s, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in particular, who tended to see Burroughs as a visionary and social theorist and to detail what Peter Murphy has dubbed a “Burroughsian” century, the twenty-first, even as Murphy himself falls back on received bromides, “William S Burroughs, the Beat writer whose name became synonymous with all things avant-garde, paranoid and transgressive, didn’t so much predict the present age as create it” (Murphy 2020). Well, perhaps more to the point is Sturm’s argument, “Burroughs’ texts exceed the generalized descriptions of what defines a writer of the Beat Generation,” or of the “avant-garde,” for that matter. Furthermore, much of the argument for getting beyond such saws as Murphy, among others, falls back on is established in the opening essay to this volume, “Weaponized

 An Atrophied Introduction 25 Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism: Cut-ups, Playbacks, Pick-ups and the ‘Limits of Control’ from Burroughs to Deleuze.” Furthermore, in “Notes from Class Transcript,” edited answers to student questions in a “creative writing” class, Burroughs announces, “So what I was interested in was writers who had the concept of schizophrenia.” Burroughs saw schizophrenia as a creative force, a means of getting beyond imposed limits, boundaries, and bindings, and he seemed to find versions of it in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, as he recalls “That little trick that Eliot has, that stylistic trick, is noticeable in schizophrenic poetry” (Burroughs, 1986b: 157). Nathan Moore takes such matters several steps further, to detail that “discomfort” that Murphy feels, as he moves into communication theory, theories of authority, power and control, and the contingency of existence, and takes as its swing point Burroughs’ invocation and critique of paranoia, which might be seen as congruent with Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis,” or even with Salvador Dali’s “Paranoid Critical Method” of artistic creation, of which Dali has said, “it makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality,” a phrase that can be found on T-shirts in the twenty-first century. Moore unpacks such issues, particularly of paranoia, in terms of societies of discipline and control via Foucault and Deleuze (and Baudrillard, Lacan, and Flusser) to extend Burroughs’ programs of resistance to control, that is, how to “become more creatively paranoid”: What does the control paranoiac know but not want to know? That their existence is contingent; i.e. that they do not exist out of necessity and, had they not existed at all, their absence would not have been noted; furthermore, from an ontological perspective, any difference in what is because a given subject (or group of subjects) was not, is so negligible as to be irrelevant. The control paranoiac can accept that everyone else’s existence is contingent, but not their own.

For Moore, “Burroughs’ experiments with paranoia led him to discover the operation of what he called control”; and so, “for those interested in resisting control, paranoia is needed in relation to both control and what presents as ‘out of control.’” Critiques like Moore’s offset the simpler views offered by the more popular press, even as it masquerades as praise, and move us into the Burroughsian century. Writing in the New Yorker on January 27, 2014, on the other hand, Peter Schjeldahl merely echoes the received wisdom on the subject, “the Massachusetts Supreme Court reversed the ban [on the novel in 1964], on the ground of ‘redeeming social value,’ a wobbly legal standard in censorship cases then and after. Thus anointed, Burroughs’ ragged masterpiece [Naked Lunch] brought to social notice themes of drug use, homosexuality, hyperbolic violence, and anti-authoritarian paranoia.” Moore opens his essay with the more pointed epithet from the man himself, a comment from Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs: “A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on” (Burroughs 2001: 161). Ash Connell-Gonzalez takes up a text cited by Moore, Ah Pook and other Texts, to examine Burroughs’ collaborative project in terms of theories of comics to examine the concepts/strategies like closure, tension, multiframes, and text as possibility, what John Bennett calls “multimodal.” Such a conversation is thus similar to, say, the

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experiments of The Book of Breeething, which also combines text and images and has comic elements/implications as well as invoking the whole hieroglyphic theory about how image relates to text and cut-ups. James Grauerholz punctuates something of the relationship between Burroughs’ emergence as a public figure in the alternative presses of the day and his experiments with textual imagery in his “Introduction” to the centenary reissue of The Adding Machine, noting: Peter Matson became Burroughs’s first literary agent in New York, and he placed short pieces in such upstart music papers as Crawdady. Founded in 1966 at Swarthmore, by the late Paul Williams, Crawdaddy in 1970 was based in New York and published by Peter Knobler, with Greg Mitchel as editor. The BurroughsCrawdaddy relationship [see Strickland, Chapter 13] began in that year with three pieces excerpted from The Job, a piece called “Cut-ups as Underground Weapons” [see Gontarski, Chapter 1], and Part I of ’The Unspeakable Mr. Hart’—a pioneering if unsung art and text collaboration with Malcolm McNeill in Britain. (‘Mr. Hart,’ with McNeill’s art, ran for two more episodes in England before evolving into Ah Pook Is Here, a brilliant if unfinished book project with McNeill, whose artwork richly deserves the praise and attention it has recently garnered. Malcolm was ahead of his time.) (Burroughs, 1986b, 2013: xi)

Allen Hibbard offers an extended engagement with Oliver Harris’ editions to support his argument about textual fluidity, a synonym, perhaps, for unbinding. There might be some disagreement between Harris and Hibbard on the question of the materiality or immateriality of the text. Harris approaches each text with an emphasis on the material archive, whereas Hibbard’s citation of Katherine Hayles’ notions of posthuman disembodiment and hypertextuality seem to move in a different direction. Foregrounding this divergence with Harris, or articulating a nuance from this supposed opposition, creates a set of useful perspectives. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari argue that Burroughs’ method is not properly rhizomatic, and thus not properly fluid, precisely because of Burroughs’ “arborescent” claim that “all my books are one book.” In “Digitizing the Word Hoard: Remediating Countercultural Archives after the American Century,” Alex Wermer-Colan focuses on the “word hoard,” in what he calls Burroughs’ post-1968 reactionary period, and he makes a convincing case that Burroughs’ cut-ups and scrapbooking in this period are reservoirs for a future battle plan. This is especially evident in the 1969 scrapbook, “The Order and the Material is the Message.”33 Much of Burroughs’ work in this period appeared in popular magazines, particularly his assignments for Esquire magazine to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention or some of his other work published in magazines in the 1970s [see also Gontarski, Moore]. His chapter is divided into two parts: upgrading Burroughs’ avantgarde enterprise for the digital era so that it becomes a valuable resource for those who seek to break out of our hyper-polarized echo chambers and focusing on open access projects like Jed Birmingham’s and the RealityStudio’s initiative, citing de Kosnik on how “traditional memory institutions” leave out such projects.

 An Atrophied Introduction 27 The essays herein, then, look simultaneously backward and forward, backward to sources and the centrality of that constantly regenerative, unstable, shape-shifting, anarchic archive to his published oeuvre, and forward to his development as a multimedia artist and performer whose voice and body were as central to that developing mode of his art as the technology he embraced. Contributor Jed Birmingham reminds us in his blog, Mimeo Mimeo: Artists’ Books, Typography and the Mimeo Revolution, of a lesser-known performative element in Burroughs’ art: “This summer [unspecified] I had a conversation with Mark Simon who played the role of [what Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker called ‘an insouciant quack, Dr.’] Benway in the theatre production of Naked Lunch.34 I had no idea there was a theatre performance of Burroughs’ classic novel. . . . The play was performed in the mid-1970s and in a few instances Burroughs took part.” The third part of this volume, then, refocuses attention on Burroughs as a performer and his interactions with and influences on other performers, particularly in what generally can be called the alt-rock music scene, all of which came together in the historic, watershed, three-day Nova Convention of 1978, which unraveled the 1960s, ended the avant-garde (according to Foucault), and unbound William Seward Burroughs, a thread that loops readers back to the opening essays of this volume. As Murphy notes: Several years ago I spoke to the novelist William Gibson about Burroughs, and he said he believed that in deep time the writer might come to be remembered mainly as a spoken word artist. Burroughs was a magnetic performer (see his classic 1981 Saturday Night Live appearance, or Gus Van Sant’s [3-minute, 1991] film of his Thanksgiving Prayer,35 [or The Island Def Jam Music Group’s version of 199036], or the album Dead City Radio, which featured John Cale and Sonic Youth among others, [or Burroughs’ performance in Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy of 1989,37 or, again, Birmingham’s aforementioned comment]). (Murphy, 2020)

“That’s really important, and I think that has attracted more musicians than anything,” Casey Rae replies (Murphy, 2020), to which we might add, “perhaps”: If it was just like trying to parse Naked Lunch, then maybe the trail would have grown cold, but you have this tremendous library of esoterica rendered by the man in his singular voice, and it’s transfixing, it’s mesmerising, and I think that William Gibson is spot on there. It represents how modern culture relates to media in a way that is different than any previous century’s literature. Burroughs is already speaking in hypnotic soundbites. When rendered through his voicebox it becomes mesmeric. (Casey Rae cited in Murphy, 2020)

Rae’s volume has garnered a great deal of attention in the popular press but it is not without its drawbacks. When he argues, for instance, that Burroughs was “a clandestine agent in the development of rock and roll” (3), we might counter to say “clandestine” only to those not paying attention. It seems difficult to reconcile, say,

Burroughs Unbound

28

Burroughs’ presence as both ubiquitous and clandestine. Reviewing the Rae book, volume contributor Barry Faulk notes: Focusing on the cut-up [in David Bowie’s art, as Rae does] provides a unique, and unifying, perspective on a musical career otherwise notable for a bewildering series of style, fashion, and genre changes. But there is a constitutive tension in Burroughs’ art; his work twinned personal obsession and the will to impersonality. Shotgun paintings, word cut-ups, tape manipulations: all these various aesthetic practices were means to an end for Burroughs. The goal was to deconstruct reason, intentionality, even personhood. This means that Rae’s biographical approach can only take him so far into his subject. (Faulk 2020: 158)

Faulk’s comment that Burroughs’ “goal was to deconstruct reason, intentionality, even personhood,” that is, Burroughs’ desire for and experiments with disappearance and invisibility, “el hombre invisible,” in Naked Lunch,38 draws him at least closer to the metaphysical project of Deleuze and Guattari, their “becoming imperceptible” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, Plateau 10), their challenges to the dominance of static unities in favor of process-oriented multiplicity and diversity, even far beyond Western culture and thought. In the “Introduction to Naked Lunch / The Soft Machine / Nova Express,” Burroughs invokes “a Chinese precedent, bow three times, and disappear into my characters—” (Buroughs 1962c: 99). Or we might see Burroughs in terms of Foucault’s discourse of ecriture, writing that “is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears” (Foucault 1998: 116, 206).39  Furthermore, Burroughs’ impact as a performer himself goes far beyond his influence on music, Rock and Roll in particular, and part of his unbinding is to

Figure I.3  Double-file folders.

 An Atrophied Introduction 29 feature his body—material, ethereal, invisible, often as a ghost of itself, and finally virtual—as part of his creative equation, whereby his own performative activity is the book, with his look and his unmistakable voice as his dominant protean art. His continued presence as a performing self remains a persistent vocal and visual image in the “Electronic Revolution” that he anticipated and fed. The American tipping point for such a performative feature of Burroughs’ art is outlined in a letter from John Giorno to François Bucher detailing the schedule for the 1978 Nova Convention (see Appendix E).40 Burroughs was also a significant visual artist from his first interactions with Brion Gysin and the Olympia Press edition of The Naked Lunch, and the cut-up itself is often a visual art. These features of his art were central to the Nova Convention of 1978 as well as the Indiana University centenary celebration in 2014, of which the curators say, “We are calling this event the Burroughs Century, but we are not looking backward; rather, we believe that the Burroughs Century is ongoing, that we are in the midst of it, and we intend to stage an event that indicates the full range of that continuing influence, including a film series, art and literature exhibits, speakers and panels, musical performances, and more.”41 Faulk references his aforementioned shotgun paintings, but as significant are his “file folder series”42

Figure I.4  Dust jacket to 1959 Olympia Press edition of The Naked Lunch. This covers the green paper cover to the Olympia Traveller’s Companion series, No. 76. Calligraphy by William S. Burroughs.

30

Burroughs Unbound

of visual images and his Seven Deadly Sins sequence.43 On the theoretical level, then, we have Burroughs as a critical theorist, a writer as anarchic archivist, and a performer in his own right, an embodied book, say, his performances on paper and with and in visual media suggest the tripartite structure of this essay collection. To see Burroughs himself as primarily a multimodal critic of power and a saboteur of control, as we do in this volume, suggests a playback (or pick-up) of Foucault’s famous 1977 assessment of Deleuze, “One day, perhaps, this century will be called Burroughsian”: “I cut radio static into the control music and festival recordings together with sound and image track of rebellion. [The result was] Cut word lines— Cut music lines—Smash the control images—Smash the control machine—Burn the books,” and, because they are part of the “Mayan control system . . . . the instruments with which they rotate and control units of thought,” “—Kill the priests—Kill! Kill! Kill! (Burroughs 2014 [1961]: 90–1). 

Notes 1 The criteria for obscenity in the United States at the time were as follows, “The Supreme Court of the United States has held that, to justify a holding of obscenity, ‘three elements must coalesce: it must be established that (a) the dominant theme of the material as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex, (b) the material is offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards, and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value.’” If any one of these seems inapplicable, the ruling of obscenity was vacated. The prosecution focused on point B, while the defense focused on point C with expert testimony and thereby prevailed. See James Lee Hamann, https​:/​/ow​​lcati​​on​.co​​m​/hum​​aniti​​es​/Wi​​lliam​​-S​​-Bu​​rroug​​hs 2 See the trial transcript as it appeared in Evergreen Review (June 1965), the house magazine of Burroughs’ American publisher, Grove Press: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/ text​​s​/nak​​ed​-lu​​​nch​/t​​rial/​ For additional cultural context see also Judson (1997): “For Mr. Burroughs’ American publisher, Grove Press, this was good news. When it first came out in France in 1959, ‘Naked Lunch’ wasn’t even reviewed. After 1965, it was a cause célèbre. Better yet, before the Massachusetts Supreme Court heard Grove’s appeal in 1966, the United States Supreme Court set a new precedent in a case involving ‘John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’—Fanny Hill [discussed by Rosset in Appendix A]. Its ruling meant that to be found pornographic, ‘Naked Lunch’ would have to be ‘utterly without redeeming social value.’” https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/ 1​​997​/0​​8​/10/​​weeki​​nrevi​​ew​/na​​ked​-l​​unche​​s​-and​​-real​​ity​-s​​andwi​​ches-​​how​-t​​he​-be​​ats​-b​​e​ at​-t​​he​-fi​​rst​-a​​mendm​​ent​.h​​tml 3 See Shoaf: 200, item 2; and https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/eph​​emera​​/ nake​​d​-lun​​​ch​-pr​​ospec​​tus/ The scanned prospectus is available at: https​:/​/rs​​pull-​​super​​ vert.​​netdn​​a​-ssl​​.com/​​image​​s​/bib​​liogr​​aphic​​_bunk​​er​/na​​ked​_l​​unch_​​prosp​​ectus​​/na ke​​d​​-lun​​ch​-pr​​ospec​​tus​.p​​df 4 Burroughs appeared in thirteen issues of ER: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​ bunke​​r​/eve​​rgree​​n​-rev​​iew​-a​​rchiv​​e​/bib​​liogr​​aphy-​​of​-bu​​rroug​​hs​-te​​​xts​-i​​n​-eve​​rgree​​n​-rev​​iew/

 An Atrophied Introduction 31

5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

For a full list of ER issues (with some errors), see https​:/​/ww​​w​.lib​​raryt​​hing.​​com​/s​​ eries​​/Ever​​gre​en​​+Revi​​ew For more on the Evergreen Club News connection to Burroughs, see Jed Birmingham at Reality Studio: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/eve​​rgree​​​n​-clu​​b​-new​​s/ The British publisher of Burroughs, among others, John Calder, one of the organizers of the 1962 conference, “hired a court stenographer to record the proceedings.” The transcript was reproduced in a very limited, 138-page mimeograph publication (see Shoaf: 200, item 1, and Maynard and Miles 1978, F6). As Shoaf notes, “This was Burroughs ‘debut’ among peers as a major writer and his works were debated. The conference is mentioned in all the bibliographies of Burroughs and its importance to Burroughs writing career noted” (Shoaf: 200). As Grauerholz admits in his “Introduction,” The Adding Machine was put together to fulfill Burroughs’ last contractual link to Richard Seaver, formerly of Grove Press then with his own imprint, Seaver Books (1986) and John Calder publishing (1985) before his moving on to other publishers via the Andrew Wylie Agency, which continues to handle publishing matters for the Burroughs Estate. The Calder edition of The Adding Machine is subtitled Collected Essays as opposed to the American edition’s Selected Essays. In his short 1986 New York Times dismissal, Anthony Schmitz notes, “In these 43 essays the wretched overwhelms the inspired. . . . often you feel you're elbow to elbow with the most opinionated drunk in the bar.” https​:/​/ ar​​chive​​.nyti​​mes​.c​​om​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/b​​ooks/​​00​/02​​/13​/s​​pecia​​ls​/bu​​​rroug​​hs​-ad​​ding .​​html Published in Transatlantic Review, 11 (January 1, 1962b): 5–10. For Rosset’s version of the publishing process, see Rosset (2016): 226–38. These capitals were restored by Oliver Harris for “The restored text” of 2014. See Harris’s “Introduction,” p. xliv. See particularly the Star reprint of 1977 of Dead Fingers Talk and further details in Oliver Harris, Chapter 5. https​:/​/ww​​w​.sch​​irn​.d​​e​/en/​​magaz​​ine​/c​​ontex​​t​/bas​​quiat​​_​and_​​the​_b​​eats/.​ https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=c70​​​E2L​_O​​Tx4. Seen at the Brooklyn Museum: https​:/​/ww​​w​.bro​​oklyn​​museu​​m​.org​​/exhi​​bitio​​ns​/da​​​ vidbo​​wieis​ http://andrezbergen​.tripod​.com​/id38​.html. Contract for the “Vaduz archive,” June 23, 1973. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bra​​dleyp​​allen​​.org/​​ wsb​-c​​atalo​​g​/pag​​es​/wi​​lliam​​-burr​​oughs​​-arch​​​ive​-c​​ont​-1​​.html.​ Quotation from his “Word Horde” web page that includes images of the material: https​:/​/ar​​chive​​s​.lop​​ezboo​​ks​.co​​m​/wil​​liam-​​s​-bur​​ro​ugh​​s​/ms.​​html. For the fuller story see Lopez: 3-7. The New York Public Library details the story of the collection thus: The William S. Burroughs “Vaduz” Archive was organized during two periods of activity, in 1965, by Burroughs himself, and in 1972 by Burroughs and his friends Brion Gysin, the Swiss-Canadian painter, and Barry Miles, a Burroughs biographer. The immediate cause of the 1972 effort was the purchase offer of a Liechtenstein financier, Roberto Altmann, who wished to assist Burroughs financially. After the papers were organized, they were shipped to Altmann's Liechtenstein home in the town of Vaduz, where they remained sealed in their cartons, inaccessible to researchers. It was in this sealed condition that

32

18 19

20 21 22

23

24

25

26

Burroughs Unbound they were sold to Robert and Carol Jackson of Cleveland, Ohio. In 2004, the Jacksons sold them to the New York Public Library, where they became part of the Berg Collection. (See catalogue link in note 22.) Recordings available at: https​:/​/ww​​w​.ope​​ncult​​ure​.c​​om​/wi​​lliam​​_s​_bu​​rroug​​hs​_cl​​ass​_o​​ n​_c​re​​ative​​_read​​ing_. “All materials listed in this catalogue are housed in the International Center of Art and Communication in Vaduz, Lichtenstein.” To this day, what happened to the catalogue (Miles 1973) that James Grauerholz gave or lent to Charles Miller in1978 remains unclear. No copy is listed in the Florida State University Library catalogue. Grauerholz asked for its return after the proposed archive sale to Florida State failed. What record remains in the Bucher Papers, however, contains no reference to its return. See Appendix E for what we do know of the Grauerholz copy. Much of this paper trail is detailed in Appendix E. Currently available on CD but downloadable here: http:​/​/lik​​eatim​​emach​​inepo​​wered​​ bybic​​ycles​​.blog​​spot.​​com​/2​​007​/0​​9​/wil​​liam-​​s​-bur​​rough​​s​-un​c​​ommon​​-quot​​es​.ht​​ml. More on the Berg Collection at https​:/​/di​​gital​​colle​​ction​​s​.nyp​​l​.org​​/divi​​sions​​/henr​​y​w​-a​​nd​-al​​bert-​​a​-ber​​g​-col​​lecti​​on​-of​​-engl​​ish​-​a​​nd​-am​​erica​​n​-lit​​eratu​​re and a full catalogue at https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyp​​l​.org​​/site​​s​/def​​ault/​​files​​/arch​​ivalc​​ollec​​tions​​/pdf/​​ willi​​am​_s.​​_burr​​oughs​​​_pape​​rs​_to​​_word​​.pdf. See, for example, The Ohio State Burroughs collection, donated in 1988, and John M. Bennett’s full finding guide available since 1999: “In addition to providing source material for the study of WSB's life and works, this collection provides a wealth of information about the avant garde literary, art, and music worlds of the 1970’s and 1980’s, primarily in North America, but also in Europe and elsewhere.” https​:/​/li​​brary​​ .osu.​​edu​/f​​i ndin​​g​-aid​​s​/rar​​ebook​​s​/bur​​​rough​​s87​.p​​hp. This purchase seems to be material associated with the “Final Academy,” the Burroughs 1982 lecture tour of Britain, since much of this material offered to Bucher in this sale was part of the Antony Balch estate (Balch died in 1980). Such material would then be part of an extended Burroughs performance tour, the “Final Academy,” situated after “The Nova Convention” of 1978 and the “Caravan of Dreams” performance in Ft. Worth, Texas, in 1978. The Manchester segment of the “Final Academy” is currently available at: https​:/​/ww​​w​.ubu​​.com/​​film/​​burro​​ughs_​​ acade​​​my​.ht​​ml. Catalog 55 of January 1991 featured material by writers and artists associated with Beat culture. 440 items—writings, recordings, videos, and so on—including items by Bukowski, Burroughs, R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and Michael McClure and rare items from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. See overlap here with material catalogued at the Ohio State University, Box 43, # 420, as follows:: Contains 16 files A-P with xerox copies of pieces for WSB's CRAWDADDY column as follows: A- “Time of the Assassins #6 variously titled “La Chute de le Mot,” “Lecture 1,” “La Chute de l'Art!” (noted “original version taken to Colloque de Tanger”); see TAM [The Adding Machine], “The Fall of Art”; B- material related to C.O.T.R.N., with quote, “liberal principles of the French and American revolutions”; C- Lecture #11 at CCNY rewrite for Crawdaddy Column” 15 Mar 74; D- “Lie Lie Lie” and xerox of news clipping, “The Growing Innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald”; E- contains xerox of typset column the subject of which is biologic warfare; see “In

 An Atrophied Introduction 33 the Interest of National Security” TAM; F- ”The Cure,” “Time of the Assassins,” #8; G- “In All Good Conscience,” “Time of the Assassins” #9; H- “Sexual Conditioning” see TAM, “Sexual Conditioning” and xerox of “Sonic Dildo from OUI” by Patrick Carr; I- “The Great Glut,” POP,” “Mind War,” and also paraphrase from John Rossman, THE MIND MASTERS; see TAM “The Great Glut,” “POP and the Heroids,” “Mind War”; J- “Medicine and Dreams”; K- “Cancer People”; L- 3 drafts of “Text for Screening of Robert Fulton’s ‘Street Film Part One’ 3rd Aug 76”; M- “Les Voleurs” of Nov 76, see TAM, “Les Voleurs”; N- untitled; 0- “The Last Junky” (note that part of this material appears in TAM, “God’s Own Medicine”); P- untitled (note that part of this material appears in TAM as “A Word to the Wise Guy”). 27 Many of these smaller, fugitive, or underground publications are available in the Barry Miles collection at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library with “Unrestricted access.” As the Emory finding guide suggests, “Materials were collected by the bibliographer [and biographer] Barry Miles and then purchased for Danowski Poetry Library”; and further, “Collection of printed material assembled by Barry Miles for the compilation of his [and Joe Maynard’s] William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography 1953-1973” (1978), commissioned and published by the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. https​:/​/fi​​nding​​aids.​​libra​​ry​.em​​ory​.e​​du​/do​​cumen​​ts​/bu​​rroug​​hs​-mi​​les​11​​12​/pr​​intab​​le/. 28 https​:/​/ww​​w​.tal​​lahas​​seema​​gazin​​e​.com​​/all-​​​is​-fl​​ux/. 29 A case in point: what is catalogued as the “William Burroughs Archive” really is a misnomer. It contains none of the cut-ups or the Time of the Assassins typescripts for Crawdaddy magazine as originally planned but is an attenuated, incomplete version of the collation website that Paul Ardoin developed for a PhD dissertation, in cooperation with the Beckett Digital Manuscript project, for his second PhD degree, from the University of Antwerp (2014). Ardoin’s work featured a genetic study of Blade Runner: A Movie, based on the Florida State University archival material augmented by that at The Ohio State University. The current website describes two phases of the “Burroughs Archive” development. Phase I is as described earlier. Phase II, which constitutes Florida State University’s contribution, lists “Project Leads and Advisors: Paul Ardoin, Dr. Stanley E. Gontarski, [volume contributor] Blake Stricklin, Katie McCormick.” Except for the last mentioned, who is associate dean for Special Collections, the others cited were part of the Burroughs project recovery team that retrieved the documents in 2010 after a decade-long search (see Appendix F), but none of that team was consulted as the project developed even as they are called “Project Leads,” and what advice they (we) offered, only in the earliest migration phase of the project, was largely ignored, the project taken over by the “FSU Libraries Technology Team: Bryan Brown, Sarah Stanley, Matthew Miguez, Micah Vandegrift.” That Phase I website was showcased at the William S. Burroughs centenary conference at Indiana University between February 5 and 9, 2014, “The Burroughs Century,” where the presentations by what the library later called “Project Leads and Advisors” was presented under the rubric, “From the William Burroughs Laboratory for Manuscript and Genetic Study.” With its fully functioning collation demonstration, it generated considerable scholarly interest. It was then migrated to the Florida State University Library site, and Phase II began, touted as a technical improvement. It was scheduled again to be a central feature of the Modernism/ modernity convention in Pasadena, CA, on November 18, 2016, as “William

34

Burroughs Unbound S. Burroughs Digital Manuscript Project at Florida State University,” an all-day exhibition, but, after two years of “improvements,” the site was not yet operational, and so an awkward, jerry-rigged, makeshift version had to be pieced together so that something could be demonstrated at this high-profile event. Even thus attenuated, the exhibit drew much attention for its innovative approach to archivism and its focus on open-access collation. Publishers exhibiting at the conference expressed considerable interest in the book potential of such a site; most direct interest came from the Clemson University Press for its Beat Studies series: https​:/​/li​​brari​​es​.cl​​ emson​​.edu/​​press​​/seri​​es​/be​​at​-st​​udi​es​​-seri​​es/. When the promised technical ”improvements” were finally unveiled to the “Project Leads” by the “FSU Libraries Technology Team” in December of 2018, four years after its initial migration, it was clear that they were made without scholarly advice or consultation. Instead, the site had been shoehorned into the library’s rigid, predesigned, ill-named “Diginole” system. The archive site was subsequently scheduled for a special presentation to the Society for Critical Exchange at its Winter Theory Institute held in Tallahassee, Florida, on February 7, 2019, but even the attenuated, clumsy, still-incomplete site was unworkable for demonstration with its complicated registration process and its awkward, rolling firewalls. The Society for Critical Exchange participants thus saw nothing of the site. To date, then, no new material, no transcriptions, no coded documents, no additional collations have been added since Phase I. In fact, not all of the Phase I material has been included in Phase II. The so-called “Burroughs Archive” sits today incomplete and rudderless, dormant, a library-created ruin, finally, since the library’s Phase II “Libraries Technology Team” worked without advice, understood almost nothing of the original website and its scholarly potential, and was reluctant to provide information on its platforms for Digital Humanities grant proposals or allow for further conference presentations. The “FSU Libraries Technology Team” showed itself resistant, if not impervious, to scholarly guidance. That conclusion may seem harsh, but it is the result not only of examining and trying to demonstrate publicly the library’s Phase II iteration of the Burroughs Archive but comes after several library-hosted digital humanities initiatives and symposia where I presented the scholarly vision and explained functions of the Burroughs Archive to an uncomprehending “Libraries Technology Team.” I made a full presentation on October 13, 2015: https​:/​/di​​gital​​schol​​ars​.w​​ordpr​​ess​.c​​om​/20​​15​/ 10​​/13​/t​​he​-ar​​​chive​​-as​-t​​ext/ My presentations were described as follows: “The Digital Scholars Reading and Discussion Group welcomes Dr. Stanley Gontarski, Robert O. Lawton Professor of English at Florida State University, to discuss the origins of the project, as well as its significance for genetic criticism, data culture, scaled reading (e.g., text markup), crowd-sourced archiving, and seminar design, among other things.” In essence it followed the work of Jerome J. McGann, who had developed the Juxta Commons collation site at the University of Virginia that I used regularly in my teaching of the digital humanities. McGann defines what he calls The Textual Condition, his “materially based investigations,” as the means to change [the focus of textual criticism] by studying those structures of textual variability that display themselves over a much more extensive textual

 An Atrophied Introduction 35 field [that is, collations]. Most important, in our present historical situation, is to demonstrate the operation of these variables at the most material (and apparently least ‘signifying’ or significant) levels of the text: in the case of scripted texts, the physical form of books and manuscripts (paper, ink, typefaces, layouts) or their prices, advertising mechanisms, or distribution venues. . . . But the poverty of criticism in respect to such matters is widespread [at least in 1991] for textual studies remains largely under the spell of Romantic hermeneutics. (12, emphasis added) McGann’s overview has been the standard operating procedure in the study of ancient and early modern manuscripts, but in The Textual Condition McGann performs such close, sociohistorical bibliographic readings on Modernist texts, particularly those of Ezra Pound. My presentation was summarized a few days later on October 18 and again on October 24: https​:/​/di​​gital​​schol​​ars​.w​​ordpr​​ess​.c​​om​/20​​15​/ 10​​/18​/c​​uttin​​g​-thi​​ngs​-u​​p​-map​​ping-​​the​-p​​oliti​​cal​-i​​nterf​​ac​e​-o​​f​-wil​​liam-​​s​-bur​​rough​​s/ https​:/​/di​​gital​​schol​​ars​.w​​ordpr​​ess​.c​​om​/20​​15​/10​​/24​/h​​ow​-bu​​rroug​​hs​-an​​d​-dig​​itiza​​tion-​​ expan​​d​-our​​-unde​​rstan​​di​ng-​​of​-te​​xts​-a​​nd​-ar​​chive​​s/ Such scholarly aims of theorizing texts and textuality seemed to elude “The Libraries Technology Team” and to suggest a total disconnect of understanding and aims between the FSU Digital Scholars “collaboratory” and “The Libraries Technology Team.” The scorecard, however, is clear: Phase I produced a PhD dissertation (rather, two half dissertations), five well-placed scholarly essays (see Ardoin and Stricklin), and two high-level conference presentations (as mentioned earlier), all based on the FSU archival material; in the seven years after migration, Phase II produced zero dissertations (and none in progress), zero scholarly essays, one failed conference presentation (after which further attempts ceased), and five rejected digital grant applications where function failures and the lack of innovative design to those parts that did function were cited in deeming our applications “non-competitive”: https​:/​/ ww​​w​.lib​​.fsu.​​edu​/b​​urrou​​ghs​​-a​​rchiv​e. 30 “The fourth title from [Ted] Berrigan’s “C” Press, Time, is in part Burroughs’ response to ‘the libelous review of Naked Lunch [Time Magazine, November 30, 1962] called ‘King of the YADS’ (Young American Disaffiliates), in which it was claimed that Burroughs had cut off a finger to avoid the draft. By transforming this supreme organ of control Burroughs was aiming at the jugular” (Miles 2014: 435). Ron Padgett, editor for the edition, relates, “Burroughs’ original manuscript was so faintly typed that the printer (a very helpful gentleman named Mr. Dymm at Fleetwood Letter Service) said it would not be legible in an offset edition.” In order to solve the problem, the editor created a facsimile of Burroughs’ manuscript. He rented a typewriter (with the same font as Burroughs’) and then acquired “a fresh (used) copy of the issue of Time (‘Transatlantic Edition,’ it called itself) he had used as the basis for his manuscript.” “It was a lot of work, and I became rather obsessed with creating a perfect replica, but I enjoyed doing it. Burroughs was pleased with the result, but, given his characteristic reserve, he didn’t gush. Throughout the project he was cordial, polite, somewhat old-fashioned in his formal good manners. Brion Gysin was equally polite but a bit warmer in his demeanor.” (Email from Ron Padgett.) From Granary Books:

36

31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42

Burroughs Unbound https​:/​/ww​​w​.gra​​naryb​​ooks.​​com​/p​​ages/​​books​​/569/​​willi​​am​-s-​​burro​​ughs-​​br​ion​​-gysi​​n​/ tim​e. See Ali’s Smile: Naked Scientology (London: Unicorn, 1971), lead story published in Exterminator! (1973), 74–84. Burroughs’ open letter to Capote also takes issues with Police tactics and Capote’s stand on capital punishment: “Your recent appearance before a senatorial committee on which occasion you spoke in favor of continuing the present police practice of extracting confessions by denying the accused the right of consulting consul prior to making a statement also came to my attention. In effect you were speaking in approval of standard police procedure: obtaining statements through brutality and duress, whereas an intelligent police force would rely on evidence rather than enforced confessions. You further cheapened yourself by reiterating the banal argument that echoes through letters to the editor whenever the issue of capital punishment is raised: ‘Why all this sympathy for the murderer and none for his innocent victims?’ . . . You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning America into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers and the retention of capital punishment to deal with the situation they have created.” See: https​:/​/li​​thub.​​com​/r​​ead​-w​​illia​​m​-s​-b​​urrou​​ghss-​​hate-​​lette​​r​-to-​​​truma​​n​cap​​ote/. See also, Wermer-Colan (2020: 6–8). Burroughs in his first television appearance reads the episode on Saturday Night Live on July 11, 1981, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nbc​​.com/​​satur​​day​-n​​ight-​​live/​​video​​/gues​​t​-per​​​forme​​r​/ n88​​73. “Thanksgiving Day, Nov 28, 1986” was first published in Tornado Alley, with illustrations by S. Clay Wilson. See the Van Sant film at https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​ atch?​​v​=s4n​​​SxArk​​9g8. Hear Burroughs perform further at http:​/​/aca​​demic​​.broo​​klyn.​​cuny.​​edu​/m​​odlan​​g​/ car​​asi​/t​​hanks​​givi​n​​gpray​​er​.ht​m https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=sLS​​​veRGm​​pIE. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=oKP​​​cR3tA​​DXc. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 2004, 56. See also “Becoming Degree Zero: Authors Vanishing into the Zone of Imperceptibility,” the final chapter of my Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), on line access at: https​:/​/ed​​ inbur​​gh​.un​​ivers​​itypr​​esssc​​holar​​ship.​​com​/v​​iew​/1​​0​.336​​6​/edi​​nburg​​h​/978​​07486​​97328​​. 001.​​0001/​​upso-​​97​807​​48697​​328​-c​​hapte​​r​-009.​ For more on Burroughs and performance and his influences on other performers, see Timothy S. Murphy’s excellent, 1997 study (developed as a UCLA PhD dissertation), Wising up the Marks. https​:/​/so​​aad​.i​​ndian​​a​.edu​​/exhi​​bitio​​ns​/gr​​unwal​​d​-gal​​lery/​​archi​​ve​/20​​14​/20​​14​-01​​​-24​-b​​ urrou​​ghs​.h​​tml. “Burroughs would adorn the folders inside and out using a mix of ink and gouache with gestural brushstrokes sometimes mixed with glitter or fluorescent paint and a line or two of text. The exhibition features fifty such works, now on show for the first time in London [where it was called “Dead Aim: The Unseen Art of William S. Burroughs.” https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/crit​​icism​​/dead​​-aim-​​the​-u​​nseen​​-art-​​of​-wi​​llia​m​​-s​-bu​​rroug​​hs/], representing every area of Burroughs creativity, combining as they do literature,

 An Atrophied Introduction 37 visual mark-making and performance, all derived from the very birth of an idea itself ” (link in note 41). See also the excellent 1988 interview with Kathy Acker in London’s October Gallery: https​:/​/al​​lengi​​nsber​​g​.org​​/2012​​/10​/k​​athy-​​acker​​-inte​​rview​​s​wil​​l​iam-​​burro​​ughs/.​ 43 See, https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phy​/b​​ooks-​​and​-b​​roads​​ide​-p​​rints​​/sev​e​​n​dea​​dly​-s​​ins/.

References Ardoin, Paul (2014), Product and Process: Making and Unmaking Films with Burroughs and Beckett, University of Antwerp Ph. D. thesis, defended November 29. Ardoin, Paul (2015a), “Versions, Cut-ups, and Bladerunners: Critique and Revision in Nourse and Burroughs,” Critique 56(1): 108–20. Ardoin, Paul (2015b), “Courage to be a writer: The Genesis of Burroughs’s Blade Runner,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 109(1): 63–81. Bartie, Angela (2017), “Cultural Interactions at the Edinburgh Festivals, c 1947–1971,” Arts and International Affairs 2(2). doi:10.18278/aia.2.2.2, https​:/​/ww​​w​.res​​earch​​.ed​.a​​c​. uk/​​porta​​l​/fil​​es​/41​​46034​​8​/Bar​​tie​_2​​017​_A​​IA​_Cu​​ltura​​l​_Int​​eract​​ions_​​at​_th​​​e​_Edi​​nburg​​ h​_Fes​​tival​​s​.pdf​ Bartie, Angela and Eleanor Bell (eds.) (2012), The International Writers’ Conference Revisited: Edinburgh, 1962, Glasgow: Cargo Publishing. Bartie, Angela and Eleanor Bell (2013), The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post War Britain, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Excerpted as “1962 International Writers’ Conference.” The International Writers’ Conference Revisited: 1962 (Paperback, Glasgow: Cargo Publishing, 2012). Available online: http:​/​/www​​.edin​​ burgh​​world​​write​​rscon​​feren​​ce​.or​​g​/b​ac​​kgrou​​nd/ Beiles, Sinclair. Interview with: http:​/​/www​​.yout​​ube​.c​​om​/wa​​tch​?v​​=PlV​i​​3o1Ud​​W8 Birmingham, Jed (2008a), “1962 International Writers’ Conference,” Reality Studio. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/196​​2​-int​​ernat​​ional​​writ​​​ers​-c​​onfer​​ence/​ Birmingham, Jed (2008b), “Burroughs’ Statement at the 1962 International Writers’ Conference,” Reality Studio. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/text​​s​/bur​​rough​​s​sta​​temen​​ts​-at​​-the-​​1962-​​inter​​natio​​nal​-w​​​riter​​s​-con​​feren​​ce/ Birmingham, Jed (2009), “‘The Ideal Product . . . No Sales Talk Necessary.’ The Olympia Press Naked Lunch as Collectable and Book Object,” Harris and MacFadyen, 142–51. Birmingham, Jed (2016a), “#1: A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive,” Reality Studio. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​ r​/the​​-top-​​23​-mo​​st​-in​​teres​​ting-​​burro​​ughs-​​colle​​ctibl​​es​/1-​​a​-des​​cript​​ive​-c​​atalo​​gue​-o​​f​-the​​​ -will​​iam​-s​​-burr​​oughs​​-arch​​ive/ Birmingham, Jed (2016b), “#4: The Urgency Press Ripoff Edition of Time,” Reality Studio. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/the​​top-​​23​-mo​​st​-in​​teres​​ting-​​burro​​ughs-​​colle​​ctibl​​es​/4-​​the​-u​​rgenc​​y​-pre​​​ss​-ri​​poff-​​editi​​on​of​​-time​/ Bockris, Victor (1981), With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, New York: Seaver Books. “The Boston Trial of Naked Lunch” (1965), Evergreen Review 9(36): 40–9.

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Bryden, Mary (2009), “The Embarrassment of Meeting: Burroughs, Beckett, Proust (and Deleuze),” in Mary Bryden and Margaret Topping (eds.), Beckett’s Proust / Deleuze’s Proust, 13–25, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Burgess, Anthony, Guardian Review of The Naked Lunch, November of 1964. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​015​/n​​ov​/20​​/will​​iam​-b​​urrou​​ghs​-n​​aked-​​ lunch​​-revi​​ew​-a​n​​thony​​-burg​​ess​-1​​964. Burroughs, William S. (1962a), “Burroughs’ Statements at the 1962 International Writers’ Conference,” Reality Studio. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/text​​s​/bur​​rough​​s​sta​​temen​​ts​-at​​-the-​​1962-​​inter​​natio​​nal​-w​​​riter​​s​-con​​feren​​ce/. Burroughs, William S. (1962b), “Censorship,” Transatlantic Review 11(January 1): 5–10. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/imag​​es​/bi​​bliog​​raphi​​c​_bun​​ker​/t​​ransa​​tlant​​i c​_re​​view/​​trans​​atla​n​​tic​_r​​eview​​.11​.p​​df. Burroughs, William S. (1962c), “Introduction to Naked Lunch / The Soft Machine / Nova Express,” The Evergreen Review 6(22): 99–109. Burroughs, William S. (1963a), “The Cut Up Method,” in Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (ed.), The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 345–8, New York: Corinth Books. Full text at Internet Archive: https​:/​/ar​​chive​​.org/​​detai​​ls​/mo​​derns​​antho​​logy0​​ 0bara​​/page​​/n​11/​​mode/​​2up. Burroughs, William S. (1963b), Dead Fingers Talk, London: John Calder in Association with the Olympia Press. Burroughs, William S. (1964), The Naked Lunch, London: John Calder. Burroughs, William S. (1966), Dead Fingers Talk, London: Universal-Tandem Publishing Company. Burroughs, William S. (1970), The Job: Interviews with William Burroughs, edited by Daniel Odier. [Revised and enlarged edition], New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1986a), “Beckett and Proust,” The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 182–6, New York: Seaver Books. Burroughs, William S. (1986b), The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, New York: Seaver Books. [Arcade Publishing “Reprint Edition,” 1993; Grove Press “Reprint Edition,” “With a New Introduction by James Grauerholz,” 2013.] Burroughs, William S. (1989), The Job: Interviews with William Burroughs, edited by Daniel Odier. [Revised and enlarged edition], London: Penguin Books. Burroughs, William S. (1993), The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, edited by Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin Books. Burroughs, William S. (1997), “Ports of Entry,” Grand Street 59 (winter): 70–9. Burroughs, William S. (2004), Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (2008), Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs, edited by Oliver Harris, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Available online: https​:/​/oh​​iosta​​tepre​​ss​.or​​g​/boo​​ks​/Bo​​okPag​​es​/bu​​rroug​​hs​_ev​​er​yth​​ing​_t​​oc​.pd​f. Burroughs, William S. (2009), Naked Lunch: 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (2012), Rub Out The Words, The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, New York: Ecco Press. Burroughs, William S. (2014), The Soft Machine: The Restored Text, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (2018), The Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution, edited by Geoffrey D. Smith and John M. Bennett, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

 An Atrophied Introduction 39 Burroughs, William S. (2020), Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text, edited by and with an Introduction by Oliver Harris, London: Alma Books. Campbell, James (1997). “Struggles with the Ugly Spirit, Obituary: William Burroughs.” The Guardian 4 August: Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/ jun/20/william-s-burroughs-naked-lunch. Campbell, James (2012). “Rub out the words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959–1974 edited by Bill Morgan—Review..” The Guardian 23 March:Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/23/rub-out-words-william-burroughsreview Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, foreword by Brian Massumi, 232–309, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evergreen Review. (1966a), “Advertisement,” New York Times, January 30. BR13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. October 15, 2009. Evergreen Review. (1966b), “Advertisement,” New York Times, February 5, 26. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. October 15, 2009. Evergreen Review. (1966c), “Advertisement,” New York Times, March 13, 341. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. October 15, 2009. Evergreen Review. (1966d), “Advertisement,” New York Times, May 1, 333. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. October 15, 2009. Evergreen Review. (1966e), “Advertisement,” New York Times, August 14, 323. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. October 15, 2009. Evergreen Review. (1967f), “Advertisement,” New York Times, August 20, BR17. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. October 15, 2009. Faulk, Barry (2020), “Review: William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock’n’Roll,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 32(3): 157–9. Foucault, Michel (1998), “What Is an Author?” in James D. Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Volume II, 205–22, New York: The New Press. Gontarski, Stanley. E. (2000), Modernism, Censorship, and the Politics of Publishing: The Grove Press Legacy, Chapel Hill: Rare Book Collection, University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gontarski, Stanley E. (2019), “The Posthuman William S. Burroughs,” “Genealogy of the Posthuman,” Critical Posthumanism Network. Available online: https://cri​tica​lpos​ thumanism​.net/. Goodman, Michael B. and Lemuel B. Coley (1990), William Burroughs: A Reference Guide, New York: Garland Publishing. Grauerholz, James and Ira Silverberg (eds.) (1998), Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader, 529–30, New York: Grove Press. Grove Press. (1966a), “Advertisement,” New York Times, August 16, 37. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. October 15, 2009. Grove Press. (1966b), “Advertisement,” New York Times, December 28, 35. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. October 15, 2009. Harris, Oliver (2007), “Cutting up the Archive: William Burroughs and the Composite Text,” Posted By Reality Studio on June 8. Available online: http:​/​/rea​​ litys​​tudio​​.org/​​s chol​​arshi​​p​/cut​​ting-​​up​-th​​e​-arc​​hive-​​willi​​am​-bu​​r roug​​hs​-an​​d​-​t he​​comp​​osite​​-text​/. Harris, Oliver and Ian MacFadyen (eds.) (2009), Naked Lunch @ 50, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Jones, Josh (2014), “How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972),” Open Culture. https​:/​/ww​​w​.openculture.com/2014/12/ how-william-s-burroughs-shut-down-londons-first-espresso-bar-1972.html. Judson, George (1997), “Naked Lunches and Reality Sandwiches: How the Beats Beat the First Amendment,” The New York Times, August 10, 1997. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/1​​ 997​/0​​8​/10/​​weeki​​nrevi​​ew​/na​​ked​-l​​unche​​s​-and​​-real​​ity​-s​​andwi​​ches-​​how​-t​​he​-be​​ats​-b​​e​at​-t​​ he​-fi​​rst​-a​​mendm​​ent​.h​​tml. Kelly, Stuart (2012), “How the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference Changed the World of Literature,” The Guardian, August 11. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/ bo​​oks​/2​​012​/a​​ug​/11​​/edin​​burgh​​-writ​​ers​-c​​on​fer​​ence-​​liter​​ature.​ Lopez, Ken (2005), William S. Burroughs Literary Archive, Sale Catalogue. Available online: http://lopezbooks​.com​/item​/24827/. McCarthy, Mary (1963a), “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” review of The Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs, The New York Review of Books, February 1. McCarthy, Mary (1963b), “Rev. of Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs,” Encounter 20(4): 92–8. McCarthy, Mary (1970), “Burroughs’ Naked Lunch,” in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays, 42–53, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. McGann, Jerome J. (1991), The Textual Condition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McNeil, Legs (2017), “William Burroughs Target Practice,” Please Kill Me. Available online: https​:/​/pl​​easek​​illme​​.com/​​willi​​am​-bu​​rroug​​hs​-ta​​rget-​​​pract​​ice/. [Reprinted from Spin, October 1991]. Maynard, Joe and Barry Miles (1978), William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953-1973: Unlocking Inspector Lee’s Word Hoard (A Linton R. Massey Descriptive Bibliography), Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press. Mikriammos, Philippe (1984), “The Last European Interview,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction IV(1): 12–18. [The interview was conducted in July 1974]. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.dal​​keyar​​chive​​.com/​​a​-con​​versa​​tion-​​with-​​willi​​am​-bu​​ rroug​​hs​-by​​-phil​​​ippe-​​mikri​​ammos​/. Miles, Barry (1973), Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, London: Covent Garden Press, 347 pp. (26 lettered copies and 200 copies of a trade edition, all signed by Gysin, Burroughs and Miles). [“The catalogue was made at the request of Kenneth Lohf at Columbia University’s Butler Library who wanted to buy the archive,” Barry Miles: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/the​​-top-​​23​-mo​​st​-in​​teres​​ ting-​​burro​​ughs-​​colle​​ctibl​​es​/1-​​a​-des​​cript​​ive​-c​​atalo​​gue​-o​​f​-the​​​-will​​iam​-s​​-burr​​oughs​​-arch​​ive/.] Miles, Barry (1992), William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible. London: Virgin Publishing, Ltd. [Revised edition 2002.] Miles, Barry (2001), The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso 1957–1963, New York: Grove Press. Miles, Barry (2014), Call Me Burroughs: A Life, New York: Twelve. [See also Maynard, Jo (1978).] Morgan, Ted (1988), Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, New York: Henry Holt & Company. Murphy, Peter (2020), “How William S. Burroughs Influenced Generations of Musicians,” The Irish Times, October 1. [Interview with Casey Rae, q.v.]. Available online: https​:/​/ ww​​w​.iri​​shtim​​es​.co​​m​/cul​​ture/​​books​​/how-​​willi​​am​-bu​​rroug​​hs​-in​​fluen​​ced​-g​​enera​​tions​​of​​-m​​usici​​ans​-1​​.4363​​747.

 An Atrophied Introduction 41 Murphy, Timothy S. (1997), Wising up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Cover design uses Burroughs’ 1992 graphic, “The Hole in His Head Is Big.”]. Available online: https​:/​/pu​​blish​​ing​.c​​dlib.​​org​/u​​cpres​​ seboo​​ks​/vi​​ew​?do​​cId​=f​​t 0580​​030m&​​chunk​​.id​=d​​0e177​​6​&t​oc​​.id=&​​brand​​=ucpr​​ess Rae, Casey (2019), William S Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll, Austin: University of Texas Press. [See also Murphy.] [Reprinted in the UK by White Rabbit in September 2020] Rosset, Barney (2016), Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship, 226–38, New York: O/R Books. Schjeldahl, Peter (2014), “The Outlaw: The Extraordinary Life of William S. Burroughs,” The New Yorker, February 3. Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh (eds.) (2004), Retaking the Universe: Burroughs in the Age of Globilization, London: Pluto Press. Available online: https​:/​/rs​​pull-​​super​​vert.​​ netdn​​a​-ssl​​.com/​​image​​s​/cov​​ers​_o​​ther/​​retak​​ing​_t​​he​_un​​ivers​​e​/ret​​ak​ing​​-the-​​unive​​rse​.p​​df. Shoaf, Eric C. (2014), William S. Burroughs: A Collectors Guide, Providence, RI: Inkblot Books. Available online: https​:/​/ti​​gerpr​​ints.​​clems​​on​.ed​​u​/cgi​​/view​​conte​​nt​.cg​​i​?art​​icle=​​ 1044&​​c​onte​​xt​=li​​b​_pub​s. Stricklin, Raymond Blake (2021), American Paraliterature and Other Theories to Hijack Communication, (Anthem Symploke Studies in Theory series), London: Anthem Press. Stricklin, Raymond Blake (2019), “‘Word Falling…Photo Falling’: William S. Burroughs and the Word as Written Image,” in Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (eds.), William Burroughs: Cutting up The Century, 324–32, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wermer-Colan, Alex (2020), “The Order and the Material Is the Message,” American Book Review 41(3): 6–8. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/abr.2020.0031. Wilson, Meagan (2012), “Your Reputation Precedes You: A Reception Study of Naked Lunch,” Journal of Modern Literature 35(2): 98–125. Available online: www​.j​​stor.​​org​/s​​ table​​/10​.2​​979​/j​​model​​ite​.3​​5​.2​.9​8 (accessed March 23, 2020). Wyatt, Edward (2006), “Public Library Buys a Trove of Burroughs Papers,” New York Times, March 1, Section E, 1. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.nyti​​mes​.c​​om​/20​​06​/03​​/01​/b​​ ooks/​​01bea​​ts​.ht​​ml​?pa​​ge​wan​​ted​=a​​ll&​_r​=0.

42 

Part I

Theory

44 

1

Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism Cut-ups, Playbacks, Pick-ups, and the “Limits of Control” from Burroughs to Deleuze S. E. Gontarski

Playback is the essential ingredient.

—WSB (1973)

How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he “wants.” —WSB (The Western Lands, 1987, p. 257) Control systems intend to duplicate fear and submission. This may involve orders that are contradictory or impossible to carry out. Here the intention is to disorder the receipt point of communication . . . . Words are made to lie with. Despite this lack of precision with the effect produced, words are the most potent control instrument when used on a mass scale as we can see through the mass effectiveness of propaganda techniques. Words are a partially effective control instrument and cut ups, that is, cutting up lines, provides a partial counter. —WSB (CCNY lectures, 1974) I . . . made a sort of move into politics in May of 1968, as I came into contact with specific problems, through Guattari, through Foucault, through Elie Sambar [editor of the Revue des études palestiniennes]. —“Control and Becoming,” GD to Toni Negri (1990, Negotiations, 1995, p. 170) There have been, of course, various remnants of disciplinary societies for years, but we already know we are in societies of a different type that should be called, using Burroughs’ term—and Foucault had a very deep admiration for Burroughs— control societies. —GD, Seminar On Cinema at La Fémis (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l'Image et du Son) (1987) (Deleuze, Two Regimes, 2007, 326)

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Burroughs Unbound

In November of 1973, the mainstream monthly Harpers published a second article by struggling outlier writer and Beat associate William S. Burroughs, entitled “Playback from Eden to Watergate” (#1482: 84–6, 88).1 Its title suggested not only grand historic sweep with a focus on contemporary issues but a change in creative (and, as it turns out, destructive, or at least combative) strategies, a shift in communication technologies from print to magnetic tape, a medium that Burroughs had been experimenting with and manipulating since the 1960s, often as part of a mélange of media: recording tape, celluloid, photo-collage, and print. Burroughs had thought for a time that he might become a mainstream writer, as he wrote to Jack Kerouac on December 7, 1954: “I sat down seriously to write a best-seller Book of the Month Club job on Tangier,” which he hoped would get “serialized in Cosmopolitan or Good Housekeeping.” His writing and media experiments grew increasingly dissonant, however, such dissonance accelerating after his move to Paris and through the meeting with French sound poet, performance artist, and champagne scion Bernard Heidsieck, who, with collaborator Henri Chopin, ran what they called Domaine Poétique. Soon after their meeting, Burroughs and his collaborators, Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, participated in an event called La Bohème. When they met, Heidsieck and Chopin had been doing what they called sound collages and assemblages, appropriating contemporary technology to their art and shifting their medium of expression from page to live body and so developing a separate, overlapping line of what became Fluxus in the United States and Britain. For Gysin their interests followed his in “sound being used as material”; as he described the encounter: In La Bohème William and I had done some very strange things along that line, reading poems off shuffled cards along with tapes running and stuff like that. And they said, “Wouldn’t you like to join in with us”? And I did, and Ian was there and we sort of jumped in on this. and said . . . it’s got to be theatre. (Miles 2000: 230)2

But Burroughs’ work also grows out of, overlaps, or runs parallel with another feature of the European avant-garde, that of the surrealist novel in collage, which included visual or visible poetry, as in Max Ernst’s La Femme 100 Têtes (“The Hundred Headless Woman”) of 1929, Rêve d’une Petite Fille Qui Voulut Entrer au Carmel (“A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil”) of 1930, and the 1934 novel in five booklets called Une semaine de bonté (“A Week of Kindness”).3 These were not only the advent of cut-up novels but included contemporary advertising among its collages and so anticipated what, after the Second World War, we would begin to call Pop Art. Ernst’s collage techniques also included rubbings that he called frottage, which has, as well, sexual connotations or undertones. As Mark Dery put it, Ernst’s collage novels still cast an unsettling spell, plunging us into a gaslit Victorian underworld of the unconscious, part magic lantern show, part séance, all Freudian uncanny. Armed with scissors and glue, Ernst performed meticulous surgery on 19th-century engravings— illustrations from Gothic romances, penny dreadfuls,

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 47 mail order catalogues, and scientific texts—to create disquieting tableaux. Marrying hallucinatory visions to hard-edged realism, true crime horror to black humor, they flicker in the mind’s eye like scenes from a silent movie—a melodrama based on Jack the Ripper’s dream journal, perhaps. (Dery)

Like many another artist working in this early or mid-twentieth-century mode of creative experiment, Burroughs kept an eye on the commercial literary markets and would work within and draw inspiration from popular culture. As Sean Lathan suggests, “Scholars like Lawrence Rainey, Stephen Watt, Kevin Dettmar and a host of others have now revealed to us the multi-form ways in which [James] Joyce, [T. S.] Eliot, and [Virginia] Woolf both drew inspiration from mass culture and sought to win the financial and social rewards of popular success” (Latham 2006: 6). To Latham’s list we might add not only Samuel Beckett (All Strange Away4) but William S. Burroughs (Ghost of a Chance, say), at least for a time, with their allusions to and inclusions of materials from “penny dreadfuls,” adventure stories, “hobo lit,” and popular journalism and music. The Harpers essay had grown out of or was related to an earlier mainstream commission that featured a photo version of the developing cut-up experiments. Esquire had published a cut-up photo-essay by Burroughs called “Tangier,” or more fully, “Photo-optical, Cartographical & Literary Footnotes to a Survey of the American SocioIntellectual Enclave in the City of Tangier,” “Text and Captions by William Burroughs,” in its September 1964, “Back to College Issue” or “New College Underground” issue focused on campus political activity that finally became the “Free Speech Movement” of the 1960s with which Burroughs resonated. Burroughs’ contribution to a newly regenerated Esquire was what began to be called the “New Journalism,” alternative publishing for alternative times. The Tangier cut-up was produced with photographer Robert Freeson, with Burroughs calling himself “your reporter” and nothing such apparently inconsequential details as, “November 8, 1957: ‘Restaurant 1001 on Garibaldi Street reopened last week with a large cocktail party. Manager Brion Gysin is back.’” The “Tangier” photo-essay thus anticipates Burroughs’ deepening preoccupation with media and technology: “Research team spoke into a tape recorder which was then played [back?] through a sound spectograph [sic]. The machine converted the words into pictures looking like contour lines on a relief map” (115). The magazine subsequently funded Burroughs’ return to the United States from London, where he was living, to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He brought along the portable tape recorder he was experimenting with, and the novel contraption amused the suspicious customs agent at O’Hare airport. The incident opens “The Coming of the Purple Better One,” the piece written to fulfill the Esquire commission,5 and was reprinted in The Exterminator (93). “In 1968,” Burroughs tells us: with the help of Ian Sommerville and Anthony Balch, I took a short passage of my recorded voice and cut it into intervals of one twenty-fourth of a second on Movie tape . . . and rearranged the order of the 24th [of a] second intervals of recorded speech. The original words are quite unintelligible but new words

48

Burroughs Unbound emerged. . . . Imagine that the speech recorded is recorded on magnetic tape which is cut into pieces .02 [of a second] long and the pieces rearranged into a new sequence. . . . this is an extension of the cut up method,” [that is, Burroughs’s initial creative methodology]. (The Job, 178)6

While Burroughs’ work with filmmaker Balch may seem merely an extension of or an extreme variant on the montage techniques of Sergei Eisenstein, the emphasis in this case is on extreme since their experiments were almost incomprehensible, at least to the conscious mind,7 and thus not dissimilar from the neo-Dadaist sound poetry performed by Heidsieck and Chopin. The appeal of these experiments was less to the rational than to what Burroughs and Gysin called “The Third Mind,”8 and in 1978 they published a book under that title with material from their experiments conducted between 1960 and 1973, including one called “First Cut-ups.”9 The “Playback from Eden to Watergate” essay was part of this larger project and was published as Part One of what Burroughs subsequently called An Electronic Revolution, 1970-71, or, alternately, “The Invisible Generation,” which appealed to youth and the alternative, countercultural press to “disrupt the exercise of power” with these developing techniques. “Just pointing out,” Burroughs deadpans, “that cut/ups on the tape recorder can be used as a weapon” (The Job, 175).10 When Gilles Deleuze asserts the “Superiority of Anglo-American Literature” (in the wake of D. H. Lawrence, say), he declares that “English or American literature is a process of experimentation. They have killed interpretation. The great and only error lies in the thinking that a line of flight consists in fleeing from life; the flight into the imaginary or into art. On the contrary, to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 49). This is the “real” that Burroughs creates. Many of these aesthetic experiments and calls for revolutionary action are thus played against a backdrop of what might be called Burroughs’ dystopian modernism or speculative fiction, both of which overlap Burroughs’ other mode, science fiction. They were subversive, designed to counter growing systems to control the governed, resistance to which had been accentuated by Burroughs’ participation in the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the riots that ensued in Chicago that August, during which he was gassed.11 “As I have indicated in the invisible generation,” noted Burroughs, “a technique for directing thought and producing events on a mass scale is available to anyone with a portable recorder or a car to transport recorders.” Burroughs called the technique “waking suggestion” after the work of one Doctor John Dent, who used it to treat alcoholism and drug addiction: “Waking suggestion not subliminal suggestion is the technique used in playback of pre-recorded tapes in the street, cocktail parties, bars, train stations, airports, parks, subways, political rallies, theatre intermissions, etc. People do not consciously hear the taped suggestions because their attention is directed toward something else” (The Job, 170–1). Burroughs’ developing focus would run parallel to what has come to be called the “free speech movement.” On December 2, 1964, standing on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, for instance, Mario Savio gave his now-famous “operation of the machine” speech:

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 49 There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. (See https​:/​/en​​.wiki​​quote​​.org/​​wiki/​​ Mario​​​_Savi​o)

Burroughs then celebrated an Electronic version of this Revolution in progress, and the electronic element, in particular, would accelerate exponentially over the century, even as his discoveries or rediscoveries seem almost belated by the 1960s after the early film experiments of Man Ray and Fernand Léger, among others, for instance.12 Even commercially, Hollywood would regularly simulate various locations either at more convenient sites or on its back lots; Casablanca, for one, was shot entirely at the Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California. And in the 1920s through the 1950s, radio broadcasts of sporting events, particularly away baseball games, were often simulated and so belated, that is, were taken, in Burroughs’ terms, outside of time. The “live” action was broadcast not in real time and directly from the playing field but as studio playback with illusionistic sound effects as a broadcaster struck the microphone with his pencil to simulate the crack of the bat. Fans would listen to technologically altered, manufactured reality reported from telegraph accounts or telephone reports, and so listeners experienced “live action” through two degrees of separation, three or four if teletype translators were needed to render Western Union dots into words. Doubtless few paid attention to the legal disclaimer, “The following program is transcribed.” Such transcriptions and preprogramming were pervasive in the age of radio, of course, prepackaged content provided by commercial program sponsors. The US Military and various transcription services had become commonplace content providers since Edison (1877). Accepting such convenience, broadcasters entered a Faustian bargain since commercials or public service messages would be unalterably imbedded into the preprogrammed content. By the 1950s, moreover, transcription and playback had already become features of experimental art. Samuel Beckett, for one, began his media experiments with disembodied voices in 1956 with the radio play All that Fall (broadcast January 1957) that included intentionally distorted, unnatural animal sounds, and he introduced a magnetic tape machine, with the altered, cut-up reality it produced, to the English stage with Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958. Beckett’s experiments were generated by broadcasts and commissions from the BBC; that is, he heard disembodied voices across the Channel in his Paris flat on his “wireless,” most strikingly, perhaps, Patrick Magee’s reading of his From an Abandoned Work in December of 1957. The more radical sound collage, Embers,13 would follow shortly thereafter, also written in 1957 but not broadcast until 1959. But Beckett was an artist, a visual artist still committed to language, even as he understood the medium to be failing or failed. By 1967–8, American artist Bruce Nauman would move beyond words to explore media images with his Live Video Corridor, video renderings of ordinary activity in restricted spaces, or movement

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Burroughs Unbound

confined to prescribed patterns like walking along the perimeter of a square, one version of which became in 1968 Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk).14 By century’s end, Burroughs’ weaponized aesthetics, or at least his vision of the political potential of playback, like much of the direct action of the 1960s, was fully appropriated by commerce and absorbed into a culture of commodity fetishism as incessant video replays and extreme montage became popular entertainment, the dominant mode of sports broadcasting, and the mainstay of computer games and action films, including two film versions of Alan Nourse’s dystopic novel, The Blade Runner, for which Burroughs did a film treatment in the mid-1970s that was never filmed, and of music videos. Burroughs’ weapons became toys, amusements, commonplace and ubiquitous in the hands of that “youth” with iPhones and Photoshop, all of which currently render Burroughs’ vision of an Electronic Revolution less prescient than quaint, the media he helped weaponize tamed or blunted in its revolutionary impact by its very commonality and ubiquity. Burroughs thus emerges from a nexus of political resistance and creative foment that we loosely call the 1960s but which comes to its political fruition in a second wave of post-Romantic 1960s, which was the 1970s of Industrial Music and Punk, accelerated street actions, and post-1968 critical theory. Although he does not deal with Burroughs per se, nor any literature at this point, American sociologist Howard Becker would associate Burroughs with what he called Outsiders in his Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, the subtitle to his influential 196315 study of, among other things, control and resistance, particularly of marijuana use among jazz musicians and attempts to control what was more generally called cannabis with the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.16 What distinguishes Burroughs’ aesthetic sensibility, however, is its relentless critique of power and control, power’s role in subject formation, and his strategies of dispersal and resistance. In the 1970s, Burroughs moved beyond play to political action, from “playback” to play attack, as he detailed the effectiveness of his weaponized media experiments through personal assaults against an historic coffee shop, London’s first espresso bar. He would record conversations and ambient sounds in and around the Moka Bar in London’s Soho, not far from where he lived from 1967 to 1974 at 8 Duke Street and where he wrote, or compiled, The Ticket That Exploded, The Wild Boys, The Job, and the least known of his longer narrative experiments, Dead Fingers Talk. He would “playback” his Moka Bar recordings outside the coffee shop days later to disjoint time through paranormal tape cut-ups, his idea of magical intervention into reality. “The idea,” writes Ted Morgan in Literary Outlaw, was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had taken place two days ago and you superimposed it on what was happening now, which pulled them out of their time position. When the Moka Bar closed down on October 30 [1972] and was replaced by the Queen’s Snack Bar, Burroughs was sure that his curse had worked. (Morgan 1988: 460)

Burroughs offered instructions for such weaponized aesthetics in “Playback from Eden to Watergate”:

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 51 How to apply the three tape recorder analogy [which he had just explained in terms of the Garden of Eden] to this simple operation [of putting a curse on the coffee shop]. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself in its pristine condition. Tape recorder two is my recordings of the Moka Bar vicinity. These recordings are access. Tape recorder two in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. Tape recorder three is playback. Adam experiences shame when his disgraceful behavior is played back to him by tape recorder three, which is God. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this locale. I affect them. They cannot affect me. (The Job, 19)

This neo-Dada street provocation was not clandestine, moreover, since Burroughs wanted to unsettle the staff by his actions, his performance, but it was deceptive. He took a wide variety of photographs inside and out in addition to taping conversations and random sounds under the pretense of making a documentary about this historic coffee shop: “Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there” (The Job, 18). The strategy was not dissimilar from his earlier “successful” experiment against the Scientology office in London, which was forced to move its offices, he thought, through similar provocations. Burroughs saw his Moka Bar attack as successful retaliation for perceived rudeness from “The horrible old proprietor, his frizzy haired wife and slack jawed son, the snarling counterman” who, Burroughs believed, attempted to poison him with doctored cheesecake. As Burroughs told Daniel Odier, “This simple operation—making recordings and taking pictures of some location you wish to discommode or destroy . . . will result in accidents, fires, removals.” Biographer Barry Miles outlined the broader targets: A major theme in his work is the fight against control systems: establishment values embedded in everyday language, thought and action; control exercised by the state, by religion, by the authoritarian family, by school and by notions of patriotism, honor, class, sexual orientation, conformity and loyalty. For Burroughs the main vehicle for control was the word. Words carry with them a set of assumptions and a system of values that, in his opinion, were often inimical to the individual’s best interests. (Miles 2014a: 23)

Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze will call such “control systems” dispositif, or the device, or the apparatus. In a roundtable interview Foucault defines dispositif as follows: What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory

52

Burroughs Unbound decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is a system of relations that can be established between these elements.17

Gilles Deleuze picks up the thread distinguishing between earlier societies of discipline and space, as outlined by Foucault, and contemporary societies of control: “In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.” Deleuze goes on to detail those “deformations”: This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. . . . The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation. (Deleuze 1992: 3–4. Emphasis added)

That is, it is not possible to think and act outside of this ensemble, this network, this apparatus, this corporation, as Burroughs, too, suggests, but Burroughs thought one could resist these “deformations,” that a writer, a user, a manipulator of words, could unleash “viral anti-bodies” as a mode of resistance. “For Burroughs,” then, as Steven Connor puts it, there is no simple way to eject or escape from this apparatus, but it is possible to reprogramme it. The cuts and displacements that Burroughs introduces [in his art, street strategies, and public performances] are aimed at jamming the system, freeing programmed subjects from their sense of having been preprogrammed. Rather than attempting to remove the tape, the tape is cut, ravelled and sabotaged [and played back, we might add]. This is one side of what tape manipulation can bring about. (Connor 2014: 92)

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 53 The results are not political or rhetorical realignments or reform, the replacement of one control system by another, say, but strategies to accelerate the total breakdown of relations, and so of control and its systems. In Electronic Revolution, Burroughs saw his cut-up tape strategy “As a long range weapon to scramble and nullify associational lines put down by mass media. The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association. When the lines are cut the associations are broken” (rpt. in “Academy 23,” The Job, 176). In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, “The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother tongue, only a power take over by a dominant language,” which Burroughs seeks to dislocate (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 101). The reason for cutting those “lines of association,” then, is to wrest control from the apparatus that constitutes the subject. Belgium sociologist Frédéric Claisse summarizes what we might call, after Félix Guattari, the capture of desire by capitalism thus: L’autonomie qui m’est gracieusement accordée, notamment par les systèmes de communication de masse, n’est qu’un des “trucs” utilisés par une instance de contrôle pour faire en sorte que je croie miens des désirs qui sont en réalité les siens. Les mots portés par cette instance sont des mots d’ordre dont le programme d’action est simple: contagion et dépendance (Claisse 2012: 106) [The autonomy that I have been graciously granted, through the means of mass communication systems among others, is nothing but a “trick” [or a thingamajig, say] used by a control authority to make me think that my desires are actually mine when in reality they belong to it. Words carried by this authority are, literally in French, “order-words,” that is, slogans, whose action plan is simple: contagion and dependency]. . . . À première vue, Burroughs ne paraît pas avoir conçu son écriture comme le lieu d’une critique du capitalisme avancé ou d’une investigation systématique de l’évolution des techniques de gouvernement. D’une certaine manière, c’est pourtant précisément ce qu’il fait. L’œuvre de Burroughs s’est construite sur la révélation du lien étroit entre drogue, marchandise et contrôle. [At first glance Burroughs does not seem to have conceived his writing as a critique of advanced capitalism, or as a systematic investigation of the evolution of government techniques. In a certain way, however, that is precisely what he is doing. Burroughs’ work is built on a revelation of the strong link between drug, commodity and control.] (Claisse 2012: 112)

Claisse speaks of “verrouille le mécanisme,” or the “dispositif,” of locking the mechanism, device, or apparatus. Burroughs’ larger target, then, was control, the “system of relations,” the apparatus itself, those forces that, finally, constitute the subject, rather than any particular formula or strategy for reforming, destabilizing, or resisting parts of it. His first solution may have been short-sighted and personal—flight. He had been subject to state-sponsored control systems, oversight, surveillance, and authority, since his early drug use in New York, Texas, and Louisiana (1945–9). He fled to Mexico City in 1949, where he wrote perhaps his most straightforward book, Junky, and where he managed to murder his

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(second) wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951. Much of this journey is laid out in a 1950s On the Road style at the opening of Naked Lunch, up to the Benway chapter (12–20). He finally escaped prosecution by testifying that the incident was a drunken accident, a William Tell game gone horribly wrong, and with some bribery thrown in. After a subsequent flight to pursue the hallucinogenic Yage in South America (1953), he moved to the Moroccan port of Tangier (1954–7), then an International Zone administered by eight Western nations, where he began to write the scraps and letters, that is, create the archive that in turn generated, through the intercession of friends like Allen Ginsberg, Naked Lunch, with its “Interzone,” before moving to the Beat Hotel in Paris, where he developed his collaborations with Brion Gysin, whom he had met in Tangier and who urged him to follow the collagist techniques of the cubists.18 But his target had always been control systems and the consequent interplay between controllers and the controlled. Of his drug use, he reminds us in 1970, “I have been arrested twice in the United States, once 17 years ago and once 20 years ago. In neither case was I convicted. In any case, this law [the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914] would seem to make it a crime ever to have been an addict” (The Job 1970: 141). That is, Burroughs’ mode of social deviance, his Outsider status in Howard Becker’s terms, is treated as a disease, an illness, as it is in the 1955 Broadway production of Michael V. Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain (1957 film version) and the concurrent “outsider” theatrical sensation of 1959, The Connection, by Jack Gebler. The Living Theater production of the latter, directed by Judith Malina and with sets by Julian Beck, featured the dialogue of addicts awaiting their “connections” interspersed with jazz music; it won three Obie awards for 1959– 60. Burroughs opens his most famous work, Naked Lunch, with an “Introduction”: “I woke from the sickness at the age of forty-five” (v), and adds that an addict has lost all behavioral control, like a “rabid dog,” and is “in a state of total sickness” (vii). But Burroughs’ preoccupation with addiction, what he called “the algebra of need,”19 and control went well beyond particular social restrictions and laws, beyond the individual’s loss of agency and volition, even beyond what Foucault would call “discourses,” to the ideology and biology of communication, to syntax and textuality, yes, but to the virulence of the word itself and its effects on subject formation, to word as organism. That is, the Electronic Revolution begins where control begins, with the word, which Burroughs saw as an insidious virus, a parasitic entity capable not only of physically transforming the organism it inhabits but of affecting its DNA: It is generally assumed that the spoken word as we know it came before the written word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. . . . We may forget that a written word is an image20 and that written words are images in sequence that is to say moving pictures. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God—and the word was flesh . . . human flesh . . . in the beginning of writing. . . . My basic theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made the spoken word possible.21 The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host, though this symbiotic relationship is now breaking down.22

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 55 Or again, amid the quasi-historical speculations in The Ticket That Exploded of 1962, Burroughs claims, The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. (49)

Burroughs concludes The Soft Machine, moreover, with a routine called “cross the wounded galaxies we intersect, poison of dead sun in your brain slowly fading” that depicts a creation myth of viral language that infects apes, who become human when they receive the Word and their own names (2014: Restored text, 182).23 Burroughs’ strategies of cut-ups and fold-ins in multiple media are designed to dislodge or destroy the parasitic power of the word virus. These experiments are inoculations to generate antibodies and so develop immunities. These theories have certain resonances with those of Jacques Derrida in his contemporaneous critique of Plato’s Phaedrus, as Derrida, too, recalibrated the hierarchy of speech and writing not in terms of hieroglyphics but as archi-écriture in his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy”24 (published in Tel Quel, 1968, but not in English until 1981). Derrida’s archi-écriture antedates the manifestation, the bifurcation of language into speech and writing; that is, archi-écriture is language inchoate, language as an idea, as a preimplemented structure. Even as Derrida doesn’t follow Burroughs into biology, evolution, speculative archeology, and ontology, the question of which manifestation of language, of archi-écriture is playback pertains, and both take issue with Aristotle’s assertion in On Interpretation that “Spoken words are symbols of mental experience, and written words are symbols of spoken words,”25 the spoken word thus closest to the mind, to thought, and so closest to the truth in Aristotle’s formulation. Derrida also quotes and critiques that Aristotelian paradigm early on in Of Grammatology (11). In his excellent Marxist critique of painting, novelist and art critic John Berger opens his very influential television series and follow-up book, Ways of Seeing, with an analysis of the image as something of an archi-écriture since children are exposed to media images, hieroglyphs, say, well before they begin to acquire language, especially in contemporary culture as television, and now smartphones and video games serve as babysitters to entertain, pacify, and so control children. The child’s mental life and her expectations and desires are shaped as she is entwined in those systems. Derrida and Burroughs share, at least, a commitment to realigning the hierarchies of communication, to breaking down borders, between inside and outside, knowledge and writing, language and speaker, and the like. If language precedes speech and writing, it then needs no speaker; it can speak. In his essay “The Limits of Control,”26 Burroughs addresses how language as image is the principal mechanism of control: “words are still the primary instrument of control. Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine

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so far devised can operate without words,” he writes, “and any control machine which attempts to do so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control” (Burroughs 1978: 38). That limit, for Burroughs, is the paradox at the heart of control that as it seeks to overcome it needs resistance, for without resistance control ceases, supplanted by mere automated use function: “control needs opposition” (Burroughs 1978: 38), and so, as early as Naked Lunch, he notes that “A functioning police state needs no police” (“Benway,” Naked Lunch 2003: 31),27 the phrase adopted as the title of an album in 2011 by the rock group called Transparent Flesh of Present Time. Legal theorist Nathan Moore reviews such “Nova Law” as he lays out a series of associations between Burroughs and Deleuze. The word “‘control,’” he reminds us, indexes a set of problems with the functioning of language or, more explicitly, with the relation between word and image. Burroughs uses the “cut-up technique” to dismember these relations, while Deleuze seeks to short circuit them in lines of flight, becomings, and war machines. In this sense, Deleuze and Burroughs share a common enemy, but an enemy with many names: globalization, late capitalism, psychoanalysis, representation, Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin [one of Burroughs’ most famous sound cut-ups and a working title for The Soft Machine in 196028], information, statistics, word virus . . . all of these are the names of control. (Moore 2007)

When Deleuze and Guattari outline the function of the rhizome in the “Introduction” to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, however, they critique Burroughs’ cut-up techniques as supplementary to the text selected, an addition, that is, rather than a subtraction; Burroughs’ strategies for disrupting control are adventitious, but not quite adventitious enough: Take Burroughs’s cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the text under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding [that is, an n +1 rather than an n -1, and so], unity continues its spiritual labor. That is why a resolutely fragmented work can also be present as the Total Work or Magnum Opus. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 6)

They see Burroughs’ work, thus, as remaining arboreal, maintaining natural unity and totality even among its fragments and so neither a multiplicity nor rhizomatic. This method is “perfectly valid,” they admit, but for one direction, “a linear direction” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 6). When they discuss Naked Lunch, not yet fully a “cut-up” novel, we might add, they focus on images of shifting bodily organs in terms of the BwO, the Body without Organs (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 150). But Deleuze picks up more of Burroughs’ methodology in Dialogues, a critical exchange generated while he and Guattari were still in the midst of writing A Thousand Plateaus, where he speaks not of cutting up or folding in archival or other linguistic

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 57 material (and so supplementing it) but extends Burroughs’ techniques to picking up snippets and flows of ideas and information from, well, here and there, thereby cutting arboreal unities and moving beyond language: “You don’t have to be learned, to know or be familiar with a particular area, but to pick up this or that in areas which are very different. This is better than the ‘cut-up.’ It is rather a ‘pick-me-up’ or ‘pick up’—in the dictionary = collecting up, chance, restarting of the motor, getting on to the wavelength, and then the sexual connotation of the word” (Deleuze 1987: 10). Such “pick-ups,” then, are more statistically random than Burroughs’ cut-ups since, in Deleuze’s assessment, “Burroughs’ cut up is still a method of probabilities—at least linguistic ones—and not a procedure of drawing lots or a single chance which combines the heterogeneous elements” (Deleuze 1987: 10). “Pick-up is a stammering,” he continues. It is only valid in opposition to Burroughs’ “cut up”: there is no cutting, folding and turning down, but multiplications according to the growing dimensions. [But the “opposition” that Deleuze cites is central to the definition and strategy of resistance; that is, “pick-up” had meaning and so force only in tandem with “cut up.”] The pick-up or double theft, the a-parallel evolution, does not happen between persons [or texts, or not only between people or texts], but it happens between ideas as well, each one being deterritorialized in the other, following a line or lines which are neither in one nor the other, and which carry off a “bloc.” (Deleuze 1987: 18)

Deleuze and Guattari detail this “bloc” in their final collaboration, What is Philosophy?: Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It preserves and is preserved in itself (quid juris?) [validity, or objective validity, say],29 although it lasts no longer than its support and material—stone, canvas, chemical color, and so on (quid facti?) [knowledge, say]. . . . If art preserves it does not do so like industry, by adding a substance to make the thing last. The thing became independent of its “model” from the start, but it is also independent of other possible personae who are themselves artists-things, personae of painting breathing this air of painting. And it is no less independent of the viewer or hearer, who only experiences it after, if they have the strength for it. What about the creator? It is independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created, which is preserved in itself. What is preserved—the thing or the work of art—is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164)

Kant would suggest of consciousness that cognition requires concepts and percepts and is part of a synthesis in which one finds, a priori, the principles of human knowledge. For Deleuze, then, such a path leads to his celebrated “betweenness,” his “neitherness,” so that in “the BwO,” different “intensities pass and circulate.” It “is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any external agency whether

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it be a lack that hollows it or a pleasure that fills it)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 154). When they do get specific, one example of such immanence they cite is the earth with its “flows in all directions” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 40). In fundamental respects Deleuze’s pick-ups and Burroughs’ cut-ups remain more concordant than discordant, however, and they are interrelated in Deleuze’s critique, especially as we look past Naked Lunch to the trilogy of novels that develops in the 1960s. On his part, Deleuze extends the cut-up strategy beyond material texts to flows of ideas, but their strategies of writing and of the archive seem in accord. Even linguistically, Deleuze comments to Antonio Negri that one mode of resistance to a control society would be to “hijack” speech [détournement, say] and “create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so that we can elude control” (Deleuze 1995: 175). Such a critique sounds like a strategy parallel to that of Burroughs, and Deleuze credits Burroughs with the phrase “control society” in his 1987 seminar on creativity, “On Cinema,” at La Fémis, where he reminds us that “Foucault had a very deep admiration for Burroughs” (Deleuze 2007: 326). In his “Author’s Foreword” to The Job, furthermore, Burroughs invokes a variant of his argument that writing preceded speech as he explains his interview strategy whereby answers precede or preexist the questions; that is, language, the word, precedes the speech of the interview: “I found that I had in many cases already answered these questions in various books, articles and short pieces. So instead of paraphrasing or summarizing I inserted the indicated material. The result is interview form presented as a film with fade outs and flash backs illustrating the answers,” that is, interview presented as cut-up and playback and drawing on the archive as an Uber text. Answers in such an archive preexist any possible question as responses thus draw from an inchoate amalgam of language that Burroughs often called his “word hoard” and which he accessed as necessary for creative or discursive material in a variant of his cut-up technique, at times recutting already-cut-up material like The Ticket That Exploded (Grove Press 1967), which has reentered the archive in a rhizomatic return, as all writing does, and which merges with a playback strategy to upset lines of communication and so destabilize concentrations of power since the answers neither derive from nor align with questions in any accepted temporal or logical sequence. The interviews themselves are often thus belated, the writing predating the speech and archivally stored, like a personal “Library of Babel,” discourse thus taken out of time. (Burroughs’ comments here are something of an a-parallel evolution with the emergence of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine with its own eccentric approach to [mostly celebrity] interviews.) Such recalibrations of the personalized mode of discourse we call interviews, a mode which comes to dominate contemporary theory, further disrupt the Aristotelian model that speech is closer to thought and so closer to truth. Burroughs’ approach, then, is not unlike that deployed by Deleuze in his entretiens with Clare Parnet in Dialogues of essentially the same period (1987, 1977 Paris), which title reflects more the book series of which it is a part than the nature of these exchanges themselves, since this record, too, is already a repetition, playback: “These ‘dialogues,’” according to translators Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Dialogues xi), “are themselves offshoots [and thus rhizomes, we might add] of Deleuze’s famous seminar at the University of Vincennes,”

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 59 and hence they, too, are playbacks. Deleuze suggests in his “Preface,” furthermore, that the divide among interlocutors is less than integral, and such a multiplicity of intersecting lines of thought and voices is what constitutes writing: “As we became less sure what came from one, what came from the other, or even from someone else,” Deleuze reminds us, “we would become clearer about ‘What is it to write?’” (Dialogues x), as Deleuze’s thread here creates something of a “discourse of betweenness” (Dialogues x). “What is it to write?,” then, seems archival as well, the “offshoots,” spurs, segments from “Deleuze’s famous seminar at the University of Vincennes,” themselves tendrils, rhizomes of other thoughts and threads of writings, and this is the strategy that Deleuze and Guattari concurrently employ for the masterwork they are writing, A Thousand Plateaus. Moreover, in the prefatory material to A Thousand Plateaus, “Introduction: Rhizome” (3), Deleuze and Guattari begin with expressing their suspicion of and hence resistance to an ontology of individual authorship, and so this “Introduction,” too, becomes a discourse of “What is it to write?”: The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied. (3)

That is, Deleuze (at least) has always been suspicious of authorial autonomy, the ontology of authorship, say, and so even his books on individual philosophers or artists have been written through or in collaboration with those artists. Such authorial multiplicity is at the core of Burroughs’ cut-up strategy and methodology. By 1973, Burroughs came to realize that the US government too had known about and had been intervening into reality and implementing weaponized playback tactics against its citizenry when news broke of what we now call the Watergate break-in and the protracted investigation that followed: “I have said that the real scandal of Watergate is the use made of recordings. And what is their use? Having made the recordings . . . what then do they do with them? Answer: They play them back on location. . . . they play them back in subways, restaurants, airports, and other public places. Playback is the essential ingredient” (The Job, 17). Such a strategy is consistent with notes Burroughs took on such issues in August of 1962, now on deposit at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. From “Box 1, Folio 4, Items 11-18,” item 15 contains the following: A writer is a map maker of psychic areas and if his map is to be accurate it must be complete—Naked Lunch was conceived as the first book in a trilogy mapping [an]

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Burroughs Unbound imaginary universe engaged in interplanetary war—I do not e deny that sex can be a dan a dane gerous weapon and indeed onepower in this imaginary war is using sex as a weapon— (sic).

This, Burroughs discovered, had been the strategy of the Watergate operatives, or the White House “Plumbers,” whose original task was simply to plug and so prevent leaks like the Pentagon Papers, but the associated strategy was blackmail based on tapes of bedroom activities, or narratives of such disclosed to psychiatrists, “breaking down the whole concept of privacy” in the process. Burroughs asks, of “those who bugged Martin Luther King’s bedroom and ransacked the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist? And how many other bedrooms have they bugged?” (The Job, 11). The underpinning of such control strategy is guilt and shame that grow out of desire, and hence the Nixon administration’s war against pornography was for Burroughs a struggle for control through blackmail. Guilt removed, perhaps the central agenda of the 1960s, control dissipates. The parallel to Nixon’s and John Mitchell’s efforts to resublimate and continue to shame sex was their “War on Drugs,” which was generated in June of 1971 as a follow-up to the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970. In Nixon’s 1971 address to Congress, “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control,” he strategically restigmatized drug use in an effort to control targeted populations like Mexican immigrants and African Americans, declaring drugs to be “public enemy number 1.” Burroughs’ critique of this issue is detailed in his extraordinary performance as Tom to Matt Dillon’s Bob in the 1989 film, Drugstore Cowboy, Burroughs’ Hollywood debut.30 Whether or not Guattari was following Burroughs’ lead into media, by the 1980s he, too, would come to understand the power of media and develop his own version of An Electronic Revolution as his interest developed in the pirate radio operations of Radio Alice and Radio Tomate and as he “conceptualised the juxtaposition of computer networking and the miniaturization and personalization of technology as a development that, if analysed and used by ‘minoritary groups’ in other than ‘a dogmatic and programmatic manner’, will bring us to a ‘post-media era’ where the mass media are stripped of their hegemonic power” (Postmedia web site and Guattari, 2009b: 300). By 1985, Guattari began to speak of “the coming post-mediatic revolution” as something of a Soft Subversion, and in “Postmodern Deadlock and Post-Media Transition” he would lay out a program of direct action: The emergence of these new practices of subjectivation of a post-media era will be greatly facilitated by a concerted re-appropriation of communicational and information technology, assuming they increasingly allow for: 1. The formation of forms of dialogue and collective interactivity and, eventually, a reinvention of democracy. 2. By means of the miniaturization and the personalization of equipments, a resingularization of the machinic mediatized means of expression; we can presume, on this subject, that it is the connection, through networking, of banks of data which will offer us the most surprising views;

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 61 3. The multiplication to infinity of “existential operators,” permitting access to mutant creative universes. (Guattari 2009b: 299–300)

Deleuze, on the other hand, would focus more deeply on biopower and “control societies” in the 1980s as he began a series of seminars on Michel Foucault after the latter’s death and on the way to publishing Foucault in 1986 (English in 1988), and he would freely admit to the impact on both him and Foucault of Burroughs and his work. Deleuze’s lectures were delivered at the Université de Paris VIII, and are now available online through Purdue University (see also Morar, Nicolae). The Foucault book, a severe condensation of those lectures, outlines Deleuze’s major topics in this “crucial examination of the philosophical foundations and principal themes of Foucault’s work, providing a rigorous engagement with Foucault’s views on knowledge, punishment, power, and the nature of subjectivity.” These lectures detail William S. Burroughs’ influence on both philosophers with his critique of “control societies,” a phrase they adopt from Burroughs.31 As Thomas Nail notes, Deleuze not only entirely equates biopower and control, but also attributes their shared origin to William Burroughs’ essay, ‘The Limits of Control,’ published in 1975. One year before Foucault introduces the concept of biopower in La volunté de savoir” (1976), Deleuze claims, based on personal knowledge, that Foucault was “profoundly struck by Burroughs’ analysis of social control. In fact, Foucault and Burroughs even presented on the same conference panel on 14 November 1975 at the Semiotext(e) Schizo-Culture colloqium [sic] at Columbia University. . . . Based on Burroughs’ concept of control, Deleuze claims, Foucault develops the idea of biopower. (Morar, Thomas and Smith 2016: 248)

William S. Burroughs was, then, very much a product of and his work a commentary on his time, even, or especially, as a cultural Outsider, but is such a vision, of a dystopian future, his discourse of repetitions, his stochastic materiality, in short his art, cultural critique, and theory, sustainable, or rather in what ways are they sustainable? The pattern that Jennie Skerl observed in 1989 continues to this day: “In our survey of the critical response to Burroughs from 1959 to 1989, Robin Lydenberg and I observed that, decade by decade, Burroughs’ work has been seen as emblematic of his times. As J. G. Ballard remarked upon Burroughs’ death [1997], ‘his weird genius was the perfect mirror of his times’” (Skerl 2004: xi). With very few direct intersections with continental philosophy and contemporary developments in critical theory, he seems, nonetheless, to have developed parallel flights of thought and comparable strategies of resistance, which at least Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault recognized. The Schizo-Culture conference organizers, particularly Sylvère Lotringer, then followed up with a Nova Convention (see Palmer’s review) focused particularly on Burroughs and his work and at which, on November 30, 1978, Burroughs delivered what the organizers called a Keynote Commentary, “Roosevelt after Inauguration,” a reprise of his 1964 essay that was originally published as part of the “Mimeograph revolution.” With its smudged pages, over-inkings, and

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overprintings (i.e., decidedly an anti-letterpress object), it was already part of the weaponizing of publishing and the rethinking of stochastic, material aesthetics. Through such encounters, Lotringer, too, would move his distrust of language toward a “materialist semiotics,” the subject of which was often performance, particularly what was called “object theater,” and visual art. On Burroughs’ development during this period, at least one critic and book collector, Jed Birmingham, has quipped that “Roosevelt was a fuck you to mainstream publishing, City Lights, and the United States government.”32 That rowdy Nova Convention featured not only Burroughs but other post-1960s, outsider artists responding, one way or another, to his work, all of which highlighted how much of that work was potentially ephemeral, performative at least, and so continuous with Burroughs’ preoccupation with media, his assaults on power and biopower, and his use of the body as text. Many of those astonishing performances have, however, been technologically preserved, including much of the Nova Convention, particularly Burroughs’ “What the Nova Convention Is All About,” which for Burroughs, in this short introduction, is space travel, which means leaving all we know behind. Such presentations are available commercially in a four-CD set on Giorno Poetry Systems’ The Best of William Burroughs (released in 1998, rereleased 2012), as the convention itself was captured in a two-record vinyl set called The Nova Convention, released in 1979. Much of it is also freely available on open-access sites like Ubu​.co​m, Realitystudio​.or​g, and Clocktower​.or​g.33 As Jonathan Sturgeon writes of the 2014 MoMA celebration of this seminal Columbia conference and the (re)publication of the Semiotext(e) Schizo-Culture issue in, now, a two-volume, boxed set, The Event, The Book, published by MIT Press in 2014: So what in the hell is Schizo-Culture? This is not an easy question to answer. It appears to be, on one hand, the undulating breakdown of governmental control in society, a development which leads to 1) new forms of psychological control (think: the 1970s fascination with mind control techniques [a theme with which Burroughs opens his Schizo-Culture address]) and 2) new forms of social organization that don’t rely on conventions, like political parties. (Sturgeon)

Guattari glosses the term more psychoanalytically: “As opposed to Freudian complexes, schizoanalytic arrangements are the sites of both internal transformations and transferences between personal levels (like those Freud described in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, for example) and the postpersonal levels that can be globally assigned to the media-driven world, extending the notions of media to every system of communication, displacement and exchange.” (Guattari 2009a: 302) “There can be no doubt that a cultural revolution of unprecedented dimensions has taken place in America during the last thirty years,” Burroughs announced in his 1975 Schizo-Culture address, and since America is now the model for the rest of the western world, this revolution is worldwide . . . the fact that this worldwide revolution has taken place indicates that the controllers have been forced to make concessions. . . .

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 63 governments are making political concessions to the dissenting population, but that these concessions are just another form of control, albeit a preferable one. . . . They could of course take all the concessions back, but that would expose them to the double jeopardy of revolution and the much greater danger of overt fascism. (Burroughs 1978: 42)

Burroughs’ warning here is of the dynamics of power, governments, say, potentially co-opting the revolutionary spirit, a fear that Guattari shared. These critiques from the 1970s were and currently remain inseparable from Burroughs’ emergence as a performance artist, such embodiment of his art readily available for consumption amid our own image-obsessed Electronic Revolution, or updated as Guattari’s “post-mediatic revolution” in Soft Subversions. The products of this period are currently being recirculated through commercial outlets and through multiple open-access formats to suggest, rather to confirm, that the artist whom many another Outsider has called “The Priest,” as in his 1993 collaboration with Kurt Cobain,34 this priest, this “cosmonaut of inner space”35 and “technician of consciousness,” this Dystopic Modernist author, visionary science fiction writer, and aesthetic weapons maker was one of the major media artists, social critics, cultural theorists, and literary figures, not only of his but of our “postpersonal” time. Michel Foucault closes The Order of Things by imagining a time when “man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” The closing image was crafted some fifteen years before Foucault would meet Burroughs in New York in 1975, but in the 1960s Burroughs, too, was already imagining and theorizing the disappearing author and a posthuman world. Such lines of thought, of flight, say, suggest parallel (but independent) trajectories that Deleuze will see as bridging philosopher and artist, if not philosophy and art, and thereby alter our perceptions of the art of William S. Burroughs.

Notes 1 The first was “Kicking Drugs: A Very Personal Story,” Harpers #1406, July 1967. 2 For a fuller account of the Domaine Poétique collaborations, see Miles (2000: 230–4), In 2004, the French recording company Al Dante (BH-AD24) rereleased the 1974 Jazz recording “Sound letter addressed to Brion Gysin”: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​ com​/w​​atch?​​v​=WY8​​​mLqVb​​rig 3 Published by Editions Jean Bucher, Paris, 1934; English version under the French title was published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 1976. Since it is a collage novel, no translation was necessary. See also Spies (1971) and Ernst’s drawings of 1926 which he titled Histoire Naturelle. 4 “tattered syntaxes of Jolly and Draeger Praeger Draeger.” 5 https​:/​/cl​​assic​​.esqu​​ire​.c​​om​/ar​​ticle​​/1968​​/11​/1​​/the-​​comin​​g​-of-​​the​-p​​​urple​​-bett​​er​-on​e 6 The essay or manifesto on media, manipulation, and resistance to control is first published in 1970 by Expanded Media Editions in West Germany and then in a second edition of fifty copies as The Electronic Revolution, Cambridge: Blackmoor

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10 11 12 13 14

15

Burroughs Unbound Head Press, 1971. It is incorporated into “revised and enlarged” editions of the collection of interviews called The Job (1970); the paperback will expand further and use the Harpers “Playback” essay as something of an “Introduction” and not thus part of the interview format of the book (Grove Press, 1974) (174); Penguin paperback reprints the Grove paperback of 1974 with identical pagination (also 1974); rpt. again in Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader, edited by James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 294–313. In 1970, Grove Press edition printed a run of 5,000 copies. Issued in a limited edition, vinyl LP in 1998, the sleeve for which reproduces the cover of the Blackmoor Head Press edition of 1971. See also, for example, Burroughs and Gysin’s 1966 film The Cut Ups: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​ tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=Uq_​​​hztHJ​​CM4 Excerpts appear in A William Burroughs Reader, edited by John Calder (London: Picador, 1982). Excerpt (not in the aforementioned): “It is impossible to estimate the damage. anything put out up to now is like pulling a figure out of the air. Six distinguished British women said to us later, indicating the crowd of chic young women who were fingering samples, ‘If our prices weren’t as food or better, they wouldn’t come. Eve is eternal.’ (I’m going right back to the Sheraton Carlton and call the Milwaukee Braves.) Miss Hannah Pugh the slim model—a member of the Diners’ Club, the American Express Credit cards, etc.—drew from a piggy bank a talent which is the very quintessence of the British Female sex. ‘People aren’t crazy,’ she said. ‘Now that hazard has banished my timidity I feel that I, too, can live on streams in the area where people are urged to be watchful.’ A huge wave rolled in from the wake of Hurricane Gracie and bowled a married couple off a jetty. The wife’s body was found—the husband was missing, presumed drowned. Tomorrow the moon will be 228,400 miles from the earth and the sun almost 93,000,000 miles away.” (“First Cut-Ups” [September 1959]) See also, “Mind Control,” Rat Magazine, March 1, 1969, and “Cut-ups as Underground Weapons,” Los Angeles Free Press, June 26, 1970. “I walk around the park recording and playing back, a beauteous evening calm and clear vapor trails over the lake youths washing tear gas out of their eyes in the fountain.” Burroughs (1968). See also Gelgud (2016). See particularly Léger’s collaborative piece of 1925, Le Ballet mécanique shown in a Berlin gallery under the rubric Images Mobile. 1963 re-make: https://archive​.org​/details​/pra​-IZ1214 https://www​.guggenheim​.org​/artwork​/3153. See also Ruth Burgon, “Pacing the Cell: Walking and Productivity in the Work of Bruce Nauman.” Burgon treats Nauman’s confined spaces in terms of “Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment (1975, translated into English 1977) to shed light upon the aesthetic of confinement and incarceration” and suggest the confined and restricted exercises of the prison yard. https​:/​/ww​​w​.tat​​e​.org​​.uk​/r​​esear​​ch​/pu​​blica​​tions​​/tate​​-pape​​rs​/26​​/​paci​​ng​-th​​e​-cel​l and https​:/​/ww​​w​.mom​​a​.org​​/maga​​zine/​​arti​c​​les​/1​8 Most of these collected chapters were originally written and published in the 1950s, however. (See also Eburne 2018).

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 65 16 Allen Ginsberg published a two-part essay, “The Great Marijuana Hoax: First Manifesto to End the Bringdown,” in the Atlantic Monthly (CCXVIII.6 [November 1966]: 104–12). As noted in the piece, the essay was written the year before. Among his more interesting and progressive comments is that “No one has yet remarked that the supression [sic] of Negro rights, culture and sensibility in America has been complicated by the marijuana laws. . . . Use of marijuana has always been widespread among the Negro population in this country, and suppression of its use, with constant friction and bludgeoning of the Law, has been a major unconscious, or unmentionable, method of assault on [the] negro Person.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​ om​/pa​​st​/do​​cs​/is​​sues/​​6​6nov​​/hoax​​.htm For further background on the era see also http:​/​/www​​.linf​​l ux​.c​​om​/so​​ciete​​/mouv​​ ement​​s​-soc​​iaux/​​aux​-o​​rigin​​es​-de​​-mai-​​68​-le​​s​-ava​​nt​-ga​​​rdes-​​ameri​​caine​​s​-1​-3​/ 17 “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977) interview. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 194–228. 18 A handy overview of these events with a chronology is available in the Biographical Note on the New York Public Library’s on-line Burroughs catalogue: https​:/​/ww​​w​. nyp​​l​.org​​/site​​s​/def​​ault/​​files​​/arch​​ivalc​​ollec​​tions​​/pdf/​​willi​​am​_s.​​_burr​​oughs​​​_pape​​rs​_ to​​_word​​.pdf 19 https​:/​/on​​scene​​s​.wee​​bly​.c​​om​/au​​dio​/w​​illia​​m​-s​-b​​urrou​​ghs​-t​​he​-al​​g​ebra​​-of​-n​​eed​-a​​udi0 20 Burroughs compares words to hieroglyphics, which are pictures not words, but we might extend the comparison to Henri Bergson on images as well. 21 Some versions appeal to the authority of someone called, “Dr. Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz [one of Burroughs’ many fictitious authorities, who] has put forward an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls biologic mutation effecting a biologic change in its host which was then genetically conveyed.” His earlier reference to one “G. Belyavin” is, however, factual (The Job, 12): “Virus Adaptability and Host Resistance,” appears in Wilson (1963). Belyavin deals with what he calls the “Virus-host Equilibrium” (320) where the virus remains “latent” and is not engaged in a parasitic process that would destroy the host but is adapting to it: “if a virus were to attain a state of wholly benign equilibrium with its host cell, it is unlikely that its presence would be readily detected, or that it would be necessarily recognized as a ‘virus’” (309–10). The example Belyavin cites is “human herpetic infections”; for Burroughs, language itself is such an analogous condition. 22 Burroughs’ work is a continuous set of variations, and this citation varies considerably in its various iterations with a weakened version published in The Job, 11–12. Cf. another modified version: http:​/​/atl​​asofp​​laces​​.com/​​The​-E​​lectr​​onic-​​Revol​​ ution​​-Will​​iam​​-S​​-Burr​​oughs​ 23 The “routine” also includes the phrase “Dead fingers talk in braille,” which will become its own cut-up “novel” (Burroughs 1966). The Corgi paperback edition of The Soft Machine (1970) ends with an additional sentence that returns to the “dead fingers” image: “He waves his hand sadly from the soft machine, dead finger in smoke pointing to Gibraltar. January 25, Gibraltar” (171). 24 Derrida is interested in “Plato’s Pharmakon” or “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Burroughs in the USP, the United States Pharmacopoeia, the official compendium of drug information, as both take up issues of speech and writing.

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25 http:​/​/cla​​ssics​​.mit.​​edu​/A​​risto​​tle​/i​​nterp​​retat​​io​n​.1​​.1​.ht​​ml 26 Reprinted in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Seaver Books, 1986), 116–20, reissued by Grove Press in 2013, pp. 143–8 (with an “Introduction” by James Grauerholz, who calls it “a cornerstone work,” p. xviii). 27 The “control” theme of Burroughs’ most famous novel is succinctly summarized in The Guardian by James Campbell on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 2009: “Naked Lunch is a savage satire on ‘control’ in various forms, from sexual censorship to McCarthyite anti-communism to the worldwide spread of narcotics. Half a century ago, Burroughs created Islam Inc, issuing from the Mecca Chamber of Commerce, a fundamentalist racket that sends out ‘nationalist martyrs with grenades up the ass’ to mingle with rank and file Muslims ‘and suddenly explode, occasioning heavy casualties’. Part of the action takes place in Freeland, a sterile Scandinavian utopia where the urgencies of instinct and hunger are removed. Scientists work to isolate the ‘human virus’. When eventually they succeed, as they are bound to, homo sapiens can be perfected and messy old life brought to an end. Freeland is an ideal police state, in which ‘there is no need for police’, since every citizen is under constant surveillance by every other.” 28 See The Soft Machine, 2014, p. li. Also: “Mr Bradly-Mr Martin, in my mythology, is a God that failed, a God of Conflict in two parts so created to keep a tired old show on the road, The God of Arbitrary Power and Restraint, Of Prison and Pressure, who needs subordinates, who needs what he calls ‘his human dogs’ while treating them with the contempt a con man feels for his victims” (Burroughs [1962]). https​:/​/re​​ality​​ studi​​o​.org​​/imag​​es​/bi​​bliog​​raphi​​c​_bun​​ker​/t​​ransa​​tlant​​ic​_re​​view/​​trans​​atla​n​​tic​_r​​eview​​. 11​.p​​df 29 Kant borrows legal terminology to distinguish between questions concerning what is lawful, or what is right, (quid juris) and that which concerns questions of fact (quid facti). 30 See also the Atlantic Monthly essay where Allen Ginsberg lays out the issue thus: “It should be understood, I believe, that in this area we have been undergoing policestate conditions in America, with characteristic mass brainwashing of the public, persecution & jail, elaborate systems of plainclothes police and police spies and stool pigeons, abuse of constitutional guarantees of privacy of home and person from improper search and seizure. The police prohibition of marijuana (accompanied with the even more obnoxious persecution of sick heroin addicts who all along should have been seeing the doctor) has directly created vast black markets, crime syndicates, crime waves in the cities, and a breakdown of law and order in the State itself. For the courts of large cities are clogged with so-called narcotic crimes and behind schedule, and new laws (such as the recent NY Rockefeller Stop & Frisk & No-Knock) spring up against the citizen to cope with the massive unpopularity of prohibition” (Ginsberg 1966). 31 Seminars “On Cinema” at La Fémis (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l'Image et du Son) (1987). Full listing of Deleuze’s seminars at: https​:/​/de​​leuze​​.cla.​​ purdu​​e​.edu​​/full​​-i​nde​​x​. In the truncated book version of these lectures, Deleuze cites Burroughs only once, and then among a string of writers who uncover “‘a strange language within language,’ and, through an unlimited number of superimposed grammatical constructions, tends toward an untypical form of expression that marks the end of language as such” (Deleuze 1988: 131). 32 Birmingham (2016). New York: Fuck You Press, 1964. First edition. 24mo, [12] pp, mimeographed from typescript and drawing. Covers illustrated by Allen Ginsberg. Full scan of the 1964 text at: https​:/​/rs​​pull-​​super​​vert.​​netdn​​a​-ssl​​.com/​​image​​s​/

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 67 bib​​liogr​​aphic​​_bunk​​er​/fu​​ck​_yo​​u​/fuc​​k​-you​​-pres​​s​-pdf​​s​/wil​​liam-​​burro​​ughs. ​​roose​​velt-​​after​​-inau​​​gurat​​ion​.f​​uck​-y​​ou​-pr​​ess​.p​​df. Published by City Lights Books in 1979. See also Weber (2016): “Mimeographed work has a quick-and-dirty aesthetic that matches its rebellious spirit. They’re also fragile, so I was surprised to find one in perfect condition in the Library of Congress’s Rare Book and Special Collections section. A librarian dug one up for me and presented it on a plastic book cradle. About the size of a passport, it was a flimsy copy of a William Burroughs short story ‘stomped into print’ in 1964 and held together with two staples. Some of the ink was smudged, the pink construction paper felt like it could tear at any moment, and the presentation seemed almost juvenile given the notoriety (and notoriousness) Burroughs would soon rise to. But when I read the story, a satire of President Roosevelt meeting with made-up political characters, the raw form made sense. ‘TOTAL ASSAULT ON THE CULTURE,’ the back cover read. And the culture took notice. The story’s publisher, Ed Sanders, ran one of the most well-known independent presses of the era, and even appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1967. ‘The reason why he was on Life was because he had his hands in all these counterculture pies that was really presenting a viable, interesting alternative to mainstream media,’ says Jed Birmingham, a book collector and writer for a blog about the Mimeo Revolution, which Schlesinger edits. Mimeographed magazines represented a new era in American culture, hence their home in the Library of Congress. There are also literary zine collections housed in universities such as the University of Iowa and New York University.” https​:/​/ne​​ws​.na​​tiona​​lgeog​​raphi​​c​.com​​/ 2016​​/06​/m​​imeo-​​mimeo​​graph​​-revo​​lutio​​n​-lit​​eratu​​re​-be​​​at​-po​​etry-​​activ​​ism/ 33 The least known of these is Clocktower: see http:​/​/clo​​cktow​​er​.or​​g​/sho​​w​/nov​​a​-con​​ venti​​on​-19​​78​-t​h​​e​-thi​​rd​-mi​​nd 34 Also used as the title of Caveney’s work 1998. For a fuller overview of Burroughs collaborations, and popular culture crossovers, from literary writer to media artist, that is, Burroughs as performer and his “ubiquity in mass media,” his movement beyond the “literary,” see Murphy (1997: 202–5); further, on Burroughs and film, including his two “screenplays,” see Murphy (1997: 205–15). 35 “In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed,” William S. Burroughs to Eric Mottram (see https​:/​/re​​ ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/my-​​own​-m​​ag​/th​​e​-my-​​own​-m​​ag​-co​​mmuni​​ty​/er​​ ic​-mo​​ttram​​​-and-​​the​-a​​lgebr​​a​-of-​​need/​).

References Becker, Howard (1963), Outsiders: A Study of Social Deviance, New York: The Free Press. Birmingham, Jed (2016), “#12: Roosevelt after Inauguration,” Reality Studio. https​:/​/re​​ality​​ studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/the​​-top-​​23​-mo​​st​-in​​teres​​ting-​​burro​​ughs-​​colle​​ctibl​​es​/ 12​​-roos​​ev​elt​​-afte​​r​-ina​​ugura​​tion/​ Burroughs, William S. ([released1962] 1959), Naked Lunch, New York: Grove Press, Inc. Burroughs, William S. (January 1, 1962), “Censorship,” Transatlantic Review 11: 5–10.

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Burroughs, William S. (1966), Dead Fingers Talk, London: Universal-Tandem Publishing Company. Burroughs, William S. (1968), “The Coming of the Purple Better One,” Esquire, November 1. Available online: https​:/​/cl​​assic​​.esqu​​ire​.c​​om​/ar​​ticle​​/1968​​/11​/1​​/the-​​comin​​g​-of-​​the​p​​​urple​​-bett​​er​-on​e Burroughs, William S. (1974), The Job: Interviews with Daniel Odier, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1978), “The Limits of Control,” Semiotext(e): Schizo-Culture III(2): 38–42. Burroughs, William S. (1982), “The Revised Boy Scout Manual: Excerpt (Cassette # 1),” RE/search 4(5): 5–11. Burroughs, William S. (1992), Naked Lunch, New York: Grove Press, Inc. [Evergreen trade pb. with ToC]. Burroughs, William S. (1993), The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, edited by Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin Books. Burroughs, William S. (2001), Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, New York: Grove Press, Inc. Burroughs, William S. (2008), Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs, edited by Oliver Harris, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Available online: https​:/​/oh​​iosta​​tepre​​ss​.or​​g​/boo​​ks​/Bo​​okPag​​es​/bu​​rroug​​hs​_ev​​er​yth​​ing​_t​​oc​.pd​f Burroughs, William S. (2012), Rub Out The Words, The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, New York: Ecco Press. Burroughs, William S. (2018), ‘The Revised Boy Scout Manual’: An Electronic Revolution, edited by Geoffrey D. Smith and John M. Bennett, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Burroughs, William S. “Mr. Bradley and Mr. Martin Hear Us through A Hole in Thin Air,” Sound Cut-Up. Available online: https://vimeo​.com​/8927689 Campbell, James (2009), “The Ugly Spirit,” The Guardian. Available online: https​:/​/ ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​009​/j​​un​/20​​/will​​iam​-s​​-burr​​​oughs​​-nake​​d​-lun​​ch Caveney, Graham (1998), The Priest, They Called Him. Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs, London: Bloomsbury. Claisse, Frédéric (2012), “Contr(ôl)efiction: de l’Empire à l’Interzone,” [Control/Counter Fiction: From the Empire to the Interzone], Multitudes 48. Available online: http:​/​/ www​​.mult​​itude​​s​.net​​/cont​​r​-ol-​​e​-fic​​tion-​​de​-l-​​​empir​​e​-a​-l​/ and http:​/​/www​​.mult​​itude​​s​. net​​/cate​​gory/​​l​-edi​​tion-​​papie​​r​-en-​​ligne​​/mult​​itude​​s​-48-​​en​​-li​​brair​​ie​-le​​-15/ Connor, Steven (2010), “Looping the Loop: Tape-Time in Burroughs and Beckett,” Lecture given in the series “Taping the World,” University of Iowa, January 28. Available online: http://stevenconnor​.com​/looping​.html. Reprinted in Connor 2014, 84–101. Connor, Steven (2014), Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination, London: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1990), “Control and Becoming,” in Martin Joughin (trans.), Negotiations, 1972-1990, 169–76. New York. Columbia University Press, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles (1991), “What is a Dispositif?” in Timothy J. Armstrong (trans.), Michel Foucault: Philosopher, 159–68. New York: Routledge. Rpt. in Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Edited David Lapoujade, trans. by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 343–52. New York: Semiotext(e) (Foreign Agents Series), 2007. Deleuze, Gilles (1992), “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter): 3–7. Available online: http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/778828. Originally, Deleuze, Gilles (1990),

 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism 69 “Societies of Control,” L'autre Journal, No. I, Mai. Rpt. in Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York. Columbia University Press, 177–82. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2007), “What is the Creative Act?” in David Lapoujade (ed.), Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (trans.), Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, 317–29, New York: Semiotext(e). (Foreign Agents Series). Available online: https​:/​/di​​scord​​ion​.w​​ordpr​​ess​.c​​om​/20​​15​/02​​/01​/w​​hat​-i​​s​-the​​-crea​​tive-​​act​g​​​illes​​-dele​​uze​-1​​987/ Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1988), Foucault, Translated by Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Clare Parnet (1987), Dialogues, Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1995), Negotiations, 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press. Dery, Mark. (2018), “Max Ernst’s Collage Novels Are Part Séance, Part Victorian Underworld, and All Uncanny,” Hyperallergic, February 9, 2018. https​:/​/hy​​peral​​lergi​​c​. com​​/4244​​32​/ma​​x​-ern​​sts​-c​​ollag​​e​-nov​​els​-a​​re​-pa​​rt​-se​​ance-​​part-​​victo​​rian-​​under​​​world​​and-​​all​-u​​ncann​​y/ Eburne, Jonathan P. (2018), Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gelgud, Nathan (July 5, 2016), “Unconventional, Part 4: William S. Burroughs in Chicago,” Paris Review. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​paris​​revie​​w​.org​​/blog​​/2016​​/07​/0​​5​/unc​​onven​​ tiona​​l​-par​​t​-4​-w​​illia​​m​-s​-​b​​urrou​​ghs​-i​​n​-chi​​cago/​ Ginsberg, Allen (1966), “The Great Marijuana Hoax: First Manifesto to End the Bringdown,” Atlantic Monthly CCXVIII(6): 104–12. Guattari, Félix ([1996] 2009a), “Entering the Post-Media Era,” in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Chet Wiener (trans.), Charles J. Stivale (intro.), Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985, 301–6, New York: Semiotext(e) (Foreign Agents Series). Guattari, Félix ([1996] 2009b), “Postmodern Deadlock and Post-Media Transition,” in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Chet Wiener (trans.), Charles J. Stivale (intro.), Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985, 291–300, New York: Semiotext(e) (Foreign Agents Series). Latham, Sean (2006), “Speculative Modernism,” James Joyce Literary Supplement XX (1): 6–7. Miles, Barry (2000), The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in The Beat Hotel, Paris, 1957–1963, New York: Grove Press. Miles, Barry (2014a), “Photographs as Weapons: William S. Burroughs and Photography,” in Patricia Allmer and John Sears (eds.), Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, 19–31, Munich: Prestel Verlag. Miles, Barry (2014b), Call Me Burroughs: A Life, New York: Twelve. Moore, Nathan (2007), “Nova Law: William S. Burroughs and the Logic of Control,” Law and Literature 19(3): 435–70. Morar, Nicolae, Thomas Nail and Daniel W. Smith (2016), Between Deleuze and Foucault, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. See also the seminars of Gilles Deleuze’s audio course lectures in collaboration with Purdue University and the Université de Paris

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VIII at La Voix de Deleuze. See also the website For Between Deleuze and Foucault, or Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.cla​​.purd​​ue​.ed​​u​/res​​earch​​/dele​​uze​/C​​ourse​​% 20Tr​​ansc​r​​iptio​​ns​.ht​​ml Morgan, Ted (1988), Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, New York: Henry Holt & Company. Murphy, Timothy S. (1997), Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs, Berkeley: University of California Press. Available online: http://ark​.cdlib​.org​/ ark:​/13030​/ft0580030m/ Nail, Thomas (2016), “Biopower and Control,” in Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail, and Daniel W. Smith (eds.), Between Deleuze and Foucault, 247–63, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Odier, Daniel (1969), “Journey Through Time-Space: An Interview With William S. Burroughs,” Evergreen Review 67(June): 38–41, 78–89. Palmer, Robert (1978), “3-Day Nova Convention Ends at the Entermedia,” The New York Times, December 4. Available online: http:​/​/mov​​ies2.​​nytim​​es​.co​​m​/boo​​ks​/00​​/02​/1​​3​/spe​​ cials​​/burr​​oughs​​-​conv​​entio​​n​.htm​l Postmedia (A Site for Collaborative Studies of the Arts, Media and Humanities). Available online: https://monoskop​.org​/Postmedia Quoted and retranslated from The Funambulist: Available online: https​:/​/th​​efuna​​mbuli​​st​. ne​​t​/lit​​eratu​​re​/ph​​iloso​​phy​-m​​y​-des​​ire​-i​​s​-som​​eone-​​elses​​-fict​​ion​-w​​illia​​m​-bur​​rough​​s​con​​trol-​​as​-se​​en​-by​​-fr​ed​​eric-​​clais​​se​-in​​-mult​​itude​​s​-48 Shoaf, Eric C. (2014), William S. Burroughs: A Collectors Guide, Providence, RI: Inkblot Publications. Spies, Werner (1971), The Return of La Belle Jardiniere: Max Ernst, 1950–1970, New York: H.N. Abrams. Skerl, Jennie (1985), William Burroughs. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Excerpt on cut-ups available online: http:​/​/web​​.arch​​ive​.o​​rg​/we​​b​/200​​01017​​17214​​4​/htt​​p://​www​.bigtable​. com​​/primer​/0013b​.html Skerl, Jennie (2004), “Foreword,” in Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh (eds.), Retaking the Universe: Burroughs in the Age of Globalization, London: Pluto Press. Available online: https​:/​/rs​​pull-​​super​​vert.​​netdn​​a​-ssl​​.com/​​image​​s​/cov​​ers​_o​​ther/​​retak​​ing​_t​​he​_un​​ ivers​​e​/ret​​ak​ing​​-the-​​unive​​rse​.p​​df Skerl, Jennie and Robin Lydenberg (eds.) (1991), William S. Burroughs At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959–1989, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Sturgeon, Jonathan (2014), “What Is Schizo-Culture?: A Classic Conversation with William Burroughs,” Flavorwire, November 17. Available online: http:​/​/fla​​vorwi​​re​. co​​m​/488​​637​/w​​hat​-i​​s​-sch​​izo​-c​​ultur​​e​-a​-c​​lassi​​c​-con​​versa​​tion-​​wit​h-​​willi​​am​-s-​​burro​​ughs Weber, Greta (June 24, 2016), “How an Obsolete Copy Machine Started a Revolution: The Mimeograph—and the Words It Printed—Changed a Generation,” National Geographic. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nat​​ional​​geogr​​aphic​​.com/​​adven​​ture/​​artic​​le​/mi​​meo​-m​​imeog​​ raph-​​revol​​ution​​-lite​​ratur​​e​-b​ea​​t​-poe​​try​-a​​ctivi​​sm Wilson, Smith (1963), Mechanisms of Virus Infection, 309–38, London: Academic Press.

2

Pay It All Back Paranoid Writing/Writing Paranoia Nathan Moore

A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on. —Burroughs (2001: 161)

Introduction Academic propriety is quickly exhausted when writing of Burroughs and paranoia. Of course, the subject of Burroughs alone is enough to make the medium of critical academic work—the word—unwieldy and difficult to contain. Syntax and semantics begin to disrupt themselves, leading one to face a stylistic problem: How to write academically if the word itself is considered as a virus? One can, of course, always take the distance of the critic—but this makes it difficult to write much without freezing the subject, of missing him, and giving oneself the illusion that one has successfully systematized Burroughs, subjecting his word to some meta-word. The point, though, is that the word as virus is not operating at the “meta-” level, but is instead immanent to itself: this is the condition of its virality. Adding paranoia only adds to the problem; yet, paranoia is the true condition of interdisciplinarity. Critical writing has to be slightly outside of itself, not quite capable of being anchored in the way in which we might desire (Goodrich 2020). The job requires a certain amount of delirium and disorientation. In fact, neither of these should be foreign to us, yet their potential often gives way to the seemingly more “practical” concerns of better management and/or better activism. However, being rigorous in fact demands better investigation and awareness of where rigor meets the points of its dissipation. It is a question of immanence: the zone of indiscernibility where, for Deleuze and Guattari, we must encounter the transcendental field responsible for distributing what we think of as rigorous procedure (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: Chapter Two). Not for freedom, but for creative practicality (Moore 2021); that is, for life.

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Writing Paranoia Burroughs’ statement on being paranoid, from 1970, is located at the juncture of an overlap between two regimes, the first being the disciplinary regime investigated by Foucault and the second the regime of control as outlined by Deleuze. Consequently, what Burroughs can be taken to mean by “a paranoid” should be understood as being referable to both. On the one hand, the individualized subject of discipline is persecuted by what they don’t know yet suspect; on the other, the dividualized subject of control is persecuted by what they do know but don’t wish to know. A certain delusion is operative in relation to both, concerned with the problem (or, as Arendt calls it, the crisis) of authority. A paranoid is one who is unable to contain themselves: either there is something threatening the integrity of their bordered self (a danger from without) or they are unable to maintain the harmonic composition of their identity (a danger from within). In either case, they are beside themselves or, more specifically, they are beside their own thinking, out of their minds, and taunted by a rationality that seems to run parallel to their own. Two things should be noted straight away: (1) that the persecution from within and without is, in essence, the same thing; or better, that if we pursue either tendency far enough, we find it bending back around, such that the exterior leads to the interior and vice versa. (2) That paranoia is the lived experience of authority’s failure. As both Carl Schmitt (Schmitt 2008: 458–9) and Hannah Arendt (Arendt 2000) have made clear, authority should not be confused with power (potestas—but nor should it be confused with potentia either). Authority does not coerce or, even, act. What it does do is to affirm power, giving it an orientation and weight that power cannot provide to itself. Authority provides something akin to a frame of reference, by which networks of power can be ordered, utilized, tracked, discussed, reviewed, and so on. For this reason, authority might be considered as an obstacle to paranoia: it prevents the possibility of a parallel rationality by giving the latter an orientation and center of gravity. However, this is certainly nothing more than an ideal: the problem, under both discipline and control, is not only the way in which authority fails to keep power contained (and following the Foucauldian analysis, how it fails to keep knowledge properly referenced), but also the way in which it must fail if authority is to be operative at all. I have put the last in italics to highlight that it is the statement of a paranoid. It follows that there is a third important point: paranoia is a type of delirium. This means that paranoia is not simply knowing the world: it is not a collection of facts that provides clear evidence that the paranoid is right to be paranoid; rather, it is a delusional relation to knowledge/power in the sense that what is encountered is not some definite factual persecution but, instead, the limits of what is known. Crucially here, it is not a subsequent problem of gaining more knowledge or data, so as to extend the limits of knowledge; rather, it is the awareness—and it is this awareness that calls for a delusional relation to one’s own parallel mind—that the limits of knowledge are inherent to, and defining of, knowledge itself. This is why the paranoid person does not know what is going on but knows something about

 Pay It All Back 73 what is going on, implying of course that they cannot be contained by events and, consequently, that they are beside events, parallel to them. However, the important point here is that the delusion cannot be cured or rectified: quite simply, a paranoid is right to be paranoid. In which case, the interesting question concerns those who deny their paranoia— those who, being out of their minds, are not able to recognize this fact. It is here that the function of authority has a particular significance. Speculatively, the problem of paranoia stems from the impossibility of proving a negative (“they are not out to get me”; “I am not of interest to them”; “I am not important”). Being unable to prove the negative, its opposite becomes a possibility that cannot finally be dismissed: because I cannot definitively prove that they are not out to get me, I cannot finally dismiss the possibility that they are out to get me. What is lacking here is a functional authority that can determine the question one way or the other (“yes, they have it in for you”; “no, they have no interest in you; furthermore, they don’t exist”). A functional authority depends, of course, upon the acceptance of that authority as having sufficient mass, such that it can serve as a gravitational point of orientation for the paranoid’s questions. In other words, authority is sufficient in this context when it can limit and/or direct the wild unfolding of the parallel mind. The question of sufficiency depends upon the type of regime in question. For brevity, I will take Deleuze’s account as being sufficient here. The disciplinary regime holds and molds (Deleuze 1995: 178); separating, confining, and assigning bodies, it makes the individual by placing them in relation to a range of normative images, to which their distance from, and conformity with, can be measured. Through such measurement, the individual becomes what they are, located via the coordination of these relative normative images. This is when things work well. On the other side, the problem opens up as to the visibility of the relevant images, posing a question in two directions: Has the right norm been applied to a particular individual, and have all of the active norms been sufficiently revealed and made accountable? Are there hidden forces at work? As Foucault pointed out, the central consequence of the type of visibility demanded by a disciplinary regime is not the lived assurance of being in the right place at the right time but, instead, malveillance: endemic mistrust circulating throughout the entire regime (Foucault 1988: 146). What does a paranoid know in such a situation? That there is something operative that is invisible and, because invisible, likely determinative of what they, the paranoid person, lives and experiences. Under discipline, authority promises reassurance as to the appropriate application of the correct norms; consequently, authority is called into question if the norms seem irrelevant, distorted, or incomplete; yet, more than this, we must suppose that discipline withdraws this promise by the same gesture by which it extends it.1 Normativity fosters the perception that the way in which one lives has an explanation: not a profound or essential explanation, but a technical, standardized one. If so, there must also be such an explanation if things are not working well: for a paranoid, there must be a reason why life does not add up or make sense. If ostensibly neutral and indifferent normativity is not working, it must be because the system is being manipulated in some way. This is the core idea of the disciplinary paranoiac:

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there are hidden, partial forces at work which are more fundamental than what appears to be happening. Control impels and modulates (Deleuze 1995: 178). It calls for constant transformation, innovation, development, and movement. It does not shape the subject into an individual, but makes the subject an inventory of effects and tendencies to be continuously managed and reviewed, like a portfolio-self. However, this is not a completely separate operation from discipline. Control can also be thought of as a phase-shifting moment of feedback in a disciplinary system, the point at which the paranoia induced by discipline calls for some operation of negative entropy to prevent disciplinary societies from falling apart completely. However, this does not happen without the system as a whole changing: the normative image is still operative, but no longer as a point of convergence and standardization; rather, it now calls for divergence, for moving away, and for being different and diverse. Rather than finding one’s correct place, coordinated to relatively stable normative images, the subject of control is in a modulating circuit of constant comparison, where they try to influence the temporary (yet relevant) images through competition2 with others. This is why communication systems are so important under control: one’s success is dependent upon circulating and competitive images, and, the more one circulates, the more relevant one becomes (at least for the time being). In this, the most banal aspects of life are potential images for circulation—everything is available for networking. Here, Mathiesen’s critique of Foucault becomes relevant: the panopticon enters into conjunction with the synopticon, the few seen by the many (Mathiesen 1997), as a privilege to be competitively fought over. Exceptionality, as a matter of circulation and communication. What is the image of authority under control, at least in the West? It is not the authorization of dispersed normative centers, but the image of distribution itself, of movement and innovation (Moore 2013). In this sense, it is the authority of universal competition.3 A paranoid would then be influenced by the suspicion that there is, in fact, no underlying normative structure at all: nothing essential is shareable or to be shared; rather, there is not only an outright battle for prestige and exceptionality but, in this, also the realization of sheer contingency and, for the “winners” at least, a brittle and defensive faith that the most arbitrary outcome must be the most just one (i.e., undistorted competitive “markets”4). In this, the illusion can be paradoxically fostered that one has overcome contingency and randomness because of one’s inherent exceptionality: I am famous because I deserve to be. The tragic thing, of course, is when the losers subscribe to the same fantasy: that the best have risen to the top; and too, that they (the losers) might have done likewise if it had not been for “factor x” in their lives. What differentiates such paranoia from the disciplinary paranoiac is the additional move of having to convince oneself that any of this is objectively true; that is, a paranoid might think to themselves that competition is just, and that they could have been a winner if only “factor x” had not occurred but, too, they must also convince themselves that, out of sheer contingency, the universal competitive battle can give sense to the current state of the world. The control paranoia is to think that the world makes sense, is explainable, and can be narrativized to achieve one’s desires—hence the rather misnamed cybernetics. This is the paranoia that control

 Pay It All Back 75 fosters: that we are each on a journey, and, while any sense of communal progress is now meaningless, we can each arrive at the destiny we deserve—and, if we do not, we can explain this to ourselves (we were blocked in some way from communicating our inherent exceptionality). What makes this paranoia specifically is the insurmountable evidence to the contrary: good discipline does not lead to just desserts. In other words, that contingency reigns; meaning: cause and effect no longer provide a sufficiently convincing explanation of what is happening. The image of authority under control is therefore more speedily self-deconstructing than anything under discipline; indeed, the authority of control is rooted in the very operation of deconstructing its own authority: this is how it absorbs all revolutionary tendencies, agrees with its critiques, and keeps on trying to de-authorize itself by putting destiny into each of our hands. To deny its meaninglessness would itself be meaningless,5 for what can authority do today except to fail, and to keep on failing?6 What does the control paranoiac know but not want to know? That their existence is contingent; that is, that they do not exist out of necessity and, had they not existed at all, their absence would not have been noted; furthermore, from an ontological perspective, any difference in what is because a given subject (or group of subjects) was not is so negligible as to be irrelevant. The control paranoiac can accept that everyone else’s existence is contingent, but not their own. Somehow, they are the exception; because they exist, there is meaning and the fact that the world exists becomes a necessary fact: necessary, as the condition of their existence. Is the key then, to become less paranoid? Unfortunately, this seems unlikely: By what frame of reference could humanity come together so as to authorize actually knowing something about itself? That is, to know something universal about itself beyond the shared spirit of competition? Maybe the solution—and this is evident from Burroughs’ own practice (Harris 2014)—is to become more paranoid, meaning to subject one’s anxiety-induced paranoia to a further test of paranoia. Meta-para-noia or, even hyper-para-noia? What this could allow is some distance from what is “actually going on”—not to take command of it, but to situate ourselves relative to it with more clarity; that is, the point at which clarity and paranoia become the same thing, and we can see the contingency of our existence. To track this, it is useful to follow a certain trajectory, not as the truth of paranoia, but as an attempt to “know something” about it.

Paranoid Writing According to Flusser, writing and history are intimately connected: they fabricate each other. This means, of course, that if we are moving beyond writing, we are also moving beyond the possibility of any history (Flusser 2011: 56–8). Indeed, we are now in post-history, mainly because of technological developments that make us less and less reliant on writing, and more and more dependent on the “technical image.”7 The technical image is mobile, private (or, at least, pertinent only to the appropriate “bubbles”), and endlessly recombinable. It is nonlinear and so does not unfold in time, and has no need to present itself as being either of a specific time or as operating

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with reference to a particular time. For this reason, it is ahistorical.8 This also means, of course, that it is not only decentralized but distributed, modulatory, connectible, specific, temporary, and exclusionary. The latter is so because the authorization of the technical image is effectively immanent, meaning that it pertains only to the bubble, group, or community to whom it is addressed and who are, in turn, authorized to manipulate it.9 Each bubble is, to use Lyotard’s adoption of Wittgenstein, a language game. Such games become unavoidable, in Lyotard’s analysis, precisely because of a failure in generalized legitimation and metanarratives (Lyotard 1984: 6). This failure is the failure or ending of history as presented by Flusser. However, Lyotard’s merit here is to focus on the problem of legitimation (Lyotard 1998: 6–9). While critical of Habermas, Lyotard nevertheless presupposes a certain level of compatibility between language games—not in terms of any possible consensus between them (which is now illegitimate) but, at least, enough that they can be in dispute with each other.10 However, here we should consider that Lyotard was somewhat overoptimistic. The differend is a practical competitive move for a language game in a dispute with another language game. However, it is never—by definition—universally guaranteed, and this means that anyone can take advantage of its means, for “good” or “ill.” Today, it is difficult to think of anyone who makes better use of the resources of the differend than the climate change denier. Because there can be no differend applicable to all (no universal language game), post-history is a mobile and complex network of bubbles/ communities that are orientated only to, and by, their own competitiveness. There is nothing between them. Therefore, any dispute is to be resolved by making all competitors losers. In this sense, it is paranoia that founds a community, combined with the means to successfully communicate this paranoia. If communications go hand in hand with paranoia, it is because, as a technical matter, the means of communication refer only to themselves. This is certainly not inevitable, but if “good” and “progressive” use is made of communications media, this is only discernible, it seems, by reference to what one has already taken to be a “good” and “progressive” language game. By itself, the only demand of communication media is to communicate—and it is a demand. For the subject, the problem of such media is that they can in no way guarantee truthfulness or sincerity (Luhmann 1995: 150); the best that one can hope for is a compensating communication that assures us that the previous communication was truthful and sincere; but then, of course, yet another such communication is required. Luhmann points out that a constant exclamation of truthfulness and sincerity is liable to produce doubts in the recipient (Luhmann 1995: 150)—being constantly reassured that the last message was truthful fosters paranoia. As such, the subject is drawn into a process of continuous communication which is less to do with the content of a message, as it is to do with the fact that repeatedly sending a message is indicative of truthfulness and sincerity. What becomes problematic therefore is not what might be in the message,11 but that one stops messaging altogether, or does not message enough. Then, suspicion can also be aroused. The specific difficulty here—exacerbated by communications media (Luhmann 1995: 162–3)—is that the information (the “content” of a communication) must not be confused with the message or utterance that “contains it” (Luhmann 1995: 151). However, within

 Pay It All Back 77 the limits of this chapter, the only thing that can finally insure against this confusion of utterance and content is authority (legitimacy), because only authority can provide, in advance, the appropriate parameters by which the meaning or sense of a communication can be extracted by the recipient (in Luhmann’s terminology: self-reference).12 Lacking legitimation of this sort (something that provides referential orientation for the message), a communication can only legitimate itself through the fact of its own transmission or circulation. With no such orientating self-reference (available to the recipient), a basic “rule” of social systematicity is transgressed: “In no way is one allowed to repeat what has already been said” (Luhmann 1995: 64); indeed, one is impelled to communicate precisely because one has nothing new to say—for how is the new to be identified? In which case, the only point of reference is the technical arrangement of the communications media itself. When utterance and information collapse into one another, then it is the network of communications that becomes authoritative. Consequently, the more a message circulates, the more authority it has, and the truer it becomes. Lyotard was right that we should be paying much more attention to sophistry.13

Obscenity For the paranoid, everything is potentially connected to their own exceptionality. Therefore, I should continue with some development of this point and, here, Baudrillard’s notion of obscenity becomes useful. In The Ecstasy of Communication,14 Baudrillard is explicit: Private telematics: each individual sees himself promoted to the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his original universe; that is to say, in the same position as the astronaut in his bubble. (1988: 15)

The control paranoiac confronts an infinite array of data and information, all of which is potentially relevant to him or her. The problem: How to sift through this mass, in order to rank it in some way? How to create sufficient distance when one has become sovereign of (or as) a communicational media node? How to foster the illusion that one is not simply another drop in the data stream? As Baudrillard indicates, by seeing oneself as sovereign. The work demanded of the subject under control is to constantly reconstruct themselves, but to do this by making themselves more themselves each time, becoming the realization of that true and special self that they know themselves to be really. The reference to sovereignty we should consider—regardless of whether this was Baudrillard’s intent or not—in the Schmittian register, as the one who decides on the exception (Schmitt 2005: Chapter One),15 except that, now, the exception is oneself and so one is called to decide upon oneself over and over again. Sovereignty has not disappeared but cloned itself and, in having done so, has been miniaturized and gone viral. Now, we all host the sovereign.

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Thus, if Luhmannian self-reference has become suspended, it is because of the hardening of one’s own sovereign bubble that seeks more and more closure, but with ever less compensating openness; indeed, this is also the spirit of competition: only open onto what you can takeover; what you can’t takeover, ignore or destroy. Otherwise, there is only the vertigo of the obscene, that which cannot be staged or placed, because it does not present the illusion of the real but, instead, the real itself. This real is not redemptive or revealing, but simply shows the unbearable contingency of one’s own being; it is the point at which we cannot distinguish the content of a communication from the articulation of a communication. Not without some irony, obscene control is the loss of the possibility of alienation: Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when every-thing becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. (Baudrillard 1988: 21–2)

This immediate transparency, the closeness of everything, creates a thin surface, as if one were situated looking at the inside of a bubble’s skin that, in its proximity, is so visible as to become meaningless—that is, nondifferentiated, equivalent, and without affect: “Obscenity lies in the fact that there is nothing to see” (Baudrillard 1988: 31). If so, what is perhaps truly disturbing about images of violence and terror—from 9/11 to police killings—is not what they show or represent (after all, such violence is known to be endemic), but that the images reproduce and become unavoidable. This is not a criticism, but the recognition of a (possible) politics that derives from the logic of obscenity, rather than the revelation of a secret.16 However, the point here is: How to prioritize oneself when one knows oneself to be a clone? By insisting upon the right to be at the center of things: in this way, from the mass of meaningless communication by which we are impelled, we might portfolio ourselves, arbitrarily collect and juxtapose this or that image, cut-up and re-arrange, play—as Flusser has it (not without some regret)—with the technical image. Then, we can carry out the work of dividualizing ourselves. That there is apparently “no alternative” is the only legitimation we have, and its immediate consequence, of course, is to legitimize all alternatives (facts and realities alike) necessarily and unavoidably by reference to oneself. However, this is not a divided or split self, a self that must bend back around to itself but, rather, the most basic globule of living matter, the barest of selves, a self that is immediately and obscenely real, and so nonreferable and consequently exceptional and one of a kind. To reach this point, to have faith in oneself when faith is no longer possible, is the work of control. There is a closeness here to the Lacanain mirror stage (Lacan 2006), in which the coordination of the human body is learned mimetically, and a sense of self-agency comes to be operative. All agents are, for this reason, paranoid (Lacan 2006: 77). However, the question with mimesis is always to do with how the image to be copied is selected. How to recognize that something out there is in fact me? At the same time— and perhaps more importantly—how is it that what is perceived as all me already can

 Pay It All Back 79 have this gap opened up in the midst of it, the space where I will encounter the other? The mirror creates a space for the subject (Lacan 2006: 77), through which they can link to “socially elaborated situations” (Lacan 2006: 79). One thinks, of course, of the Latah (Burroughs 1993a) mindlessly copying in fine detail the acts and movements of others, a mimetic automaton who is not able to resist immediately acting out whatever they happen to see. This is the perfect illustration of the bubble self: with no ability to distinguish images, or to extract meaning from communications, nothing remains to be done except to mirror the image and to repeat the communication, to pass it on. This is already clear from Lacan: it is we ourselves who are the mirrors. The difference between discipline and control at this point is that, with the former, we look at the reflected self but, with the latter, we see the self only in outline and in its absence; it is the images around it which draw our attention. The space of the mirror implodes, making of the subject an ever-decreasing spot or fleck on the screen. This blank spot becomes necessary as the tiniest distance, the fraction of space that must be kept open if we are not to be totally consumed by obscenity: “the subject’s capture by his situation gives us the most general formulation of madness” (Lacan 2006: 80). Perhaps the “selfie” is the last line of defense against total immersion? The idea that obscenity is something shocking or provocative is hard to maintain. This does not mean that an image of shock and outrage cannot be circulated— “members of the public” reflect it all the time in news broadcasts when asked for their opinion—and, in this, flashing moments of authoritativeness can pass by because, in obscenity, only the miming out of our horror and concern seems able to provide such scintillations. Was Naked Lunch ever intended as a shocking work? No, the point of its obscenity was to show how close the obscene has now come—the collapse of reference and authority precipitating the absorption of the meat of existence into the filaments and cables of communication. But, all of this—this is what a paranoid person would think, right? That Burroughs saw Naked Lunch as a satirical work is well known, and exaggeration is obviously one if its tools. Similarly with Baudrillard in his ecstasy of pessimism, a writer whose works certainly become more prescient as time passes but who yet still remains readable. So, perhaps the proper formulation of paranoia at this point is to say: there are only seconds to go. What might this mean?

Competition It would be interesting to undertake an analysis of why certain communicated images take on a specific force at a given time. It cannot just be because they are horrific in their violence and cruelty, because such images abound. The hyper-cynical Baudrillardian line might be to say that the illusion of affect has to be maintained if we are to keep deluding ourselves that something like community is possible. Without wishing to propose anything exceptional about humanity it does seem, at least, that we have a certain specificity. Our histories are, of course, the rich and bloody narratives of what that specificity might be and, to borrow from Nancy, here we find

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a commonality: that what we have in common is that we have nothing in common (Nancy 1991: 15). Diverging slightly from Nancy, I would prefer to say that what we have in common is our exposure to contingency, that we do not exist by necessity as individuals or as a species, and that, in this fragility, we find an existential sharing. However, this is not a sharing of content and meanings, of beliefs or enjoyments, of gods and monsters. What is shared is our incapacity to share these things. This is the exposure to contingency, evident in images of violence that, for whatever contextual reasons, many of us can suddenly perceive and feel something about when we encounter them. This feeling, I suggest, is the sudden awareness that our paranoia is correct and truthful—that we do indeed know something about what is going on— and so take offense at those who would deny it for their own ends. That is: we become authorized by our paranoia. At such a point, we move from an existential paranoia to a political one. We are faced with something intolerable at that point, feeling the vertigo of what we know but don’t want to know: that the contingency of our existence is being used to authorize the misery, murder, mutilation, suffering, degradation, depression, illness, ignorance, and so on of others with whom we have in common the lack of any reason to be. Given that, it might be asked: “Who cares, so long as it is not me?” Perhaps such a question is difficult to answer historically, but an advantage we have today is that the emptiness of such a position is fully apparent. That is because, on moving from the existential to the political we now re-find the existential. The lesson of biopolitics: today, politics is directly concerned with the existential fragility of our being (i.e., our being without necessity). This means that we must turn our paranoia to good use. Such a strategy is clear in many of Burroughs’ writings, particularly during his time in London from 1967 to 1974. As Oliver Harris notes in his introduction to The Soft Machine, such a method was not without its dangers, being liable to stimulate the most banal and vicious reactions in its subject (in Burroughs’ case as expressions of antiSemitism and misogyny (Harris 2014: xxvi)). However, valuable and practical insights were also obtained, and reported by Burroughs in works such as The Third Mind (with Brion Gysin), Electronic Revolution, Ah Pook is Here, and others. In particular, Burroughs’ experiments with paranoia led him to discover the operation of what he called control—this term being subsequently adopted by Deleuze in 1990, with explicit reference to Burroughs’ work. In The Third Mind, for example, Burroughs explains the cut-up method, encouraging his readership to utilize it for themselves, the purpose being to create some distance from what was otherwise obscenely proximate—the prerecorded images and words distributed across lines of association, serving as flow charts through which the subject could “navigate” their own lives and biographies. The cut-up disrupted these lines, showing their workings, and, too, allowed for the possibility of counter-lines to be developed—new juxtapositions of word and image, through which new subjectivities might emerge alongside novel assemblages of time and space. This raises the question of feedback (Moore 2007), as Burroughs outlines in his short essay “The Limits of Control”:

 Pay It All Back 81 Consider . . . the impasse implicit here. All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely, there would be nothing left to control. (1993b: 117)

At the same time, control is a type of addiction (Burroughs 1993b: 118–19)—the more control one has, the less margin for control one has, and so more situations susceptible to control are required. The feedback problem is: control needs what is out of control to function. Therefore, for those interested in resisting control, paranoia is needed in relation to both control and what presents as “out of control.” Burroughs himself does not quite make this leap, because he remains wedded to the idea that the problem of control is also the problem of the state (Burroughs 1993b: 120–1); we might say that he wasn’t paranoid enough in this instance. Electronic Revolution goes further, because it addresses the problem of feedback in a more detailed way: How to disrupt feedback systems? How to foster positive feedback, at the expense of negative feedback? In the context of that essay, by using the (then current) methods of communication against the system of communications (as a sort of lived cut-up), where playback of the sounds of riot, war, and resistance might be used to induce actual riot, war, and resistance.17 However, even this (positive feedback) calls for caution today.18 Is it possible to cut into both discipline and control, to fashion a new strategy? Can we become more creatively paranoid? What can we take from discipline? The paranoia that secret forces are at work. What can we take from control? The paranoia that we will have to confront our own contingency. Is there a certain denudement possible if we can assemble these together? Are secret forces at work that do not want us to confront our (and their) contingency? This is not the strategy of a strongly juridical image that asserts continuity and inevitability as the ground of its command and which must, in turn, be resisted (e.g., by “breaking out” into an outside); rather, it would be to become paranoid about everyone and everything that claims to want to “free us,” to “return us” to a natural state, that wants us to “realise our potential.” In short, it would be to become suspicious of both the fact and the “advantages” of de-authorization, deregulation, equality of opportunity, and so on, to become suspicious of competition.19 What then of competition? Taking off from Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics, Dardot and Laval have constructed a genealogy of (neo)liberalism that shows competition to be at the core of contemporary governmentality and administration. More than this, even: that competition is now constitutive of neoliberal subjectivities—which echoes the idea of “dividuality” as outlined by Deleuze. The crucial feature of competition, as a sociological arrangement, is its acceptance of inequality—not merely as an unfortunate outcome from the game of “equality of opportunity” but as the very basis and condition of the game in the first place (Dardot and Laval 2013: 83). Competition needs asymmetry, disequilibrium, movement, and circulation to function. What is its function? Unsurprisingly, this question is shown, by Dardot and Laval, to have been grasped by the proponents of competition as being a moral one. Hence, with reference to Herbert Spencer, they write that competition between individuals was understood as the “very principle of the progress of humanity” (Dardot and Laval 2013: 34) and

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that “assimilation of economic competition to a general struggle for existence must be allowed to develop so as not to arrest evolution” (Dardot and Laval 2013: 34). Implicit in this is the same feedback problem faced by control: there must be a bottom tier of “losers” (those unfit to survive) who will necessarily be allowed to die or, at least, be left to lead alienated lives so that competitive progress can proceed. The progress of some requires the de-progressing of others. Therefore, it will be necessary to de-progress more and more humans as the regime unfolds. In the midst of knowledge and plenty, it will be necessary to create scarcity and ignorance (Deleuze and Guattari 2013: Part 3). During the course of the mid-twentieth century, a seemingly more human face was put on the tenet of competition, inasmuch as it was thought20 that the latter would lead to a more just society through enabling more personal (i.e., private) liberty— such liberty being both guaranteed by and directed toward competitive relations among individuals. As Dardot and Laval are careful to explain, this should not be thought of as an embrace of laissez-faire economics—on the contrary, the respective proponents of this newer vision of competition grasped that it was not a naturally occurring consequence of “free” markets: a lack of state intervention would likely lead to uncompetitive practices such as monopolies (Dardot and Laval 2013: Chapter 2). It was understood that the “communal” resources of the state should be targeted on making competition the central principle for all aspects of human life—not (of course) to achieve equality, but rather “liberty” for all (Dardot and Laval 2013: 65–6). If this leads to a new vision of the competitive life as being the most fulfilling life (an idea that still has currency today, even among progressive thinkers), then the contemporary moment is marked by the realization that, at a certain point, neoliberalism must come into conflict with democracy, because the latter places a seemingly arbitrary limit upon the competitive freedom of the neoliberal subject (Dardot and Laval 2013: Chapter 9 and Conclusion). In which case, the use of state intervention, alongside the proper educating of humanity, becomes geared toward allowing for the most successfully competitive strata to break away from the rest of society. Indeed, at such a point, the very notion of society will have become nonsensical: for the highest strata, there is only “the tyranny of the majority” (Dardot and Laval 2013: 306), an obscene exposure from which they must continuously free themselves if they are to fully pursue the competitive tendencies of which they are capable. How can paranoia help us at this point? First, a new type of secret has become operational: not the state secret (the revelation of which often actually helps to conceal this new type of secret) but the secret of active disinformation: the use of doubt, lies, distraction, alternative facts, and misdirection to conceal the fact that the top competitive strata—the 1 percent—have ceded from the rest of society. The purpose of any remaining social or communal resources is then to be utilized in concealing the fact that the 1 percent have withdrawn. The primary method of secrecy here is not to hide things away, but to randomize their significance. The most obvious example is, of course, climate change denial. This involves the exploitation of communications networks to de-authorize any consensus being drawn on the controversy. Nevertheless, if consensus remains ostensibly possible here, it is because

 Pay It All Back 83 what is at stake is not a question of how we should live but, rather, a question as to whether we shall live at all. The primary means of concealment is to keep any and all controversies open. Second, following from this, we must become aware that the 1 percent are encouraging us to doubt all institutional, state, and collective forms to the extent that these might be viable methods for curtailing their liberty. Of significance here is the obscenity of reality: the proximity of the communicational technical image is no longer a matter of nudging us toward the correct normative standards, but instead is mobilized to emphasize the arbitrariness of such standards, so that all response or action seems equally arbitrary and disconnected as a consequence. In other words, if we are being guided, it is to make us turn away from communal institutional resources, and into our own competitive subject/community bubbles. We have become trapped in liberty. Third, we must become aware of wanting to not face our own nonnecessity. The 1 percent have already grasped this, and have decided to act on it: if no human life is necessary, they will do all they can to foster their human lives. Our paranoid refusal of the contingency of existence is being used against us (e.g., with promises of human rights, diversity, that we are all important, that we must not suffer, etc., etc.). The point is not to fall into a deathly competition of all against all, but to realize that we all lack necessity. Therefore, the advantages enjoyed by the 1 percent (or any other percentage) cannot be justified on any ethical or philosophical basis. Here, a task remains outstanding: how to think community beyond the opposition of liberty and equality (i.e., noncompetitively). Clearly, there are only seconds to go. The super-rich—the 1 percent—are already making plans for their survival in the face of worldwide calamities,21 of which Covid19 is likely only the relatively benign harbinger. We should be clear and paranoid: this is not a “natural” survival instinct which just happens to be able to draw on vast resources; this is the deployment of vast resources to make sure that the majority of us—the 99 percent—are wiped out and, if not wiped out, at least rendered containable. Bruno Latour has made a similar point in his recent Down to Earth (2018: 18–21). In the full expectation of impending global catastrophe, the 1 percent have dismissed any idea of solidarity—they are not with us, and their cause is not our cause: “These people . . . understood that, if they wanted to survive in comfort, they had to stop pretending, even in their dreams, to share the earth with the rest of the world” (Latour 2018: 19; emphasis in the original). Latour suggests that a coordinated effort is now being undertaken to extract and stockpile whatever resources still remain while, simultaneously, through a Baudrillardian ecstasy of communication, confusing the rest of us as to what is actually going on. If we can no longer rely on authorized truth, and if we refuse the bubble of bespoke alternative facts, then the only course open to us is paranoia—that we nevertheless have some idea of what is going on. In an endnote, Latour writes: The problem with conspiracy theories, as Luc Boltanski has shown, is that they sometimes correspond all too well to reality. (Latour 2018: 113, n. 21)

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Unfortunately, Latour’s self-professed naivete in matters of political science is evident throughout the rest of his short book. He proposes that the solution might be for all of us to insist, modestly, on belonging somewhere. But, if we humans belonged anywhere, there would be no scope for paranoia at all, and, even more so, all political philosophy would be redundant. No, the problem is that humanity has never belonged, not on this planet nor anywhere else; and it is because we don’t belong that we must insist that we are not going anywhere. As a first practical step, simply: tax the rich. Tax them for Black Lives Matter, for victims of domestic abuse, and for refugee children. Tax them for bullshit jobs, for no future, and for the fostering of an infantilized culture. Trickledown doesn’t work, and we don’t want the precarity they’re offering. Tax the rich. Tax them for a lifetime of debt, for slashed wrists, and for hostile environments. Tax them for murder, torture, and rape. Tax them for every desperate person who drowned in the Mediterranean and in the English Chanel. Tax the rich. Tax them for the time they have stolen from those yet to be born. Nothing has changed except that now, there are only seconds to go: Pay it all pay it all pay it all back. (Burroughs 2013: 2)

Conclusion Facing up to contingency means developing an acceptance of the capacity for human extinction.22 We are not owed anything, so how we live always remains to be constructed. Historically, the trend has been to construct human life as if it were not contingent, as if it were exceptional because of its sacrifices, its gods, its wars, its suffering, its productivity. We know well the discrimination this has produced—but the solution is not (only) to carry on in the competitive struggle for ways of life, in the belief that any of them can offer a permanent foundation or existential guarantee. Rather, the problem is to find ways to think our universal exposure to contingency and, in light of this, to find new ways to live. To stress, this is not because we deserve anything at all but that through the condition of contingency a creative capacity is continuously open. It is this which must be taken back from our masters—as inevitably, they are masters without any mastery at all.

Notes 1 Because a norm will always need to be affirmed by yet another norm. 2 On competition, see Chapters 2 and 3 of Dardot and Laval (2013) and Foucault (2010: 118 et seq). 3 That is, in its most “benign” formations. Achille Mbembe has shown how, in terms of contemporary colonizations, the interplay of what I am here referring to as discipline and control operates in a much more overtly exclusionary manner, with tight, bespoke, and mobile zones of discipline being flexibly coordinated and controlled to make bodies remove themselves. See his references to South Africa and Palestine

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4 5

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in his famous essay “Necropolitics” (Mbembe 2013: 173–7). On the auto-removal of bodies, see too my “Diagramming Control” (Moore 2013). Of course, it takes a lot of intervention to make markets apparently undistorted. Also relevant here is a line repeated in Naked Lunch: as one judge said to another, be just, and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary (Burroughs 1993a). Again, Mbembe is helpful here, for showing how this results in a necropolitics of survival, which is of course intimately tied to universal competition. Indeed, the very logic of competition is victimizing, in the sense that there can only be winners if there are losers or, more accurately, one wins because someone else has lost (Mbembe 2013: 182). In a different context, the conjunction of paranoia and narrativization (usually in the form of a play) are constant themes in the films of Jacques Rivette. See, for example, Paris nous appartient (1961) or the epic Out 1 (1970), where the feeling that a causality is at work, but beyond the comprehension of many of the films’ protagonists, is palpable. For more on this theme, see (Diamantides and Schütz 2017: Chapter 4). Of course, Flusser points out that post-history was already contained in history proper as the most likely outcome, given the contradictions within history (and writing) itself (Flusser 2011: 8–9). Now that the accident of technology has arrived at a particular point of development and availability, those contradictions can come to the fore, radically transforming the image of authority. Unlike well-known others, Flusser did not see this as an immediate cause for celebration (Flusser 2011: 87–94). Here, a certain habit of language is evident. Manipulation in this context should not be taken to indicate mastery. In this context, mastery is a meaningless proposition, and both the image and its handlers are caught up in a reciprocally constituting relation—one that is, within its own terms, not only fully cognizant of this fact, but is also dependent for its operation upon this malleability being “easily” available to the relevant subjects. It is difficult to avoid a Schmittian implication here, in terms of hostis: an enemy that one recognizes as being sufficiently like oneself that the prospect of peace or an accord remains possible. In distinction, the enemy who has forfeited their “human rights” can only be eradicated (Schmitt 1996: 28). A provocative thought: Could trolling be an attempt to give some meaning back to the content of communications? If so, it would, of course, suggest an extreme assumption of exceptionality by the sender. See (Luhmann 1995: 32–41). If I can refer to self-reference as a legitimating authority in this context, it is because both function as augere, that is, as necessary elements in the process for the augmentation of what exists (or, at least, of what is taken to exist by the system in question). Although a slight digression, a Luhmannian definition of paranoia can then be proposed, extrapolated from his discussion of information and meaning in (Luhmann 1995: 65): for a paranoid, information remains new no matter how often it is encountered. That is, information never augments a system which is, for the paranoid, already fully what it is. The attempt by a philosopher such as Badiou to redraw a clear distinction between philosophy and sophistry seems, in this regard, a bit naively utopian (see, for example, the sustained differentiation of philosophy and anti-philosophy in Badiou 1999). On sophistry and rhetoric, see, generally (Crome 2004). See too (Baudrillard 1990: 50–70).

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15 For the important connection of exceptionality with immunity, see (Esposito 2011: 66–74). 16 It is difficult to gauge the impact of someone like Edward Snowden, for example; but it seems that the public at large were not too concerned to find out what various governments were really up to. From a Baudrillardian perspective, it might be because today we already know that they are up to no good; hence, we are bored by secrets and their revelation to the extent that these pertain to some sense of a shared reality, but we can each be impelled by obscenities if the communicational circumstances are right. 17 As Baudrillard pointed out: try robbing a bank with a fake gun, and see what happens (Baudrillard 1983: 39). 18 I am thinking here of disaster capitalism—see, generally (Klein 2008). 19 It is interesting to note that, in the 2016 edition of their book Intersectionality, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge seek to authorize intersectionality in terms of improving competition—through leveling the playing field and giving equality of opportunity to those otherwise excluded from competitiveness (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016—see Chapter One in particular). This shows the complexities of the current time, inasmuch as such a justification must be agreed with and supported in practical terms, while nevertheless recognizing the limits of its theorization to the extent that it leaves competition in place as something essential. 20 See Dardot and Laval’s discussion of the Walter Lippman Colloquium and German Ordo-liberalism, in chapters two and three, respectively, of The New Way of the World (Dardot and Laval 2013). 21 See, for example, Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel’s investments in seasteading https​:/​/ww​​w​.sea​​stead​​ing​.o​​rg​/ab​​out/?​​gclid​​=EAIa​​IQobC​​hMItf​​vu4vu​​S6wIV​​2​-7tC​​ h2Z4A​​h9EAA​​​YASAA​​EgJGJ​​fD​_Bw​​E; the use of “disaster bunkers” during the current pandemic https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/wo​​rld​/2​​020​/m​​ar​/11​​/dise​​ase​-d​​odgin​​g​-wor​​ ried-​​wealt​​hy​-je​​t​-of​f​​-to​-d​​isast​​er​-bu​​nkers​; the setting up of fortress communities and super-rich militias https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​yorke​​r​.com​​/maga​​zine/​​2017/​​01​/30​​/doom​​ sday-​​prep-​​for​-​t​​he​-su​​per​-r​​ich (note the link drawn between this paranoia and communications technology); billionaire “preppers” buying up swathes of remote real estate https​:/​/ww​​w​.msn​​.com/​​en​-us​​/mone​​y​/rea​​lesta​​te​/su​​per​-r​​ich​-s​​anctu​​aries​​to​-s​​urviv​​e​-glo​​bal​-d​​isast​​ers​/s​​s​​-BB1​​364s7​​#inte​​rstit​​ial​=2; and so on. All accessed August 11, 2020. 22 On the contingency/extinction of human existence, see, generally, Brassier (2007) and Meillassoux (2008).

References Arendt, Hannah (2000), “What Is Authority?” in Peter Baeher (ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt, 462–507, London: Penguin. Badiou, Alain (1999), Manifesto for Philosophy, translated by Norman Madarasz, New York: SUNY. Baudrillard, Jean (1983), Simulations, translated by Paul Foss et al., New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, Jean (1988), The Ecstasy of Communication, translated by Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze, New York: Semiotext(e).

 Pay It All Back 87 Baudrillard, Jean (1990), Fatal Strategies, translated by Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, New York: Semiotext(e). Brassier, Ray (2007), Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Burroughs, William S. (1993a), Naked Lunch, London: Flamingo. Burroughs, William S. (1993b), The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, New York: Arcade. Burroughs, William S. (2001), Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e). Burroughs, William S. (2013), Nova Express, London: Penguin. Burroughs, William S. and Brion Gysin (1979), The Third Mind, London: John Calder. Crome, Keith (2004), Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval (2013), The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, translated by Gregory Elliott, London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles (1995), “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Martin Joughin (trans.), Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, translated by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Version. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2013), Anti-Oedipus, translated by Robert Hurley et al., London: Bloomsbury Academic Press. Diamantides, Marinos and Anton Schütz (2017), Political Theology: Demystifying the Universal, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Esposito, Roberto (2011), Immunitas, translated by Zakiya Hanafi, Cambridge: Polity. Flusser, Vilém (2011), Into the Universe of Technical Images, translated by Nancy Ann Roth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel (1988), “The Eye of Power,” in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics, translated by Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodrich, Peter (2021), What Should Critical Legal Theory Become? Colorado Law Review 92: 987. Harris, Oliver (2014), “Introduction,” in William S. Burroughs, Nova Express: The Restored Text, ed. Harris, ix–lv, London: Penguin. Harris, Oliver (2014), “Introduction,” in William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine: The Restored Text, ed. Harris, ix–liii, London: Penguin. Hill Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge (2016), Intersectionality, Cambridge: Polity. Klein, Naomi (2008), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Penguin. Lacan, Jacques (2006), Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, New York: Norton. Latour, Bruno (2018), Down to Earth, translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Polity. Luhmann, Niklas (1995), Social Systems, translated by John Bednarz Jr. and Dirk Baecker, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (1998), The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mathiesen, Thomas (1997), “The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s Panopticon Revisited,” Theoretical Criminology 1(2): 215–34.

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Mbembe, Achille (2013), “Necropolitics,” in Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (eds.), Biopolitics: A Reader, 161–92, Durham: Duke University Press. Meillassoux, Quentin (2008), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray Brassier, London: Continuum. Moore, Nathan (2007), “Nova Law: William S. Burroughs and the Logic of Control,” Law and Literature 19 (3): 435–70. Moore, Nathan (2013), “Diagramming Control,” in Peg Rawes (ed.), Relational Architectural Ecologies, 56–69, London: Routledge. Moore, Nathan (2021), “Why Record Improvised Music?” in Danilo Mandic (ed.), Law and Sound, London: University of Westminster Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991), The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor et al., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schmitt, Carl (1996), The Concept of the Political, translated by George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl (2005), Political Theology, translated by George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl (2008), Constitutional Theory, translated by Jeffrey Seitzer, Durham: Duke University Press.

3

The Tension of Possibility Reading Closure in Ah Pook is Here through the Multiframe Ash Connell-Gonzalez

Comics are a medium that is fractured by its genre conventions. A single comic page presents itself sliced into sections spatially, temporally, and by its written narration. William Burroughs’ Ah Pook is Here intensifies this fragmentation as the text is only available in incomplete slices ranging from comic strips to illustrated excerpts in magazines to the written and visual parts which were published separately from each other. When reading each piece isolated from the others, only one segment of the full narrative potential is accessible. Reading only Burroughs’ written narration or Malcolm Mc Neill’s visual narration offers the same segmented understanding as reading only one or two issues of Spider-Man. Though entertaining enough on its own, the broader scope of the story and themes are harder to grasp. The more fragments of Ah Pook is Here that are gathered and read as a unit, the more the text morphs from an incomplete object to an experience that mirrors the thematic concerns of the narrative. While this suggestion may seem simplistic, it is the first step to using comic reading practices toward a text that was always supposed to be in graphic narrative form. In a comic, the layers of narrative—the written and visual, which may consist of multiple narrative layers as well—are not separable in that just one or the other is not a complete story. The publication history of Ah Pook is Here is characterized by several repeated attempts to offer one layer of the narrative, attempts in which the separated visual narration is left with empty dialogue boxes, while the written narrative borrows imagery from the visual to fill in gaps. This split is unfortunate, and while there is no way to marry the two pieces together again,1 a reading based in comic theory allows for all of Ah Pook is Here’s different sections to coexist in a multiframe. Coined by comic theorist Thierry Groensteen, the multiframe is the sum of an entire work, whether a single panel or multiple books ([1991] 2007: 31). The border for the multiframe is not rigid either, and can allow for the inclusion of as many related texts as necessary. As an unfinished work, everything from Mc Neill’s autobiography to Burroughs’ interview with Rolling Stone can aid in reading the usual comic narrative tensions and closure into Ah Pook is Here. Additionally, reading Ah Pook as a comic/graphic novel

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can expand and open new reading practices for approaching both incomplete and experimental graphic narratives. Graphic narrative reading practices such as “text as object versus texts as experience” multiply in the fragmented narrative (Hatfield 2005: 58). Mc Neill’s visual narration, when read alone on the “text as object” side of the tension, for instance, leans into the novelty of the text as a material object to distract from the missing components needed for a reader to form closure between the fractured images of the narrative. Lack of written narrative in dialogue boxes and speech bubbles hides behind the beauty of long and glossy pages. As an object, the text offers itself up as an art book instead, not a narrative experience. The multiframe allows us not only to read this tension in the single text but also to then place the text into a broader context and read other tensions and closure into the narrative. Using graphic narrative reading practices on Ah Pook is Here does not only offer a narrative experience that flows forward, backward, and sideways as the spatial becomes the temporal. It also offers a new type of narrative tension, which will be called “text as possibility vs. text as presented.” This tension creates a space for an incomplete work to be theorized both through what it could have been and by what it actually became. For instance, the exclusion of written narrative alongside the visual narration pushes a reader to accept the incomplete text “as is.” At the same time, the chosen shape of the book—horizontal and long—helps facilitate an imagined reading of the text as the long, unfolding accordion Burroughs and McNeill envisioned. Even in more conventional graphic novels and comics, part of the responsibility of assembling the narrative will always be on the reader; Ah Pook is Here offers a different way to think about how and where this assembling takes place. The assembling taken up by the reader utilizing comic theory bears similarities to how many have already approached Burroughs’ fragmented narration in his written texts.2 For instance, Michael Sean Bolton in Mosaic of Juxtaposition draws attention to how Burroughs’ narrative “provides a means of making sense of the unstable elements within it by providing anchor points from which to reassemble or discover meanings that been fragmented or obscured” (Bolton 2014: 16). Bolton further clarifies, drawing attention to Burroughs’ directive, “You can cut into Lunch at any intersection point,” that readers should not be seeking “the reconstruction of fragmented narratives” but should find an alternative way of making sense from texts specifically constructed to elide stable meaning” (Burroughs 1956: 191; Bolton 2014: 16). Assembling Burroughs’ text is a process that occurs over and over again, resisting the control of linear temporality. As Bolton states, “Burroughs frequently works to conflate present and past in his novels, leaving readers incapable of fixing the narrative in either periodic or relative time” (Bolton 2010: 57). However, the linearity of a written text can only be destabilized so much. The structure of written texts still requires varying degrees of forward progression. A written text can be cut up, rearranged, or started from any page, but language’s form still holds control over the text. This structure forces readers into the established horizontal and vertical reading patterns. The structure of language limits recursive reading in written text. Graphic narratives’ tabularity opens multispatial, multidirectional pages, putting up a stronger resistance against control. If control needs time and “Time is that which ends,” then the mise-en-page of graphic narration naturally delineates time. Though this

 The Tension of Possibility 91 resistance is ultimately doomed to fail, the recursive reading encouraged by expanding the multiframe and reading through the different comic narrative tension proliferates the reincarnations possible through each new reading of the text.

Finding the Fragments Even though some of the early speculations around the 2012 Fantagraphics publication suggested that the release would be a “resuscitated” version of the project, what ended up being released was a further fragmentation of the imagined project (Thill 2010). Reviving a decades-old, incomplete project brought old interpersonal struggles back to the surface, alongside some of the fundamental practicality issues of publishing the piece, problems that were intensified by both the incompleteness and deterioration theory of some of the work. Much like earlier-published iterations of Ah Pook is Here, the scope of the project and the extent of the collaborative effort in the project are not directly evident without the inclusion of Mc Neill’s companion text, Observed While Falling. This autobiographical account of working on Ah Pook—both with Burroughs and Fantagraphics—helps orient the reader’s journey through the horizontal, glossy pages of The Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here. This text also provides background on Mc Neill’s collaboration with Burroughs, useful in uncovering the project that Ah Pook almost was. This collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill started in 1970 when McNeill agreed to do the drawings based on the text sent into to the independent “adult” English comix3 publication Cyclops. Titled The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, the black-and-white comix strip ran in all in four issues of Cyclops as a doublespread, an exceptionally large double-spread for a serial comic strip as Cyclops was printed on large format newsprint measuring 11 inches by 17 inches (Burroughs and McNeill 1970a–d). All four comic strips of The Unspeakable Mr. Hart are written narrative heavy with the first and third strip focusing on what McNeill calls “‘textbook’ factual-fiction narrative style” (2012a: 17) and the second and fourth focused on actiondriven narrative. For the more exposition-heavy sections, McNeill states that he had to rely more on the words that popped off the page at him. With the emphasis of death and war in the narrative, many of the panels in Mc Neill’s work are depictions of real pictures of violence and death, such as the Saigon Execution photo reinterpreted into the strip in the October issue of Cyclops (Burroughs and McNeill 1970d). What stood out in Mc Neill’s work and allowed his and Burroughs’ collaboration after Cyclops shut down was that McNeill had been unwittingly drawing a Mr. Hart that look remarkably like Burroughs. In Observed While Falling, McNeill states the likeness was entirely a coincidence of the universe; “I hadn’t intended to make Mr. Hart look like Burroughs. Even if I had known what he looked like, it would hardly have made sense to draw him as the villain. As a younger version of himself, however, the likeness was remarkable. An ‘identikit’ picture he called it” (2012a: 19).

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Between this accidental depiction of Burroughs and McNeill having just turned twenty-three, everything about their first-time meeting seemed to point to some enigmatic sign that the project was meant to continue. Drawing inspiration from the Mayan Codex, the initial plan for the text was for it to be a large accordion fold. However, Burroughs would change portions of the written narration, and McNeill wanted to be able to create frames individually that could be assembled once everything was complete. So instead of a long accordion fold-out, the finished text was to be a continuous panorama of mixed media. The panoramic was an appealing idea to both men as it eliminated the start and endpoints and could be assembled around a reader, creating an eternally recursive reading experience. Pages not only of comix art but of visual narration and written narration were mixed throughout, ranging from black-and-white sketches to full-range color4 (McNeill 2012a: 40). Before the project lost steam and became abandoned, the visual narration consisted of around 100 pages and was around “two feet wide and over twenty-five feet long” (McNeill 2012a: 73). Due to the size and content of the project, it was hard to find a publisher. Several were on the hook at various times, but the money would always run out, or larger companies would acquire and collapse the interested publishers, companies who felt the project did not fit with their cultural image and values (Van Ness 2012: 150). An excerpt from Burroughs’ written narration and some of Mc Neill’s visuals were published in the cannabis lifestyle magazine Rush in 1976, six years after the start of the project, with the hope of gathering funding interests. Three years later, Burroughs’ written narration was published without images along with reprints of and other graphic text, The Book of Breeething,5 and the essay Electronic Elsewheres under the title Ah Pook is Here: And Other Texts. The hope of getting the whole work published had not yet wholly diminished as Burroughs writes in the preface, “Finally Malcolm Mc Neill and I have decided to publish the text without the artwork, still in hopes of seeing the eventual publication of this work” (1979: xi). Unlike the excerpt published in Rush, in this preface Mc Neill’s part in the collaborative project is only directly mentioned in passing. However, McNeill makes two unverifiable claims about his participation in the publication of the written narrative. First, he claims that several portions of the “completed” written narration drew inspiration from his visuals to fill in gaps that were previously only visual narration, “a series of sex scenes had been tacked on to the very end—male-to-male sex obviously. I’d used ejaculated birds, bats, and other flying creatures as graphic transitional devices in the sequence after Virus B23, but now they were presented literally. Young guys actually ejaculating goldfish, cherries and so on” (Mc Neil 2012a: 87). However, this seems to have left McNeill disappointed at the imagery becoming cruder than poetic in written narration than it was in visual form. He expresses a more depressed tone that the artwork he made for the cover was not selected for the final publication. McNeill retroactively attributes this oversight to the bad blood between James Grauerholz and himself, claiming to found a series of letters in the twenty-third box of the Burroughs archive proving that Grauerholz actively tried to have found alternative artwork for the cover (2012a: 144). The citation from Grauerholz provided by McNeill is simply

 The Tension of Possibility 93 instructions for what the visual theme of the text should be; McNeill reads the absence of mention as an intentional spurn. Whatever the source of their divergence, failure to reach an agreement on the inclusion of Burroughs’ written narration in the Fantagraphics publication of the recovered text of Ah Pook is Here completes the split of the graphic narrative that Ah Pook is Here: And Other Texts started. The segments of Ah Pook is Here, which survived thirty-plus years of haphazard storage, are printed without their written narration. Even the reproduced strips of The Unspeakable Mr. Hart appear with empty speech bubbles and narration boxes. Fragments are left. The two dissociated parts of the graphic narrative, yes, and also Burroughs’ and Mc Neill’s telling of what they had planned and what might have been. For the reader of comics/x, broken and scattered narratives are not the end but a familiar convention.

Reading Graphically: Closure and the Multiframe Before reading the texts of Ah Pook is Here using comic theory, it is important to acknowledge that deciding which medium form Ah Pook falls under comes with a set of implications and assumptions about the text. There were not previous texts of similar scope to borrow a textual genre from in the 1970s. As such, Burroughs and McNeill even used a mixed range of terms while emphasizing that the project did not quite fit into any of them. Several times throughout Observed While Falling, McNeill expresses a desire to stay away from labeling Ah Pook a comic. He wants to avoid “the instant dismissal the word ‘comic’ tended to invoke from publishers, lines around things restricted the kinds of images I was able to produce—particularly with depth and light. They were also contrary to the very idea of Ah Pook” (2012a: 39). Stylistically, McNeill did not feel that his work fit the label of comic/x. Instead, McNeill refers to the project as a visual narrative, which he defines as text “where pictures and text interacted in whatever form seemed appropriate” (2012a: 20). Burroughs appears less committed to defining the text by a singular term. In the preface to Ah Pook is Here: And Other Texts, he emphasizes the medium fluidity of the text by stating it “falls into neither the category of the conventional illustrated books nor that of a comix publication” (1979: xi); at the same time, in a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, he also called the project a comic book because it had “sequences of actions in pictures” but also a codex of a sort after the Mayan Codices from which the text draws heavy inspiration6 (Palmer 1972). The struggle to decide on clear terminology lies in the tension between recognizing that Ah Pook is telling a story in progressive sequences that require both the written and the visual text and recognizing that Mc Neill’s highly detailed work bore little surface resemblance—beyond sequentially and narrative boxes—to the type of narratives marketed as comics/x. Burroughs and McNeill were at least a decade ahead of developments in the comics/x and graphic narrative communities. Descriptive options that could help market Ah Pook to publishers and audiences at the time of conception were limited to illustrated novels or comics/x. Selecting the term “illustrated novel” offers a precedent for the length and level of detail in the

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visuals of the text. Works such as Rodolphe Töpffer’s The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, which included multiple images in separate panels above segments of text, were published as early as 1837, and are considered by some scholars to be pre or proto comics7 (Smolderen [2000] 2014). However, the visuals in these illustrated novels did not necessarily contribute to the progression of the story. Most cases repeated information that was already conveyed in the written narration. Another issue with the label is that it excludes collaborative work. In response to being reduced to the role of illustrator in the excerpt published by Rush, McNeill argues that being labeled as an “illustrator” ultimately reduces his role in the project to “someone who comes along after a text is complete” (2012a: 77). The use of “illustrator” is a convention in attribution that establishes an authorial hierarchy that does not work for the creation process of graphic narratives. As Van Ness proposes in her article on the issue of authorship in the publication attempts of Ah Pook, genre labeling is one of the ways authorship is conveyed (2012: 144). She writes, “collaboration is not simply the pairing of two or more authors or artists, who individually contribute to a work, but rather, a pairing that creates a third entity, indistinguishable as an individual” (2012: 145). The author in charge of the visuals not only forms as much of the narrative as the author in charge of written narrative but in graphic narratives the types of narrative are so intertwined that the authorship cannot be separated. Their connectivity multiples the recursiveness of the reading, the tension between the narrations encouraging readings of both narrations individually, then together, then in possible contradiction to each other, each authorial contribution playing both with and against that of the other. Comics and graphic novels have authorial attribution practices that allow for recognition of this collectiveness. The narrative structure of comics/x in 1970 was a closer match for the narrative structure of Ah Pook than anything labeled “illustrated.” Per the definition of comics proposed by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, comics are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (1993: 9). Mc Neill’s description of “visual narrative” falls within McCloud’s parameters. The hesitation in choosing comics/x as an identifier rests in aesthetic limitations and thematic concerns of the time. Comics under large publishers were still under the strict, puritanical regulations of the Comic Code Authority, which prohibited everything from amoral protagonists to sex and gore (Nyberg 2011). Put simply, comics had to be safe for children. The underground comix scene that arose in the 1960s, headed by such artists as Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, were published either by independent and creator-owned presses who could fly under government radar or self-publish. Even if McNeill did not object to aligning his work with the caricature style of the time, the printing costs of the full photographic color images his visual narration needed would be astronomically higher than the standard newsprint or four-color process. In addition, the printing technology available for comics at the time had limited color range, imprecise layering, and visible color dots (McCloud 1993: 187). Ah Pook had the sequentially and many of the structural aspects common (though not required) of a comics/x such as dialogue boxes, the occasional bordered panel, and distinct sections. Still, the distinction

 The Tension of Possibility 95 between comic art style of the time, the caricatured art with the thick lines McNeill wanted to avoid association with, and comic narrative techniques were not yet separate distinctions. While “comic” has evolved into a catch-all for the genres within the medium (comic book, comic strip, graphic novel, webcomic, etc.) in an unstated recognition of the shared reading practice used for comic narratives (Witek 2009: 149–50), the subgenre of “comics books” still carries the juvenile connotations it gained in the decades of the Comics Code Authority enforcement. “Graphic novel” would become the term used to express that a work was of a higher caliber than the more disposable comic strip and book. Comic writer and critic, Richard Kyle, first proposed the term in a 1964 newsletter for CAPA-alpha, the first amateur press association dedicated to comic fandom (Schelly 2001: 132). Kyle pointed toward the “more serious” stories (including adaptations of novels and shorts stories such as Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian”) being published recently and proposed that the association of comics with illiteracy was fading8 (1964: 3). The emergence of these “genuinely creative efforts” needed a more appropriate and less “antiquated terms” to help delineate them for the readership. Kyle suggested that “graphic story” or “graphic novel” would help people know when a comic text was “artistically serious” (1964: 4). “Graphic novel” became the popular term in 1978 with three publications—The Silver Surfer, ElfQuest, and A Contract with God—each fulfilling different interpretations of what makes a graphic novel different from a comic book. Marvel Comics’s The Silver Surfer met the definition of a graphic novel that focused on higher material quality. Although much longer than a single comic book issue, the narrative was only slightly more polished than the rest of the “adolescent” superhero genre9. Wendy and Richard Pini’s ElfQuest would be one of the first comics to have a planned ending. Many comics that were first published as a limited run in individual comic issues and collected in larger volumes later are now considered graphic novels, the most famous of these perhaps being Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986) (Baetens and Frey 2015: 106). ElfQuest had a story arc that knew where it was going. It had a conclusion planned from the beginning, and that planned ending allowed for a more complex narrative than the serialized, villain of the weektype comics. Will Eisner did not leave the subgenre of A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories up to the discernment of the viewer and became the first comic writer and artist to label their work a graphic novel on the cover. Even if Eisner had not selflabeled his work, the themes of religion, death, violence, and immigrant identity in the United States would place it among the more “serious” types of texts suggested in Richard Kyle’s column. The mutability of what defines graphic novels creates a space for the fluidity of material and spatial conditions. As Baetens and Frey put it, “differentilization of the graphic novel can be easily observed, and . . . has been a long-standing feature in a field where relationships between image and page have been subject to variation because of differing and multiple publication venues” (2015: 107). Comic narratives undergo transformation and variation as they expand or rearrange themselves—turning a strip into a full issue, collecting issues together in a single volume, restructuring the arrangement of pages for different publication sizes. Ah Pook is Here’s publication

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history, and ever-shifting forms are at home among comics and graphic novels. The most obvious is the length of the texts. A single comic book issue would typically be between twenty to thirty-two pages while a graphic novel would be book-length or longer. The number of pages in graphic novels would be a contributing factor to another qualification. Better quality. Graphic novels are usually printed on higherquality paper with top-quality ink and bound as a trade paperback instead of with staples10. The physical text of graphic novels is meant to last while comic books were considered consumable, and this difference in materiality reflects the difference in narrative material. Graphic novels often cover mature themes with more intense stories and detailed visual narrative. Ah Pook meets all these qualities and can retroactively be described as a graphic novel. Some of the genre concerns raised by Burroughs and McNeill now have texts setting precedent for their inclusion in a graphic novel. Moore’s Watchmen has pages full of dense text, and Vaughn-James’s The Cage (1975) contains numerous page-long stretches of entirely visual narration. Even the accordion or panoramic shape is not enough to shift the medium from comic narrative into some other one. As better printing technology developed and printing cost lessen, comic writers like Chris Ware have begun to publish graphic novels requiring unpacking, unfolding, and assembly as is the case in Building Stories (2012), which offers the reader a box containing an apartment building to construct among other pieces in need of some assembly. Ah Pook is Here was just, unfortunately, a few decades ahead of its time to see a fully realized publication. The genre extending elements Burroughs and McNeill were experimenting with would have to wait for an appearance in different comics. Recognizing Ah Pook as a graphic novel retroactively, however, places it in a framework that grants it recognition as a text of considerable length in comic narrative form that explores dark, sexual, and violent themes. This approach also allows a theoretical framework and reading practice for making those juxtaposed and sequential images speak, revealing how they mirror the secret fragmentation, time, and space of Burroughs’ universes, both fictional and real. In order to navigate the mutations, variations, and sometimes unusual material forms, comic narratives have their own reading methodology. One of the essential tools in reading a comic narrative is the concept of closure. As conceived by Scott McCloud, closure describes how the fractured and representational narrative of comics is made whole by the reader. It is the act of “observing the parts but perceiving the whole” whether this is perceiving or filling of fragmented action, turning abstraction of images into the complete image, or recognizing a temporal and spatial change (1993: 65). McCloud suggests that most closure takes place in the gutter, the negative space between panels, but this emphasis on the gutter is reductive of the way panelization works (1993: 66). Many texts eschew the traditional panelization that utilizes distinct borders and spaces between the panels. McNeill uses a combination and blend of visibly separate panels and images that blend into other images. In the sequence narrating what appears to be the release of the B23 Virus in The Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here, the panelization starts with distinct outlined panels. As the sequence progresses, the panels are overlaid on larger images beneath, and the panelization of these larger panels are signified by changes in color—black and white to gold tones; red tones to

 The Tension of Possibility 97 green and brown tones to red tones again; followed by black and white once again, which fades into transparency (McNeill 2012b: 106–12). Few negative space gutters appear in this segment of text. However, closure can still be read in this color-based panelization as the colors follow the eruption and mutations of the virus, the military’s response, and fade back into the more settled state depicted in the black-and-white panels. The absence of the gutter draws attention to other elements that need to be read into the closure. The overlapping and bleeding one image into the next is a way of placing spatially separate narrative events into the same spatial temporality and suggesting that the narrative’s tempo has increased. The technique McNeill is using here relies on what Charles Hatfield calls a “tension,” more specifically the tension between sequence and surface (2005: 36, 48). Hatfield’s four tensions, “code vs. code,” “single image vs. image in series,” “sequence vs. surface,” and “text as experience vs. text as object,” look at the multiplicity of interpretations that play against each other in a comic narrative. In sequence versus surface, the linearity of reading a single panel at a time in chronological order offers a different perspective than the page as a total unit; this unit is also referred to as a “tabular” (Pierre FresnaultDeruelle) or “hyperframe” (Thierry Groensteen) (Hatfield 2005: 48). A reading of the panels of virus outbreaks as sequence offers the progression of the mutation, war, and death. This tabular reading is what allows for the events in different locations to be juxtaposed, which shows they are occurring simultaneously. The US politicians argue as the virus spreads; the troops are deploying and mutating themselves as soon as they encounter other mutated beings (McNeill 2012b: 106–12). This whole progression then either ends (if reading in sequence) or accumulates (if reading as surface) in the pile of mutated bodies in a burning city as the narrative starts a new segment signified by the change of color to black and white. The layers at which sequence versus surface can be read are multiplied in Ah Pook as the panorama is missing segments and cut up into pages. One of the most extended and most complete sections in The Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here is this virus segment. Due to adapting the text from a panorama to a horizontal book, the single surface in the seven-page portion could be the entire seven pages, each two-page spread, or each page individual, each segmentation choice that encourages further recursive readings to experience all the framing possibilities. Deciding on the parameters of the hyperframe’s surface depends on how many fragments of Ah Pook a reader includes in the multiframe. Among all the different levels of organizing the fragments of comic narrative, the multiframe is the highest level.11 French comics theorist Thierry Groensteen defines the multiframe as the borders of the “entire work, whether it is an isolated strip or a story of two hundred pages. The multiframe is the sum of frames that compose a given comic—that is, also, the sum of the hyperframes” ([1999] 2007: 31). Unlike the hyperframe/tabular, the multiframe does not have an assigned limitation; it is as much material as a comic needs to be complete. However, Groensteen’s use of “comic” in this definition contains an ambiguity. “Comic” could mean everything bound in a single material unit ranging from a single comic book issue to all the comics that have Spider-Man in them and therefore are part of the character’s story. This second definition comes with some more inclusive implications for what else

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could be included in a comic’s multiframe as many of the more commercialized comics have parts of their narrative spread across other mediums. Everything from trading cards, cartoons, movies, and video games all have been tie-ins to the sum of a comic narrative, adding to characterization and world-building, and adding new narrative segments to comics. I will refer to these texts that are not in comic narrative form but expand and add to a comic’s story as “comic adjacent.” A definition of the multiframe that includes comic adjacent texts allows for the heterogeneous segments of Ah Pook is Here to be read as sections of the same narrative instead of disparate adaptations. This entire framework aims to make the visual narrative of Ah Pook, cleaved from both its written narration, intelligible. Mc Neill’s visuals are stunning, the linework is detailed, and the colored pages shock with their depth of tone and shadows, but alone they only tell part of a story. The violence of the separation of the narrative layers feels substantial in the blank spaces of empty speech bubbles and dialogue boxes. While it may not be possible to directly refill these blocks, using closure between the two texts creates moments of grounding among the extreme fragmentation of both. Burroughs’ more exposition like sections on the B23 Virus makes it clear that mutation from the virus is what McNeill is depicting in the segment previously discussed. And Mc Neill’s visuals of fighting and chaos intensify the pace of Burroughs’ sequences, the scattering of small, empty dialogue boxes still echoing the ghost of code versus code tension, and visuals asking for more time to absorb the minute details of each panel, while the text demands an ever-forward progression—dialogue boxes forming a cascade directing the reader’s attention down, across, and over to the next panel. And the next. And the next. Segments of written narration such as the following: Boys open sex magazine . . . Young Japanese couple fucking to count down . . . Two boys jacking off to count down . . . 23 WHE​EEEE​EEEE​EEEE​EEEE​​EEEEEE . . . A BLINDING FLASH OF WHITE.12 (Burroughs 1979: 21)

They have their temporal simultaneity conveyed in the contrasting panels in a way that even the stylistic arrangements of Burroughs’ text could not achieve. McNeill arranges the images of the boys looking at the sex magazine in the row above the fornicating couple to signify the spatial distance but temporal synchronicity (2012b: 33). The magazine is not in the panel frame, but the eyelines of the boys point to the couple. The sex the boys are observing both is and is not the fucking couple as the organization of pages literally descends and the panels’ formation slants downward into a landing on the bottom-right corner of the page. The written narration sets up that the A-bomb is coming, but so are the people. Meanwhile, the visual narration of this sequence creates a space where everything and everyone13 can climax at once by reading closure between these two fragments in separate texts.

 The Tension of Possibility 99 Any pleasure experienced by the reader upon matching and creating narrative closure in this hyperframe reveals the tension of “text as experience vs. text as object.” “Text as object” is the navigation of a comic as a material object, including “not only the design or layout of the page but also the physical makeup of the text including its size, shape, binding, paper, and printing,” all of which can help in the meaning-making of the narrative (Hatfield 2005: 58). Such experiences might include a webcomic about dementia that blurs when the reader tries to scroll back to previous panels as Sutu’s These Memories Won’t Last does. Or a graphic novel about a character piecing their life back together that requires assembly like Chris Ware’s Building Stories. Reading “text as object,” The Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here is a gorgeous book; the detail and colors of Mc Neill’s visuals are printed on thick glossy pages, but it is hard to ignore the materiality while reading. The horizontal span of the book is over two feet when opened, and the thick paper adds a considerable amount of weight. It demands the reader’s physical attention to navigate its materiality. This materiality is essential to Ah Pook as it helps builds the overwhelming sense of the expanse of Mc Neill’s original text; the span of the open book fills the reader’s scope of vision to the peripheral in the same manner as viewing a section of the panorama. “Text as experience,” on the other hand, focuses on the reader’s involvement in the text. More specifically, the “active role of the reader in constructing meaning” or the way the reader uses closure to understand the text (Hatfield 2005: 61). As previously shown, constructing meaning out of Ah Pook often depends on drawing the closure between Mc Neill’s visual narration in The Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here and Burroughs’ written narration Ah Pook is Here: And Other Texts. This closure, though not seamless, demands more labor from the reader than more traditional comic narratives, but returns more explosive connections. The closure and tensions of reading Ah Pook run into limitations, however, when the only comic adjacent text in the multiframe is Burroughs’ written narrative. As an incomplete text, Ah Pook is not presented in the intended form. Without the inclusion of Mc Neill’s Observed While Falling in Ah Pook’s multiframe, the reader lacks information to form certain types of closure. Taking the B23 Virus segment as an example, without the information on the dimensions and structure of the intended project, the borders of the hyperframe might naturally be read as the borders of the page per the format of most printed comics. Knowing that pagination is a forced constraint for publication purposes allows this perspective to shift. Completed segments, color changes, or even corresponding breaks to the breaks in Burroughs’ written narration all become new possible ways to reassemble and refracture the visual narrative. Neither the option to choose the physical page of Mc Neill’s visual text nor the opportunity to utilize different forms of closure drawing connections from the multiframe are wrong. Instead, they reveal a tension that covers that often-shifting material construction of comic narratives, which I will call “text as presented vs. text as possibility.” “Text as presented” includes the reader’s experience of a narrative enclosed in a single material book. Here the reader is not concerned with the parts of the narrative that come before or after; or those sections that may be missing. They focus instead on how the narrative in the single material book in their hands functions on its own accord. Burroughs’ written narration in Ah Pook is Here: And Other Texts performed as a “text as presented” for

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decades; read without its visual narration and paired with other texts it was accepted as a short story. Mc Neill’s The Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here and Observed While Falling each also works as text as presented, offering what might be understood as an art book and autobiography, respectively. Like a single comic strip or single comic book issue, all three of these texts can be read alone. What the multiframe offers is an expansion of this experience, and one of those expansions is “text as possibility.” “Text as possibility” opens a way for comic narratives that are unfinished or limited by technical limitations to reveal what the unlimited possibilities under ideal material conditions. Understanding these possibilities can create space for reading or altering the other comic tensions. In Ah Pook, “text as possibility” requires placing the written narrative back in synch with the visual narration and deciding on panelization and hyperframes based on reading the images as a continuous panorama. Resynching the visual with the written, in turn, allows the reader to construct reference points from which to read “code vs. code.” Or rather, the destabilization of the word/image split that the synchronous hybridity of comic narrative collapses when word sometimes functions as images and images as words (Hatfield 2005: 36–7). In the segment of the Hiroshima bombing, for instance, Burroughs’ “23 WHE​EEEE​EEEE​EEEE​EEEE​​ EEEEEE . . .” becomes a word that functions as visual, the twenty-three “E”s working as a visual tally for the enigmatic number (1979: 21). McNeill makes image operate as word in the same sequence by replacing any written indicator of the magazine being a pornographic one. No Playmate or Sex Jamboree is scrawled across the pages the boys are reading—instead, the image of the couple having sex is at the end of the boys’ line of sight. The image of the couple having sex replaces the words that would signify the pornography (McNeill 2012a: 84). The interplay of this tension is made possible by reading the “text as possibility” instead of “as presented.” The tension of “text as presented vs. text as possibility” also opens the reading of spatiality and temporality in the comic narrative. Read as presented, the pagination that splits up the sections of Ah Pook adds another layer to the violence of fragmentation that the panels and separation from the written narrative creates. The fracturing and reading of the panels on a single page is a similar process to the “cut-ups” practiced by Burroughs as detailed by Gérard-Goreges Lemaire in “23 Stiches Taken” from The Third Mind: In these cut-ups phrases were broken apart, mixed, and combined; the business of disarranging and redistributing the meaning of the message was left to chance. All possibilities of this message were explored. Two—or more—messages, once assembled according to this strategy on the page, revealed another message. (Burroughs and Gysin 1978: 14)

A tabular reading of a single page encourages the same out-of-order reading and rereading to process the evolving understanding of the hyperframe’s fragments. The reader’s eye is not always drawn to the first panel on the page. Instead, they will often read a mix of panels within the same hyperframe before reorienting their focus to read the linear narrative; this is another one of Hatfield’s tensions, which he calls single

 The Tension of Possibility 101 image versus image in series (2005: 41). Groensteen offers an additional understanding of the way the spatial spread of panels hinders nonlinearity, “Each new panel hastens the story and, simultaneously, holds it back. The frame is the agent of this double maneuver of progression/retention” ([1999] 2007). The frame being both the panel frame and the hyperframe encourages attention to the specific moment contained in them and marks an end to the moment, requiring progression to the next frame. Each new frame also adds to the understanding of previous frames, which encourages a backward reading to form a complete understanding of the closure at hand. All the panels within a hyperframe read first at random, then in a linear order, and lastly in a continuous recursive cycle until moving to the next hyperframe, the turning of the page, is required. The segmentation of Ah Pook’s visual narrative in The Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here restrains the full mirroring of the eternal recursive nature of the universe. Reading the text through the potential offered in Mc Neill’s description of the project, however, makes this cycle intelligible. The single panorama would not force an end to the progression/retention scanning, the continuous stretching of the page, allowing a fluid scan in any direction. Like Hatfield’s tensions, neither side of the text as presented versus text as possibility tension presents a complete reading on its own. All of the narrative devices and layers of comics urge rereadings through a multitude of frameworks, and this new tension demonstrated in Ah Pook is Here is another way to reread.

Conclusion In the foreword to Ah Pook is Here: And Other Texts, Burroughs writes about the ways to escape control and its endless creation of time through death (1979: 15–19). Time has no meaning without death, and Burroughs believed the Mayans wanted to escape this cycle of death and time. Space is the only way to escape the oppression of time; “Time is that which ends. The only way out of time is into space. Why did the Mayan priests need human bodies and human time? Wait. They needed these bodies and this time as a landing field and as a launching pad into space” (Burroughs 1979: 19). “Space” here can be read as an atemporal consciousness to escape the control of the Mayan priests who are withholding the schematics of reincarnation14, but it is also creating a contrast of dimensions—dimensions like the mise-en-page of graphic narration. Human time ends in death because it is linear. It progresses in a forward moment like a written narrative. In contrast, a comic narrative takes time and breaks into pieces that are read spatially, the tabular stretching spreading out and offering freedom from the control of linearity. The comic form encapsulates the escape from control better than written narrative alone could. Control usually gets to pick up the texts and read them for you, pushing things ever forward so they can end—people dying so more time can be made and books coming to an end so another one can be read. Comics resist the drive toward the end, with every addition to the multiframe and the reading of tension. Each recovered fragment of Ah Pook allows the reader to free themselves from control

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a little more. The 1979 written narration pushes the reader through, all control still in the reigns of some word god demanding a linear experience. As Mc Neill’s visual narration adds itself to the multiframe, things shift. Time becomes cut-up, fracture; pick your own starting point on the page and skip to wherever you want. Up and down. Backward and forward. Zig and zag. It is not a perfect escape through space. The turning of the pages requires forward progression even as the reader pulls backward. “Let’s read that panel again, find something new in it.” And when that first stretch of time cannot hold the end back any longer, it is not so worrisome. We can read it again. And again. Pay attention to the sequence this time, the surface in the next life. Even the production of Ah Pook is a circle. Burroughs and McNeill observed the Mayan Codex that fed inspiration into the project as a narrative missing a layer of meaning. The images in the Codex are only able to convey what can be gleaned from the pictures, the written language tied to the visual long lost. Ah Pook performed this split in reverse. The written left to tell the reader they could escape in space, but unable to offer the platform on which to do so. Shaking the dust off the recovered visual narrative and taking control by filling the gaps ourselves, we can make our time a little longer every time. Digging further into the ruins to find more pieces not only reveals what survived the violent split but shows what could have been possible—a panorama of space-time with no small hyperframes forcing us to the end. Unfortunately lost. But uncovering this tension of possibility found in the multiframe gives us another round in the freedom of space, even if the end must still arrive.

Notes 1 The sections of Ah Pook is Here on display at the Track 16 gallery are incomplete as well due to improper storage previous to their rediscovery. 2 Murphy’s Wising Up the Marks (1997), Boloton’s Mosaic of Juxtaposition (2014), Morgan’s Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (2012), Drag and Guignery’s introduction in The Poetics of Fragmentation: Contemporary British and American Fiction (2019), and Vrbančić’s “Burroughs’s Phantasmic Maps,” to name a few. 3 “Comix” as opposed to comics came into use to differentiate the underground and more explicit comix scene from the mainstream, Comics Code Authority adhering publishers. The content in comix would cover both more explicitly violent or sexual content and content that included the concerns of minorities and counter cultures. 4 This would make printing extremely expensive for a comix project as it would have to printed using photography technology instead of the much cheaper four-dot color printing that kept comics inexpensive but also did not allow for the depth and range of color in Mc Neill’s work. 5 The Book of Breeething is another texts of Burroughs’ that could undergo a vigorous reading of its own using comic theory as it is a fascinating mixture of written, pictographic, and graphic narration originally printed in similar (though much smaller and in all ink drawings) format to the eventual printing of Ah Pook is Here.

 The Tension of Possibility 103 6 In Observed While Falling, McNeill reports that Burroughs and himself spent days in the British Museum going over the Mayan Codex and reading about precolonial cultures in South America (2012: 23). 7 Like Burroughs, other comic scholar and artists, such as Scott McCloud, sometimes also refer to pictographic languages as proto-comics based on a definition of comics as a narrative that is told at least partly in sequential images (McCloud 1993: 10). 8 Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century newspaper comic strips were often serialized to sell papers to an illiterate or non-English-speaking audience (Yaszek 1994: 24). These strips were also useful as an educational tool, aiding in the spread of literacy and sometimes aiding the complicated issue of navigating an immigrant identity in the United States. 9 Though perhaps any naysayers are too hasty and snobbish in their dismissal, Jack Kirby’s visual work in the superhero genre is recognized as iconic either way. 10 Unfortunately, staples have contributed to the deterioration of the already cheaply made early comics, rusting, and tearing the pages, leaving gaps in many retroactive comic archives. 11 From smallest to highest, the order is panel, row, tabular/hyperframe, multiframe. These units, especially the smaller ones, may be harder to distinguish in more experimental comic narratives. 12 All line breaks and ellipses reproduced from source text. 13 Even the reader. 14 This reading of Burroughs’ concepts here has been generously suggested by one of my reviewers.

References Baetens, Jan and Hugo Frey (2015), The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, New York: Cambridge University Press. Bolton, Micheal (2010), “Get Off the Point: Deconstructing Context in the Novels of William S. Burroughs,” Journal of Narrative Theory 40(1): 53–79. Bolton, Micheal (2014), Mosaic of Juxtaposition: William S. Burroughs’ Narrative Revolution, New York: Rodopi B.V. Burroughs, William (1956), Naked Lunch, New York: Harper Perennial Press. Burroughs, William (1979), Ah Pook Is Here and Other Stories, London: John Calder. Burroughs, William and Brion Gysin (1978), The Third Mind, New York: The Viking Press. Burroughs, William and Malcolm Mc Neill (1970a), “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart,” Cyclops, July. Burroughs, William and Malcolm Mc Neill (1970b), “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart,” Cyclops, August. Burroughs, William and Malcolm Mc Neill (1970c), “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart,” Cyclops, September. Burroughs, William and Malcolm Mc Neill (1970d), “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart,” Cyclops, October. Burroughs, William and Malcolm Mc Neill (1976), “Ah Pook Is Here,” RUSH, December, 39–50. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/rus​​​h​-mag​​azine​/ (accessed July 15, 2020).

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Groensteen, Thierry ([1999] 2007), The System of Comics, translated by B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, Charles (2005), Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson: University Pres of Mississippi. Kyle, Richards (1964), “The Future of Comics,” CAPA-Alpha mailer: 3–4. McCloud, Scott (1993), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Mc Neill, Malcolm (2012a), Observed While Falling, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Mc Neill, Malcolm (2012b), The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Nyberg, Amy (2011), “Comics Code History: The Seal of Approval,” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, October 1. Available online: https​:/​/we​​b​.arc​​hive.​​org​/w​​eb​/20​​11100​​10322​​ 30​/ht​​tp:/​/cb​​ldf​.o​​rg​/co​​mics-​​code-​​histo​​ry​-t​h​​e​-sea​​l​-of-​​appro​​val/ (accessed January 5, 2020). Palmer, Robert (1972), “William Burroughs: Rolling Stone interview,” Rolling Stone (108). Schelly, Bill (2001), Sense of Wonder: A Life in Comic Fandom, Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing. Smolderen, Thierry ([2000] 2014), The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, translated by B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Thill, Scott (2010), “William S. Burroughs’s Lost Graphic Novel Ah Pook Is Here Gets Exhumed,” Wired, September 9. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.wir​​ed​.co​​m​/201​​0​/09/​​ willi​​am​-bu​​rroug​​​hs​-ah​​-pook​/ (accessed July 25, 2020). Van Ness, Sara (2012), “Ah Pook Is Were?,” in M. Mc Neill (ed.), The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here, 141–59, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Vaughn-James, Martin ([1975] 2013), The Cage, Ontario: Coach House Books. Ware, Chris (2012), Building Stories, New York: Pantheon Graphic Library. Witek, Joseph (2009), “The Arrow and the Grid,” in J. Heer and K. Worcester (eds.), A Comics Studies Reader, 149–56, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Yaszek, Lisa (1994), “‘Them Damn Pictures’: Americanization and the Comic Strip in the Progressive Era,” Journal of American Studies 28(1): 23–38.

4

Fluidity and Fixity in William S. Burroughs’ Writing The Text Will Not Hold Allen Hibbard

All Thought emits . . . A Throw of the Dice. —Mallarmé (“Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance”) You win something like jellyfish, Meester. —William S. Burroughs (The Soft Machine)

Overture We see the text in front of us. It seems to be stable. The letters, sentences, paragraphs, and pages remain fixed, in a particular order. Things do not move. We read the text and set it aside. When we return to it, there it is—just as it was when we last checked in on it. It is reassuring, like a mountain landscape that seemingly remains forever in place. This kind of stability does not apply to most of William S. Burroughs’ texts. Readers and critics invariably note the slippery nature of his writing. “One thing you can say about any book by William Burroughs,” Oliver Harris writes in his introduction to Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” “is that whenever you think you’ve got it pinned down, that’s when it has just slipped between your fingers” (2003: ix). Micheal Sean Bolton begins his study of Burroughs, Mosaic of Juxtaposition, with the assertion that Burroughs uses subversive narrative strategies and argues that these features thus demand that “Readers are required to find an alternative way of making sense from texts specifically constructed to elide stable meaning” (2014: 16). While Bolton acknowledges the lack of textual fixity (“Burroughs’ narratives undermine all possibility of fixity or stability and maintain a constant fluidity by decentralizing narrative subjectivity” (2014: 17), his focus is on reading strategies, assuming a fixed text. My focus here in this chapter, rather, will be primarily on the text itself—modes of production and presentation that make the writing inherently unstable. There is, as phenomenological approaches show us, always a certain degree of play between reader

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and text in the process of interpretation. What this examination of Burroughs’ texts reveals, though, is that the very stability of the text must be called into question. Words are matter, and matter itself is not stable. This quality of the Burroughs text, resulting from his writing practices and the history of textual production, has wider significance, particularly in relation to contemporary culture, change, and tradition. What potentials lie within writing to change practices, politics, and ideological perspectives? What particular values might inhere in a writing designed to remain fluid, resisting fixity, defying stability? In the end, it will be seen that this insistence on instability is directly tied to an anti-authoritarian philosophy designed to liberate the reader.

The Texts It has been more or less accepted that the trajectory of Burroughs’ production moves from rather conventional, stable narratives, as early as his collaborative project And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, through Junky and Queer, toward more experimental, unstable texts (beginning with Naked Lunch, through the cut-up trilogy), then finally toward some kind of happy medium in the Western Lands trilogy. Naked Lunch has been seen as a turning point. In that novel narrative lines begin to break down, marking the postmodern turn in Burroughs. Elsewhere, in “Tangier and the Making of Naked Lunch,” I have described how the novel was put together in Tangier, in a semi-random fashion, sections arranged rather like pieces of a quilt (Hibbard 2009). The story is well-known, as is the fragmented quality of the novel which has become a common topos in both Burroughs and postmodern criticism. Recent textual scholarship by Oliver Harris, based on extensive archival research, has resulted in a half-dozen new editions of Burroughs’ works, from the early period, that provide access to new and broader dimensions of the writer, particularly his methods of writing and revising. This expanded knowledge confirms what we already had strongly suspected: Burroughs’ conception and practices of writing result in highly unstable texts. Various published versions of works as well as draft manuscripts show how compulsively and incessantly the writer-arranger reread, edited, revised, and reshuffled his works. Far from settling textual issues, new “restored” editions simply underscore Derridean principles of “undecidability” with regard to the possibilities of arriving at a final, definitive text; arrival at a specific, unshifting destination is continually postponed and deferred. Even a work as seemingly straightforward as Burroughs’ first novel, Junky, proves to be more unstable than originally thought, in part because of the history of its composition and publication. As so often is the case with Burroughs’ texts, a variety of contingencies came into play in the assemblage of Junky, first published by Ace Books in 1953 under the title Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, authored by William Lee. Ambiguity and indeterminacy begin with the title itself, as well as the name of the author. When Penguin prepared to reissue the novel in 1977, Burroughs wrote to his agent, Peter Matson: “I would suggest that the title of this new edition be

 Fluidity and Fixity in Burroughs’ Writing 107 JUNK, rather than JUNKIE. JUNK was the original title which I gave the book, and this was changed by A.A. Wyn [of Ace Books] for reasons unknown to me” (quoted in Harris 2003 xiii). Burroughs’ wishes, however, were never carried out. The following month Matson reported that Richard Seaver, editor at Penguin, liked JUNKY and that “without the ‘Y’ it sounds too much like garbage, if you’ll excuse the expression” (quoted in Harris 2003: xiii.). Harris’s 2003 edition, which keeps the title Junky with a subtitle “The Definitive Text of ‘Junk’” so as not to create unwarranted confusion, now lies palimpsestically on top of these preexisting versions. Harris submits that his purpose was to restore the “definitive text,” seeking to discern and follow the author’s intentions even though the author was no longer available to consult (except, perhaps via Ouija board). Here, thus, he exposes himself as a textual materialist, believing in the possibility of arriving at a teleological point where things are concluded and settled once and for all. Commentary and editorial choices reflect considerations of established canonical practices and prevailing marketing forces. This new edition also draws on archival and biographical material, providing us with fresh understanding of what the text had been at various points, how it became what it is, and what it might have been were other choices made and executed. The result is, thus, a text that—while it purports to offer us a “definitive” version of Junky—rather serves up a more destabilized version of the work. Harris’s description of his editorial practices and the inevitable conundrums he faced point to the impossibility of resolving textual puzzles: “The use of manuscripts is always a matter of delicate decisions (you can draw up principles, but have to apply them flexibly) and of chance factors (unlike a jigsaw puzzle, you can never say there aren’t more small pieces still to discover), as well as of interpretation (finding more evidence doesn’t always resolve ambiguities)” (2003: xxix). These candid admissions of perhaps arbitrary decisions come closer to my own deconstructivist position that any reinstatement of the text will be tentative, subject to change by the very nature of the text itself. In other words, Harris’s texts allow us to imagine other possible arrangements, other “definitive” texts. What this version does is make more transparent the reasons for ambiguities and lingering questions, beginning with the title, as well as the dedication, and the status of sections which were either added or excised along the way, for various reasons. Harris relates the story of how portions of Queer were added to the manuscript of Junky in response to the publisher’s request for more material to lengthen the manuscript and comply with expectations for the book. At the same time, Burroughs evidently determined to cut sections originally written to be part of the book, such as a chapter on the economy of the lower Rio Grande and a chapter (considered lost for some time) on Wilhelm Reich. The “Definitive Text” includes both of these chapters in appendices, though Harris argues for inclusion of the Reich chapter within the book, even though Burroughs had stated that he wanted it cut from the first version. Harris writes that in this section, “Suddenly Burroughs breaks into his own voice, as if relieved to escape the constraint of his narrator’s, and the person that emerges is a speculative philosopher, a theorist of addiction” (2003: xxx). Burroughs had apparently chosen not to include it because he thought it broke the narrative flow (the issue of readability, oddly enough, often being a consideration as he revised). Folding these chapters into the novel

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(reading them where they might have “belonged” rather than where they appear in the appendix) does indeed make for a different book and thus a different kind of reading experience. This most recent edition of Junky allows readers to ponder various forms the novel took, or might have taken. Ultimately, along the lines of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, we can assemble various different textual experiences from reordering various chunks of the narrative. In editing Queer, Oliver Harris notes that he has included material also found in Junky. Of all the various options for restoring to Queer what had been cut for Junky, it seemed right to reinstate just one section, Lee’s visit to the Chimu Bar, which fits better in Burroughs’ second novel. That this material now appears in both Junky and Queer, though odd, is no more than a logical extension of the striking textual fluidity and extreme contingency that always characterized Burroughs’ first trilogy. (2010: xliv–xlv)

These “restored” editions thus display integral connections between Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters, connections that had been elided or obscured because of the original forms of those works and their publication history. While Junky and Queer were composed almost contemporaneously and integrally connected, the publication of Queer thirty years after it was written (in 1985) dislodged it from its original place in Burroughs’ oeuvre. We now put together the pieces in new arrangements. In so doing, we become more conscious of what it means for things to be in a particular order, and may lead us to think more deeply about the very nature of what narrative is and how it is constructed—simply by placing one element beside another. With Burroughs narratives, however—as we know—these individual units of narrative often refuse to stay in their places. They are, rather, continually shuffled and reshuffled. More complicated and convoluted are the textual issues surrounding the cut-up novels (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded), as Oliver Harris’s new restored editions, based on extensive archival work, show. These particular works are almost inherently unstable due to the nature and history of their assemblage and publication. “The messy richness of the textual and manuscript histories is integral to the books themselves,” Harris writes (2014b: 212). Thus, arriving at a fixed manuscript is always problematic, perhaps even impossible. While any or all of the cut-up novels could be examined to demonstrate this notion, our discussion here centers on The Soft Machine, whose textual history is perhaps the most complicated and interesting to unravel. What Harris says of Nova Express, whose textual history is less convoluted than The Soft Machine, applies as well to all three of these novels: “Nova Express has no final form any more than it allows a definitive reading, since the paradoxical result of its mechanical creative procedures is an organic textuality, a living text that changes on every reading” (2014a: lv). Nonetheless, Harris does his best to construct (or reconstruct) a definitive text, combing through archives and producing a text that surpasses and surmounts all previous versions.

 Fluidity and Fixity in Burroughs’ Writing 109 Burroughs worked on The Soft Machine over a six-year period—more, if one includes earlier times at which some portions of the novel were written. The first edition of the book was published in 1961, by Olympia Press, in Paris; Grove in New York brought out the second version in 1966; in 1968, John Calder published the third version, in the UK. Grove brought out Oliver Harris’s edition (the fourth) in 2014, based on the 1962 typescript, prepared for a projected new Olympia Press edition, never published, then used as the basis for the new Grove edition. Rereading the novel in this new edition, one might not, on one’s own, without consulting editorial notes and commentary, discern major changes from whatever version of the text we might have previously read (likely the second Grove edition, at least for readers in the United States). Since the novel has no coherent plot, we might even wonder whether the term “rereading” applies to this experience of returning to the text. Yes, certain words and phrases seem vaguely familiar, as do certain narrative chunks; however, each reading of The Soft Machine (regardless of what version we read) seems like a fresh (virgin) experience. With no firm characters or plotlines running through the work, it is difficult to grab hold of, and easily slips away. Indeed, thinking about our experiences of returning to the text may help us understand something about this quality of fluidity. Without plot or character, what holds us, what provides coherence, and where does coherence lie? We may be drawn to words and phrases themselves, images, repetitions, and permutations: “Tide flats”; “Panama wind dawn”; “On the sea wall; kerosene lamp sputter”; “No glot clom Fliday”; “You come with me, Meester?”; “Hurry up”; “The boy peeled off his stale underwear scraping erection”; and so on (Burroughs 2014). Image after image, phrase after phrase. It is the poetry— the language itself—that captures and holds our attention, not any discernable story unfolding in a conventional way. Within this flotsam and jetsam of words, images, and phrases, gelatinous substances and jissom float or ejaculate to the surface and drift hither and thither, serving as metaphors for this fluidity of word mass, this incipiency of form—capable of sliding, slipping, and perhaps even inseminating some available (willing or not) host, ready to produce new forms of life and meaning. “Shivering back to the mucus of the world,” we read in one line, followed in the next line, in a new paragraph, by “Dust jissom in the bandanna trailing afternoon wind” (Burroughs 2014b: 46). To be sure, at times there seems to be some kind of story. For example, in “Case of the Celluloid Kali,” we have a first-person narrator, Clem Snide, “Private Ass Hole” (2014b: 65) right out of a hard-boiled detective story, who directly engages in a conversation with Mr. Bradly-Martin, “the biggest operative in any time universe” who is prepared, we quickly learn, “to rat on everybody and split this dead whistle stop planet wide open” (2014b: 66). Then, somehow, with no connective tissue, we are in some kind of bar with Johnny Yen whose dick is popping out of a jock strap, dissolving “in pink light back to a clitoris, balls retract into cunt with a fluid plop” (2014b: 67). Then we meet the doctor who made over Johnny’s face after an accident in a Bentley. Then Snide runs into Nova police. Jump cut. Bologna. Then Rome. Another boy, a pick-up, a nudist party hosted by Contessa di Vile, where we find ourselves watching a film featuring the hanging of a young man who ejaculates as he’s being hung (a

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common Burroughs trope) (2014b: 77). Viewers ejaculate. Film runs in slow motion, then speeds up. Within just a few pages, we are thrown into generic confusion, as we slide from detective story to porn to sci fi, then back to porn, with little if anything in the way of transition. The next chapter, “The Mayan Caper,” offers another narrative, somewhat coherent, involving time travel and transferring the narrator’s “soul” into the body of a young Mayan. What in this assemblage of parts belongs to The Soft Machine, and what portions or textual variations are placed in appendices? Again, the Restored Text raises as many questions as it answers, for it includes material that had not been included in other versions, such as “along the brass and copper street,” which Harris places as Appendix I. Why was it not included in other editions? What criteria did Burroughs, and his editors, use to determine where to place material, what to include, and what to omit? In the case of this particular section, the reason for its omission couldn’t be that it broke the narrative thread! (What narrative thread is there to break?) After all, it’s got centipedes, green crab flesh, neon claws, and chrysalis boys and ejaculation, images that certainly would fit with the fabric of the novel. By contrast, it is easier to see reasons why the material in Appendix 3, from the 1967 edition of The Soft Machine, was not included in the central body of the Restored Text. The noir-ish narrative (involving Enrique de Santiago, a foreign landscape, an explosion at the harbor, and La Mamba Negra) is perhaps too straight. Like “The Mayan Caper,” it features one person finding himself in the body of another. Yet it does become more disjointed, ending in “Street of Chance.” Intrinsic physical qualities of the text, as well as processes of composition, produce these effects. We might thus ask: How did Burroughs write? The basics of the cut-up technique and Burroughs’ innate inclination to experiment are well known. Oliver Harris’s description of this procedure is spot on, as usual: “[W]hen Burroughs cut up his writing he introduced the magical chance factor, an experimental random element, and his writing desk resembled a Ouija board in a science lab; whereas when he edited the results, he could be as rigorous as the most traditional nineteenth-century novelist” (2014b: xiii). No sooner did he “finish” than he began revising. Indeed, it seems as though he was constantly in the process of revising and rearranging material. In part, because of the nature of the prose, its nonlinear quality, things could simply be shifted around, in various arrangements, rather like an Oulipo poem. Through this process of revision, as Harris notes, Burroughs “made it less cut-up and more readable as he moved publishers” (2014b: xxxvi). The line between cut-up and elements of Burroughs’ own narrative composition thus is often fuzzy. “Roughly speaking, the first edition is 55% cut-up and 45% narrative, the second edition 30% cut-up, 70% narrative,” Harris tells us (2014b: xlii). The move from the first edition to the second resulted in 50% new material and 50% old (2014b: xli). “The Mayan Caper” and “Who Am I to Be Critical?” chapters were all new. As well, changes were added to galleys of the Grove Edition. From the second to the third edition, according to Harris, Burroughs cut 1,500 words and added 19,000, some unused outtakes from the first edition. The “Restored Text” (in notes) provides previously unpublished material (from the OSU and Berg collections) that provides background information. Harris’s notes show how

 Fluidity and Fixity in Burroughs’ Writing 111 Burroughs cut, pasted, and rearranged portions of the first edition—particularly in “Pretend an Interest” and “Last Hints”—as he revised for the second edition, adding new material along the way. One book bleeds into another. “All my books are one book,” Burroughs famously asserted (quoted in Miles 1992: 106). He continually recycled material, cannibalizing his own words. As James Grauerholz writes in his introduction to Interzone: “[Burroughs] is also one of the great recyclers in literary history, a programmatic one—in the creation of his powerful language mosaics, Burroughs will use whatever materials are at hand” (1989: ix). “This sounds familiar,” we may say to ourselves as we read. “Haven’t I read it somewhere before?” And quite possibly we did. “Twilight’s Last Gleamings”— (one of his earliest works, from late 1930s, included in Interzone) appears again in Nova Express under the title “Gave Proof Through the Night.” Outtakes from Naked Lunch cannibalize sections of Yage Letters. “Uranian Willy,” in The Soft Machine, is also found in Nova Express. The cut-up trilogy draws from material assembled from 1957 to 1959, leftovers from Naked Lunch, meals pulled out of the refrigerator, réchaufé. The effect is rather like Wagnerian leitmotifs that recur from time to time within the Ring Cycle, creating a sense of unity through repetition, as we recognize familiar refrains and phrases. Grauerholz accounts for these repetitions, noting that they are “partly a result of Burroughs’ multifarious memory, partly due to the chaos of his manuscript drafts, and partly inherent in the nature of the ‘cut-up’ technique” (1989: xix). While astute readers may have noticed these overlaps, Harris’s editions make them clear and explicit. This means of “writing” is not unlike Brion Gysin’s permutations: Take a bunch of words, scramble them, put them in as many different orders as possible, with no respect for syntax. While certainly the element of chance is always there, so too is the possibility for authorial intervention. The “writer” arranges, composes, moves things around to create certain effects. Pressed to clarify his writing method (likely in early 1960s, while he was working on cut-ups), Burroughs wrote: “The procedure is not arbitrary but rather directed toward obtaining comprehensible and useable material— There is careful selection of the material used and even more careful selection of the material finally used in the narrative” (quoted in Harris 2014c: xxxiii). Notions of original text or authorial intention (common guidelines for editors creating new editions) have little or no meaning given Burroughs’ writing methods. Moving beyond the cut-ups, another inflection of this sense of fluidity can be found in My Education: A Book of Dreams, a superb and distinctive later work (1995) which has figured very slimly in Burroughs criticism. I realize now, returning to this work within the context of themes I’ve set out to orbit here, just what fascinates me about the book. Its material comes from the author’s sleeping world and thus involves the transformation of fragmented, ephemeral images, and narratives into what is a fairly coherent verbal form. Burroughs captures the evanescence of dreams: their amorphous, fleeting, fuzzy, fluid quality. Dreams are often difficult to inscribe or pin down. While they may seem so real and vivid when we are in them (or they are in us), they often have an utterly surreal quality, incorporating an unexpected logic, one unlikely element placed beside another. Their composition and movement, unbound

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by traditional logic, defy natural laws of time and space, resembling the arrangement of material in The Soft Machine and other cut-ups. Some of the first dreams recounted in My Education involve levitation and movement from room to room in ways reminiscent of the narrative movement in Kafka’s novels. Where am I now? How did I get from here to there? Who is that? Where does that door lead to? These kinds of questions simply don’t apply to dream logic. In the dream world, time and space dissolve. You may find yourself in a place that is a conflation of the Garden District of New Orleans and Garden City in Cairo. You may find yourself moving seamlessly (as in a film jump cut) from one moment in the dream text to another, at another time. People you have known in one spatial, temporal context find themselves jumbled with people from other scenes in other places. The living commune with the dead. Burroughs’ dreamscapes, for instance, draw from various places he knew at different times in his life: New York, St. Louis, Paris, London, Tangier, Latin America. People, too, from different periods and places, come and go: Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville, Mikey Portman, Paul Bowles, James Grauerholz, and others. Many of the dreams resurrect friends and acquaintances from the realm of death. At one point the dreamer even notes that in his dream he is in the Land of the Dead (Burroughs 1995: 148). As with all his works, a central question for Burroughs was how to organize all of this seemingly disjointed material that was not held together by one overarching story. Early on in the book, the dreamer (a Burroughs avatar) describes efforts to write a story about the Mary Celeste that can be taken as a meta-commentary on the process of writing the book: I am writing a story, if it could be so called about the Mary Celeste. . . . digression and parentheses, other data seemingly unrelated to the saga of the Mary Celeste, now another flash of story . . . a long parenthesis. Stop. Change. Start. Should I tidy up, put things in a rational sequential order? Mary Celeste data together? Flying dreams together? Packing dreams together? To do so would involve a return to the untenable position of an omniscient observer in a timeless vacuum. But the observer is observing other data, associations flashing backward and forward. (1995: 16)

Our narrator here lays out the challenge of giving order to what is inherently fragmented. This is the challenge Burroughs—as dreamer, writer, and editor—faces in the book. A number of repeated and familiar tropes recur in Burroughs’ dreams. (Do we not all have our own private reservoir of preoccupations and recurring images from which we draw in our dreamscapes?) The dream sequences in My Education feature rooms, corridors, hotels, scenes featuring attempts to get breakfast, attempts to get home, packing suitcases, jumping off ledges and flying or floating or levitating, guns, sexual fantasies, and shooting up. Early on, he inscribes this one, which bears his inimitable narrative style: There are some aliens camped near us in blue denim suits—Martians, I think— and I visit them. They seem friendly enough and one man takes off his clothes and

 Fluidity and Fixity in Burroughs’ Writing 113 there is a column of bone running down from his neck and nothing else except his hipbones. He says, “Well, I really got a turkey of a body . . .” He shit sure does. (1995: 5)

Where did this or that dream come from? What connection does the dream have to the life we are living? Dream logic tells us something about the logic of other texts (especially the so-called cut-ups). “How are shifts made in a dream?” the narrator asks toward middle of the book. “How does one get, say, from one room to another?” (1995: 102). There is the movement within dreams, as well as the movement—jerky—between dreams. Certain tropes recur, yet in highly fragmented form. In the logic of dreams, there is no obligation to create a coherent, comprehensible overarching story, like that of a traditional narrative. Like clips of film, dream fragments can be allowed simply to exist on their own, even while they may be juxtaposed with or spliced to other strips, as they are in My Education and other Burroughs works that—as I have suggested here—follow a kind of dream logic, disjointed and displaced.

The Ends We see throughout Burroughs’ work how he deploys multiple means and methods— whatever suits his purposes—to create texts that push the boundaries of what we previously had thought narrative was or could do. Certainly, he opens possibilities for the intervention of chance, in ways that call to mind Heraclitian notions of the perpetual, unpredictable movement of time and potentiality, working against arrivals at final form. At the same time, a closer examination of his writing practices shows that he has exercised a lot more authorial role than often has been assumed, playing the role of arranger, composer. He thus redefines what writing is, like Dadaists and Surrealists before him, all the time preserving a degree of mystery, making us wonder just how he did what he did. There will always be that which we will never know. It has occurred to me, as it no doubt has occurred to others, particularly while reading and rereading Oliver Harris’s restored versions of the so-called cut-up novels, that Burroughs’ work is especially well suited for hypertext formatting that would allow for coinciding multiple versions of texts that might be accessed and reconfigured by a click here or a click there to produce or reproduce one text or another, with an almost infinite number of permutations. (And to take this a step further, perhaps it would be possible for readers themselves on their digital devices to become editors and create their own textual variants! Whoa, Nellie! The text is getting way out of control!) This kind of thinking and speculation leads to a consideration of ways the inherent instability of Burroughs’ work might productively be placed alongside work of critics such as Katharine Hayles, who draws our attention to the nature of hypertext and notions of disembodiedness in cyberspace in ways consistent with the kind of playful critique of materiality that I have raised through this discussion, questions the status of a definitive, stable text, and examines the inherently immaterial nature of dreams. In these kinds of recent theoretical reflections, many of which might be placed under the

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category “post-humanist,” as well as in Burroughs, we ask: Where is the body? Where is the text? Both animate and inanimate beings can be transformed into “informational patterns,” lacking physical embodiment. Notions of original text—temporally and spatially—are confounded. Whatever text we have in front of us—say, on the screen— is inherently unstable, flickering, on the screen. Hayles’s descriptions of the nature of digital texts underscores their instability. As I write these words on my computer I see the lights on the video screen, but for the computer, the relevant signifiers are electronic polarities on disks. Intervening between what I see and what the computer reads are the machine code that correlates alphanumeric symbols with binary digits, the compiler language that correlates these symbols with higher-level intersections determining how the symbols are to be manipulated, the processing program that mediates between these instructions and the commands I give the computer, and so forth. (1999: 31)

Hayles shifts the focus of our thinking from post-structuralist dialects of absence/ presence to a dialectic of pattern/randomness. “Flickering signification brings together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman,” she writes (1999: 33). These descriptions seem to apply to the experience of reading Burroughs. Hayles draws our attention to what happens to words and texts as they are digitalized: “[O]nce it has been digitized, the computer will garble its body, breaking it apart and reassembling it into the nonstory of a data matrix rather than an entangled and entangling narrative” (1999: 41). It is that moment— when we as “human” subjects” engage with (and thus in some way become defined by) the computer—that we become posthuman. Burroughs creates a distinctly posthuman text, in which the body is disjointed and transformed.1 Though he may not engage specifically with Artificial Intelligence (AI ) in the way Hayles describes and analyzes, Burroughs—as is so often the case— anticipates and addresses the central issues at stake in discussions of the posthuman; he is there long before these theorists. In “The Mayan Caper,” for instance, intelligence can be “downloaded” and placed into another body. He entertains possibilities for metamorphosis between animal or insect. Think Gregor Samsa’s transformation from human to cockroach. No wonder the director who made The Fly found affinities between his vision and Burroughs’ coming together in the making of the film version of Naked Lunch. And, of course, as shown earlier, at the center of his experimental work has been the play between pattern and randomness. What is at stake here? What does it all add up to, this fluidity of identity and text? For Burroughs, these radical ruptures of language and narrative seem to be tied both to freedom and to survival. Without freedom, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine or envision alternative realities. If we are too rigid and unadaptable, we risk extinction. In My Education, the story is told of a Vanderbilt going down on The Titanic, insisting on being a gentleman to the end. This inflexible, stable posture is set against that of the captain who dresses as a woman to get on a life boat! Issues of stable identity also come into play in the story Burroughs tells (with apparent delight) of a white South African

 Fluidity and Fixity in Burroughs’ Writing 115 who, when stung by bees, turns black, and thus is taken to a black hospital. “Where am I, you black bastards!” the man screams upon realizing he has crossed the color line (Burroughs 1995: 9). The ability to adapt, to slip unnoticed across borders, to don disguises (e.g., businessman with fedora, suit and tie, and briefcase) may not just spare one a lot of grief; it may save your life. Look straight, be queer! Hide your Jewishness to survive! Hide your Muslim beliefs when you are under attack! Take on camouflage like those insects who imitate predators. Evolve or perish. What effect, to what end? Burroughs’ aim, it seems, is to challenge and break down fascist structures of mind and narrative, proving metaphors and examples of organisms that are designed and built to allow for radical ruptures and departures, creation of new forms. This articulation calls to mind Deleuze and Guattari’s project in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, particularly their well-known distinction between “root” and “rhizomatic” thinking (using the metaphor of the tree and the tuber for explanatory purposes).2 The book, by its very linear nature, has inscribed and reproduced “root” thinking, with one word following another, one chapter following another. In A Thousand Plateaus, they try to create a book that is rhizomatic, defying root thinking—a book that could be picked up at any point, a book not dependent on linear narrative progression or argument. Early on in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari point to Burroughs’ cut-up method, “making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow,” as a means of writing that challenges conventional root-based narrative construction (1980: 6). And in Anti-Oedipus, they point to Naked Lunch as an example of their central conceit, the Body without Organs: “The unproductive, the sterile the ungendered, the unconsumable,” the “imageless organless body” (1972: 8). The text, in other words, has a capacity to resist being coopted by whatever systems surround it and try to incorporate it into their machines. (Think the Borg here.) Though Deleuze and Guattari champion Burroughs’ work, giving it prominence within discussions of their key concepts, they express misgivings about its success in escaping root qualities, noting that its implied “supplementary dimension” could move toward unity that “continues its spiritual labor” (1980: 6). My earlier discussion of Burroughs texts here, particularly the so-called cut-up novels, clearly displays the rhizomatic qualities of these works. Indeed, it is hard to imagine more rhizomatic texts than these. Burroughs’ novels are more radical and less fixed than A Thousand Plateaus, a text that—no matter its authors’ assertions and claims—remains relatively static and stable, in book form, in one edition. These writers seem to share reasons for celebrating and performing the rhizomatic—a impulse to dismantle fascist tendencies of culture, thought, and being. Burroughs’ work is “not in service to any agenda,” Micheal Sean Bolton writes in the conclusion of Mosaic of Juxtaposition (2014: 179). It is simply anti-dogmatic, challenging rigid, authoritarian structures. “They [his narratives] cannot be coopted or commodified because they cannot be located either materially or ideologically,” Bolton writes (2014: 179). This, I would maintain, is because they are fluid, free, unrestrained, untethered to any particular object. Bolton’s phrase “mosaic of juxtaposition” (taken from Naked Lunch) “refers to a method of developing narrative by creating networks of images, characters, themes, and events that are not causally

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related but connect to one another through their associations and juxtapositions” (2014: 12). Readers thus become “participants in the creation of narrative meaning” (2014: 13). Dislodging signifiers from stable relationships with signifieds (to invoke Saussurean terms and concepts) leads to textual instability and fluidity. To take this a step further, Burroughs places readers in the position where they need to construct a new language, and that revolution in language, as Julia Kristeva submits so compellingly in Revolution in Poetic Language, can result in revolutions in society (1984). Robin Lydenberg, three decades ago, realized this potential in Burroughs, noting “the liberating effects of his techniques for manipulating language” (1987: xi.). This quality, I argue, is tied to the nature of the texts he creates—texts that resist fixity, texts that insist on their fluidity, resulting, as Burroughs has stated, in “an alteration in the reader’s consciousness” (Conrad Knickerbocker interview, quoted in Bolton 2014: 9–10). The unanswered question, then, is how will readers’ consciousnesses be altered, and what is to be built? How is meaning to be constructed from these seemingly random, incoherent fragments? Once readers assume active roles in creating meaning, in stitching things together in new ways, what will happen? These issues related to moving from one system (marked by injustice and inequality) to another (yet undefined) are at the center of Fernando Pessoa’s “The Anarchist Banker” (2001) as well as in current movements to dismantle or reform police and judicial structures in which certain intransigent practices may inhere: How to break the patterns of controlling systems while preventing the same ills to continue or be replicated in whatever new forms emerge. In “The Mayan Caper” (The Soft Machine), the Mayan codex is sliced, spliced, and sabotaged. Cut portions at the end of the chapter that appeared in Gambit, included in the notes of Harris’s version, go farther, suggesting the technique’s contemporary relevance and applicability: Note: The Mayan control calendar is not dead—Using precisely the same techniques supplemented with IBM machine and electronic brains it is operating now, controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions, controlling and monopolizing your life your time your fortune—The techniques for dismantling the machine I have described here are still valid—A machine is a machine and can be redirected—Whatever you feed into the machine on subliminal level the machine will process—Cut, shift, tangle word and image lines-Disconnect the control machine of the world press, of Madison avenue and Hollywood. (2014b: 242)

The process, thus, is focused on dismantling and breaking down control mechanisms, not in proposing or imposing a particular order, for that in itself would be a move replicating the very kinds of patterns that tend to reinforce established patterns of domination and control. The key, then (as in deconstruction), is to keep things open, to keep things in motion, to resist particular impositions of order on material that intrinsically is fluid and unfixed.

 Fluidity and Fixity in Burroughs’ Writing 117

Notes 1 Interesting in this context is Katharine Streip’s essay “William S. Burroughs, Transcendence Porn, and The Ticket That Exploded.” Streip argues that this novel, especially in the revised 1967 edition, contains material that counters prevailing views that Burroughs’ representation of bodies in the text that are merely “soft machines,” subject to receiving whatever programs are inserted into them, a position I find extraordinarily compelling. My own attention here is on the body of the text, not so much the body in the text, though I realize that this distinction may be subject to slippage. 2 In my essay “Shift Coordinate Points: William S. Burroughs and Contemporary Theory,” I present an expanded discussion of what follows, within a broader examination of how various theoretical approaches can be brought to bear on Burroughs’ work.

References Bolton, Micheal Sean (2014), Mosaic of Juxtaposition: William S. Burroughs’ Narrative Revolution, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Burroughs, William S. (1995), My Education: A Book of Dreams, New York: Penguin. Burroughs, William S. (2014), The Soft Machine: The Restored Text, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Grove. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1972), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1980), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Grauerholz, James (1989), Introduction to Interzone, by William S. Burroughs, ix–xxiii, New York: Viking. Harris, Oliver (2003), Introduction to Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” by William S. Burroughs, ix–xxxiii, New York: Penguin. Harris, Oliver (2005), “‘Burroughs Is a Poet Too, Really’: The Poetics of Minutes to Go,” Edinburgh Review 114: 24–36. Harris, Oliver (2010), Introduction to Queer, by William S. Burroughs, ix–xlv, New York: Penguin. Harris, Oliver (2014a), Introduction to Nova Express: The Restored Text, by William S. Burroughs, ix–lv, New York: Grove. Harris, Oliver (2014b), Introduction to The Soft Machine: The Restored Text, by William S. Burroughs, ix–liii, New York: Grove. Harris, Oliver (2014c), Introduction to The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text, by William S. Burroughs, ix–lv, New York: Grove. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hibbard, Allen (2004), “Shift Coordinate Points: William S. Burroughs and Contemporary Theory,” in Philip Walsh and Davis Schneiderman (eds.), Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization, 13–28, London: Pluto Press.

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Hibbard, Allen (2009), “Tangier and the Making of Naked Lunch,” in Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen (eds.), Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, 56–64, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Kristeva, Julia (1984), Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press. Lydenberg, Robin (1987), Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Miles, Barry (1992), William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, London: Virgin. Pessoa, Fernando (2001), “The Anarchist Banker,” in Richard Zenith (trans.), The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, 167–96, New York: Grove. Streip, Katharine (2019), “William S. Burroughs, Transcendence Porn, and The Ticket That Exploded,” in Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (eds.), William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century, 368–83, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Part II

Texts

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5

Making Dead Fingers Talk Oliver Harris

Mish-Mash It is a historical irony that Dead Fingers Talk has barely talked at all for the past sixty years, because on its publication in Britain in November 1963 the text inspired the most voluble public reception of any William Burroughs title, with the sole exception of Naked Lunch during its famous censorship trial in Boston two years later. Naked Lunch would long outlive the issue of obscenity; not so Dead Fingers Talk, and the heated exchanges sparked by its appearance, which ran in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement until the end of January 1964, now belong in a dusty chapter of 1960s censorship debates. This is one reason the text soon lost any claim to significance. The other is that Dead Fingers Talk had been specifically commissioned by John Calder as an expurgated “reader” of three real books—Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded—in order to smooth the way to publish Naked Lunch in Britain without the charges of obscenity then facing the novel in the United States. Dead Fingers Talk was therefore seen as less a work in its own right than an expedience, the merely pragmatic means to other more important ends that no longer matter, and has since been ignored as the most commercially compromised and least original Burroughs text. The critical consensus is that there’s simply nothing to say for or about it, and until the Restored edition of 2020, the only analysis of it had been in a French PhD from almost twenty years earlier, in which Benoît Delaune noted the irony that the leading French authority on Burroughs couldn’t even get right which three books Dead Fingers Talk cobbled together.1 Compromised, sanitized, cynically cut, the book had to be much less than the sum of its parts, and when the three source texts became legally available later in the 1960s, it’s no wonder Dead Fingers Talk soon went out of print. Likewise, if you’re going to discuss Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, or The Ticket That Exploded, why would anyone bother with bits and pieces of the old 1960s texts—all long since replaced by much revised new editions—when you can analyze the real things in full? Nevertheless, on its original jacket blurb Dead Fingers Talk was spun with sales talk that anticipated and openly defied the objections to come: “Dead Fingers Talk is not a book of selections but a new novel constructed out of these three earlier books together with some new material.” Was any of it “new”? Opinions range wildly, from “one quarter new material” to none

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at all (Miles 1982: 38).2 The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian newspaper weren’t fooled, dismissing it as a “rehash” (Burroughs 1982: 306)3 and a “mish-mash.”4 The unmaking of Dead Fingers Talk has not just been a matter of the book’s physical unavailability—never printed outside the UK, never translated, not republished since some cheap paperback editions in the 1970s—but of its critical misrecognition. The search for new text that would make it possible to speak of Dead Fingers Talk without really talking about this or that part of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, or The Ticket That Exploded means looking in the wrong place and missing what is hidden in plain sight. By reconstructing its manuscript genesis to reveal the making of Dead Fingers Talk, this chapter aims to reclaim the long-neglected minor work as in fact definitive of Burroughs’ cut-up project. It does so by establishing that its assembly was not so different from the composition of its supposedly more “original” source texts, and by thinking through the radical challenges to textual identity (and editorial practice) posed by what should now be recognized as the first remix—which makes Dead Fingers Talk a revolutionary textual innovation on a par with the Mellotron synthesizer, another essential precursor of digital and sampling culture made in Britain in 1963 (Rice 2007: 75). However, far from being an early but essentially crude instance of remix aesthetics, Dead Fingers Talk turns out to be complex and challenging in the most subtle and surprising of ways.

The Dead Still Talking To begin with, it is a matter of naming and classification: Burroughs himself in letters from the time always referred to Dead Fingers Talk as a “book of selections,” Kenneth Allsop called it a work of “modified selections” (Allsop 1965: 19), John Calder spoke of “an amalgam of his three novels” as well as their “fusion” (1982: i: 254), and the evercontemptuous TLS reviewer preferred an “assortment of lumps” (in Burroughs 1982: 254). But what was in the early 1960s derided as a “mish-mash” and a “re-hash,” we now recognize as a literary prototype of mashup and remix. Far from being historically dated, a book only of and for its times, Dead Fingers Talk was a unique analog anticipation of the predominant mode of production in the digital era. Is there a better definition of digital culture than the talking of dead fingers? Burroughs not only had family connections to the booming business of computer technology but collaborated with the permutation experiments of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, some of which—made on a Honeywell Series 200—were included in The Third Mind, a text where Burroughs made the pun that connects fingers to numbers via digital quite explicit: “Numbers are repetition and repetition is what produces events. Dead Fingers Talk” (Burroughs and Gysin 1979: 178). As a book of repetitions, Dead Fingers Talk spoke of the digitized future through cut-and-paste methods that retrospectively-prophetically made Burroughs a “pre-Internet Remixologist,” to borrow Mark Amerika’s verdict on his audio experiments that applies equally to his cut-up texts (Amerika 2011: 138).

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 123 Recognizing Dead Fingers Talk as a remix avant la lettre is crucial in order to distinguish it from the cut-up trilogy. The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express are radically composite works, indeed, but none appropriated preexisting texts in a comparable manner. And above all, it is to separate Dead Fingers Talk categorically from such books as A William Burroughs Reader (1982), edited by Calder, or Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (1998), edited by James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg. The latter, a 500-page monument to the recently dead author with essays that map the chronology of the complete oeuvre, is a very practical retrospective but a textual tombstone. In absolute contrast, with Dead Fingers Talk Burroughs not only wanted “to avoid the kind of books of selections I always find so dreary,” as he told an interviewer in early 1963 (Weatherby 2000: 52), but understood what it meant to create new life from old body parts—to make dead fingers talk; that was the novelty of the book, which therefore did not depend on anything so banal as whether or not he added some new material. In fact, creating a remix would not have been possible had Burroughs introduced much more new text than he did. And so while he called it a “book of selections,” he also—even in the same breath, in a January 1963 letter to Alan Ansen—insisted it was more than that: “By rearranging the material and adding some new sections I have endeavoured to create a new novel rather than miscellaneous selections.”5 Burroughs’ phrasing sounds suspiciously like the origins of Calder’s jacket blurb (“not a book of selections but a new novel . . . with some new material”), except for the critical difference that his stress fell on the unused opening phrase, “rearranging the material.” What looked like a brazen self-contradiction to justify a rip-off, presents Dead Fingers Talk in its true guise: as a riff or a remix, a ripped work whose recombinant creative logic is not governed by traditional paradigms of literary novelty. This isn’t the place to rehearse the rise of remix or sampling in musical cultures of the 1970s, from dub and scratch to hip-hop onward, nor its relationship to collage in avant-garde art and literature, but Burroughs’ role in this history is recognized in both general and very particular ways of relevance to Dead Fingers Talk. Acknowledged in works like David Gunkel’s Of Remixology (2016), he is made the de facto embodiment of the phenomenon in The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies—“remix culture has spread like a virus” (Falconer 2015: 400)—and in Eduardo Navas’ Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling—“Remix is more like a virus that has mutated” (Navas 2012: 4)— both of which credit Burroughs with the ubiquitous viral metaphor.6 Navas is of particular interest in this context as an active participant in exhibitions of Burroughs’ 1960s tape experiments, curated by Mark Jackson at the IMT Gallery, London, in 2010, and at Galleri Box, Gothenburg, in 2012, both entitled “Dead Fingers Talk.”7 Jackson’s wink to Burroughs’ least-well-known cut-up book was informed by only a loose grasp of its significance as a text but a very sharp sense of its title’s significance for the methodology of cut-up, explaining that for him it “evoked the on-going project element of Burroughs’ activities: the dead still talking” (Jackson 2014). That was indeed the premise of the 2020 Restored edition: that the old words had new things to say. To restore Dead Fingers Talk means not only rescuing it from obscurity by recovering its lost histories of reception and production, or resurrecting the book by putting it back into circulation in a new edition; it means taking literally the logic

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spelled out in its title and applying it to the text. In recent years, with the availability of new cut-up materials something strange has happened to the Burroughs oeuvre, or to be more precise, its inner strangeness has become apparent. Like the cut-up technique itself, the larger project is insistently future-oriented, finding its meaning through what Burroughs called its “point of intersection,” which depends on the present moment and so is constantly in flux.8 The upshot is to go beyond a linear model of literary history, in which texts are products of their times, in favor of a network model of constantly shifting interconnectedness. Within a remix that renews and recreates itself, the center is wherever we happen to be; “Right Where You Are Sitting Now,” as Burroughs’ original title for The Third Mind put it. Organically, by practice more than by the application of any theoretical model, cut-up methods enabled the Burroughs oeuvre as a whole to fulfill the textual logic he described in 1957 when glossing the still-unfinished Naked Lunch: “If anyone finds this form confusing,” he wrote Allen Ginsberg, who was its first reader but not its last to be confused by Burroughs’ rapid nonlinear montage structure, “it is because they are accustomed to the historical novel form, which is a three-dimensional chronology of events happening to someone already, for purposes of the novel, dead. That is the usual novel has happened. This novel is happening.” (Burroughs 1993: 375). The text as an event and the event as an ongoing process that renews itself in the material activity of rereading has become, half a century later, the new critical wisdom: “As reader and writer, you and I, we are currently sharing a moment of text-based spatial interaction,” writes the literary geographer Sheila Hones: “Our shared text event is happening now in place and time, at the intersection of all these things” (Hones 2008: 1301). Rather than being a redundant “reader” of recycled originals, Dead Fingers Talk turns out to be the very model of the Burroughs oeuvre and its purest experiment. Identifying it as a remix rather than a rehash makes it possible to ask the right questions of Dead Fingers Talk as an assemblage of rearranged materials. The question of censorship—of what was left in or cut out to avoid possible legal action—is uninteresting because it reveals little about the inner workings of the text. For behind the phrase “book of selections,” there lies a unique and uncanny reading experience, one that cannot be reduced to identifying its three source texts. This is true even for those chapters that appear so simple they might well have been chosen by John Calder (as the publisher implied),9 in contrast to the numerous chapters that combine anywhere from half a dozen to nearly two dozen separate elements and are therefore as complex structurally as anything Burroughs ever produced. How did Dead Fingers Talk use its source texts? It’s not one question but many. In terms of raw statistics, what percentage of the text came from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, or The Ticket That Exploded, and, conversely, what percentages of those three texts were used to make Dead Fingers Talk? In what ways were the selections cut and combined, and were the source texts treated the same or differently? Was there just one draft or several rearrangements? Did Burroughs cut at random or always with deliberate intent, and if so, with what aims? And whether by chance or design, is the result chaotic or coherent? Since Dead Fingers Talk gives more than one answer to

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 125 even the most seemingly straightforward of questions—like how many chapters it has (twenty-six and thirty-one)—it’s time to examine what lies behind its original jacket design—“the coolest first edition hardcover” (Birmingham 2006)—and to see that the TLS reviewer who noted its “excellent (though irrelevant)” title was only half right (in Burroughs 1982: 254).

A Cover of a Cover of a Cover The relevance of Dead Fingers Talk’s title and its equally excellent original jacket are best appreciated by default; that is, by way of the three paperback designs that followed it between 1966 and 1977. All feature graphic images in which the fingers in the book’s title are represented holding syringes, showing a heroin addict in various stages of shooting up. In the 1966 Tandem, the painting of a hand injecting the addict’s outstretched and bloodstained left arm is stylistically redolent of the pulp Ace paperback of Junkie (1953), and is indeed very nearly identical to a 1969 New English Library reprint of Burroughs’ first novel. The 1970 Tandem edition opts for a photographic fisheye image of a longhaired junky in shades injecting his arm against a grim urban backdrop, while the 1977 Star paperback narrows the focus to just an open, bloody hand holding the syringe against a white background. What the three covers have in common is an insistence on realist narrative content, which the 1966 Tandem doesn’t just spell out visually but hammers home below the title: “The sensational novel of the nightmare world of the junky by the author of THE NAKED LUNCH” (see Figures 5.1–5.4).    Especially in its opening chapters, Dead Fingers Talk does represent the underworld of drug addiction, so the paperback covers, seedy as they are, have a peg to hang their representations on. Nevertheless, all three wilfully miss-sell and misrepresent the text as a whole. Trading on Burroughs as the author of Naked Lunch, they not only imply that Dead Fingers Talk is a new novel in the same vein, cynically ignoring how much of Naked Lunch is actually in the book, but conveniently airbrush out of the picture the two cut-up source texts. The emphasis on drugs, like that on sex in the censorship controversy, reads the title in ways that therefore fix the focus on realism and content at the expense of experimental form, and in this way lose—betray is not too strong a word—the specific genius of the original 1963 cover (see Figure 5.5). The hand that appears on the cover of the Calder Dead Fingers Talk is a disembodied blank. It is the white ghost of a hand, impossible to mistake for a real one in its abstraction as a shape and in its flatness with respect to the background, eerily visible through the hand’s semitransparent edges. Precisely superimposed over the middle three fingers, the words Dead Fingers Talk literalize the verbal-visual relationship between the title and the cover design so that this unearthly dead white hand directly points up the book’s formal dimension. The hand casts its uncanny white shadow over a background that might at first be mistaken for merely a series of advertisements for the component parts of the book,

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Figure 5.1  The 1966 Tandem Books edition of Dead Fingers Talk.

Figure 5.2  The 1969 New English Library edition of Junkie.

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 127

Figure 5.3  The 1970 Tandem Books edition of Dead Fingers Talk.

Figure 5.4  The 1977 Star Books edition of Dead Fingers Talk.

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Figure 5.5  The 1963 John Calder edition of Dead Fingers Talk (front cover).

since it reproduces in miniature the jacket covers of the Olympia Press first editions of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. But this is not just promotion for Olympia and its publisher Maurice Girodias (in association with whom Calder published Dead Fingers Talk). To begin with, the design relates the three titles to each other and visually identifies them as forming a trilogy, and in doing so asserts a connection between Naked Lunch and the cut-up books that was important to Burroughs for both marketing and aesthetic reasons. This association might seem surprising if we think of Naked Lunch as followed by and quite separate from the cut-up trilogy that comprised The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. But a year before Dead Fingers Talk, Burroughs had already conceived an alternate trilogy, grouping Naked Lunch with The Soft Machine and Nova Express,10 so that this cover design representing another permutation affirms the true fluidity of “the trilogy” and its recombinant logic—one quite at odds with the logical but false linearity of their standard literary history. Each cover not only stands for a text by Burroughs but makes visible a particular experimental practice beyond writing: Naked Lunch presents rows of small calligraphic glyphs inspired by Gysin and drawn by Burroughs himself; The Soft Machine displays

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 129 Gysin’s own larger gouache and ink drawings; The Ticket That Exploded shows an “infinity” photomontage produced by Burroughs and Ian Sommerville. The cover for Dead Fingers Talk, created by Burroughs and Sommerville, doesn’t just reproduce those earlier Olympia Press jackets but is a visual record of that history which carries on their creative tradition of multimedia experiment and collaboration. The dizzying miseen-abîme effect of all these miniature covers—some thirty-six in all—is analogous to Gysin’s permutation poems, except that instead of rows of repeating words, here we have book jackets, arranged in nine rows of four, so that each line is different and each contains one duplicate image. The design has striking parallels with the repeated image series in Andy Warhol’s silkscreens from the early 1960s. However, the frame of reference is also highly specific to Burroughs’ cut-up project in its extension beyond the book format. For this multimedia collaborative jacket design made from previous multimedia collaborative jacket designs points past the literary intertextuality of Dead Fingers Talk that is signaled by a book cover made of book covers. It reaches out to experiments Burroughs began in Tangier in spring 1961, when he made what he referred to as photographic and collage “concentrates,” like a “collage of collage of collage to the Nth power” (Burroughs 2012: 76). That June, Burroughs reported that he planned to “apply what I have learned from the photo collages back into writing” (82), so it is no coincidence that eighteen months later such recursive miniaturizations and reduplications appear on the front cover of Dead Fingers Talk. As a collage of source texts that were collages of source texts that were often themselves also collages of source texts (e.g., Eliot’s The Waste Land), Dead Fingers Talk took cut-up methods to a higher power. And as a cover made of covers that stands for a text made from texts, it performs the ever-increasing practice of rerecording cover versions of popular songs that historically anticipated the logic of remix in digital music.

The Big Picture The Calder design makes an inviting analogy between creative methods in multiple media, but it can only point its ghostly finger in the general direction of the bigger picture. To grasp the experimental method of Dead Fingers Talk requires reconstructing its manuscript genesis, starting from recognizing the particular context in which Burroughs was working. From the biographies, it is well-known that he assembled Dead Fingers Talk in the immediate aftermath of the August 1962 Edinburgh Writers’ Conference, organized by John Calder, at which the British publisher offered him a contract for the book. However, the four months to the end of 1962 were an extraordinarily intense period in his career that has been neglected precisely because all Burroughs did during it was write. Witnessing his working habits at first hand that October, fellow Beat Hotel resident Gregory Corso observed with a mix of dismay and awe: “He stays in his room and writes writes writes writes” (Corso 2003: 342). Burroughs summarized his spectacular creativity in mid-November: “Finished Nova Express and another novel entitled The Ticket That Exploded—Did a complete rewrite

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job on The Soft Machine and a book of selections for publication in England.”11 To appreciate just how radically this summary changes our view of Dead Fingers Talk and where it fits within the bigger picture, we need to take a step back and see the striking fact that it was one of four books on which Burroughs worked simultaneously between September and December 1962. The chronology of their publication, and the linear literary history it has established, has always given a misleading impression about the timing and sequence in which Burroughs composed his cut-up books, and therefore the connections between them. Because Grove Press didn’t publish Nova Express until late 1964 and their edition of The Soft Machine until spring 1966, these two books seemed disconnected from the period in which Burroughs completed The Ticket That Exploded and to have no connection at all to the composition of Dead Fingers Talk. But the archival evidence confirms that Burroughs had completed a first draft of Nova Express in March 1962 and did a “rewrite job” on it that October, having already begun rewriting The Soft Machine in September—all at the same time he was assembling Dead Fingers Talk. The terms in which Burroughs described his work on Nova Express are especially revealing for how he approached Dead Fingers Talk. “I am not satisfied with the arrangement of material,” he informed his publisher, Barney Rosset, at the start of October 1962, referring to the Nova Express manuscript he had submitted six months earlier, “and some of the sections could do with a rewrite job.”12 Burroughs insists that it is not just a matter of rewriting parts of his manuscript but of changing their “arrangement,” and in letters that month he keeps referring to the “revised and rearranged manuscript” or “the corrected and rearranged manuscript.” In the early days of experimenting with cut-ups, Burroughs had emphasized the same key term when referring to what he called “The Cut Up and Rearrange Method.”13 Since his revisions of The Soft Machine, like those he was making for Nova Express at the same time, involved rearranging the structure as much as rewriting the content, it becomes clear why in his account of composing Dead Fingers Talk (“By rearranging the material and adding some new sections . . .”) it’s the rearranging that matters. In short, we begin to see that Burroughs not only assembled Dead Fingers Talk at the same time as he worked on all three parts of his novel-length cut-up trilogy, but that this was not a coincidence. On the contrary, the relationship between his commitment to Dead Fingers Talk and his radical restructuring of Nova Express and The Soft Machine was causal. “While doing this job of selecting and rearranging,” he told Ansen, “I became so dissatisfied with The Soft Machine that I have completely rewritten it.”14 Selecting and rearranging material for Dead Fingers Talk was what led Burroughs to revise the original edition of The Soft Machine and then his manuscript of Nova Express. Reciprocally, that larger creative context informed his approach to Dead Fingers Talk. This bigger picture of the book’s creative genesis also shows what’s wrong with the way in which Dead Fingers Talk is always described as combining “excerpts” from already-published novels, a book of books. To say that it was a splicing together of three novels into one gives the impression that Burroughs simply selected pages from published source texts and stuck them together. While his typesetting manuscript

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 131 confirms the process of cutting and pasting, this was a much more complex and active process in two ways: at a local level, the cut-and-paste job did not result in reproducing passages identical to their source texts; and structurally, because Burroughs was at the same time cutting and pasting and rewriting The Soft Machine, rearranging Nova Express, and correcting the proofs for The Ticket That Exploded, he was also rethinking his methods. For Dead Fingers Talk not only brought three different texts together but also three distinct techniques of textual production: the pre-cut-up Naked Lunch, the cut-up Soft Machine and the fold-in Ticket That Exploded. Dead Fingers Talk was a book of selections (i.e., of content) but also a book of methods. It anthologizes a decade-long history of technical experiments going back to the routines of the early 1950s, and through their juxtaposition the reader is both enabled and invited to compare them. To borrow a phrase used in The Ticket, and reused in Dead Fingers Talk that derived from the text he read at the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference, Burroughs’ aim was “to show the method in operation” (Burroughs 2020: 203). What has been treated as the most drearily pragmatic and least creative work in the Burroughs oeuvre therefore has something unexpectedly in common with his most advanced compendium and theorization of cut-up collaboration, published in the 1970s as The Third Mind but originally conceived in January 1963 by Burroughs and Gysin as precisely a “book of methods.”15

Mixmaster On the same day in January 1963 that Burroughs wrote to Alan Ansen to make his strongest pitch for Dead Fingers Talk (“By rearranging the material . . .”), he also wrote to Brion Gysin. While one letter discussed Dead Fingers Talk—and indeed named it for the first time—the other referred to “the how-to book we discussed which takes the form of an army bulletin”: “Officers must be poets and remember that the area of poetry must be constantly recreated—That is why cut-ups and fold-ins form one of our most vital instruments” (Burroughs 2012: 119). A revised version of these lines would appear in The Third Mind (“Since our theater is under constant attack it must be constantly shifted and re-created”), where any material connection to Dead Fingers Talk seems unlikely (Burroughs and Gysin 1979: 91). However, Dead Fingers Talk is in fact referenced five times in The Third Mind (more often than either The Soft Machine or The Ticket That Exploded), leaving, I would argue, the trace of its unsuspected influence. That’s to say, if Dead Fingers Talk led Burroughs to rewrite and rearrange two volumes of his cut-up trilogy, so too, directly or indirectly, its textual shifting and recreating led him to conceptualize the strategic methodology of The Third Mind. And if Dead Fingers Talk should be recognized as a “book of methods,” conversely The Third Mind, as a collection of mostly already-published materials, should be seen as a remix. Even though the reedited texts in The Third Mind standardize the originals and lose some of their experimental interest—especially in the case of selections from Minutes to Go and The Exterminator—the context makes this more than a dreary cover version. Nor is it just another permutation of material that implies its refusal of fixed

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and knowable form, deconstructions of closure that would soon become tiresome staples of Postmodernist literature and theory. Indeterminacy in Burroughs may look postmodern, but that’s not the way it feels.16 That’s because it’s not a literary game but epistemological warfare: in a move which reflects back on Dead Fingers Talk, the remix of material in the form of an “army bulletin” insists on its weaponization. The guerrilla strategy Burroughs proposed in January 1963 for The Third Mind is the theorized extension of what he had been practicing over the previous four months. In a move that is absolutely characteristic of the way he worked, Burroughs’ material practice preceded and produced the theory that retrospectively accounts for it. This is how cut-up methods are defined in The Third Mind: “It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about” (31). So too, Dead Fingers Talk was as much the source as the result of theorization, and not illustrative but performative. It embodies the strategic shift from creation to recreation as a move that redefines the authority of the author, who now becomes more of an editor, curator, or dj. “His only power,” as Roland Barthes would famously put it in “The Death of the Author” later that decade, “is to mix writings” (Barthes 1993: 146). Or as Burroughs himself said in “The Future of the Novel,” the talk he gave to the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference, reprinted in The Third Mind: “In using the fold-in method I edit, delete and rearrange as in any other method of composition” (96). Cutting up this line for The Ticket That Exploded and Dead Fingers Talk, Burroughs demonstrated how a strategy of re-creation redefined the notion of text itself. In the digital era, updating, sampling, and remixing are ubiquitous because they have become so simple, but in 1963 Burroughs was using analog methods half a century before theoreticians of digital culture would describe how a text is released from “its static, fixed position in a single work, enabling it to participate in a proliferation of potential texts amid continuously changing assemblages of authorial, intertextual, and communal networks” (Voyce 2011: 409). Remixing its source texts, Dead Fingers Talk retroactively reveals a series of remixing images within all three—the “nasty old Mixmaster” from Naked Lunch, “Puto The Cement Mixer” from The Soft Machine, and the Subliminal Kid “Mixing in suggestions from Rewrite” from The Ticket That Exploded (75, 151, 193)—so that the texts now show they knew where they were going all along.

Potter’s Field The brilliance of the 1963 Calder front cover of Dead Fingers Talk is to point in seemingly contrary directions. The rows of miniature jackets renew as well as pay homage to a history of collaboration so that, like the abstract hand image, the design identifies the text with acts of formal experiment and remix creativity. However, the hand on the cover is also absolutely particular and personal because it lacks the distal phalanx of the digitus minimus manus. In plain English, this is unmistakably

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 133 the left hand of William S. Burroughs, lacking the tip of his pinkie he severed in 1938: “the finger joint was sent to Potter’s Field with a death certificate,” William Lee wisecracks in Burroughs’ 1950s short story “The Finger” (Burroughs 1989: 17). Making the link between his own hand with its amputated finger joint and the book’s title, Burroughs was paradoxically asserting his identity through absence and loss: we know it’s Burroughs, recognize his presence, because of the cut, because of what’s not there. Gregory Corso had made the same ghoulish, ghostly pun three years earlier, when Burroughs first showed him cut-up methods at the Beat Hotel, and Corso wrote a text intended for Minutes to Go that evoked “the missing pinky” in Hitchcock’s espionage thriller The 39 Steps, whose mysterious mastermind is also identifiable via the same missing body part (Burroughs et al. 2020: 76). The hand with four-and-a-half fingers not only identifies the hand of the author but denies the “obviously” metaphorical gesture of cut-up methods, insisting on their literalism as operations on language as a biological form and vice versa: on the body as a text and the text as a body. The biographical author appears in tension, therefore, with the formalism of the design as a whole, but does not contradict it. For while it lacks the bloody red stains of the vulgar paperback covers, the empty space of the missing fingertip reminds us of the violence in the physical act of cutting. Through the cover image, the Stanley blades and scissors of cut-up methods are made to invoke the poultry sheers with which Burroughs had mutilated his own body twenty-five years before. The psychopathology imminent in the act of cutting and slashing connects experimental artist and self-harming man, bringing into the open phantasms of emotional anguish and physical pain. It’s a reminder that the cut-up method was not a disembodied, bloodless formalism, not some sort of abstract experimental writing game, but an obsessive material activity, literally hands on, that projected trauma into a textual body. And so, the missing finger points to the biographical singularity of the author behind Dead Fingers Talk at the same time as it identifies the text’s component parts as so many dismembered body pieces.

Who Are You? As well as invoking the cut-up body of the author, the imagery on the cover and in the title of Dead Fingers Talk calls attention to the recurrence of hands and fingers in the text itself, nearly 200 altogether. Bringing to the fore details that might otherwise pass unnoticed, the uncanny effect exemplifies the particular way in which Dead Fingers Talk functions as a remix. We most likely overlook them in Naked Lunch, but when repeated here we suddenly recognize no fewer than seven references specifically to the left hand, sinister images always associated with firing guns or shooting up heroin. The image forces itself on us like a trick card not just because we’re primed by the book title and the cover image, but because of the editing in the opening chapter that reveals the very precise way in which the material has been cut and remixed. Such precision is

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absolutely central to any understanding of Dead Fingers Talk, which is otherwise liable to be recognized as a remix but dismissed as crude and clunky, a quick and simple cutand-paste job. The devil is in the detail. At first sight, Dead Fingers Talk begins exactly as you would expect a dreary book of selections to begin: at the beginning, by reproducing the opening section of Naked Lunch, the first part of the chronologically earliest of its three source texts. The final third of the chapter reproduces “hauser and o’brien,” Naked Lunch’s closing narrative section. Bringing together these two sections of New York-set, hard-boiled first-person narration that bookended the original novel seems reassuringly intended to affirm their coherence. Michael Goodman, for example, asserts: “When placed together, the two sections provide a coherent plot and were probably written at the same time. . . . In fact they were restored to their original order for the beginning of Dead Fingers Talk” (Goodman 1981: 117).17 On closer inspection, however, the effect is the precise opposite—they don’t add up in either narrative chronology or geography—and, contrary to the standard critical assumption, Burroughs was not restoring an original genetic continuity at all: the narratives were actually composed two years apart and in reverse order, since Burroughs wrote most of “hauser and o’brien” in early 1955 and what became the opening pages of Naked Lunch in late 1957. So, far from being a conservative act of reunification, gluing back together a text that had been cut up and forced apart, Dead Fingers Talk begins by juxtaposing narratives whose linearity turns out to be subversively more apparent than real. What’s also happening at the start of Dead Fingers Talk through this juxtaposition of material is to create new connections between very particular textual details that, in Naked Lunch, were separated by the entire length of the book. For example, the “newlyweds from Sioux Falls” (from the opening narrative of Naked Lunch) are now quickly echoed by the “Chink Laundry of Sioux Falls” (from its closing narrative), so that in Dead Fingers Talk evocations of South Dakota suddenly and mysteriously catch the eye (Burroughs 2003: 8, 181, 2020: 7, 22). Likewise, the detective in the white trench coat, who tails Lee on the opening page (“holding my outfit in his left hand”), now sets up Lee’s four references to left hands in the detective genre episode “hauser and o’brien” (Burroughs 2003: 3, 177, 2020: 3, 18–19). To the reader already familiar with Naked Lunch, the effect of the repetition of all these left hands is uncanny in Freud’s strict sense of encountering something familiar that now feels disturbingly unfamiliar, as if we didn’t already know Naked Lunch at all. Dead Fingers Talk is three times as uncanny as its source texts because such recombinations of material and their eerie effects apply across texts as well as within them. For example, the second chapter of Dead Fingers Talk, which immediately follows the “hauser and o’brien” material from Naked Lunch that ends the first, derives from The Ticket That Exploded, and could not seem more disconnected in style and genre, as we cut from pulp detective narrative to science fiction fantasy. But these worlds apart from different novels suddenly reveal a precise intertextual point of intersection, as Ali, from The Ticket That Exploded, wakes to discover an “Irishman with iron grey hair who looked like a con cop from vaudeville” (which is near verbatim from “hauser and

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 135 o’brien” in Naked Lunch) and protests: “But Mr. O’Brien said” (25). The question asked of him, “Who the fuck are you and what are you doing in my apartment?” now applies to the composite narrative produced by the intersection of Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded: What is O’Brien doing here, transported from Manhattan to an alien planet—and where the fuck are we?

Pseudesthesia The assemblage of disparate textual parts produces new disturbances in our experience of fictional space-time through their unexpected intersection, and, in this instance at least, we can see how carefully the effect has been contrived. For Burroughs cut the ending off “hauser and o’brien” so that the first chapter of Dead Fingers Talk doesn’t end with the line “Like da Vinci’s flying machine plans . . .” but with the word that is the point of intersection across the first and second chapters and between Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded: “O’Brien” (22). Sometimes, the cuts in Dead Fingers Talk are not only visibly intentional but clearly intended to reinterpret the source text. The chapter “the parties of interzone,” for example, reproduces “islam incorporated and the parties of interzone” from Naked Lunch but omits the original’s closing pages. What’s left out promoted the party of Factualism—which the first-person narrator (presumably William Lee) claims to “represent”—so that Dead Fingers Talk no longer ends on a positive note: “The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated” (123, 141). Seemingly straightforward, such cuts also have an uncanny dimension. What makes Dead Fingers Talk so unusual a reading experience is that it presumes no knowledge of its source texts (why else bother with an anthology?) and yet is impossible to read without reference to them. Now that almost every reader of Dead Fingers Talk also knows Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded, the cutting of material generates a curious double take. We read “hauser and o’brien”— or rather reread it—only to find that the ending is missing. Even if we can’t recall every detail, what’s not there instinctively, almost physically registers its ghostly presence. These cuts to the textual body are recurrently experienced as a kind of pseudesthesia, the uncanny sensation of so many phantom limbs. They create “phantom twinges of amputation” (195), to borrow one of the innumerable images of amputated body parts in Naked Lunch: the talking of dead fingers. Such an uncanny experience is recurrent throughout Dead Fingers Talk because all three source texts are so discontinuous that it’s impossible to keep track of what is or is not there. So, this isn’t like sampling a conventional novel with a plot and characters, such as The Bell Jar, also published in 1963, when you’d remember if a scene was missing or in the wrong order. The dismembered text teases us to re-member, but we’re bound to miss more than we get or to experience phantom phantom limb syndrome, the doubly-eerie imagining of an imaginary sensation. It’s not just that we might have false ghost memories, mistakenly feeling something’s been cut when actually nothing has, but that we’re able to miss in Dead Fingers Talk what was never materially there in

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the first place. That paradoxical experience comes about because the versions of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded almost everybody knows are not the originals sampled for Dead Fingers Talk, but the quite different texts of the much revised and expanded later editions. To read Dead Fingers Talk is to find yourself reading texts that no longer exist and rereading texts that did not yet exist at the time it was written.

The Containment of Ghosts The spectral quality of Dead Fingers Talk is captured in two ways by the 1963 Calder jacket. Even more vividly than the ghostly hand on the front cover, the back presents a haunting image of Burroughs’ face that fills the whole design. Staring through a faint gray mesh of shadowy patterns that is actually a superimposed photomontage, Burroughs steadily meets our own gaze, outstares us. What makes the image doubly ghostly and a symbol of the text’s uncanny effect is the contrast it invites with the front cover of Calder’s 1964 Naked Lunch, published twelve months later. This is a stunning and rightly famous cut-out image of the author’s face set against a white background so that the eyes, colored a blazing demonic red, are all the more menacing, inhuman, alien. However, since the face on the front of Naked Lunch is actually an adapted copy of the one on the back of Dead Fingers Talk, what the comparison also manifests is the peculiar ability of Dead Fingers Talk to usurp and invert the relation between original and copy, as if it were not Dead Fingers Talk that rewrote and rearranged Naked Lunch but the other way around (see Figures 5.6 and 5.7).  Dead Fingers Talk is uncannily disorientating in precisely such ways because of the uniquely repetitious nature of its source texts. Sometimes preserving but more often inverting the order of their original appearance, its rearrangements of material will make phrases that were once echoes now come uncannily first and vice versa. Connections inside individual texts and between them that we had never noticed come to the fore, and ones that used to be there disappear. But it is also uncanny in such ways when you least expect it that clarify why this is no crude rehash but a remix of surprising subtlety. Take the first chapter, which brings together the opening and closing narratives of Naked Lunch. Minor differences in content are not hard to identify—even the title used for Dead Fingers Talk (“the heat closing in”) differs from both the first edition (which had none) and the Restored Naked Lunch (which titled the opening “and start west”)— but they don’t explain the vague yet disturbing feeling that something is wrong, that this is not the same text even if the words don’t seem to have changed.18 Although the trace of this difference appears just half a dozen lines in, it probably takes half a dozen pages to become noticeable, when the Vigilante is incarcerated “in a Federal Nut House specially designed for the containment of ghosts: precise, prosaic impact of objects—washstand—door—toilet—bars—there they are—this is it—all lines cut— nothing beyond—Dead End—And the Dead End in every face” (8). This is Naked Lunch, but with a difference. Not in the words on the page but the spaces in between

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Figure 5.6  The 1963 John Calder edition of Dead Fingers Talk (back cover). them, because the eleven ellipses of the original passage have all been changed into em dashes—as happens to Naked Lunch material throughout Dead Fingers Talk where hundreds of ellipses from the original are replaced with either dashes or, at the end of sentences, periods. For readers familiar with the original, Dead Fingers Talk rewrites the text and subtly but significantly changes how it looks and reads: the abrupt staccato em dashes cause a marked shift in tone from the suggestive, slowly trailing ellipses that are the original text’s signature form of enigmatic punctuation. The revised punctuation is especially evident in Dead Fingers Talk’s reuse of lines from the “atrophied preface,” the most elliptical montage section in Naked Lunch that contains some 250 ellipses, but its impact is perhaps clearest in the “paco, Joselito, Henrique” chapter that repunctuates “the examination” section. In a scene relying so much on innuendo and insinuation, the conversion of the many ellipses in the original into em dashes has a peculiar effect, strikingly so in lines of dialog such as, “‘And now—Carl—’ He dragged the name out caressingly” (160)—since you can’t drag out a dash. While the content is semantically unchanged, therefore, in its punctuation at the sentence level as much as in its recombination structurally, the material from Naked Lunch that appears in Dead Fingers Talk is no longer the same. And for anyone reading

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Figure 5.7  The 1964 John Calder edition of The Naked Lunch. Naked Lunch after Dead Fingers Talk, it is the “original” that in some elusive way now seems different. Nothing sounds more pedantic and less Burroughsian than to concentrate on punctuation, due to false dichotomies that associate radicalism with recklessness and chance-based experimental methods with carelessness. But while Burroughs was a sloppy typist and speller, he took advantage of slips during the creative process and never let stand unwanted interventions by editors, copyeditors, or compositors in the final text. And he paid attention to the smallest-possible textual elements: “All periods after Mr Martin should be eliminated throughout the text,” he informed his American publishers of the revised Ticket That Exploded in November 1966.19 Ironically, his preference for the British spelling was not observed in Dead Fingers Talk, where the American usage “Mr.” appears ten times more often, and it would have been reductive to revise it for the 2020 edition, since the author’s preferences at a later time for another text weren’t enough to warrant imposing consistency on a text that is relentlessly inconsistent. But changes in punctuation matter because they measure in miniature Burroughs’ commitment to re-creation, to shifting and unsettling “the text” as a single, stable, known, and unchanging identity with clearly defined borders—an unsettling that in turn unsettles the reader.

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No Glot The unsettling effect is cumulative not only within Dead Fingers Talk or between the text and its three source novels but across the Burroughs oeuvre. It is a function of his work’s unique mode of intertextuality and a product of his ceaseless reediting and remixing of material, which not only means that his text is happening but that criticism can never deal with one text in isolation from others. Paradoxically, the same consequences apply and the same effect is created by what is cut, by material that is not there—by the dead fingers of his texts. Take the case of the opening lines of “cut city”: The Sailor and I burned down The Republic of Panama from Darien swamps to David trout streams on paregoric and goof balls (Note: Nembutal)—You lose time putting a con down on a Tiddly Wink chemist—“No glot—Clom Fliday”— (Footnote). (39)

A reader familiar with the January 15, 1953, letter that begins “In search of Yage” in The Yage Letters (1963) will recognize the original source of the opening line (“Bill Gains was in town and he has burned down the Republic of Panama from Las Palmas to David on paregoric”) (Burroughs and Ginsberg 2006: 3), while a reader of Naked Lunch will recognize another version (“Gains and Lee burned down the Republic of Panama from David to Darien on paregoric”) (183). Meanwhile, a reader who knows the 1961 Olympia Press edition of The Soft Machine will recognize the opening line and maybe notice how, within the same sentence, for Dead Fingers Talk Burroughs revised in both directions his use of upper and lower case (revising “the Republic of Panama” to “The Republic of Panama,” and “Darien Swamps” to “Darien swamps,” and “Paregoric and Goof Balls” to “paregoric and goof balls”) (Burroughs 1961: 70, 2020: 39). What none of these intertexts explain, however, is the baffling appearance in Dead Fingers Talk of the second parenthetical note—“(Footnote)”—which follows the phrase “No glot—Clom Fliday” and is baffling because there is no note at the foot of the page. Only a reader of the revised, 1966 Grove Press edition of The Soft Machine might remember the parenthetical note that should follow here, and feel one of those “phantom twinges of amputation.” For in the revised Soft Machine, the parenthetical aside “(Footnote)” is followed by a gloss of the phrase “No glot—Clom Fliday” (Burroughs 2014b: 31). However, it appears there bafflingly too, since the “Footnote” is printed within the body of the text, not at the foot of the page. The baffled reader of Dead Fingers Talk will, a few pages later, in fact find this very missing note (although it is not quite identical to the one in The Soft Machine), placed at the foot of the page as an actual footnote to gloss the second appearance of the phrase “No glot” (42). And then, in Dead Fingers Talk’s last-but-one chapter, the note will appear once again to gloss the same phrase (206). Is this mix-up of where notes belong physically on the page

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and sequentially in the text a deliberate inversion of academic procedure, a mocking mashup of editorial scholarship, or the result of random sloppy cutting? A reader of the 1959 Naked Lunch might recall that this same note glossing “No glot” had originally appeared as the very last words of the text (Burroughs 1959: 226), before it was cut in 1962 for all future editions and relocated to gloss the phrase’s first appearance earlier in the text (Burroughs 2003: 121).20 That relocation of the note “corrected” a continuity error, but was still an editorial mistake in context of both the novel’s aesthetics and Burroughs’ own explicit instructions to his publisher.21 What is going on here with the remixing of the same material across The Yage Letters, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and Dead Fingers Talk is a form of editing in the image of cut-up methods, which is why authorial intention is indistinguishable from apparent errors and one text’s identity segues into another’s. It is therefore less of a surprise to find a precise precursor in one of Burroughs’ earliest cut-up texts, The Exterminator, whose opening section includes a cut-up version of itself that mysteriously adds in the anomalous phrase, “Foot Writer,” followed shortly by “foot . . . Note” (Burroughs and Gysin 2020: 2). The appearance of this cut-up “footnote” baffles because there is no footnote in The Exterminator (although there was one in Burroughs’ original draft for this passage). The recurrence from text to text of such notes that point to missing or amputated footnotes implies a self-conscious playing with readers’ expectations, signaling the existence of much-needed annotations and explanatory glosses only in order to deny them. The “academic manner” is repeatedly parodied by notes in Naked Lunch, and the final one in the original edition is typical in offering information that mocks the reader’s need for information: “Note: Old time, veteran Schmeckers—faces beaten by grey junk weather—will remember. . . . In 1920s a lot of Chinese pushers around found The West so unreliable, dishonest and wrong, they all packed in, so when an Occidental junky came to score, they say: ‘No glot . . . C’lom Fliday . . .’” (116 and 156; 121). Dead Fingers Talk takes the logic to its conclusion: including the note but cutting out its content leaves only the empty form, only the sign of an appendage to the main body of the text which is not there, only the signifier not the signified: “No glot” indeed.

Capacity for Life Burroughs exploited the chance-based creativity of cut-up methods and the processes of rearranging and reediting his material in order to unsettle the text at the tiniest typographic as well as the largest structural level. Orthographic inconsistency was part of his philosophical method, and he exploited variations in the most elementary conventions in order to subvert linguistic representations of identity and agency. Comparing original and revised editions of The Ticket That Exploded, for example, we notice that Dead Fingers Talk normalized the original edition’s irregular use of lower case for the first-person pronoun (“i”), whereas the revised edition made five years

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 141 later did the very opposite (often changing “I” to “i”).22 Dead Fingers Talk also set em dashes without spacing either side of them, changed end-of-paragraph em dashes into periods, often split hyphenated phrases into single words and retained uppercases at the start of sentences that the revised Ticket later converted to lowercase on a massive scale. The effect of such typographic changes to The Ticket material is difficult to put into words—and that is precisely the point. It is not the abstract sense of typography but its physical sensation that matters most. Far from coincidentally, the phrase which gave Dead Fingers Talk its title (“Only dead fingers talk in Braille . . .”) is followed in almost every Burroughs text (from Naked Lunch to Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, and The Soft Machine) by an ellipsis, a series of dots that is the visual counterpart to Braille’s system of raised dots. Braille of course is a language that must be felt with the fingers, not seen with the eyes, so that Burroughs’ constant use of dots and dashes in his cut-up texts (leading to lines of Morse Code in Nova Express) translates the effect by insisting on the materiality of typed signs over their semantic content. At the end of the decade, Carl Weissner’s dazzling mixed-media cut-up book The Braille Film would develop Burroughs’ insights into the tactile and visual quality of language, and although his title seems to originate in an epigraph by Marshall McLuhan,23 it also echoes the words cut from the phrase that gave rise to the title Dead Fingers Talk by Burroughs, whose preface to Weissner’s book, “BRAILLE FILM COUNTERSCRIPT,” immediately follows the citation of the media theorist (Weissner 1970: np). Likewise, while Burroughs’ first remix novel appears at first sight typographically utterly conventional, it should be reviewed in light of its unsuspected influence on his own most advanced book-length mixed-media experiment, The Third Mind, which wasn’t published until 1978 but whose origins go back to the assemblage of Dead Fingers Talk some fifteen years earlier.24 For rewriting his source texts at the level of punctuation, Dead Fingers Talk might be called the purest experiment in the Burroughs oeuvre, a defining instance of his attention to the very smallest particles of textual information—to echo a passage of Nova Express that he composed while at work on Dead Fingers Talk: “these information molecules were not dead matter but exhibited a capacity for life which is found elsewhere in the form of virus” (2014a: 49). In broad terms, cut-up methods evidently operationalized Dada ideas from forty years earlier; but more precisely, Burroughs was experimenting with Tristan Tzara’s “typographical microbes,” taking his rhetoric of biological textuality quite literally at the molecular level (Tzara 1981: 80).25 His revision of dots and dashes was as much a part of the viral remix as any rearrangements of “content,” even if—or rather, precisely because—the intentionality is not always certain and the outcome cannot always be calculated. This is what makes Dead Fingers Talk truly experimental: Burroughs knew what he was doing, but the nature of his methods ensured the results could not all be predicted. This element of autonomy in his textual operations, the material’s “capacity for life,” is registered as uncertainty in the experience of reading, which leaves us with the persistent doubt: Is this happening by chance or design?

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Future Events A focus on Burroughs’ selection of content for Dead Fingers Talk is less revealing than its placement, of where it appears in the rearrangement of the remix. Its appearance is not, however, always easy to appreciate. In some chapters, such as “that’s the way i like to see them” which samples “the market” and “ordinary men and women” sections of Naked Lunch, material is taken out of sequence but the restructuring is hard to spot because of the episodic nature of the originals. In contrast, the “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter comprises rapid crosscutting between material from Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded that almost always resumes where it had left off, but this observance of original structure is equally hard to spot given the lack of clear continuity in either source text. At times, the element of design in the placement of material appears selfevident, for example when one chapter beginning “So I am assigned to engage the services of Doctor Benway” is followed by another beginning “So I am a public agent and don’t know who I work for” (52, 68). The rhyming structure connects a section of Naked Lunch to one from The Soft Machine and so makes visible their continuity. Although there’s no archival evidence to establish a genetic connection across texts in this case, there is for other sections where Naked Lunch segues seamlessly into Soft Machine material via the continuity of recognizable characters: Carl in “paco, Joselito, Henrique” and Benway in “it’s the great work.” Likewise, when one chapter segues from “the black meat” section of Naked Lunch into “the black fruit” section of The Ticket That Exploded and we encounter Mugwumps in both parts, the connection is unambiguous even if surprising. Equally clear in this case is the continuity across texts via the color black, which is the predominant color in Dead Fingers Talk, repeated over 120 times.26 On closer inspection, however, both the textual and genetic connections are almost always more complicated than they seem. The rhyming structure of chapter opening lines that connects Naked Lunch and Soft Machine material, for example, implies a continuity across texts that is visibly contradicted by the way Naked Lunch and Soft Machine material is actually combined within the second of these chapters. Instead of a smooth transition, there’s an abrupt cut as the chapter moves from one source text to the other starkly divided by a headline that functioned as the section title in Naked Lunch: “MEETING OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF TECHNOLOGICAL PSYCHIATRY” (71). Often, the recombinant logic that connects material is highly cryptic or seemingly contingent, as in “these our actors,” the penultimate chapter of Dead Fingers Talk, which opens with a paragraph that corresponds to the final page of The Soft Machine (in all editions) before cutting to the final pages of Naked Lunch. The transition seems simply arbitrary, but on close reading the passages are connected by precise and resonant details: the “scattered gasoline fires” from Naked Lunch echo the “gasoline crack of history” from The Soft Machine (205, 204), while “disgrace to his blood” echoes “disaster to my blood” (204). Of course, these “echoes” invert the true compositional and publication sequence of texts, since the passages are reprinted here in reverse order.

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 143 This question of order was crucial for Burroughs, above all in this late chapter that brought all three source texts together one final time. In fact, he revised the order at the last minute, as is revealed from the chapter-by-chapter lists of source material he drew up as he constructed Dead Fingers Talk, because the sequence had initially been: “End of Naked Lunch—/ End of Soft Machine—/ New End of Ticket.”27 Clearly enough, that proposal simply observed the chronological sequence of the three source texts. Changing his mind for his final list and the published text, Burroughs dis-ordered the sequence so that the end of the second title, The Soft Machine, came before the end of the first title, Naked Lunch. Whereas a linear combination of these endings would merely evidence the continuity of Burroughs’ writing, the inversion has uncanny effects. It forces the earlier text to be read not only after but in light of the later one, and this retrospective effect is directly comparable to the creative process of cut-up methods, in which meaningful patterns are constantly discovered retrospectively and contingently. Reassuring distinctions between chance and design seem to dissolve, since one can so often be found behind the other. Even the most visibly arbitrary of shifts in material can be made to reveal connections, as in the “it’s the great work” chapter, which cuts abruptly from a Soft Machine narrative into a dialog set out in script format between Doctors Benway and Schaefer from Naked Lunch. The clue to the link lies in the closing words of The Soft Machine material—“the phosphorescent fallout where giant centipedes eat the terminal slag” (78)—because Benway and Schafer are discussing what happened in another episode in Naked Lunch, when Schafer’s “Master Work” mutated into a giant centipede. As for the dialog of Benway and Schafer, it is cut in Dead Fingers Talk at exactly the point where in Naked Lunch “The Talking Asshole” began, so that Burroughs’ own “Master Work” becomes a felt absence, another phantom limb. As an extension of cut-up creative techniques, the composite construction of chapters in Dead Fingers Talk walks the fine line between the hand of the author and the hand of chance. Burroughs promoted the prophetic function of cut-up methods because his own experience with chance operations showed him time and again that meaningful images and enigmatic messages emerged from the physical rearrangement of material. For Burroughs, it was an empirical method, not magic, that future referents emerged from old ones. When he cut up Naked Lunch for Dead Fingers Talk, he must have been conscious of how uncannily he had anticipated himself, like A. J., whose “repartee often refers to future events,” or the “tiresome old prophet” who declares, “Yes sir, boys, the shit really hit the fan in ’63,” a line written in 1957 intended to make sure Burroughs always remained one step ahead of even himself (122, 189). And the shit did indeed hit in 1963 for Burroughs, in mid-November with the “UGH” review of Dead Fingers Talk in the TLS, and for America with Kennedy’s assassination one week later. Far from being an irrelevant eccentricity, Burroughs’ faith in the prophetic power of cutting up—his claim that “the future leaks out”—was just the other side to his use of chance-based methods to scramble and potentially escape the commonsense chains of causality and chronology. That’s surely why he was never dogmatic about such

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seemingly nonsensical ideas: the point was to go beyond rationalism by expanding the realm of possibilities, not to replace one belief with another.

Twenty-three The material history of the book’s title turns out to be the most significant instance of the uncanny and paradoxical logic of the retrospectively-prophetic in Dead Fingers Talk. To understand the significance of the title phrase for Burroughs, it’s not enough to know that it came from a line in Naked Lunch (“Only dead fingers talk in Braille . . .”) (166). Specifically, it appears in “have you seen pantopon rose?” a short, highly fragmented section that came into being as a drastic redaction and rearrangement of nine blocks taken from “Word,” the longest and most densely fragmented section of Burroughs’ 1957 “Interzone” manuscript.28 Elsewhere in “Word” there appears a teasing question that Burroughs would later connect with the phrase “dead fingers talk”: “Dead men tell no tales or do they?”29 The tale that the title tells is that this enigmatic phrase that sounds like a cut-up carries over from the Naked Lunch manuscripts a very particular genetic history of radical editing. In the new context of Dead Fingers Talk, the titular phrase becomes a prophetic precursor of cut-up methods and the remix aesthetic. This is the broad tale, but what’s so fascinating and revealing is the precision with which Burroughs put it to work. In parallel to composing Dead Fingers Talk in fall 1962, Burroughs went back to his largely unpublished “Word” manuscript for his new edition of The Soft Machine. He made another redaction and rearrangement of “Word,” cutting it up into forty pieces to make the bulk of a new chapter of The Soft Machine he entitled “Dead Fingers Talk.” In the material that came from “Word” that Burroughs used in the “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter of The Soft Machine, there is only one point of overlap with the chapter titled “Dead Fingers Talk” in Dead Fingers Talk itself, which is the short paragraph that includes the phrase “dead fingers talk.” The “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter in Dead Fingers Talk is the most complicated in the whole book in terms of its rearrangement of material, combining no fewer than twenty-three separate blocks drawn from all three source texts. The appearance here of the paragraph containing the title phrase is notable for two reasons. Textually, this paragraph is anomalous: of the eleven blocks of Naked Lunch material used in the chapter, ten derive from the “atrophied preface” section, and just this one from “have you seen pantopon rose?” Since these lines had already appeared earlier in Dead Fingers Talk (along with the rest of “pantopon rose?”), they are a deliberate duplication. And genetically, as the manuscript evidence reveals, the lines containing the phrase “dead fingers talk” were inserted into this chapter only at the very last stage of composition. Up until then the chapter had been titled “Back Seat Dreaming,” and Burroughs changed it to “Dead Fingers Talk” at the same time that he inserted the phrase “dead fingers talk,” at which point this chapter, listed in his table of contents as Chapter 22, now comprised not twenty-two parts, but twentythree—Burroughs’ special number. The hand of the author and/or the hand of chance?

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 145

N. MAT There’s a beautiful, sepia-toned manuscript illustration of Dead Fingers Talk’s unsuspected complexity as a composite text that also illustrates what devils are in the detail of the bigger cut-up picture. Reproduced in full color in Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs, the catalog of a 2012 exhibition at the Kunsthalle, Vienna, the page is composed of some fourteen separate elements cut out and pasted onto it: six strips of typescript of varying widths interspersed with seven cuttings of printed pages, three of which show blue ink emendations, and a large autograph inscription in Burroughs’ distinctive script that, in a mix of green felt and thick black marker pen, reads: “original pages of Dead Fingers Talk” (in Fallows and Genzmer 2012: 85). In the William S. Burroughs Papers at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, this is one of four leaves comprising Folio 28, “Paste Up Pages From Mss of Dead Fingers Talk.”30 But there’s a problem with this illuminating document: contrary to the exhibition catalog, the archival finding aid and the author’s own description, this isn’t a page of Dead Fingers Talk (see Figures 5.8 and 5.9).  The manuscript page of Dead Fingers Talk that isn’t one is not just an object lesson in the risks of taking material evidence at face value but, more specifically, in the baffling complexity of Burroughs’ cut-up texts and their genetic histories, such that even he became confused. The page certainly looks like some in the “real” manuscript (housed at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin).31 Burroughs’ confusion is a product of the very particular methods and material circumstances of his work in fall 1962 and so casts light on not only Dead Fingers Talk but also the other cut-up books on which he was working. For the text of this cut-and-paste page is effectively identical to a page in the revised Soft Machine, and is a draft that Burroughs assembled and then cleanly retyped for the revised manuscript of that book in mid-November 1962.32 What this case of misleading appearances reveals is the unexpected similarity of the “new material” Burroughs composed for The Soft Machine to the composite text of Dead Fingers Talk. In total, half the material on The Soft Machine page is a composite, and by tracing the cuttings of printed pages back to their sources, we can identify them as one cutting from Naked Lunch and six from The Ticket That Exploded—or to be more precise, from the uncorrected proofs of The Ticket (evident from minor differences to the text which had not yet been published). Cross-referencing multiple manuscripts and published works to construct an accurate genetic history gives an insight into two features of Burroughs’ work: the similarity rather than difference of Dead Fingers Talk with respect to his other cut-up books in terms of compositional process and the challenge that remix methods pose to definitions of the “new.” The archival record of Dead Fingers Talk’s genetic history is incomplete, as it is for all Burroughs’ writing from this era. But the manuscript housed at the University of Texas—comprising 26 pages of new typescript, 248 of paste-ins—and other documents at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library offer enough evidence to refute any assumption that Burroughs worked randomly or sloppily, or with less attention to detail

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Figure 5.8  Burroughs, typescript, in Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs, edited by Colin Fallows and Synne Genzmer (Kunsthalle Wien, 2012), 85. for Dead Fingers Talk than any other of his cut-up manuscripts. He planned out the more complex chapters and produced three detailed lists (from three to nine pages long) that show him progressively updating the content he was selecting and combining for the book (see Figures 5.10–5.12).33 While the overall structure and sequence didn’t change, some material was later dropped (the “shuffle cut” section of The Ticket), one chapter was added later on (“all members are worst a century”), and, as already noted, at a final

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 147

Figure 5.9  Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk typescript (William S. Burroughs Collection, Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; 1.1-4). stage Burroughs retitled the chapter named after the book itself. The lists he drew up are especially revealing of Burroughs’ own hesitation when it came to defining material as new. For example, on the earliest list, he identifies one block of material by the page range of the original text in The Soft Machine; on his updated list, he again gives the page range but now identifies this as “Rewritten”; and on the final list, he gives it simply as “N. Mat”: new material.34 Transiting from original to rewritten to new, these three versions of the same thing explain why it’s so hard to answer the seemingly simple question, “How

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Figure 5.10  Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk draft contents list 1; William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–72, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 39.1.

Figure 5.11  Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk draft contents list 2; William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–72, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 39.1.

Figure 5.12  Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk draft contents list 3; William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–72, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 3.18.

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 149 much of Dead Fingers Talk is new?” And if we actually examine the material in question, a passage of just under 200 words, we find that while it has been cut and resequenced, only three words are new in the strict sense that they have no equivalent in The Soft Machine. But as shown by the example of changing all the ellipses in Naked Lunch into em dashes, Dead Fingers Talk makes over its originals even when the words remain the same. Complicating definitions yet further, what was “new” in Dead Fingers Talk included material that would appear in the revised Soft Machine in 1966 (and therefore doesn’t seem to be new), so that there are at least three answers to the question: out of some 69,000 words, either 750 or 1,500 (1% or 2%) could be called new, or, in the broadest definition subversively implied by Burroughs’ remix methods, all 69,000. Other questions have more straightforward answers, such as the percentage of Dead Fingers Talk deriving from its three source texts: over half comes from Naked Lunch, a quarter from The Ticket That Exploded, and a fifth from The Soft Machine. As for the percentage of the source texts Burroughs used: he took almost two-thirds of Naked Lunch, just under half of The Ticket That Exploded and nearly one-third of The Soft Machine—although this last was heavily revised in ways the other material was not. And finally, calculating the combinations of material reveals that eighteen chapters in Dead Fingers Talk used material taken from only one text: eight of Naked Lunch, eight of The Ticket, and just two of The Soft Machine. Seven chapters combined Naked Lunch with The Soft Machine, three chapters combined material from all three texts, two combined The Ticket with The Soft Machine, and one combined Naked Lunch with The Ticket. (To clear up the mystery: Burroughs’ table of contents lists twenty-six titled chapters, and while it looked like there were thirty-one in Dead Fingers Talk, five were effectively subchapters with titles carried over from the source text and set out misleadingly on the page.) The statistics indicate a good deal about Burroughs’ attitude toward each source and its interrelationships, as does the way he distributed the material across the book. There’s much more from Naked Lunch in the first half of Dead Fingers Talk than in the second, more Soft Machine material in the first half, and massively more from The Ticket in the second half (see Appendix 1). That nearly threequarters of the first half of Dead Fingers Talk comes from Naked Lunch indicates how the book roughly respects the chronology of its source texts, while the greater narrative coherence and readability of the material suggests why the book’s four longest chapters—amounting to one-third of its entire length—come entirely from Naked Lunch. As for what Burroughs did and did not use (see Appendix 2), if we count Naked Lunch as having twenty-two sections—and that’s a big bibliographical “if ”35—then he used ten in full and drew on eight more, taking nothing from four sections (“county clerk,” “hassan’s rumpus room,” “a.j.’s annual party,” and “campus of interzone university”). While most sections were used in just a single chapter, the material from “ordinary men and women” and “atrophied preface” was broken up into a dozen blocks and used in four and five different chapters, respectively. From The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs used material from fifteen of its nineteen sections (taking nothing from “do you love me?” “writing machine,” “terminal street,” and “shuffle cut”), using four in their entirety and very nearly all of four

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more (see Appendix 3). Finally, there’s the use Burroughs made of The Soft Machine (see Appendix 4), which is on a completely different order of complexity and resists simple summary for two reasons. To begin with, Burroughs almost always took material from the 1961 Olympia Press Soft Machine in a way that he only rarely took it from Naked Lunch and The Ticket, by bringing together and adapting short passages or lines or sometimes just single phrases drawn from numerous different parts of the original text and recombining them in new sequences. Not a single section of the 1961 Soft Machine was used in its entirety, while in one chapter of Dead Fingers Talk, the aptly titled “cut city,” Burroughs revised and recombined material from no fewer than twelve different Soft Machine sections, including the section titled “cut city.” It’s necessary to spell out the extent and complexity of Burroughs’ remix and rewriting, since literary and critical history has completely obscured it. That’s because few readers, and even fewer critics, know the 1961 original edition of The Soft Machine, which was never reprinted: the 1966 Grove Press revised edition that replaced it is radically different, and its use of material drawn from the first edition closely resembles the use made of it for Dead Fingers Talk—which is unsurprising, since Burroughs was creating the two texts in parallel. (Although in the end it appeared three years later, he expected the revised Soft Machine to be published before Dead Fingers Talk.) In revised editions of The Soft Machine, the material that forms the first half of “cut city” in Dead Fingers Talk corresponds to the “Trak Trak Trak” chapter (minus one long passage and the last few paragraphs), while the second half of “cut city” corresponds (with minor differences) to the start of the “Gongs Of Violence” chapter. The typescript of “cut city” in the November 1962 Dead Fingers Talk manuscript is largely identical to the corresponding pages in the revised Soft Machine manuscript that Burroughs submitted to Olympia Press that same month (for an edition that was never published).36 However, the differences at a local and structural level are just as important as the overall similarity, because they demonstrate Burroughs’ commitment to alternative combinations of the same source material, which in turn establishes the singularity of Dead Fingers Talk. At a local textual level, while the content of “cut city” may be substantially the same as the material in “Trak Trak Trak” and “Gongs Of Violence,” the “cut city” typescript still shows Burroughs cutting out and pasting in further typed inserts. And structurally, it’s revealing that the material forming “cut city” should appear in not just two different chapters of the revised Soft Machine but in chapters separated by almost the full length of the book (“Trak Trak Trak” being the fourth and “Gongs Of Violence” the fifteenth out of the book’s seventeen chapters).37 Likewise, there is another inversion in the sequence of material and a distinction in its division into structured parts involving the closing pages of “cut city.” These pages don’t come at the end of “Gongs Of Violence” in The Soft Machine but appear instead in the short chapter that immediately precedes it, “Uranian Willy.” The material itself shows minor substantive variations, each version having some half a dozen words that don’t appear in the other. The most revealing comparison, however, is not between Dead Fingers Talk and the revised Soft Machine but with the text of the 1961 edition, because it provides the source of barely a tenth of these closing pages. Yet what Burroughs referred to when itemizing the provenance of “cut city” on his third list of Dead Fingers Talk source material as “Rewritten Combat Section” was, in fact, passages that appear in Nova Express in the

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 151 “Uranian Willy” and “Towers Open Fire” sections. The genetic and textual history of “cut city” therefore brings into play the revised Nova Express, which Burroughs was also working on in November 1962. Revising the same material across three different works simultaneously, he was putting into practice editorially the creative model that informed the cut-up combat tactics promoted in and demonstrated by his rewriting: just as the battle plan “shifted and reformed as reports came in,” so too each text shifted and reformed in the moment of rewriting. The smallest differences between the manuscripts of Dead Fingers Talk and the revised Soft Machine are, therefore, the most telling. Not only do they demonstrate Burroughs’ attention to detail, sustaining the case for recognizing Dead Fingers Talk as a book in its own right, but they confirm the application of his combat plan at a textual level. Burroughs’ revisions are not like those of a conventional novelist tweaking his material, both because they were generating multiple versions for publication rather than perfecting one single text, and because they rarely seem accountable solely in terms of content. When Burroughs makes a single-line pasted insert of Soft Machine material intended for Dead Fingers Talk without making a corresponding change for the manuscript of the revised Soft Machine, the difference is a matter of form, of the principle of difference itself.38 The inevitable result of pursuing alternative possibilities for rearranging and rewriting the same original source material was to destabilize the identity and integrity of any one text. New editions of Burroughs’ cut-up books, even those committed to explaining his methods and restoring his texts, inevitably add to that confusion. Since the 1961 original Soft Machine was in 1966 replaced by the Grove Press edition, a very different text, and since that edition has in turn been replaced by the Restored text of 2014 (a closer version of the 1962 revised manuscript but still quite distinct from it), almost all readers now find themselves at not one but two removes from the original Soft Machine, and quite reasonably confused. Indeed, this is true of Dead Fingers Talk’s two other source texts, since Naked Lunch was extensively reedited in 1960 for the Grove edition published in 1962 and then again for the Restored text of 2003, while The Ticket That Exploded was substantially reedited and expanded for the 1967 Grove edition and then the 2014 Restored text. And so, readers of the 2020 Restored edition of Dead Fingers Talk have had to face a regress of different editions each with its own bibliographical backstory, and the genetic backstories behind all of them, receding into the horizon like one of Burroughs and Sommerville’s infinity photomontages.

But This Is Interesting The call to understand Dead Fingers Talk’s composition is as old as the book itself, and was made by Burroughs’ British champion, Eric Mottram, in his intervention in the TLS saga: “at least we ought to have been informed about its construction and its relation to these earlier works” (in Burroughs 1982: 266). What was complicated for Alan Ansen in 1964—cross-referencing Dead Fingers Talk with Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded in the first and for half a century the only critical assessment39—has become exponentially more so since. In the 1980s, James Grauerholz observed that “Burroughs has always presented interesting challenges to

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his editors” (in Burroughs 1989: ix), and if “interesting” is a euphemism for “almost impossible,” they don’t come more interesting than Dead Fingers Talk. The challenge of editing the book was not only a practical matter of working with ten editions and a dozen primary manuscripts but of answering some interesting ontological questions, such as: Does editing Dead Fingers Talk mean editing Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded? And: is it possible to edit Dead Fingers Talk as if its three source texts had not themselves all long since been reedited? These questions give a new twist to the choice that has to be made somewhere between two polarized alternatives, which might be called the Degree Zero of editing and the Totally Restored options. The trouble with the first is that its goal to keep faith with the original edition means fetishizing a text riddled with various kinds of error and fixing the past in a way that would negate Burroughs’ subversion of textual stability. The risk with restoration work is that it de-historicizes the past, erases precisely those variations that make it historically particular, and is also almost impossible to limit: where to begin always seems straightforward, not so where to end. Steering between the rock of Scylla and whirlpool of Charybdis, the Restored edition of Dead Fingers Talk documented its changes not only in the name of transparency—“to show the method in operation”—but to provide a record on which future scholarship can rely and future readers can build. For Burroughs’ editorial guerrilla tactics remix choice and chance to keep the dead fingers of his text forever talking, pointing the way not only from analog to digital culture but toward the material’s viral capacity for new life.

Figure 5.13  William Burroughs reading Dead Fingers Talk (William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951-1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 26.29).

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 153

Appendices Appendix 1 (Use of All Source Texts) Dead Fingers Talk

Naked Lunch The Soft Machine NL = Olympia 1959 SM1 = Olympia 1961 NLR = Restored 2003 SMR = Restored 2014

3–22 (the heat closing in)

3–16: NL 7–24 (NLR 3–18) 16–22: NL 199–208 (NLR 175–81)

23–8 (in a strange bed) 29–38 (no good no bueno)

39–49 (cut city)

50–1 (to quiet the marks)

33–4: NL 189–90 (NLR 165–6); 34–6: NL 190–3 (NLR 166–8); 36–8: NL 193–6 (NLR 169–71) 39–41: SMR 31–4; 39–40: SM1 70–2; 40: SM1 103–4; 41–4: SMR 36–41; 40: SM1 50; 40: SM1 54; 40–1: SM1 45–7; 41–2: SM1 78; 42: SM1 73–6; 44–8: SMR 151–7 42–44: SM1 80; 44: SM1 7; 44: SM1 107–9; 44–5: SM1 100; 45: SM1 23–4; 46–8: SM1 8–13; 48–9: SMR 149–50; 48: new SM; 49: SM1 15; 49: new SM

The Ticket T1 = Olympia 1962 TR = Restored 2014

T1 17–27 (TR 36–45) 29–33: SM1 158–64 (SMR 1–7)

51: new SM (SMR 157–8) 52–67 NL 25–47 (NLR (science pure science) 19–38) 68–73 68–71: SM1 164–9 (SMR (the meat handler) 25–30) 71–3: NL 97–99 (NLR 87–9); 73: NL 214–15 (NLR 186–7)

50–1: T1 136–8 (TR 159–60)

154 Dead Fingers Talk

74–6 (but this is interesting)

77–81 (it’s the great work)

Burroughs Unbound Naked Lunch The Soft Machine NL = Olympia 1959 SM1 = Olympia 1961 NLR = Restored 2003 SMR = Restored 2014

75–6: NL 119–20 (NLR 104–5); 76: NL 134–5 (NLR 117); 76: NL 120 (NLR 105) 77: NL 121 (NLR 105–6)

79: NL 126 (NLR 110); 79–81: NL 131–4 (NLR 114–17) 82–5 82: NL 104–5 (NLR (that’s the way i like to 93); see them) 82–4: NL 135–7 (NLR 118–20); 84–5: NL 130–1 (NLR 113–14) 86–101 NL 139–60 (NLR (the parties of 121–40) interzone) 102–9 102–3: NL 115–16 (save proof through (NLR 100–1); the night) 103: NL 58 (NLR 48); 103–8: NL 61–7 (NLR 51–6)

110–15 (expense account)

116–19 (i urge distraction)

120–9 (the black fruit)

109: NL 67–8, 69 (NLR 56, 57, 58) 110–12: NL 69–72 (NLR 58–62); 112–14: NL 116–19 (NLR 101–4); 114–15: NL 135 (NLR 117–18) 116–17: NL 137–9 (NLR 120–1); 117–19: NL 197–9 (NLR 172–4)

120–4: NL 52–7 (NLR 43–7)

74: SM1 127–8, 130 (SMR 72–3)

77–8: SM1 149–50 (SMR 97–8); 78–9: SM1 89–90, 91, 92–3 (SMR 98)

108–9: SM1 142–5 (parts)

119: SM1 42, 43 (SMR 41–2) 120: SM1 49 (SMR 42); 120: SM1 25 (SMR 115)

The Ticket T1 = Olympia 1962 TR = Restored 2014

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 155 Dead Fingers Talk

Naked Lunch The Soft Machine NL = Olympia 1959 SM1 = Olympia 1961 NLR = Restored 2003 SMR = Restored 2014

126–7: SM1 87 (SMR 105); 127: SM1 84–5 (SMR 101–2) 128–29: SM1 86–7 (SMR 102–3) 130: SM1 83–4 (SMR 100)

130–7 (all members are worst a century)

133–4: new SM (SMR 34–6)

138–49 (place of burial)

150–3 (survivor survivor)

154–63 (paco, Joselito, Henrique) 164–7 (combat troops in the area)

138–42: NL 47–52 (NLR 39–43); 142–3: NL 210–11 (NLR 183–4); 143–9: NL 170–8 (NLR 148–55)

154–62: NL 178–88 (NLR 155–65)

136–7: SM1 50–58, parts; new SM; SM1 139 (SMR 115–17)

The Ticket T1 = Olympia 1962 TR = Restored 2014 124–6: T1 82–6 (TR 99–103); 126: T1 79 (TR 96–7)

127–8: T1 88–90 (TR 105–6);

130–3: T1 92–6 (TR 108–12) 134–6: T1 97–100 (TR 112–15)

150: SM1 111 (SMR 67); 150–51: SM1 115–16 (SMR 68); 151–53: SM1 119–22 (SMR 68–72); 153: SM1 131 (SMR 73); 153: SM1 170 (SMR 73–4); 153: SM1 132 (SMR 73); 153: SM1 132

162–3: SM1 139–42 (SMR 113–15)

164: T1 106–7 (TR 121–2); 164–5: T1 108–10 (TR 123–5); 165–7: T1 100–2 (TR 115–18); 167: T1 15 (TR 34–5)

156 Dead Fingers Talk

Burroughs Unbound Naked Lunch The Soft Machine NL = Olympia 1959 SM1 = Olympia 1961 NLR = Restored 2003 SMR = Restored 2014

168–73 (the board books)

174–81 (dead fingers talk)

174: NL 219 (NLR 190–1) 174: NL 220 (NLR 191) 175 NL 190 (NLR 166) 175–6: NL 214 (NLR 186) 176: NL 218 (NLR 190) 177: NL 218 (NLR 189) 177: NL 222 (NLR 193); 177: NL 217 (NLR 188–9)

179: NL 222–3 (NLR 193) 179: NL 223 (NLR 193) 179: NL 216 (NLR 188)

The Ticket T1 = Olympia 1962 TR = Restored 2014 168: T1 135–6 (TR 158–9); 168–70: T1 128–30 (TR 152–3); 170–2: T1 123–7 (TR 147–51); 172–3: T1 142 (TR 164) 174: T1 112 (TR 134) 174–5: T1 112 (TR 134) 175: T1 113–14 (TR 135–6) 176: T1 114 (TR 136) 176–7: T1 114–15 (TR 136–7) 177: T1 115–16 (TR 140)

177–8: T1 116–17 (TR 140–41); 178–9: T1 130–1 (TR 153–4) 179: T1 131 (TR 154–5) 179: T1 132 (TR 155) 179–80: T1 132–3 (TR 155–6)

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 157 Dead Fingers Talk

Naked Lunch The Soft Machine NL = Olympia 1959 SM1 = Olympia 1961 NLR = Restored 2003 SMR = Restored 2014 180–1: SM1 171–4 (SMR 174–6)

182–91 (operation rewrite)

192–9 (the subliminal kid)

200–3 (let them see us) 204–10 (these our actors)

199: NL 223–4 (NLR 194)

204–6: NL 224–6 (NLR 194–6)

204: SM1 181–2 (SMR 182–3)

The Ticket T1 = Olympia 1962 TR = Restored 2014

182–4: T1 37–40 (TR 57, 57–61); 184–90: T1 40–50 (TR 61–70); 190: T1 133 (TR 156); 190: T1 134 (TR 157); 190: T1 139 (TR 161); 190 T1 141 (TR 163); 190: T1 139 (TR 161); 191: T1 159–60 (TR 183) 192–3: T1 160–2 (TR 184, 189–91, 192–3); 194–9: T1 163–72 (T2 193–7, 198–202) T1 172–78 (TR 203–7)

206–7: new cf T1 TR; 207: T1 178 (TR 207–8); 207: new cf T1 TR; 207: T1 178 (TR 208); 207–10: T1 178–3 (TR 208–9, 226–9, 230)

Appendix 2 (Use of Naked Lunch) NLR (Restored 2003)

Dead Fingers Talk

NL (Olympia 1959)

3–18 175–81 165–6 166–8 169–71 19–38 87–9 186–7 104–5

3–16 (the heat closing in) 16–22 (the heat closing in) 33–4 (no good no bueno) 34–6 (no good no bueno) 36–8 (no good no bueno) 52–67 (science pure science) 71–3 (the meat handler) 73 (the meat handler) 75–6 (but this is interesting)

7–24 199–208 189–90 190–3 193–6 25–47 97–9 214–15 119–20

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NLR (Restored 2003)

Dead Fingers Talk

NL (Olympia 1959)

117 105 105–6 110 114–17 93 118–20 113–14 121–40 100–1 48 51–6 56, 57, 58 58–62 101–4 117–18 120–1 172–4 43–7 39–43 183–4 148–55 155–65 190–1 191 166 186 190 189 193 188–9 193 193 188 194 194–6

76 (but this is interesting) 76 (but this is interesting) 77 (it’s the great work) 79 (it’s the great work) 79–81 (it’s the great work) 82 (that’s the way I like to see them) 82–4 (that’s the way i like to see them) 84–5 (that’s the way i like to see them) 86–101 (the parties of Interzone) 102–3 (save proof through the night) 103 (save proof through the night) 103–8 (save proof through the night) 109 (save proof through the night) 110–12 (expense account) 112–14 (expense account) 114–15 (expense account) 116–17 (i urge distraction) 117–19 (i urge distraction) 120–4 (the black fruit) 138–42 (place of burial) 142–3 (place of burial) 143–9 (place of burial) 154–62 (paco, Joselito, Henrique) 174 (dead fingers talk) 174 (dead fingers talk) 175 (dead fingers talk) 175–6 (dead fingers talk) 176 (dead fingers talk) 177 (dead fingers talk) 177 (dead fingers talk) 177 (dead fingers talk) 179 (dead fingers talk) 179 (dead fingers talk) 179 (dead fingers talk) 199 (the subliminal kid) 204–6 (these our actors)

134–5 120 121 126 131–4 104–5 135–7 130–1 139–60 115–16 58 61–7 67–8, 69 69–72 116–19 135 137–9 197–9 52–7 47–52 210–11 170–8 178–88 219 220 190 214 218 218 222 217 222–3 223 216 223–4 224–6

Appendix 3 (Use of The Soft Machine) SMR (Restored 2014)

Dead Fingers Talk

1–7 31–4 31–4 31–4 31–4 36–41 36–41 36–41 151–7

29–33 (no good no bueno) 39–40 (cut city) 40 (cut city) 40 (cut city) 40 (cut city) 40–1 (cut city) 41–2 (cut city) 42 (cut city) 42–4 (cut city)

SM1 (Olympia 1961) 158–64 70–2 103–4 50 54 45–7 78 73–6 80

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 159 SMR (Restored 2014)

Dead Fingers Talk

SM1 (Olympia 1961)

151–7 151–7 151–7 151–7 151–7 149–50 149–50 149–50 157–8 25–30 72–3 97–8 98 Not in 41–2 42 115 105 101–2 102–3 100 34–6 115–17 67 68 68–72 73 73–4 73 Not in 113–15 174–6 182–3

44 (cut city) 44 (cut city) 44–5 (cut city) 45 (cut city) 46–8 (cut city) 48 (cut city) 49 (cut city) 49 (cut city) 51 (to quiet the marks) 68–71 (the meat handler) 74 (but this is interesting) 77–8 (it’s the great work) 78–9 (it’s the great work) 108–9 (save proof through the night) 119 (i urge distraction) 120 (the black fruit) 120 (the black fruit) 126–7 (the black fruit) 127 (the black fruit) 128–9 (the black fruit)) 130 (all members are worst a century) 133–4 (all members are worst a century) 136–7 (all members are worst a century) 150 (survivor survivor) 150–1 (survivor survivor) 151–3 (survivor survivor) 153 (survivor survivor) 153 (survivor survivor) 153 (survivor survivor) 153 (survivor survivor) 162–3 (paco, Joselito, Henrique) 180–1 (dead fingers talk) 204 (these our actors)

7 107–9 100 23–34 8–13 New/Nova Express 15 New/Nova Express New 164–9 127–8, 130 149–50 89–90, 91, 92–9 142–5 42, 43 49 25 87 84–5 86–7 83–4 New 50–8, new, 139 111 115–16 119–22 131 170 132 132 139–42 171–4 181–2

Appendix 4 (Use of The Ticket That Exploded) TR (Restored 2014)

Dead Fingers Talk

T1 (Olympia 1962)

36–45 159–60 99–103 96–7 105–6 108–12 112–15 121–2 123–5 115–18 34–5 158–9

23–8 (in a strange bed) 50–1 (to quiet the marks) 124–6 (the black fruit) 126 (the black fruit) 127–8 (the black fruit) 130–3 (all members are worst a century) 134–6 (all members are worst a century) 164 (combat troops in the area) 164–5 (combat troops in the area) 165–7 (combat troops in the area) 167 (combat troops in the area) 168 (the board books)

17–27 136–8 82–6 79 88–90 92–6 97–100 106–7 108–10 100–2 15 135–6

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TR (Restored 2014)

Dead Fingers Talk

T1 (Olympia 1962)

152–3 147–51 164 134 134 135–6 136 136–7 140 140–41 153–4 154–5 155 155–6 57, 57–61 61–70 156 157 161 163 161 183 184, 189–91, 192–93 193–7, 198–202 203–7 207–8 208 208–9, 226–9, 230

168–70 (the board books) 170–2 (the board books) 172–73 (the board books) 174 (dead fingers talk) 174–5 (dead fingers talk) 175 (dead fingers talk) 176 (dead fingers talk) 176–7 (dead fingers talk) 177 (dead fingers talk) 177–8 (dead fingers talk) 178–9 (dead fingers talk) 179 (dead fingers talk) 179 (dead fingers talk) 179–80 (dead fingers talk) 182–4 (operation rewrite) 184–90 (operation rewrite) 190 (operation rewrite) 190 (operation rewrite) 190 (operation rewrite) 190 (operation rewrite) 190 (operation rewrite) 191 (operation rewrite) 192–3 (the subliminal kid) 194–9 (the subliminal kid) 200–3 (let them see us) 207 (these our actors) 207 (these our actors) 207–10 (these our actors)

128–30 123–7 142 112 112 113–14 114 114–15 115–16 116–17 130–1 131 132 132–3 37–40 40–50 133 134 139 141 139 159–60 160–2 163–72 172–8 178 178 178–83

Notes 1 Benoît Delaune’s unpublished PhD “Le Cut Up Chez William S. Burroughs” (Université Rennes 2, 2003) asserts the importance of Dead Fingers Talk as the link between Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels and as a ghostly, paradoxical fourth text in that trilogy (“fantôme de la Trilogie”). He cites Gérard-Georges Lemaire’s mistaken description of it, in Burroughs (Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1986), as a compilation of The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. Lemaire also misses both the singularity of Dead Fingers Talk and the principle of multiplicity when arguing that “le volume permet de saisir l’œuvre dans sa continuité, ne formant plus qu’une seule et même entité” (“the volume allows us to grasp the continuity of his oeuvre, forming as it does a single entity”; my translation), 66. 2 In fairness, this is not an assessment Miles later repeated, and his advocacy for Dead Fingers Talk helped lead to the new edition. 3 The review and the correspondence it provoked appeared in an appendix to the Calder edition of Naked Lunch.

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 161 4 Andrew Leslie, The Guardian (November 22, 1963). 5 Burroughs to Ansen, January 23, 1963 (Ted Morgan Papers, Arizona State University; Box 1). After, abbreviated to ASU. 6 Unusually, Dead Fingers Talk gets name-checked in Voyce (2011: 430). 7 To be precise, the IMT exhibition was titled “Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs” and the Galleri Box exhibition “Dead Fingers Talk 2012—The Mayan Caper.” 8 On this topic, see my essay, “Cutting Up Politics” in Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization, edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh (London: Pluto, 2004), 175–200. 9 According to Calder in The Pursuit: The Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder (London: Calder, 2001), the redactions made for the text had been a collaborative effort, resulting in what he referred to it as “our [sic] carefully selected volume of extracts” (226). When asked directly about the selection of material, Calder replied to me, “It was his, but with a little bit of guiding” (unpublished interview, June 1985). See the 2020 Restored edition for further details of how Burroughs did and did not redact Dead Fingers Talk to reduce its explicit content. 10 See “Introduction to Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Novia Express,” Evergreen Review 6.22 (January–February 1962). 11 Burroughs to Ansen, November 14, 1962 (ASU). 12 Burroughs to Rosset, October 2, 1962 (Grove Press Records, Special Collections, Syracuse University). After, abbreviated to Syracuse; Burroughs to Rosset, October 24, 1962 (William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–72, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 75.1); after, abbreviated to Berg; and Burroughs to Rosset, October 26, 1962 (Syracuse). 13 Burroughs (1960: 33). In this obscure bilingual text, the phrase is translated as “la méthode du ‘Dépeçage et du décollage’” (33). Burroughs had from the start also made prominent use of the term “arrangement” to describe cut-up texts; see Burroughs (2020c), 130. 14 Burroughs to Ansen, January 23, 1963 (ASU). 15 From spring 1965, this is how Burroughs most often refers to what became The Third Mind. See the forthcoming volume edited by Davis Schneiderman and Marcus Boon. 16 On Burroughs and Postmodernism, see Murphy (1997) and my essay “William S. Burroughs: Beating Postmodernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Beats, edited by Steven Belletto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 123–36. 17 Aiming to make the book “more comprehensible” by rearranging it thematically, Calder recombined the two sections for a chapter he called “The Drug Scene” in his A William Burroughs Reader (London: Pan Books, 1982), while inverting the sequence, so that “hauser and o’brien” comes first (28). 18 On the history and titling of the opening chapter, see my essay “The Beginnings of Naked Lunch, an Endless Novel,” in Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, coedited with Ian MacFadyen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), especially 21–4. 19 Burroughs to Marilyn Meeker, November 10, 1966 (Syracuse). 20 The second appearance of the note in Dead Fingers Talk is precisely the same as that which closed the 1959 Naked Lunch, since it too glosses the use of “No glot” as the

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23

24

25

26 27 28

29

30 31

Burroughs Unbound final words of that text, even though by the time Burroughs assembled Dead Fingers Talk, the note had been cut from the end of the 1962 Grove edition. A reader of the 1959 Naked Lunch would also know that its notes and asides were originally not always in the main text but in one spectacular case in “the market” section a footnote that divided the text in two by running across the foot of the page for a dozen pages. Burroughs to Irving Rosenthal, July 20, 1960: “The book should end with ‘No glot Clom Fliday.’ Explanation in footnote” (in Burroughs 2003: 251). For example, where the 1962 Ticket mixed upper and lower case (“I am a stranger here—i am sorry if—i do not”) (Burroughs 1962: 23), Dead Fingers Talk regularized the case to upper (“I am a stranger here—I am sorry if—I do not know your laws”) (Burroughs 2020a: 27), and the 1967 revised Ticket changed to all lower case (“i am a stranger here—i am sorry if—i do not know your laws”) (Burroughs 2014c: 42). Claiming the “BRAILLE LIKE CHARACTER OF THE TV IMAGE,” the epigraph credited to Marshall McLuhan derives from Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 293. On Weissner’s book, see Robinson (2011: 109–13). Thanks to Jim Pennington for sharing information about The Braille Film. McLuhan was clearly on Burroughs’ mind, perhaps dating from his November 1964 review of Nova Express for The Nation, and during its original assembly in 1965, The Third Mind was going to begin by citing McLuhan’s 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, with a quotation that ends: “is it not absurd for men to live involuntarily altered in their inmost lives by some mere technological extension of our inner senses?” (Berg 45.3). Œuvre croisée, the French edition of The Third Mind, translated by Gérard-Georges Lemaire and Christine Taylor, appeared in 1976. Since Allen Ginsberg singled out a similar phrase (“Dada is a virgin microbe”) from the copy of Motherwell’s anthology he was reading while staying with Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in June 1958 (and meeting Tzara in person at the Deux Magots café), it’s almost certain that Burroughs knew the specific phrase; see Ginsberg and Orlovsky (1980: 175). Black also dominates in Naked Lunch; blue is the predominant color in The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. Burroughs, four-page typescript (Berg 39.1). When “Word” was published in the Interzone collection, overlaps with material already published in Naked Lunch were edited out, including the phrase “dead fingers talk,” which would have appeared just before “The Caid in gasoline” (Burroughs 1989: 153). In “Word,” the two lines are separated by twenty pages in the sixty-one-page manuscript (Allen Ginsberg Papers, Columbia University, Box 27). After, abbreviated to CU. In the “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter of The Soft Machine, they are placed just one page apart (Burroughs 2014b: 172, 174). Burroughs, typescript (Berg 6.16). Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk typescript (William S. Burroughs Collection, Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; 1.1-4). After, abbreviated to HRC. Actually, this is one of relatively few pages in the manuscript to feature multiple paste-ups; far more often, Burroughs retyped composite material.

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 163 32 The material corresponds to The Soft Machine, 58–9, and to page 44 in Burroughs’ 1962 manuscript (William Burroughs Papers, 1957-1976; CU 2.4). 33 The earliest list is three pages long, the second four pages (both Berg 39.1), and the final list is nine pages long (Berg 3.18). 34 On the manuscript table of contents page, Burroughs distinguishes between “Rewritten Parts of The Soft Machine” and “New Material” (HRC). 35 The number of titled sections in Naked Lunch varies considerably from edition to edition: from just fourteen in the 1959 original to twenty-two in the revised 1962 edition and twenty-five in the Restored edition (which created two new sections and counts “quick” as one). 36 For a detailed account of the manuscript history, including the use made of the November 1962 typescript for the 2014 edition; see my introduction to the Restored Soft Machine. 37 Note that the Restored edition has eighteen chapters. 38 Such is the case for the line “Before I was five, saw a man burned to death in the square,” which Burroughs pasted into Dead Fingers Talk for “it’s the great work” (77), but not for the opening of “Pretend An Interest” in his revised Soft Machine manuscript. 39 In “After THE NAKED LUNCH” (City Lights Journal, 2 [1964], reprinted in William Burroughs: An Essay [Sudbury: Water Row, 1986]), Alan Ansen answered Mottram by paying close attention to Dead Fingers Talk, although he calculated the percentages slightly differently and without taking into account the complexities of such calculations, reckoning that it “includes two-thirds of Naked Lunch, threesevenths of The Ticket That Exploded and a little less than two-fifths of The Soft Machine” (29).

References Allsop, Kenneth (1965), Scan, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Amerika, Mark (2011), Remixthebook, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Barthes, Roland (1993), Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, London: Fontana. Birmingham, Jed (2006), Dead Fingers Talk. Available online: http:​/​/rea​​litys​​tudio​​.org/​​bibli​​ ograp​​hic​-b​​unker​​/dead​​-fing​​​ers​-t​​alk/. Burroughs, William S. (1959), The Naked Lunch, Paris: Olympia. Burroughs, William S. (June 1960), “Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted,” Haute Société 1: 33. Burroughs, William S. (1961), The Soft Machine, Paris: Olympia. Burroughs, William S. (1962), The Ticket That Exploded, Paris: Olympia. Burroughs, William S. (1982), The Naked Lunch, London: Calder. Burroughs, William S. (1989), Interzone, edited by James Grauerholz, New York: Viking. Burroughs, William S. (1993), The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Viking. Burroughs, William S. (2003), Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, New York: Grove.

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Burroughs, William S. (2012), Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan, New York: Penguin. Burroughs, William S. (2014a), Nova Express: The Restored Text, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Grove. Burroughs, William S. (2014b), The Soft Machine: The Restored Text, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Grove. Burroughs, William S. (2014c), The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Grove. Burroughs, William S. (2020), Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text, edited by Oliver Harris, London: Calder. Burroughs, William S., Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso (2020), Minutes to Go Redux, edited by Oliver Harris, Schönebeck: Moloko. Burroughs, William S. and Allen Ginsberg (2006), The Yage Letters Redux, edited by Oliver Harris, San Francisco: City Lights. Burroughs, William S. and Brion Gysin (1979), The Third Mind, London: Calder. Burroughs, William S. and Brion Gysin (2020), The Exterminator Redux, edited by Oliver Harris, Schönebeck: Moloko. Calder, John (1982), Foreword, The Naked Lunch, London: Calder. Corso, Gregory (2003), An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters, edited by Bill Morgan, New York: New Directions. Falconer, Rachel (2015), “The New Polymath (Remixing Knowledge),” in Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and Xtine Burrough (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, 397–408, London: Routledge. Fallows, Colin and Synne Genzmer (eds.) (2012), Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien. Ginsberg, Allen and Peter Orlovsky (1980), Straight Hearts’ Delight, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine. Goodman, Michael (1981), Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Metuchen: Scarecrow. Hones, Sheila (2008), “Text as it Happens,” Geography Compass 2(5): 1301–17. Jackson, Mark (2014), Nothing Short of Complete Liberation: The Burroughsian Ideal of Space as Curatorial Strategy in Audial Art, PhD, University of the Arts, London. Available online: http:​/​/ual​​resea​​rchon​​line.​​arts.​​ac​.uk​​/​7780​/. Miles, Barry (1982), “A Checklist of the Books of William Seward Burroughs,” in Roger Ely (ed.), The Final Academy, 37–42, London: The Final Academy. Murphy, Timothy (1997), Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs, Berkeley: University of California Press. Navas, Eduardo (2012), Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling, New York: Springer. Rice, Jeff (2007), The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Robinson, Edward S. (2011), Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Stephen, Voyce (2011), “Toward an Open Source Poetics: Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Commons,” Criticism 53(3): 407–38.

 Making Dead Fingers Talk 165 Tzara, Tristan (1981), “Dada Manifesto 1918,” rpt. in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weatherby, W. J. (2000), “Dressed for Tea” (1963), in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1996, 51–3, New York: Semiotext(e). Weissner, Carl (1970), The Braille Film, San Francisco: Nova Broadcast.

6

*Whale Drek The Lost Footnotes of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch Jed Birmingham

 *Whale Drek 167

Introduction The prepublication history of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch is a story of reference and citation. Allen Ginsberg referred to the virtually nonexistent Naked Lunch in the Dedication to “Howl,” as if to wish Burroughs’ nightmare vision into being. Little magazines, like Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review, excerpted Naked Lunch as proof that new, exciting literature spoke in the Silent Decade, and these quotations served as testimony against a bland literary establishment and the society that supported it. Despite making Time magazine’s list of the top novels of the twentieth century, Naked Lunch is something of a footnote to literary history. It is the quintessential cult novel, more referenced than read. It is from the margins, a book that percolates from the bottoms like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. An outlaw text, its legal battles are replete with footnotes, and its obscenity trial is a footnote to legal history. I first learned of Naked Lunch in a freshman survey of American Literature. Professor Wilson mentioned it as an aside during a discussion of Henry Miller. I duly marked down the title and the author in the margins of my notes and read it that summer. The footnote is the bane of academic and legal writers, yet despite its detractors, the footnote matters. For the forces of good, the footnote provides a foundation for supporting a main text’s points and arguments. For those of evil, a multitude of footnotes creates a briar patch of thorny issues and tangled arguments that threaten to engulf the body of the text and obscure it from view. Robin Lydenberg in Word Cultures discusses the footnotes of Nova Express. She suggests that Burroughs’ practice of footnoting began with the cut-up trilogy. In the “Double Text” section of Word Cultures, Lydenberg writes: The collaboration of minds achieved by the cut-up finds a most graphic representation in Nova Express in a kind of double text in which lengthy footnotes on the lower half of the page run parallel to the main narrative. This double-talk is in some ways an extension of the device Burroughs uses in Naked Lunch where brief parenthetical asides to the reader provide definitions or alleged historical sources for particular expressions or events. In the more complex structure developed in Nova Express, the definitional aside loses its derivative status as clarification of the primary text and takes on a life and energy of its own.

She proceeds to read Burroughs’ use of the footnote through Jacques Derrida. According to Lydenberg, Burroughs complicates the footnote’s reinforcement of binary oppositions by using the footnote to open and extend the text. The footnote, like the cut-up, provides a multilevel discourse. Furthermore, footnotes allow Burroughs to collaborate with the reader in an “effort to control rather than be controlled by the unwieldy mass of the ‘already written,’ the ubiquitous intertext.” Yet Burroughs’ use of the footnote was “already written” before Nova Express. The Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch clearly has footnotes. A long footnote appears

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in the “Market” section from pages 102 to 113, and deals with the yage experience (hereafter the “Yage footnote”). Brief notes on whale drek and venereal disease appear on pages 171 and 172, respectively. Most remarkably, the Olympia Press Naked Lunch ends with a note explaining the phrase “C’lom Fliday.” Technically this is not a footnote but I include it because Burroughs specifically mentions the reference as a footnote in a letter to Irving Rosenthal in 1960. In addition, the structure and placement of this note lends itself to spectacular literary effects that parallel those of the other more traditionally structured footnotes. Clearly, Burroughs makes literary use of the footnote before Nova Express. The Yage footnote is most definitely a “complex structure.” In fact, here, Burroughs, like Derrida in his essay “Living On,” quoted by Lydenberg, uses the “overrun of a running footnote which doubles his discourse.” Again like Derrida, Burroughs interrupts his own footnote with further citation, thus extending his text into an “infinite plurality.” The Yage footnote transgresses the limits of the text and collaborates with the reader, just as Lydenberg describes. In addition, the Naked Lunch footnotes, including the seemingly short and insignificant asides on whale drek and venereal disease, also have, as Lydenberg observes of the footnotes in Nova Express, a “complex relationship to the main narrative” that has been overlooked and glossed over. They have “a life and energy of [their] own.” The reason for this oversight is simple. Nobody, including the most diligent of academics, reads the Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch. The Grove edition (1962) and, more recently, The Restored Text (2001) have become the standard texts. The Olympia edition is, in essence, a lost novel. Lydenberg with her reference solely to Naked Lunch’s parentheticals has the Grove Press edition at hand and in mind. Therefore, the footnote as a literary structure in the Olympia edition has faded from view. The footnotes on whale drek and venereal disease appear on page 179 of the Grove Naked Lunch. The note to “C’lom Fliday” appears in the Grove edition on page 144 at the end of “Ordinary Men and Women,” when that phrase first appears. True, much of the text of these Olympia footnotes remain but that is all. These citations are no longer outside the body of the text but have been incorporated within as parentheticals. The footnoted material is merely added to the end of the paragraphs they once noted. In addition, this footnote structure has been erased from literary history as written by academics like Lydenberg. The “lost” Olympia footnote is symbolized by the shift in spelling from “whale drek” in the Olympia edition to “whale dreck” in the Grove edition and The Restored Text. This may seem like a simple correction of a spelling error, but “whale drek” was not one of the errors Burroughs corrected in the reprint done shortly after the first Olympia edition, nor was the footnote as a literary structure. As demonstrated later in this essay, the form and content of these footnotes matter, and this seemingly meaningless shit, this drek, adds to the rich substance of Naked Lunch. What happened to the Yage footnote is far more complicated. In the Grove edition, the Yage footnote should begin on page 108, just after the beginning of the description of the Meet Café: “liquids to induce Latah.” In the Olympia edition, the footnote begins by providing a description of what a Latah is, followed by a description of Bang-utot.

 *Whale Drek 169 Bang-utot appears further down from Latah in the body of the Olympia Naked Lunch text (“perfected operation Bang-utot”). In the Grove edition, the note on Latah appears as a parenthetical following the first time that term appears in the novel, on page 28 (“a Latah trying to perfect A.O.P.”). The note dealing with Bang-utot appears across pages 71 and 72 of the Grove edition as a parenthetical following “a Bang-utot attack in Honolulu.” Again, after the first appearance of that term. The transfer of the Olympia footnote to the Grove edition proves, in some instances, to be even more convoluted. Another portion of the Yage footnote reads: Section describing The City and the Meet Café written in state of Yage intoxication . . . Yage, Ayuahuasca, Pilde, Nateema are Indian names for Bannisteria Caapi, a fast-growing vine indigenous to the Amazon region.

In the Grove edition, this appears in the body of page 109 as a parenthetical, with the additional note, “See discussion of Yage in Appendix.” This refers to Burroughs’ “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” (“Master Addict Letter”), originally published in The British Journal of Addiction in January 1957 and added as an appendix to the Grove edition. The portion of the footnote from pages 105 to 110 in the Olympia edition quotes the Yage section of the Master Addict Letter extensively. Burroughs’ citations to the Master Addict Letter in the Olympia edition theoretically should be printed in the Grove Appendix within the Yage notations of the Master Addict Letter. This is not fully the case. For example, Burroughs interrupts his own Yage footnote with a further citation, in a parenthetical, thus extending his text into an “infinite plurality”: So far as I could discover, only fresh-cut vine is active. I found no way to dry, extract or preserve the active principle. Tinctures are worthless, the dried vine completely inert. The pharmacology of Bannisteria requires laboratory research. Since the crude extract is such a powerful hallucinating narcotic, perhaps even more spectacular results could be obtained with synthetic variations . . . (Since this was written I have discovered that alkaloids of Bannisteria are closely related to LSD6, which has been used to produce experimental psychosis. I think they are up to LSD25 already.)

The Grove edition includes this parenthetical aside within the Master Addict Letter of the Appendix. Obviously, this aside never appeared in the original Master Addict Letter published in The British Journal of Addiction. (Note: A table documenting the incorporation of the Olympia footnotes within the Grove and Restored Text editions is attached as an Appendix to *Whale Drek: The Lost Footnotes of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch. The table does not compare against the original January 1957 text of the Master Addict Letter as published in The British Journal of Addiction but relies on the Master Addict Letter as reprinted in the Grove edition and The Restored Text. This is not to say there are not differences between the original and the reprints. In fact, there are; as the table notes, the Grove and The Restored Text revise scientific

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names and alter capitalization. The following paragraph provides examples of where the Olympia Press edition strays from the Master Addict Letter of The British Journal of Addiction. This discussion of differences from the Master Addict Letter may or may not be comprehensive, as the original Master Addict Letter was consulted only in isolated cases.) In a further wrinkle, Burroughs does not accurately quote the Master Addict Letter as published in The British Journal of Addiction in his citations. The footnoted phrase “Tinctures are worthless” does not appear in therein. This is not an isolated case. From the Olympia Press footnote: “All medicine men use it in their practice to foretell the future, locate lost or stolen objects, to diagnose and treat illness, to name the perpetrator of a crime.” And the Master Addict Letter: “All medicine men use it in their practice to foretell the future, locate lost or stolen objects, to name the perpetrator of a crime, to diagnose and treat illness.” The Grove Appendix includes the Master Addict Letter version and capitalizes “Medicine Men.” It is as if Burroughs transposed the end of the sentence as he was typing the Naked Lunch manuscript. To further complicate matters, this sentence also appears in the body of the Grove text in quotations (and not as a parenthetical) on page 110, just as Burroughs misquoted it in the Olympia footnote. The next part of the Olympia footnote, the routine on Old Xiuptutol, appears in the Grove edition, but again not in parentheticals, like the other portions of the Olympia note, but as if it were always a part of the body of the text. The final portion of the Olympia footnote, a further quotation from the Master Addict Letter on yage, is placed in the appendix of the Grove edition. As this summary proves, the Yage footnote of the Olympia edition is clearly a “complex structure” coming from multiple sources and taking multiple forms, such as academic quotation, routine and drug notation. Before Nova Express, Burroughs demonstrated the ability to use the form and function of the footnote in a complicated, multilevel manner. The Restored Text follows the conventions of the Grove edition when it comes to the Olympia Press footnotes. In the editors’ note to The Restored Text, Barry Miles and James Grauerholz explain, “But Burroughs himself relied upon the Grove text for years; he read from it at public readings, and made spoken-word recordings from it. Therefore the Grove edition guided us.” The footnotes are mentioned once in The Restored Text’s editors’ note: In the same letter [Burroughs to Ginsberg, July 3, 1960] Burroughs agreed to the inclusion of his long first-person letter to The British Journal of Addiction, “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs,” which was published in that journal in January 1957 at the behest of its editor, Dr. John Dent, and most of which was broken up into numerous footnotes in the Olympia edition of Naked Lunch.

Numerous is something of an overstatement as there are only three footnotes (four if you include the “C’lom Fliday” note) in the entire Olympia edition. Granted, the Yage

 *Whale Drek 171 footnote runs over numerous pages (from page 102 to page 113), but it is clearly one continuous footnote. Furthermore, this note is the only one that refers to the Master Addict Letter. Much of the Yage footnote actually deals with other material besides the Master Addict Letter, including definitions of Latah and Bang-utot and a short routine. Thus, the Olympia footnotes are not among the restored material within The Restored Text. While the footnoted material is incorporated into later editions (and, as demonstrated earlier, not incorporated verbatim), the structure of the footnote is lost. As demonstrated in this essay, this loss is sorely felt, like the sensation of the presence of a limb after amputation. A parenthetical is not the same as a footnote. The structure of a footnote carries with it conventions and connotations. Footnotes can be read symbolically and metaphorically. As literary structure a footnote has meaning outside of any text contained within it. Despite the editors’ note accompanying The Restored Text, the Master Addict Letter is not footnoted throughout the Olympia Press edition. For example, a reference to Nutmeg (the entry after Yage in the Master Addict Letter) is incorporated into the text of the Olympia Press edition, without a parenthetical or a footnote, on page 34. Parenthetical asides abound throughout the Olympia edition, yet there are only three footnotes. They are far from numerous. Burroughs specifically footnoted yage, whale drek and venereal disease. It could be argued that these footnotes were mistakenly included during the rushed and convoluted process of getting the Naked Lunch manuscript prepared for printing by Olympia Press. Miles and Grauerholz suggest, “Inevitably, with such a rushed editing job—typeset by compositors who did not read English well—a number of errors crept into the text.” But the limited, directed use of footnotes in the Olympia edition suggests authorial intention, not a compositor’s mistake. Miles and Grauerholz note that Burroughs “corrected about fifty [errors] when the book was reprinted a few weeks later.” The footnotes remain in the reprinted Olympia edition. In a letter to Rosenthal, who would edit the Grove edition, Burroughs wrote on July 20, 1960, “First a general statement of policy with regard to Naked Lunch. The Olympia edition aside from typographical errors is the way the book was conceived and took form. That form can not be altered without loss of life.” Truly, the alteration of the form of the footnote results in “loss of life.” What was Burroughs trying to say by means of his footnotes? What has been silenced in the typesetting and proofreading of the later editions? Naked Lunch has been described as a voracious text capable of incorporating anything and everything. In The Secret of Fascination, Professor Oliver Harris discusses this aspect of Naked Lunch in his analysis of whale drek. Professor Harris suggests that Burroughs could only find a cohesive (for lack of a better term) structure for Naked Lunch when Burroughs paradoxically abandoned conventional literary structures and found a purpose for his seemingly useless and unassimilable writings, like the letter routine. It was only when Burroughs embraced the routine that he found the form and structural foundation for Naked Lunch. In discussing the routine, Burroughs writes, “There is no such thing as an exhaustive routine, nor does the scholarly-type mind run to routines.” Yet nothing signifies “the scholarly-type mind” more than a footnote. So it is strange that the Yage footnote on

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pages 102 to 113 incorporates a routine and that the reference to whale drek is duly footnoted. So strange, in fact, that Professor Harris never mentions footnoting in his discussion of whale drek. The footnote to whale drek reads, “Whale drek is reject material that accumulates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it down. A horrible, fishy mess you can smell for miles. No one has found any use for it.” Like the routine, the structure of the footnote finds use for Burroughs’ excess material and places it in relation to the body of the text. That which was waste now has value. Professor Harris writes: It is therefore no surprise that Burroughs’ subject matter should return images of the worthless put to work. In the novel opening he describes in December 1954— which appears in the “Interzone” section of Naked Lunch—Burroughs planned to “incorporate” all his “scattered” material.

This “Interzone” section begins with the mention of whale drek. Footnoted material is at the novel’s origins. Footnoting, like the routine, is a literary device that allows Burroughs, to quote Professor Harris on the routine, “to incorporate fragments, making a textual body out of miscellaneous parts; to make the rotten mess ripe for marketing.” Burroughs realizes the audacity of his use of the routine, as just such a practice was used by Herman Melville in writing Moby Dick. In his discussion of whale drek, Professor Harris mentions that the “whale, itself, summons Moby Dick,” but he does not explore how whale drek also calls Moby Dick to mind. The British edition, entitled The Whale, like Naked Lunch, had difficulties with the printers and was released with a rearranged and incomplete ending. Henry Chorley, in the London Athenaeum, called the novel on publication “so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.” This Great American Novel is composed of whale drek of a sort—that is, philosophical mini-essays on various aspects of the whaling industry that make up the majority of the novel. The London Morning Chronicle (1851) described Melville’s digressions as follows: with that store of quaint and out-of-the-way information—we would rather call it reading than learning—which he ever and anon scatters around, in frequently unreasonable profusion, with the old mingled opulence and happiness of phrase, and alas! too, with the old extravagance, running a perfect muck throughout the three volumes, raving and rhapsodising in chapter after chapter—unchecked, as it would appear, by the very slightest remembrance of judgment or common sense, and occasionally soaring into such absolute clouds of phantasmal unreason, that we seriously and sorrowfully ask whether this can be anything other than sheer moonstruck lunacy.

The frustration over Melville’s endless digressions was a common mantra among contemporary reviewers. For example, the London Spectator (1851): “This sea novel

 *Whale Drek 173 is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad.” Or the London Literary Gazette (1851): This is an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive. The author has read up laboriously to make a show of cetalogical learning. Herman Melville is wise in this sort of wisdom. He uses it as stuffing to fill out his skeleton story. Bad stuffing it makes, serving only to try the patience of his readers, and to tempt them to wish both him and his whales at the bottom of an unfathomable sea.

This “muck,” this “stuffing,” is whale drek, that is, useless digressions on “cetalogical learning.” Yet these asides are precisely what make Moby Dick a classic. They can be viewed as Melville’s version of the routine. Burroughs is also aware of the ridiculousness of relying so heavily on such “reject material.” Burroughs parodies Melville’s method (and his own) by footnoting his reference to whale drek in precisely the tone and manner of the footnotes in Moby Dick. The first edition, The Whale, from 1851, likewise used an asterisk to indicate a footnote. Burroughs mocks Melville’s and his own refusal to part with any of their writing and using that refusal as the organizing principle of their novels. Burroughs’ footnotes also work as metaphor. Form follows content. The footnote as a literary device taps into the essence of whale drek. The “shipload of K.Y. made of genuine whale drek in the South Atlantic at present quaranteened by the Board of Health in Tierra del Fuego.” Whale drek is “quaranteened” in a footnote, set off from the body of the text, which it threatens to infect. As discussed by Professor Harris, Burroughs’ routines and fragments, his drek, took over his attempts at mainstream writing. The footnote is, likewise, “reject material,” which cannot be incorporated into, and which is cut out of, the body of the text. The footnote is made of accumulated information, excess. In “cooking down” or editing the body of a text, the footnote finds use for that which stubbornly remains outside the main narrative or argument. The footnote on whale drek, thus, is itself a form of whale drek. “Whale drek” is furthermore a term that smells fishy. It is just not quite right. So much so that it was changed to “whale dreck” in the later Grove and Restored Text editions. The term “whale drek” itself has become “reject material”; later editors could “find no use for it” when “cooking down” the Naked Lunch manuscripts. Throughout the Olympia edition, footnotes represent and enact that which is noted. “The Market” section begins on page 99 in the Olympia edition. Here Burroughs attempts to describe his yage experience. The narrative enters the Meet Café on the bottom of page 101, and on the next page begins a long footnote that runs until page 113. Like the Composite City, the Yage footnote is a composite text. It is a juxtaposition of fragments of the Master Addict Letter, references to other texts, drug notation and a short routine. Mimicking Naked Lunch itself, the footnote is “a mosaic of juxtaposition.”

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Burroughs writes on page 103: “Yage is space time travel.” Lydenberg suggests how the footnote draws attention to the space of the page and its layout. The footnote transports the reader spatially outside the body of the text into the margins, into a textual underworld. David Foster Wallace, describing his use of endnotes, states that one function was to “allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns.” For example, this to and fro, this shift of perception, enacts the experience of watching and playing tennis, a major theme in Infinite Jest. Running over several pages, the Yage footnote similarly takes the reader over multiple pages, across textual space, while taking the reader out of narrative time. Footnoting is, thus, a form of space-time travel; it parallels the yage experience as described in the body of the text resting above the note. The Composite City also contains reference to “a white museum.” The Yage footnote, with its reference to the Saturday Evening Post, True magazine and The British Journal of Addiction, functions as a repository for texts, a Borgesian archive. The footnote, like Burroughs’ yage vision of the Composite City or the Borgesian Library of Babel, has been viewed as an early form of hypertext. George Landow, who wrote the book on hypertext, so to speak, sees the scholarly footnote in precisely this fashion. He states in an interview: It seems fairly obvious that beginning readers—and that is many of us much of the time—read only in a more or less linear fashion. But as we become more sophisticated, we tend to use footnotes, glossaries, and we tend to leave the work we’re reading, consult another work, and then return to the first. That is very similar but not exactly the same as the experience of reading hypertext. And of course there are some print works that are more hypertextual than others. Scholarly works which have footnotes or end notes or glossaries are much more hypertextual than a straight novel or a short story.

The Yage footnote encourages just such an act of hypertextual reading with its tantalizing references to arcane articles. This is a further example of space-time travel, as diligent readers will leave the novel and track down the references in bookshops and libraries. The footnote puts them in physical motion and in contact with other related textual spaces. (Copies of The Saturday Evening Post and True magazine articles referenced in the Olympia footnote are included in the Appendix to *Whale Drek: The Lost Footnotes of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch.) Page 225, the last one with a page number, ends: “C’lom Fliday” Note Tanger, 1959.

The phrase “C’lom Fliday” appears earlier on page 139, so Burroughs specifically wanted a note in this precise location. The note is strategically, and oddly, placed

 *Whale Drek 175 between time (Fliday) and space (Tanger), as it transports the reader outside them both. Again, as with the Yage footnote, the reader experiences the physical act of moving through textual space, since to read the C’lom Fliday note, one must turn the page to an unpaginated verso, which contains the footnote and closing “THE END.” In this case, the movement through textual space is even more pronounced than in the Yage footnote since the unpaginated verso places the reader simultaneously outside, yet still technically inside, the text of Naked Lunch. This is the famous space between of which Burroughs writes in the Talking Asshole routine: a zone of possibility and freedom. Just before the Atrophied Preface in the “Hauser and O’Brien” section, Burroughs writes, “I had been occluded from time-space like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso. . . . Locked out. . . . Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection.” With the description of 1920s drug culture, the “C’lom Fliday” footnote takes readers on the “Far side of the mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O’Brien . . . clawing at a not-yet of Telepathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts:” Here, “The Heat is off ” the reader “from here on out. . . relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a land-locked junk past.” The C’lom Fliday note works as a literary device, which allows Burroughs to recreate the ending of Hauser and O’Brien in an Interzone outside of textual space and time. The reader experiences the Narrator’s act of liberation, since like the Narrator, the reader becomes occluded out of Naked Lunch by means of the anus of the note. In the footnote on page 172 on venereal disease, form again follows content. Footnotes take the reader, to quote Burroughs on the experience of reading Naked Lunch, “back and forth, in and out, fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement.” David Foster Wallace describes a similar “arrangement” but in terms of tennis. This intercourse between body and bottom is diseased. The footnote is a virus, a parasite that feeds on the body of the text, its host. Quoting Derrida, Craig Dworkin, in his book No Medium, writes of the footnote: Ostensibly outside the text that both contains and is framed by it, with a subservient role that nonetheless possesses an authority to trump the text that would seem to master it, the note is a dangerous supplement that establishes “the problematic limit between an inside and an outside that is always threatened by graft and by parasite.”

The most famous parasite in Naked Lunch is the Talking Asshole. This routine begins on page 126 in the Olympia edition. The Yage footnote, which ends just pages prior to this, foreshadows and enacts this infamous routine. Before footnotes were known as such, they were called “bottom notes.” This is represented typographically by the asterisk, the symbol of the Talking Asshole. Although the Yage footnote does not employ an asterisk, the whale drek footnote does. Shit, like whale drek, is “reject material” “you can smell for miles” and of which “[n]o one has found any use for it.” A footnote is the ass talking.

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Like the Talking Asshole, the Yage footnote is an act of ventriloquism. Burroughs references his own writing and thus the footnote, like a dummy, mouths Burroughs’ own words. Yet on pages 102–113, the subservient Yage footnote overtakes the body of the text and takes over the master narrative. In addition, the dummy slips control of the master, and misquotes the text (as described in the table located in the Appendix herein). Just as the Yage footnote foreshadows the upcoming Talking Asshole routine, the process of footnoting predicts the future of Burroughs’ literary practice. The footnote on whale drek reads: “Whale drek is reject material that accumulates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it down.” The key phase is “the process of cutting up.” The footnote is an early form of the cut-up. David Foster Wallace, again in his footnoting practice, “mimic[s] the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence.” These sensorial assaults cause slips, shifts and interruptions. Burroughs saw the cut-up, particularly the newspaper and fold-in methods, as working in a similar manner. In The Paris Review interview (1965), Burroughs states: cut-ups make explicit a psycho-sensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up.

The footnote, like the newspaper column format, forces the reader to shift his perception, in this case from the body of the text down and across pages. This is particularly true of the long, complex Yage footnote. Why was the footnote structure removed if it provides, as Lydenberg comments on Nova Express, such a vibrant “life and energy of [its] own”? In The Secret of Fascination, Professor Harris demonstrates in detail Burroughs’ effort to suppress the origins of his early novels. Footnotes are sites of repression. Damning evidence and testimony can be buried therein. Yet the act of reading them requires the movement from body to bottom and back again, thus enacting a return. As such, footnotes also draw attention to themselves allowing damned material to uncannily rise before the eyes of the reader. The Yage footnote works in precisely this manner. A composite text juxtaposing letter fragments and routines, the Yage footnote provides evidence of Naked Lunch’s origins in letters to Ginsberg, scientific writing (The British Journal of Addiction) and drug notation (The Yage Letters). A literary fragment, a ruin, it suggests the buried origins of the novel. Quite possibly, in editing the Grove Press edition, this incriminating corpse had to be dismembered into several pieces and scattered throughout the text. Interred in parentheses within the body of the text, the remains of the footnote could be consumed by readers with greater ease and, thus, less attention. The secret of fascination remains in plain sight, yet remains hidden, like “The Purloined Letter.”

 *Whale Drek 177 Footnotes also provide authority. They are the bedrock upon which legal argument is made. Burroughs’ self-quotation and references to The Saturday Evening Post and True magazine attempt to give credence to his seemingly outlandish claims. Not surprisingly, the pages above the Yage footnote describe a court case and contain the phrases “gentleman of the jury” and “Order in the Court.” Read after 1962, these legal phrases draw attention to the fact that the editing of the Grove Press edition was done with an obscenity trial in mind. By that year, Naked Lunch’s footnotes undermined (or uncovered, as the case may be) Burroughs’ “author”-ity, as described earlier. The asterisk suggests censorship and omission. Thus, the Olympia footnotes predicted their eventual deletion from the start. Furthermore, footnotes call attention to the layout of the page; they are protuberances on the body of the text. In Naked Lunch, these blemishes mar the otherwise clean pages of text, and they sully the image of a coherent whole. Furthermore, as moles, they burrow underneath the text, suggesting that Naked Lunch is merely a collection of whale drek or an infectious venereal disease. Burroughs, Ginsberg and Rosenthal were under the gaze of legal and critical judges as they scrutinized Naked Lunch. The body of the text on page 109 of the Olympia edition contains the ominous phrase “two types of publicity, favorable and otherwise.” Many of their edits were attempts to clean up the text for public display or to provide evidence testifying to the text’s moral center or its cohesive structure. In the process of beautification and rehabilitation, Naked Lunch’s footnote structure was marked up and redlined out of existence. Could Burroughs himself have called out the order to rub out the footnotes? As Burroughs told Rosenthal, the Olympia edition “is the way the book was conceived and took form. That form can not be altered without loss of life.” Yet in the next paragraph, Burroughs writes, “Yes it is definitely my intention that the book should flow from beginning to end without spatial interruption or additional chapter headings.” Footnotes are clearly “spatial interruption” and definitely disrupt the book’s flow. Burroughs then states that including the “Journal of Addiction article is an excellent idea. IN APPENDIX.” Burroughs authorizes a place for the majority of the Yage footnote. Perhaps Rosenthal took this as his cue to reposition the footnotes to enhance Naked Lunch’s flow. In Burroughs’ instructions to Rosenthal on editing the Grove edition, Number 47 reads, “The book should end with ‘No glot Clom Fliday.’ Explanation in footnote.” As demonstrated earlier, this footnote has atrophied and amputated spontaneous like the little toe amputates. Perhaps it, like the other footnotes, had to go in order to preserve Naked Lunch’s flow.*

* Besides signifying the presence of a footnote, the asterisk implies an absence. It is the sign of omission and the mark of the censor. The footnotes to the Olympia Press Naked Lunch therefore spoke of their own eventual deletion. In *Whale Drek: The Lost Footnotes of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch, they are restored. The Talking Asshole always gets the last word. Can you smell it?

*

 *Whale Drek 179

A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet**

(Latah is a condition occurring in southeast Asia. Other‑ wise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every motion once their attention is attracted by snapping the fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive involuntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once.) (Bang-utot, literally “attempting to get up and groaning . . .” Death occurring in the course of a nightmare . . . The condition occurs in males of S.E. Asiatic extraction . . . In Manila about twelve cases of death by Bang-utot are recorded each year.

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Yage is space-time travel***

One man who recovered said that “a little man” was sitting on his chest and strangling him. Victims often know that they are going to die, express the fear that their penis will enter the body and kill them. Sometimes they cling to the penis in a state of shrieking hysteria calling on others for help lest the penis escape and pierce the body. Erections, such as normally occur in sleep, are considered especially dangerous and liable to bring on a fatal attack . . . One man devised a Rube Goldberg contraption to prevent erection during sleep. But he died of Bang-utot.

 *Whale Drek 181

Inscribed on the coffin****

Careful autopsies of Bang-utot victims have revealed no organic reason for death. There are often signs of strangula‑ tion (caused by what?); sometimes slight hemorrhages of pancreas and lungs—not sufficient to cause death and also of unknown origin. It has occurred to the author that the cause of death is a misplacement of sexual energy resulting in a lung erection with consequent strangulation . . . (See article by Nils Larsen M.D., The Men with the Deadly Dream in The Saturday Evening Post, December 3, 1955. Also article by Earle Stanley Gardner for True Magazine.)

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Order in the Court.*****

Section describing The City and the Meet Café written in state of Yage intoxication . . . Yage, Ayuahuasca, Pilde, Nateema are Indian names for Bannisteria Caapi, a fastgrowing vine indigenous to the Amazon region. I quote from article by the author in British Journal of Addiction, Jan., 1957: “The active principle is apparently found throughout the wood and bark of the fresh-cut vine. The inner bark is considered most active and the leaves are never used. One must take a considerable quantity of the vine to experience full effects of the drug. About five pieces

 *Whale Drek 183

gentlemen of the jury******

of vine each eight inches long, for one person. The vine is crushed and boiled two or more hours with the leaves of a plant identified as Palicourea Sp. Rubiaecae—Indian name in Peruvian Amazon, ‘Caway.’ “Yage is a hallucinating narcotic that produces a profound derangement of the senses. In overdose it is a convulsant poison, the antidote being a barbiturate or other strong anticonvulsant sedative. Anyone taking Yage for the first time should have a sedative ready in the event of an overdose. “The hallucinatory properties of Yage have led to its use by

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A notorious metabolic junky*******

medicine men to potentiate their powers. They use it as a cure-all in the treatment of illness. Yage lowers body temperature and is of some use in treating fever. It is a powerful antihelmithic indicated for conditions of stomach or intestinal worms. Yage induces a state of conscious anesthesia and is used in rites where the initiates must undergo painful ordeals like whipping with knotted vines or exposure to the sting of ants . . . “So far as I could discover, only the fresh-cut vine is active. I found no way to dry, extract or preserve the active principle.

 *Whale Drek 185

In India, where they got no sense of time********

Tinctures are worthless, the dried vine completely inert. The pharmacology of Bannisteria requires laboratory research. Since the crude extract is such a powerful hallucinating narcotic, perhaps even more spectacular results could be obtained with synthetic variations . . .” (Since this was written I have discovered that the alkaloids of Bannisteria are closely related to LSD6, which has been used to produce experimental psychosis. I think they are up to LSD25 already.) “I did not observe any ill-effects that could be attributed to the use of Yage. The medicine men who use it continu-

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two types of publicity, favorable and otherwise******** ally in line of duty seem to enjoy normal health and longevity. Tolerance is soon acquired so that one can drink the extract without nausea or other ill-effects. “Yage intoxication is in some respects similar to hashish intoxication. In both instances there is a shift of viewpoint, an extension of consciousness beyond ordinary experience. But Yage produces a deeper derangement of the senses with actual hallucinations. Blue flashes in front of the eyes are peculiar to Yage intoxication. “There is a wide range of attitudes in regard to Yage.

 *Whale Drek 187

every Fact is incarcerate********

Many Indian and most white users regard it simply as another intoxicant, like coca leaves or alcohol. In other groups it has ritual use and significance. Among the Jivaro young men take Yage (Indian name ‘Nateema’) to contact ancestral spirits and receive a briefing for future life. It is used during puberty rites to anesthetize the initiates for painful ordeals. All medicine men use it in their practice to foretell the future, locate lost or stolen objects, to diagnose and treat illness, to name the perpetrator of a crime.” Since the Indian (straitjacket for Herr Boas—trade joke—

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unlock my Word Horde

The word cannot be expressed direct mosaic of juxtaposition defined by negatives and absences********

nothing so maddens an anthropologist as Primitive Man) does not regard any death as accidental, and they are unacquainted with their own self-destructive trends, referring to them contemptuously as “our naked cousins,” or perhaps feeling that these trends above all are subject to the manipulation of alien and hostile wills, any death is murder. The medicine man takes Yage and the identity of the murderer is revealed to him. As you may imagine, the deliberations of the medicine man during one of these jungle inquests give rise to certain feelings of uneasiness among his constituents.

 *Whale Drek 189

In a white museum room********

“Let’s hope Old Xiuptutol don’t wig and name one of the boys.” “Take a curare and relax. We got the fix in . . .” “But if he wig? Picking up on that Nateema all the time he don’t touch the ground in twenty years . . . I tell you, Boss, nobody can hit the stuff like that . . . It cooks the brains . . .” “So we declare him incompetent . . .” So Xiuptutol reels out of the jungle and says the boys

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A waste********

in the Lower Tzpino territory done it, which surprises no one . . . Take it from an old Brujo, dearie, they don’t like surprises . . . But leave us return to the author’s article: “The alkaloid of Bannisteria Caapi was isolated in 1923 by Fisher Cardenas—whoever he may be. He called the alkaloid Telepathine—also known as Bannisterine and Yageina. Rumpf demonstrated that Telepathine is identical with Harmaline, the alcaloid of Perganum Harmala. (I should mention in passing the close chemical affinity between Mescaline and Telepathine. The two states of intoxication are similar though not identical.)”

 *Whale Drek 191

genuine whale dreck********

*Whale dreck is reject material that accumulates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it down. A horrible, fishy mess you can smell for miles. No one has found any use for it.

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a side line********

*Six separate venereal diseases have been identified to date.

 *Whale Drek 193

“They are rebuilding the City.”

“C’lom Fliday” Note Tanger, 1959

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Note: Old time, veteran Scmeeckers—faces beaten by grey junk weather, will remember . . . In 1920s a lot of Chinese pushers around found The West so unreliable, dishonest and wrong, they all packed in, so when an Occidental junky came to score, they say. “No glot . . . Clom Fliday . . .”

 *Whale Drek 195

Appendix

Burroughs Unbound

196

Table Cooking Down the Olympia Press Footnotes Text of Footnote in Olympia Press Naked Lunch (Latah is a condition occurring in southeast Asia. Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every motion once their attention is attracted by snapping the fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive involuntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once.) (Bang-utot, literally “attempting to get up and groaning . . .” Death occurring in the course of a nightmare . . . The condition occurs in males of S.E. Asiatic extraction . . . In Manila about twelve cases of death by Bang-utot are recorded each year.) One man who recovered said that “a little man” was sitting on his chest and strangling him.

Olympia Press (1959) p. 102

Grove Press (1962)

p. 102

p. 71 as parenthetical: “Note:” added to beginning of paragraph; Bang-utot no longer italicized

p. 60-61 as parenthetical: “Note:” added to beginning of paragraph; Bang-utot no longer italicized; “S.E.” edited to “Southeast”

p. 103

p. 71 as parenthetical

p. 61 as parenthetical: Moved to end of paragraph beginning “Careful autopsies” p. 61 as parenthetical

Victims often know that they are p. 103 going to die, express the fear that their penis will enter the body and kill them. Sometimes they cling to the penis in a state of shrieking hysteria calling on others for help lest the penis escape and pierce the body. Erections, such as normally occur in sleep, are considered especially dangerous and liable to bring on a fatal attack . . . One man devised a Rube Goldberg contraption to prevent erection during sleep. But he died of Bang-utot.” Careful autopsies of Bang-utot p. 104 victims have revealed no organic reason for death. There are often signs of strangulation (caused by what?); sometimes slight hemorrhages of pancreas and lungs—not sufficient to cause death and also of unknown origin. It has occurred to the author that the cause of death is a misplacement of sexual energy resulting in a lung erection with consequent strangulation . . . (See article by Nils Larsen M.D., The Men with the Deadly Dream in The Saturday Evening Post, December 3, 1955. Also article by Earle Stanley Gardner for True Magazine.)

p. 28 as parenthetical: “southeast” edited to “South East”

p. 71-72 as parenthetical

p. 72 as parenthetical

The Restored Text (2001) p. 25 as parenthetical: “southeast” edited to “Southeast”

p. 61 as parenthetical: “One man” sentence added after “strangulation”; the reference to Larsen and Gardner articles printed as its own paragraph

 *Whale Drek 197 Section describing The City and the p. 105 Meet Café written in state of Yage intoxication . . . Yage, Ayuahuasca, Pilde, Nateema are Indian names for Bannisteria Caapi, a fast-growing vine indigenous to the Amazon region.

I quote from article by the author in British Journal of Addiction, Jan., 1957: “The active principle is apparently found throughout the wood and bark of the fresh-cut vine. The inner bark is considered most active and the leaves are never used. One must take a considerable quantity of the vine to experience full effects of the drug. About five pieces of vine each eight inches long, for one person. The vine is crushed and boiled two or more hours with the leaves of a plant identified as Palicourea Sp. Rubiaceae—Indian name in Peruvian Amazon, ‘Caway.’”

p. 105-106

Yage is a hallucinating narcotic that produces a profound derangement of the senses. In overdose it is a convulsant poison, the antidote being a barbiturate or other strong anti-convulsant sedative. Anyone taking Yage for the first time should have a sedative ready in the event of an overdose.

p. 106

p. 109 as parenthetical: “fast-growing” edited to “fast growing”; “See discussion of Yage in Appendix” added after “Amazon region.”

p. 91 as parenthetical; “Yage, Ayuahuasca, Pilde, Nateema” edited to “yagé, ayuahuasca, pilde, nateema”; “Bannisteria Caapi” edited to “Banisteriopsis caapi”; “See discussion of yagé in Appendix” added after “Amazon region.” p. 252 in Appendix as p. 226 in section entitled part of the “Letter from “Original Introductions a Master Addict to and Additions by the Dangerous Drugs”; “I Author” as part of “Letter quote” to “1957:” is deleted; from a Master Addict to “wood and bark” reads “the Dangerous Drugs”; reads as wood”; “One must take a the Grove edition with the considerable quantity of further revision “Palicourea the vine to experience full Sp. Rubiaceae” reads effects of the drug.” reads Palicourea fam. rubiaceae; “It takes a considerable quantity of the vine to feel the full effects of the drug.”; “About five pieces of vine each eight inches long, for one person” reads “About five pieces of vine each eight inches long are needed for one person.”; “plant” reads “bush”; “Palicourea Sp. Rubiaceae” reads Palicourea sp. rubiaceae; “Indian name in Peruvian Amazon, ‘Caway.’” is deleted p. 253 in Appendix pp. 226-227 in section as part of the “Letter entitled “Original from a Master Addict Introductions and to Dangerous Drugs”; Additions by the Author” “Yage is a hallucinating as part of “Letter from narcotic that produces a a Master Addict to profound derangement of Dangerous Drugs”; the senses.” reads as “Yage “Yage is a hallucinating or Ayuahuaska (the most narcotic that produces a commonly used Indian profound derangement of name for Bannisteria the senses.” reads as “Yagé caapi) is a hallucinating or Ayahuasca (the most narcotic that produces a commonly used Indian profound derangement of name for Banisteriopsis the senses.”; comma after caapi) is a hallucinating “strong” narcotic that produces a profound derangement of the senses.”; comma after “strong”; “yage” reads “yagé”

198 The hallucinatory properties of Yage have led to its use by medicine men to potentiate their powers. They use it as a cure-all in the treatment of illness. Yage lowers body temperature and is of some use in treating fever. It is a powerful antihelmithic indicated for conditions of stomach or intestinal worms. Yage induces a state of conscious anesthesia and is used in rites where the initiates must undergo painful ordeals like whipping with knotted vines or exposure to the sting of ants . . .

Burroughs Unbound p. 106-107

So far as I could discover, only the p. 107-108 fresh-cut vine is active. I found no way to dry, extract or preserve the active principle. Tinctures are worthless, the dried vine completely inert. The pharmacology of Bannisteria requires laboratory research. Since the crude extract is such a powerful hallucinating narcotic, perhaps even more spectacular results could be obtained with synthetic variations . . .” (Since this was written I have discovered that alkaloids of Bannisteria are closely related to LSD6, which has been used to produce experimental psychosis. I think they are up to LSD25 already.) I did not observe any ill-effects that p. 108-109 could be attributed to the use of Yage. The medicine men who use it continually in line of duty seem to enjoy normal health and longevity. Tolerance is soon acquired so that one can drink the extract without nausea or other ill-effects. Yage intoxication is in some respects p. 109 similar to hashish intoxication. In both instances there is a shift of viewpoint, an extension of consciousness beyond ordinary experience. But Yage produces a deeper derangement of the senses with actual hallucinations. Blue flashes in front of the eyes are peculiar to Yage intoxication.

p. 253 in Appendix as part of the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; “hallucinatory” reads “hallucinating”; “medicine men” reads “Medicine Men”; “consequently” inserted between “and” and “is”; “treating fever” reads “treatment of fever”; “It is a powerful antihelmithic indicated for conditions of stomach or intestinal worms.” reads “It is a powerful antihelminthic, indicated for treatment of stomach or intestinal worms.”; comma after “anesthesia”; “painful ordeals” reads “a painful ordeal”; ellipsis replaced with period p. 253 in Appendix as part of the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; “Tinctures are worthless, the dried vine completely inert.” reads “No tinctures proved active. The dried vine is completely inert.”; Bannisteria reads yage; comma after “powerful”; “Certainly the matter warrants further research” added before footnote; “written” reads “published”; “that alkaloids” reads “the alkaloid”

pp. 227 in section entitled “Original Introductions and Additions by the Author” as part of “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; reads as the Grove edition with the addition of “yagé” for yage

p. 253 in Appendix as part of the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; “illeffects” reads “ill effects” or “ill effect”; “medicine men” reads “Medicine Men”; “and longevity” is dropped p. 253-254 in Appendix as part of the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; addition of “Yage is a unique narcotic.” at beginning of paragraph; “hashish intoxication” reads “intoxication with hashish”;

pp. 227 in section entitled “Original Introductions and Additions by the Author” as part of “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; reads as the Grove edition with the addition of “yagé” for yage pp. 227-228 in section entitled “Original Introductions and Additions by the Author” as part of “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; reads as the Grove edition with the addition of “yagé” for yage

pp. 227 in section entitled “Original Introductions and Additions by the Author” as part of “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; reads as the Grove edition with the addition of “yagé” for Bannisteria; Bannisteria in footnote reads “Banisteriopsis”

 *Whale Drek 199 There is a wide range of attitudes in regard to Yage. Many Indian and most white users regard it simply as another intoxicant like coca leaves or alcohol. In other groups it has ritual use and significance. Among the Jivaro young men take Yage (Indian name “Nateema”) to contact ancestral spirits and receive a briefing for future life. It is used during puberty rites to anesthetize the initiates for painful ordeals. All medicine men use it in their practice to foretell the future, locate lost or stolen objects, to diagnose and treat illness, to name the perpetrator of a crime.

pp. 109-110

Since the Indian (straitjacket for Herr Boas-trade joke- nothing so maddens an anthropologist as Primitive Man) does not regard any death as accidental, and they are unacquainted with their own self-destructive trends referring to them contemptuously as “our naked cousins,” or perhaps feeling that these trends above all are subject to the manipulation of alien and hostile wills, any death is murder. The medicine man takes Yage and the identity of the murderer is revealed to him. As you may imagine, the deliberations of the medicine man during one of these jungle inquests give rise to certain feelings of uneasiness among his constituents.

pp. 110-113

“Let’s hope Old Xiuptutol don’t wig and name one of the boys.” “Take a curare and relax. We got the fix in . . .” “But if he wig? Picking up on that Nateema all the time he don’t touch the ground in twenty years . . . I tell you, Boss, nobody can hit the stuff like that . . It cooks the brains . . .”

p. 254 in Appendix as part of the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; “white” reads as “White”; “regard it” reads as “seem to regard it”; “coca leaves or alcohol” reads as “liquor”; “(Indian name ‘Nateema’) deleted; “to contact ancestral spirits and receive a briefing for future life” reads “to contact the spirits of their ancestors and get a briefing for their future life”; “puberty rites” reads as “initiations”; “medicine men” reads as “Medicine Men”; “to diagnose and treat illness, to name the perpetrator of a crime​.na​ me the perpetrator of a crime” reads as “name the perpetrator of a crime to diagnose and treat illness” ; the entire sentence also appears in quotes on p. 110 pp. 110-111 inserted in body of text without parenthetical; “seldestructive” is misspelled; “But leave us return to the author’s article:” is deleted

pp. 227-228 in section entitled “Original Introductions and Additions by the Author” as part of “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; reads as the Grove edition with the addition of “yagé” for “Yage”; the last sentence of this portion of the footnote appears on p. 92 without quotes

pp. 92-93 inserted in body of text without parenthetical; reads as the Grove edition with the addition of “yagé” for “yage”; misspelling corrected; “referring to them contemptuously as ‘our naked cousins’” moved to after “Primitive Man”; “Nateema” reads “nateema”; “Brujo” reads “brujo”

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“So we declare him incompetent . . .” So Xiuptutol reels out of the jungle and say the boys in the Lower Tzpino territory done it, which surprises no one . . . Take it from an old Brujo, dearie, they don’t like surprises . . . But leave us return to the author’s article: The alkaloid of Bannisteria Caapi was isolated in 1923 by Fisher Cardenas-whoever he may be. He called the alkaloid Telepathinealso known as Bannisterine and Yageina. Rumpf demonstrated that Telepathine is identical with Harmaline, the alcaloid of Perganum Harmala. (I should mention in passing the close chemical affinity between Mescaline and Telepathine. The two states of intoxication are similar though not identical.)”

p. 113

p. 254 in Appendix as part of the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”;”Caapi” reads “caapi”; “whoever he may be” deleted; “alkaloid” reads “alcaloid”; “also known as Bannisterine and Yageina” reads as “alternately Banisterine”; “demonstrated” reads “showed”; parenthetical to footnote is deleted

Whale drek is reject material that accumulates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it down. A horrible, fishy mess you can smell for miles. No one has found any use for it. Six separate venereal diseases have been identified to date.

p. 171

p. 179 in parenthetical attached to end of paragraph mentioning “whale dreck” not “whale drek”

P 172

Old time, veteran Scmeeckersfaces beaten by grey junk weather, will remember. . . In 1920s a lot of Chinese pushers around found The West so unreliable, dishonest and wrong, they all packed in, so when an Occidental junky came to score, they say.

Unpaginated

p. 179 in parenthetical attached to end of paragraph mentioning “six ways” p. 144 in parenthetical after “C’lom Fliday”; “Schmeckers, faces” not “Schmeeckers-faces”; : after “say”

“No glot . . . Clom Fliday. . .”

pp. 228 in section entitled “Original Introductions and Additions by the Author” as part of “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs”; this reads as follows “The alkaloid of Banisteriopsis caapi was isolated in 1923 by Fisher Cardenas. He called the alkaloid telepathine, alternately banisterine. Rumf showed that telepathine was identical with harmine, the alkaloid of Peganum harmala. p. 150 in parenthetical as its own paragraph after paragraph mentioning “whale dreck” not “whale drek” p. 150 in parenthetical as its own paragraph after paragraph mentioning “six ways” p. 121 in parenthetical after “C’lom Fliday”; “Schmeckers-faces” not “Schmeeckers- faces”; between “weather” and “will” : after “say”

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7

“There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” Burroughs’ Textual Infection of the New York School Nick Sturm

Writing to Brion Gysin from Tangier on June 30, 1964, William Burroughs relays his interest in a new visual-textual cut-up project. “I am most anxious to discuss with you a plan to publish a magazine about the length of Time in the Time format with your drawings and my text,” writes Burroughs. The aesthetic aim of the proposed collaboration was clear: “The point is to find precise intersection points between text and drawing” (Morgan 2012: 103). The unstated political aim, though it would have been explicit to both of them, was to cut up Time as a response to the infamous “King of the YADS” review of Naked Lunch, published in the November 30, 1962, issue of the magazine. Describing Burroughs as “lured by the sirens of faucet composition and second-growth Dada,” the reviewer disparages his writing as grotesque and irrational, “utter babble” that amounts to an “embarrassment” to American literature (“King” 1962). Not only was his work illegible, but Burroughs was cut through with moral failings—drugs, violence, homosexuality, even self-mutilation to avoid military service—claims that led him to sue the magazine. “Time, Life, and Fortune is some sort of police organization” (1965a), Burroughs told The Paris Review, recognizing the trinity of popular magazines run by Henry Luce as a manipulative media syndicate, a coordinated effort to control and correct American cultural and political discourse. In this context, the description of the cut-up method as “Time cut to pieces,” followed by the mirrored command “Cut time to pieces,” resonates with his plan for a new cut-up of Time, a material enactment of the method’s formal terms (Burroughs 1961). It was time to attack Time. Published in 1965 by Ted Berrigan’s “C” Press, Burroughs’ TIME, which includes four drawings by Gysin, is the most sustained textual-visual cut-up experiment that he produced in the 1960s. Burroughs had been publishing column-style cut-ups with some basic graphic elements in the London-based My Own Mag since early 1964, and while his collaboration with Gysin, The Third Mind (created in 1965 but not published until 1978), planned to include a range of dense visual-textual collages, the published version—restricted by costs associated with reproducing Burroughs’ complex visual

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texts—is composed mostly of essays about the cut-up method as well as examples of textual cut-ups. Only the seven-page “The Dead Star,” published in a late issue of My Own Mag and reissued as a pamphlet in the Nova Broadcast series in 1969, is visually similar to TIME. Standing on its own, TIME is notable for its length, the variety of visual texts and cut-up styles it incorporates, and its weaponized intertextuality with Luce’s magazine. It is also notable as one of the most little-known of Burroughs’ works, released in an edition of 1,000 copies that are now available mostly in university special collections and as rouge PDFs. It remains nearly unaccounted for in scholarship.1 Despite the archival turn in literary scholarship and increased focus on critical recuperation projects, especially the genetic criticism of Burroughs’ novels, TIME has yet to be recognized as a critical hinge in mid-1960s avant-garde American aesthetics. As Jed Birmingham notes, Literature professors are still reading the Grove cut-up trilogy in an effort to unlock the mysteries of Burroughs’ technique and not the “C” Press Time, The Dead Star or his little magazine appearances, let alone the thousands of cut-up experiments, including hundreds of combinations of text and image, in the NYPL. . . . Studying the Restored Texts by Oliver Harris will not correct this failing. (2015)

A turn to TIME addresses this gap in scholarship of Burroughs’ work and allows for a closer look at the aesthetic production that coincided with his tumultuous, influential visit back to the United States from 1964 to 1965—a year where Burroughs swirled through New York City’s art scenes. To the younger poets of the so-called “Second Generation” New York School—such as Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Tom Veitch—Burroughs arrived in New York City as a “returning hero” (Veitch 2009) who, through the publication of his Nova Trilogy novels and regular appearances in avantgarde magazines like Evergreen Review, had been the source of an array of innovative composition methods. Though glossed over or unacknowledged by scholars, there is a deep aesthetic reciprocity between Burroughs’ methods and the experimental compositions of the New York School writers who met and collaborated with Burroughs during this time. “The word is a virus” (1985: 51), Burroughs famously announces, though his textual infection of the New York School has gone undiagnosed. One reason for this oversight is that academic classifications of New York School and Beat writers have tended to isolate figures like Burroughs and Berrigan. But in the mid-1960s both writers’ work show vivid traces of their influence on one another. TIME especially embodies a startling collaboration between these writers at pivotal moments in their careers. Nevertheless, when Berrigan is mentioned as the publisher of TIME in Call Me Burroughs, Barry Miles’ description reduces him to a minor actor, even a caricature. Burroughs made contact with poet Ted Berrigan, the bearded, overweight father figure of the Lower East Side poetry scene. He was the editor of C: A Journal of Poetry, and had published one of Bill’s experimental texts, “Giver of Winds Is My Name,” in the summer of 1964, the first of his texts to use Egyptian glyphs.

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 231 Berrigan was enthusiastic about his work so Bill gave him another text, “Fits of Nerves with a Fix,” which he published that February. (2013: 434–5)

This description of Berrigan as a folksy beatnik-like patriarch reflects the degree to which mythologized representations of him as a merely social rather than a literary figure continue to be perpetuated in contemporary scholarship. In addition to being extraneous, Miles’ inclusion of “overweight” in his description suggests an image of Berrigan that coalesced around his death in 1983 rather than an understanding of him twenty years earlier in a pre-Poetry Project New York. In other words, Miles’ inherited rather than studied portrayal is not only erroneous, it has the effect of short-circuiting the legitimacy of this “Lower East Side” poet (notably not “New York School”). Miles also presents a one-way conversation in which an acolyte-like Berrigan-as-editor shepherds Burroughs’ work into print. While Berrigan did publish three cut-ups by Burroughs in C: A Journal of Poetry (not two, as Miles suggests) before publishing TIME, there is more to be said about Berrigan’s catalytic effect on Burroughs as well as the ongoing influence of Burroughs’ methods on the work of the New York School poets, such as Berrigan’s unpublished cut-up novel Looking for Chris and the novels of Tom Veitch. In fact, the piece by Burroughs that Miles references, “Fits of Nerves with a Fix,” can be read as a microcosm of the more nuanced aesthetic exchanges between Burroughs and the New York School. Miles suggests that Burroughs submitted “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” to be published in C, but the piece has a much more fascinating collaborative origin. It was actually Berrigan who instigated the composition of “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” when he gave Burroughs a fill-in-the-blank form, titled “Fits of ___________,” which he had been passing around to a small group of mostly New York School writers. Berrigan created the fill-in-the-blank form—whose title refers to Joseph Ceravolo’s Fits of Dawn (“C” Press, 1965)—by adapting a paragraph from an essay on literary tradition and Christian values called “Voices of the Dead” by John Cumming, a strange text collected in the 1883 tome Gems for the Fireside Comprising the Most Unique, Touching, Pithy, and Beautiful Literary Treasures. The dramatic Victorian seriousness of this obscure text with its B-movie-like title and overwrought prose—“go forth into the high places, or into the lowly places of the land; mix with the roaring cataracts of social convulsions” (Cumming 1883: 300)—make the piece ripe for appropriation and erasure. Berrigan would have been delighted at how the essay’s proclamations about the moral obligations of writing, how “the echoes of our words are evermore repeated” (298), serendipitously resonant with his own composition methods. Cumming’s statements that what one writes “is repeated after him in ever-multiplying and neverceasing reverberations” and that “[l]iving we act, and dead we speak” (300) function as uncanny readymade descriptions of Berrigan’s own dense textual repetition, collaged sourcing, and playful critiques of literary tradition. (It would not have escaped Berrigan that Burroughs’ Dead Fingers Talk echoes in Cumming’s otherworldly proclamation that “dead we speak.”) The essay even appears to invite its own erasure in a bizarre declaration of nineteenth-century religious individuality: “He may be a blot, radiating his dark influence outward to the very circumference of society, or he may

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be a blessing, spreading benedictions over the length and breadth of the world; but a blank he cannot be” (298–9). Nevertheless, a set of blanks he became—twenty-four blanks, to be precise, which were filled out individually and collaboratively by Berrigan, Burroughs, Padgett, Dick Gallup, and Aram Saroyan. For example, the opening sentences of the form reads, “It is only the ___________ that brings forth ___________. The ___________ will only produce ___________.” In Burroughs’ syntactically rearranged version, this becomes: “It is only the paper moon that brings forth a violet evening sky over the empty broken streets. Will only produce distant wind and dust.”2 The one-paragraph prose works generated by the fill-in-the-blank form were published together in the late 1964 mimeograph booklet Fits, a rare document that embodies the New York School’s playful enlargement of literary collaboration. Notably, Burroughs is the only non–New York School writer included. When “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” was published again in the tenth issue of C magazine, Burroughs had expanded it by cutting up the original single paragraph to generate three additional poem-like sections, a miniature poetic sequence of repetitions and variations that formally resembles Berrigan’s own The Sonnets more than any of Burroughs’ other one-off texts from the mid-1960s. In this sense, “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” is a distinctly Berrigan-esque work by Burroughs that was composed out of a series of close social and aesthetic collaborations with the younger New York School poet. That the issue of C including “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” was published on February 14, 1965—the occasion of Burroughs’ well-known Valentine’s Day reading at the American Theatre for Poets—further confirms the close textual bond between Berrigan and Burroughs in the mid-1960s. As this genetic analysis of “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” shows, uncovering the aesthetic interactions between Burroughs and the New York School poets from archival sources and little magazines provides an opportunity for more nuanced, specific descriptions of the experimental composition methods used by these writers. For instance, it is not uncommon to read that Berrigan’s The Sonnets are cut-up poems—an inaccurate description, at least as it corresponds to Burroughs’ method, though Berrigan did utilize Burroughs-style cut-up methods for other poems and prose works. Highlighting the differences in source material, process, and purpose for the New York School’s use of these methods—especially where it intersects with Pop art, parody, autobiography, genre, and canonical critique—goes a long way toward making aesthetic distinctions in what is too often generalized as a catch-all experimentalism, “the hazy canon of 1960s experimental poetry” (2000: 108), as Libbie Rifkin disparagingly calls it. Describing the compositional methods of the New York School, especially as they arise and diverge from Burroughs, generates an interdisciplinary network of associations and influences that give clearer portraits of the artistic choices made by both Burroughs and the New York School poets. The “C” Press edition of TIME foregrounds this sense of avantgarde purposefulness when it announces on the title page, unironically, that “[t]here are no typographical errors in this edition” (Burroughs 1965b). TIME is an unwieldy facsimile text full of blacked-out lines, cross-outs, overlapping text, handmade corrections, drawings, and photographs that use a variety of vertical and horizontal formal arrangements—but nevertheless, there are “no errors.” This absorption of the

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 233 rough edges of experimental process, the inclusion of the “error” or mistake while denying it as such, is central to how Burroughs formally infects the New York School. One of the earliest intersections between Burroughs and the New York School is found in the second issue of Locus Solus, the elegantly printed journal edited by John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James Schuyler. In the summer of 1961, Koch edited the special collaboration issue, Locus Solus II, that opens with Ashbery’s cento “To a Waterfowl” and features the first publication from Ashbery’s and Schuyler’s collaborative novel A Nest of Ninnies. This issue is often cited as the catalyst for the collaborative ethos of the younger New York School poets. As Padgett says, “Not only was the magazine wonderful in itself, it provided historical precedents. The collaborative spirit that Kenneth fostered in that issue energized me and Ted to do more collaborations” (Kane 2003: 162). While Locus Solus is edited by and has a strong focus on New York School poets, similar to Evergreen Review and other avantgarde magazines in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it published a range of writers that do not reflect or solidify the aesthetic categories recently established by Donald Allen’s Grove Press anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. For example, Burroughs’ and Gregory Corso’s cut-ups of Arthur Rimbaud appear alongside Frank O’Hara’s “Choses passagères,” described as a collaboration between O’Hara and “The French Language,” as well as Ruth Krauss’ poem made from a mashup of texts by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and Shakespeare. The inclusion of these different methods under the banner of collaboration is crucial for understanding how poets like Berrigan absorbed their influence. The way in which collaborating “jars the mind into strange new positions” (1961: 193), as Koch describes in the afterword of Locus Solus II, is embodied in each of these methods—cut-ups, experimental translation, and, as in Krauss’ poem, sourcing texts from disparate contemporary and historical sources, what Koch describes as “drawing on them at regular intervals—i.e. using them as if they were other poets in the room” (197). In this sense, collaboration is something one does with other writers, with existing texts and sources, and even with other languages, all potentially simultaneously. The happenstance of proximity—“as if they were other poets in the room”—is key. Also shared among these experiments is an interest in using different methods to variously address, critique, and humorously amend established and avant-garde literary canons. Transforming Rimbaud, playing fast and loose with French translation to occupy the language of the European avant-garde, and placing Shakespeare, the textual embodiment of canonicity, in conversation with nonliterary sources are all moves that Berrigan would experiment with in the 1960s. The Burroughs-Corso cut-ups—both of which originally appeared in Minutes to Go (1960), the first published manifestation of the cut-up project—combine two of these methods as Burroughs and Corso transform the polyphonic modernism of Rimbaud’s prose poem “To A Reason” into clipped fragments of near-lyric non sequiturs. The poems are made of terse, unsettling lines—“Everywhere / march / your / head” (Burroughs and Corso 1961: 148–9)—that embody the process of dismemberment that produced them. In fact, the note on the poems describes these cut-ups as “arrangements,” suggesting an extraliterary aesthetic resonance with mediums such as the musical compositions of John Cage. In Burroughs’ and Corso’s hands, Rimbaud’s

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avant-garde dictum that the poet “arrive[s] at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses” (1957: xxvii) becomes a systematized derangement of all the sources, a conversation between the dead and living that degrades and remakes historical and canonical hierarchies. And in case an uninitiated reader might wonder if cut-ups are restricted to solemn engagements with the literary, Corso’s “collaboration” with Dwight Eisenhower, titled “Cut Up,” directly follows these two poems in the issue, a signal that these methods are equally available for critical Cold War spoofs using the banal discourse of American imperialism. In fact, cutting up sources imbued with such nationalistic power might offer the terms for (re)weaponizing the avant-garde. As Corso writes in the Eisenhower cut-up: “it has been my intention / so let the elements raid” (1961: 152). Locus Solus served as an index of experimental composition methods for Berrigan, Padgett, Brainard, and Veitch. They would have still been reading these poems when the famous Art of Assemblage exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1961, a show that explicitly articulated how the modernist avant-gardes enacted a “liberation of words” and a “liberation of objects” (Seitz 1961: 13–21). “It was the poets,” curator William Seitz writes, “working with less physical and more immediately responsive materials than the painters and sculptors, who . . . responded most rapidly and directly to the spirit of the times” (13). “[T]he confrontation of fragments as a literary method” in the poetry of Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Reverdy, and Cendrars, as well as the “literary cubism” (13) of André Gide’s novels, are all cited in Seitz’s account of how writers “decided to use as poetical material any words or word combinations, however mundane, jarring, or disassociated they might appear” (15). When Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath was published in 1962, the younger New York School poets immediately recognized the resonances between these avant-garde lineages and Ashbery’s kaleidoscopic collage poems. Berrigan’s The Sonnets, composed from late 1962 to early 1963 using a range of methods that include collaged sourcing, assemblage and reordering, and experimental translation, emerged directly from this rich interdisciplinary environment. As Berrigan says in a 1971 interview, he had “been given permission to do this by my readings in Duchamp, John Cage, Bill Burroughs, [and] John Ashbery” (1991: 25). He then makes an important distinction, echoing the language of liberation from the MoMA catalog: “I mean these people sort of gave me permission which I already felt I had received . . . to cut up things, move things around, to be free” (Berrigan 1991: 27). This aesthetic permissiveness was confirmed and amplified by the litany of experimental artists and forms that Berrigan and his friends were exposed to in New York City during the early 1960s. In one three-day stretch in March 1962, Berrigan records that he attended a Jean Dubuffet exhibition at MoMA, saw plays by O’Hara and Koch, went to a “bad opera” based on The Sorrows of Young Werther, and saw a double feature of Breathless and L’Avventura, all while being “in a kind of trance from reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn” and “working on a series of poem collages based on the American flag theme” with Brainard (2010: 32–7). These motley sources became their own kind of assemblage that resonates as the artistic background out of which Berrigan produced The Sonnets. Everywhere Berrigan looked, permission was the aesthetic principle writ large.

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 235 Within this rush of avant-garde self-education, Berrigan was also metabolizing Burroughs’ work as a key figure in his personal lineage. Burroughs’ prose would have especially charged Berrigan’s interest in how experiences of time, particularly the effects of simultaneity, emerge out of collage and repetition. “I have read some of his cut-up poems in Locus Solus II,” he writes in a letter in March 1962, “and also a work of his called Naked Lunch, which was very exciting. It was a surrealistic piece of writing filled with horror and hallucination and was very well done” (Berrigan 2010: 79). Though The Sonnets is a distinctly un-Burroughsian text, Burroughs was one of the many literary presences that Berrigan carried into the composition of his first book, a sonnet sequence that operates as an out-of-sync parade of echoes whose repetitions and variations accumulate, dissolve, and ricochet off a prismatic pantheon of sources. Berrigan’s range of references is entirely his own, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Marilyn Monroe, William Carlos Williams, John Wayne, John Greenleaf Whittier, Charles Olson, Juan Gris, O’Hara, Shakespeare, a rotating cast of friends’ names, and many others. As Berrigan writes in one of the sonnets, “we love our lineage / Ourselves” (2005: 50), describing a celebratory and radical reframing of literary inheritance based on intimacy, proximity, and experimental momentum. This catalog of sources—his “lineage”—is idiosyncratic and eclectic, including lines “dissevered” from Gallup’s poems, material repurposed from Berrigan’s own earlier work, and poems that collage phrases from Brainard’s journal with descriptions of an actual visual collage made by Brainard like a kind of meta-ekphrastic montage. These sources accumulate into an alternative canon of intertextual sounds and textures that reads as a polyphonic autobiographical assemblage. However, the extent to which The Sonnets is composed from external sources and influenced by particular writers, especially O’Hara, has generally been overstated and mythologized. As Berrigan says in an interview in 1972, “The only works I cut up are my own, as I did in The Sonnets, and I didn’t really cut those up I did it visually, by looking at a page and taking a line, and then looking at another page” (1991: 28). The visual-textual process of assembling The Sonnets was therefore deeply self-referential, a kind of auto-poetic self-portrait of Berrigan’s history of writing, reading, and thinking about art in the energetic environment of New York City in the early 1960s. As I have written elsewhere, “These are ‘the Pollock streets’ of  The Sonnets, an aesthetic stage where Berrigan’s keen associational eye was able to trace a generative compendium of artistic influences and historical networks” (Sturm 2015). The poems constantly mix and disassemble aesthetic metaphors that put them in conversation with mediums and genres such as painting, music, architecture, dance, film, and radio. As Ashbery writes about The Sonnets, “Berrigan has converted poetry into an environment” (2004: 119). The Burroughs-Corso cut-ups of Rimbaud in Locus Solus would have had an influence on this experimental environment. In April 1962, Berrigan composed “a giant imitation/translation” of Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” “which is in part a translation,” he writes, though “[b]y imitation I mean that I have not attempted to be directly literal, rather I have tried to write as if I were Rimbaud” (2010: 224). This performative embodiment of Rimbaud, which involved “us[ing] words not in the French, etc.,” would be part of the material reworked into The Sonnets, a subtle weaving

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of Berrigan’s collaboration with Rimbaud—to use Koch’s terms—into the sonic background of the book. O’Hara’s collaboration with the French language, “Choses passagères,” also echoes in Berrigan’s “Mess Occupations,” a sonnet that often stands out to first-time readers of The Sonnets as one of the strangest, most singular poems in the book. In fact, “Mess Occupation” is a homophonic translation of Henri Michaux’s “Mes Occupations,” an experimental translation practice based on sonic associations and false cognates that requires no knowledge of a text’s source language. Hence, “Mes Occupations,” which translates to English as “My Pastimes,” in Berrigan’s hands becomes “Mess Occupations.”3 Within the poem itself, Michaux’s line “Je le mets sur la table, je le tasse et l’étouffe” becomes in Berrigan’s translation “Jelly him sure later! Jellyass ails are tough!” (2005: 50), an incredible musical derangement of the line’s sound and sense. One of the most memorable lines from The Sonnets, “I like to beat people up,” is actually an accurate translation sourced from “Mes Occupations,” showing how translation was a fluid process for Berrigan between fidelity and experimentation— both processes equally serious and useful. While “I like to beat people up” is easy to become attached to as one of the most direct first-person statements in The Sonnets, its collaged sourcing from Michaux’s humorously misanthropic poem suggests a more self-reflexive aesthetic reading. In light of “Mess Occupations” and Berrigan’s litany of experimental composition methods, “I like to beat people up” can be read as a description of the poet’s sourcing methods, a process of ecstatic and studied disassemblage in which friends, heroes, movie stars, and modernists are “beat up,” remade, into Berrigan’s poetry. In each case, expectations about clarity are superseded by an interest in process as a generative method, as a way to get to new language through creative reading practices. As The Sonnets reverberate and remind us, “Everything turns into writing” (Berrigan 2005: 53), a line that resonates equally with Burroughs’ massive intertextual cut-up project. In the spring of 1963, not long after Berrigan finished The Sonnets, he started editing C: A Journal of Poetry, the legal-size mimeograph magazine with covers by Brainard and Andy Warhol that, after the end of Locus Solus, redefined the aesthetic and material character of poetry magazines in the 1960s. C is a quintessential document of the so-called “Mimeo Revolution,” with issues published from 1963 to 1967 featuring a raucous amalgam of known and then-unknown writers such as John Wieners, Edwin Denby, LeRoi Jones, Joe Ceravolo, Barbara Guest, and Lorenzo Thomas. The magazine emerged simultaneously out of the latter-day coffee house poetry readings at Les Deux Magots and Le Metro, the censorship of an issue of Columbia Review edited by Padgett (released by Padgett and Berrigan as The Censored Review—the direct precursor to C), and the core communities of Lower East Side writers and artists who, before the establishment of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in 1966, could be found at Bob Wilson’s Phoenix Bookstore, Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore, and the early incarnations of Warhol’s Factory. C was also the occasion for Berrigan’s first correspondence with Burroughs. In the summer of 1964, Berrigan sent copies of C and Veitch’s Literary Days, the first mimeographed book published by “C” Press, to Burroughs in Morocco. On July 8, 1964, just over a week after Burroughs had written to Gysin about his proposed Time project, he sent Berrigan his inaugural contribution

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 237 to C, “Intersection shifts and scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch,” which Burroughs had constructed almost entirely from Veitch’s book. Burroughs even folded in the text accompanying Brainard’s illustration in the book—a drawing of a folding chair that reads “A chair that folds”—a process-based visual pun whose humor suggests a noteworthy playfulness within Burroughs’ methods. The cleverness of this choice certainly would have registered with Berrigan. In his letter, Burroughs describes his new piece as “an extension of the cut ups I call intersection writing or reading,” a process that Berrigan would have recognized as a variation on the appropriative, collage-based reading and writing methods he had already used to make The Sonnets.4 Just as Berrigan’s iconic timestamp “It is 5:15 a.m.” repeats in the simultaneous temporality of The Sonnets, Burroughs’ cut-up of Veitch’s prose is marked as his own through the inclusion of two iterations of his own signature date—“Sept. 17, 1899 over New York,” sourced from the opening pages of Nova Express. Berrigan began appropriating September 17, 1899, into his own homages to Burroughs, linking the two writers’ attentive reordering of time as an ontological and aesthetic marker. It is vital not to underestimate the importance of Berrigan’s first correspondence with Burroughs. As a young poet experimenting with a range of visual-textual art practices while studying and publishing the work of his peers and immediate New York School predecessors, Berrigan’s reception of Burroughs’ cut-up of Veitch’s book is essentially the act of Burroughs pulling Berrigan, Veitch, and “C” Press into the intertextual world of the cut-up project. The effect would have been enormously catalyzing. Burroughs ends his letter with further encouragement for C magazine and press: “Time I think for writers to do their own publishing.”5 To Burroughs, the rise of mimeograph magazines like C created a much-needed underground network that allowed him to generate and publish one-off and more wayward cut-ups situated beyond the Nova Trilogy, the last installment of which, Nova Express, had been published by Grove Press that year. The relationship that Burroughs developed with Berrigan through “C” Press was instrumental for the proliferation of experiments he was undertaking in the mid-1960s. For Berrigan, as our understanding of The Sonnets shows, his relationship with Burroughs strengthened his ongoing attention to the overlapping lineages of the writers whose aesthetic he was absorbing. Here was the real Willie the Agent, as well as the real Old Bull Lee, emerged from the fictional worlds of Kerouac’s and Burroughs’ novels, all of which Berrigan knew well, mailing cut-ups from the land of Naked Lunch directly to Berrigan on the Lower East Side. It was a momentous alignment of sources and lineages. Following their first exchange, Berrigan wrote to Burroughs for more work for C, also asking about Burroughs’ familiarity with John Ashbery’s cut-up experiments, such as the long poem “Europe” from The Tennis Court Oath. On September 10, 1964, Burroughs wrote back: Yes I have talked with John Ashbery who has been using cut ups for years. Before I talked with him I knew that he was using cut ups from reading his work. There are of course many ways of doing cut ups and I no longer use the actual scissors on the page. You can arrange material in columns and read cross column, read

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lines in different order, pass material through grids ecetera [sic]. I would be most interested to see what a mathematician could work out in the way of cut ups to formulae.6

Burroughs’ fluency in Ashbery’s poetry would have confirmed a vital link between two of the most important experimental writers of the era. His miniature crash course in cut-up methods would have also been generative for Berrigan, who, after the publication of The Sonnets in 1964 with “C” Press, continued to experiment with a range of compositional methods including cut-ups, columns, erasure, and different kinds of collaged texts. The piece that Burroughs enclosed for his second contribution to C, “Giver of Winds is My Name,” was the most radical visual-textual cut-up he had made yet. “I hope the enclosed contribution is not too difficult to reproduce,” Burroughs warns.7 “Giver of Winds” includes four pages of three-column cut-ups “Traced from the Format of Newsweek, July 6, 1964,” making this text a direct precursor to TIME. Pages are interspersed with columns of hand-drawn glyphs and formulae, created by Ian Sommerville, some of which are, “owing to an error in the Scribe Dept.,” misplaced on the incorrect page (an “error” included in the original manuscript sent to Berrigan), all of which is followed by a one-page intersection cut-up of the July 7, 1964, edition of The New York Times.8 “[T]hat words are pictures,” as Burroughs writes in his letter, was further confirmation for Berrigan—who would begin writing reviews of visual art for ARTnews in March 1965—that attention to visual aesthetics is a vital part of his writing practice. Berrigan’s placement of Burroughs’ dense visual-textual cut-up between poems by Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest shows the importance of C as a venue for Berrigan to curate his predecessors and peers. Despite their surface differences, Berrigan experienced these writers’ work—New York School or not—as a continuum of literary influence. These influences converged when Burroughs came to New York City from Tangier on December 8, 1964. Berrigan and Veitch visited him just three days after he arrived in the city. As Berrigan writes in his journal on December 11, “Talked to Burroughs today & Brion Gysin at Hotel Chelsea about methods etc for 2 hrs. Gave him a fill in the blank & he sd it was an interesting idea & he’d try it.”9 This initial meeting not only generated “Fits of Nerves with a Fix,” it also led directly to Berrigan’s publication of Burroughs’ TIME a few months later. As Veitch recalls, Burroughs showed them notebooks full of his three-column cut-ups, which likely included the text of TIME. Berrigan and Burroughs would continue to meet regularly throughout December and into the next year. Interestingly, during this time Burroughs gave Berrigan and Veitch a set of cut-up materials to make their own version of “The Moving Times,” the column-style cut-up series that Burroughs had been publishing in Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag. Held in the archive at Northwestern University, this unpublished fivepage manuscript version of “The Moving Times,” which lists Burroughs as “Editor,” Veitch as “Managing Editor,” and Berrigan as “Publisher 1899-1965,” is an incredible collaborative text that shows Burroughs and the New York School experimenting together on a newspaper-style cut-up.10 This version of “The Moving Times” is notably distinct from the Burroughs-made versions in My Own Mag, including being more

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 239 dense with photographs, offering even more multidirectional and nonlinear reading methods, and devoting nearly all of the piece’s final page to the collaging of cut-out comic-book panels, a genre that the younger New York School poets were especially familiar with. In fact, this Berrigan-Burroughs-Veitch “Moving Times” is more similar to the Burroughs-Gysin collages, also produced in 1965 in New York City, that were originally intended to be published in The Third Mind. These visual-textual collages are a complete disruption of the cut-up methods that generated the Nova Trilogy, allowing for a more media-saturated compositional environment not restricted to traditional paragraph-organized prose. Like these original Third Mind collages, the BerriganBurroughs-Veitch “Moving Times” uses the page as a compositional frame that is organized and fractured in multiple ways, including pages that combine three-column sections, larger blocks of traditional text, and images altered by white-out, drawing, and collage. It even includes a set of glyphs cut-up from “Giver of Winds is My Name.” The intertextual Burroughs-New York School network was quickly expanding. “The Moving Times” is a precursor to TIME in terms of its compositional methods, interest in the mock magazine layout, and conceptual attention to time as an object of critique and reformation. Berrigan even adopts Burroughs’ 1899 timestamp as a mock birthdate for himself as “publisher” of “The Moving Times,” revealing the extent of Berrigan’s absorption of Burroughs’ Nova universe. (Burroughs had signed Berrigan’s copies of The Ticket That Exploded and The Exterminator during their first meeting in December.) It also appears that “The Moving Times” was assembled to be released as a pamphlet from Berrigan’s “C” Press, as the cover includes the note “Published every day in the year by “C” Press Inc.,” a nod to the bureaucratized dystopia of the Nova Trilogy and to the production of a collaged simultaneity in Burroughs’ texts. Though “The Moving Times” was never printed, “C” Press would publish TIME on April 15, 1965, just in time—as it was—for Burroughs’ appearance at Lester Persky’s “Fifty Most Beautiful People Party” at Warhol’s Factory, an avant-garde epicenter where Berrigan could regularly be found. Such events were living collages of the unwieldy range of American celebrity and experimentation, from mainstream to underground, that defined the aesthetic collisions of the mid-1960s. Berrigan’s publication of TIME is a significant event within this richly proliferating experimental milieu. Other than Jeff Nuttall in London, Berrigan was the only editor willing to facilitate the publication of Burroughs’ most radical visual-textual works. Issued as the fourth book from by “C” Press directly after Berrigan’s own The Sonnets, a publishing sequence that we should read as its own micro-lineage of collage aesthetics, TIME was edited by Padgett—with Brainard as “Art Director” and Berrigan as “General Editor”—a process that required Padgett to meticulously retype the entirety of the manuscript using a rented typewriter with the same fonts as Burroughs’ own machine. The result is a wildly experimental textual-visual collage composed of three distinct parts: a section of three-column cut-ups interspersed with images and altered pages from issues of Time, a four-page section of symbol drawings by Gysin, and a final section of intersection-style texts similar to Burroughs’ “Intersection shifts and scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch.” Though many of the words are unconventionally broken within individual columns to maintain Burroughs’ cut-up

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margins, the first column on the opening page begins stably enough with this direction (which is transcribed here without the fractures in the text): Now try this: Take a walk a bus a taxi. Do a few dreary errands in these foreign suburbs here. Sit down some cafe drink a coffee watch the TV look through the papers look listen around. Now return to your trap one way or another and write what you have just seen heard felt with particular attention to intersection points: “Do you have the time, sir?” (1965b: 1)

From the interjection of the disembodied, culturally complacent voice asking for the time, a stark manifestation of one’s inability to escape their “trap,” Burroughs’ text spirals into a mesh of fragments, repetitions, and déjà vu-like flashes of recognition

Figure 7.1 Page one from Burroughs’ TIME featuring the three-column cut-up arrangement used in most of the first half of the text.

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 241 that, in general, can be read as a deformed record of an experiment in time travel. As the Brainard-designed advertisement for TIME states: “BURROUGHS DE- / CLARES TIME WAR. Wm. Burroughs, internationally famous author of The Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc., declared today a time war on (continued on page 5 . . .).”11 This “time war” is enacted in TIME as a splintering of dates—September 17, 1899; August 1, 1917; May 25, 1917; March 23, 1918; January 15, 1953—that are metaphorically and literally the times of Burroughs’ other texts—The Dead Star, “Coldspring News,” Naked Lunch, and the Nova Trilogy novels—all of which are referenced or alluded to in TIME. The text of the time travel narrative in TIME is itself a cut-up of “The Mayan Caper” section of The Soft Machine, where the original’s The Evening News becomes Burroughs’ own recently created paper The Dead Star: THE DEAD STAR brings you the shocking story of The Mayan Caper special to THE DEAD STAR @@@ by J.Brundi by J.Q??Brundiage: “We will travel not only in space but in time as well.” A Russian scientist said that. I have just returned from a thousand year time trip and I am here to tell you what I saw to tell you how such time trips are made. It is a precision operation. It is difficult. It is dangerous as the early days of aviation. It is the new frontier and only the adventurous need apply. It belongs to anyone who has the courage and the know how to travel. It belongs to you. I started my trip in the old newspaper morgue. Like this. Like this. Take today’s paper. Fill up three columns with selections you scan out. Now read cross column. (1965b: 2)

Stripped from the context of The Soft Machine, this description of the fold-in technique as time travel is even more bizarre than in the original, though it also acts as a stabilizing fragment within the broken surface of language that surrounds it. The excerpt’s dissolution begins at the appearance of “the old newspaper morgue” where the repeated “[l]ike this” becomes a self-referential gesture to TIME itself. As the column progresses over subsequent pages, pieces of the fold-in description reappear in even more dissolved states, like this excerpt: Now consider the picture through word columns. Now as you move back in time orgetting” present time the page. The page is “f less of present time on e you do this there is and so on back. Each tim selections from yesterday maining two columns with ing. Now fill in the re with cross column reading column on another page. (1965b: 3)

Turn to anywhere in TIME and a reader will find this kind of maimed composite text cut through with visual content. This includes simple graphic marks but also more elaborate visuals, such as a full-page unaltered advertisement for the Johns-Manville company’s “Celite diatomite filter aids” illustrated with an image of a convex New York City skyline emitting small circles through a grid—an illustration that Burroughs would have found both resonant and horrifying—as well as a range of other pictures. Some of these images have been added by Burroughs, such as a profile portrait of

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Burroughs strangely illuminated, a photograph of the Grove Press edition of Nova Express on top of an issue of Time in Burroughs’ suitcase, a nude man in a sculpturelike pose, and a portrait of the Missouri-born outlaw Bob Younger of the Jesse James Gang. Other images from articles originally published in Time are realigned into new contexts, the most notable being the juxtaposition of a portrait of “Mao & Friends at Peking Airport, July 1963” above a picture of William Faulkner and his brother John that Burroughs has transposed into a September 13, 1963, Time article on “Red China.” This William-William alignment allows Burroughs to resurrect the recently deceased Faulkner, another prose writer known for experiments in time and intertextuality, into his nonlinear Cold War universe. Burroughs’ visual citation of Faulkner—with a caption that mysteriously reads, “City Shopper in Red China, Patience and a private self ”—amplifies TIME’s radical visual-textual intertextuality, pulling advertisements, global politics, and dead American modernists into conversation across mediums in a text that continually exceeds legibility. As Burroughs writes in TIME, “he once lived in the imagination of another novelist” (1965b: 12), a fragment that suggests the kind of viral literary occupation within other writers’ work that describes Burroughs’ methods just as much as the experimental processes of the younger New York School poets. The ambiguity of the pronoun as well as the identity of the other “novelist” creates an intentional dissolution of authorial power that might include Burroughs, Faulkner, or any other writer whose work Burroughs had inhabited from Naked Lunch throughout the Nova Trilogy. Just as other authors might spontaneously appear in the text, characters from Burroughs’ novels pop up in the intertextual assemblage of TIME, including the ubiquitous Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin, the Klinker, the Shoe Shine Kid, and Doctor Unruh—the fictional German doctor whose biological theories about language as virus are cited throughout Burroughs’ work. TIME also refers to the 1963 film Towers Open Fire, a reference amplified by another set of lines folded in from The Soft Machine: “The next step was carried out in a film studio. I learned to talk and think backwards on all levels” (Burroughs 1965b: 4). Scattered references to autobiographical and textual tropes that recur in Burroughs’ work and interviews, like “the Shakespeare Squad”—a reference to him and Kerouac discussing Naked Lunch, to Hassan J. Sabbath—the supposed “source” for the opening section of Nova Express, and frequent descriptions of “words falling” and “streaking across the sky,” allusions to the merger of language and dystopic upheaval in Burroughs’ work, also appear throughout TIME. At other moments, Burroughs’ voice breaks through the surface of the text to describe the process of a proposed collaboration with Gysin—likely for The Third Mind—only slightly disturbed by other voices. Now here is the progression.​.Words.​.glphys.​.dra​wing or painting expansion of the glphys into a Gysin picture..You can do the same of course with any photo.. The “Priest” they called him..The photo..Draw an old junky there—blue grid of windows Winter sunlight.​.i​ce on the street.​.wi​nd cold from the lake..Now as to the presentation of page with a practical budget. First page text and the photo..Second page..drawing on image lines—Third page a Gysin picture..That is using your time format a sapce on each page for photo or picture..We could then wind it up with

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 243 a page of the intersection photos followed by a page of pictures..Two silent pages that could immediately read by any attentive reader. (1965b: 21–2)

Burroughs’ meticulous description of his plans with Gysin, a compendium of compositional methods used by them in the 1960s, is also a kind of associative spell that Burroughs casts on the text. The use of second-person pronouns turns this passage into a set of directions, as if the reader were engaged in the composition of the book they are reading. Though submerged in the debris of the text, we are suddenly the “attentive reader” brought into focus by Burroughs’ description, the third mind of TIME’s radical fragmentation. Though Gysin’s work only appears briefly in the middle of the book, Burroughs makes clear how central he is to the composition of their collaborations when he writes, “So my words just disintegrate into Gysin” (1965b: 20). Here “Gysin” is more an aesthetic space of experimental potential than Gysin the collaborator and artist. Burroughs’ disintegration into Gysin, like his citation of Faulkner and inhabiting of “the imagination of another novelist,” echoes a sense of collaboration embodied by the New York School poets in Locus Solus. As Koch puts it, Burroughs is “drawing on [other writers] at regular intervals—i.e. using them as if they were other poets in the room.” Koch’s sense of “drawing on” is amplified further in the context of TIME, which includes Gysin’s hypnotic drawings wedged between the book’s visual-textual collages. Just as Koch’s Locus Solus issue articulated an insurgent history of experimental poetics—an attack embodied in Koch’s panning of the poetry establishment in his mock dramatic poem “Fresh Air”—Burroughs cuts into established literary values in one of the most direct statements in TIME: “I don’t know if Mr. Graham Green [sic] is going to like this but he has his place in the garden along with Truman Capotes music across the golf course” (1965b: 20–1). Like the outlaw Bob Younger whose portrait is collaged into TIME, Burroughs reinforces his literary criminality with this biting critique of bourgeois prose aesthetics. Not only has Burroughs’ broken into the pages of Time and scrambled its middle-brow messaging, he has pillaged the very issue of the magazine that published the libelous “King of the YADS” review. “[U]tter babble,” the disparaging phrase used to describe Naked Lunch, reemerges in a set of shifting fragments that repurpose the terms of the attack: “world’s art compacted feathers hallugigen fur coat for a lap dog? utter babble. I cancel all your hot tenderness in nine shades” (1965b: 9). Though not directly legible, the cut-upgenerated “hallugigen” suggests both hallucination and halogen, a new Cold War adjective to describe the pitifully complacent “world’s art” becoming a commodified “lap dog.” Now it is Henry Luce’s media syndicate, the magazine that weaponizes this commodification, that is “utter babble.” All ensuing “tenderness,” as Burroughs has it, is cancelled. Remember, this is “TIME WAR.” Burroughs’ transformation of the magazine, as Oliver Harris notes, offers “ways to disrupt and escape both ‘time’ in a philosophical sense and ‘the times,’ the teleological drumbeat of Luce’s American Century, the universal time of global capitalism” (2019: 31). It also offered a way to critique a literary establishment of prose writers who could not imagine a textual practice as ephemeral and capacious as the cut-up method. Visual-textual collages

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like TIME and The Dead Star were even more unwelcome in the literary “garden” of the Greenes and Capotes. In publishing TIME, Berrigan would have been sympathetic to Burroughs’ sendups of what Robert Lowell favorably called the “cooked” in American literature— as opposed to the “raw” of the Beats and New York School—as well as Burroughs’ antipathy toward Time magazine. A few years earlier, Berrigan had taken issue with a Time article, “Poetry in English: 1945-62,” that he describes as “the worst article I have ever seen anywhere on poetry. It is horribly banal, patronizing, dishonest, and completely wrong. I never thought that even Time could be so stupid, so evil” (2010: 38). Part of this banality is the article’s restatement of “the raw and the cooked” dichotomy in the elite politesse of “the couth and the uncouth.”12 However, rather than a spirited defense of “couth” traditionalists against the “bohemians,” the article summarily pans nearly all of the poets it offers as examples of recent English language verse, noting that “Poetry is not, unfortunately, what most poets are writing in English today.” The unnamed reviewer rifles through curmudgeonly dismissals of writers from Wallace Stevens to Michael McClure to Theodore Roethke, the latter of whom “writes like a self-made idiot.” The reviewer particularly loathes Allen Ginsberg for whom, the author writes, “excrement is of the poetic essence.” “Howl is an astounding screed,” they continue, “an interminable sewer of a poem that sucks in all the feculence, malignity and unmeaning slime of modern life and spews them with tremendous momentum into the reader’s mind.” This vitriolic description placing Ginsberg and the Beats in the literal “underground” of American life—the sewers overflowing with “unmeaning slime”—is one of the more dramatic examples of the conservative backlash against what such writers perceived as the “calculated squalor,” as the caption on Ginsberg’s photograph reads, being strategically unleashed by the Beats against all forms of literary respectability. In this sense, “Poetry in English: 1945-62,” published in the March 9, 1962, issue of Time, is the direct precursor to the November 30, 1962, “King of the YADS” article that generates TIME. Both articles’ shared derision of the Beats, including the suggestion that literary experimentation and “bohemian” lifestyles are conspiratorial extensions of an Un-American sensibility, left a reader like Berrigan with a bad taste in his mouth. The evil and stupidity of Time, as Berrigan saw it, put him in league with Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, and Kerouac, all writers he already read closely and devotedly. Publishing TIME became part of their shared disaffiliation. The two writers’ sudden proximity to one another in the mid-1960s—both textually and geographically (Berrigan’s apartment by Tomkins Square Park was a forty-minute walk to Burroughs’ Chelsea Hotel apartment)—spurred Berrigan to experiment with Burroughsian methods in a range of genres. Following the release of TIME in April 1965, Berrigan published a flurry of texts influenced by and in dialogue with Burroughs, especially in the form of book reviews. In 1965, Berrigan published three reviews using cut-up methods, including two in Kulchur magazine: a review of Nova Express in Summer 1965 that is itself a cut-up of Nova Express, dated by Berrigan “September 17, 1899,” and another review of Bill Berkson’s Saturday Night: Poems 1960-61, published in Autumn 1965, that is a cut-up of multiple obscure texts, including the 1915 novel Jaffrey by British writer William John Locke.13 The deranged

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 245 syntax of the Berkson review accumulates in labyrinthine sentences that tangentially celebrate the prismatic collage aesthetic of Berkson’s poems. As Berrigan writes, “Berkson’s book is both noticed and that old brandy correctitude if they proceeded often when a poet’s first collecting doves which dragged a musical comedy” (1965a: 93). This sentence continues over five additional lines. The effect is a shimmering reflection of compositional methods where the linear, sense-making continuity of sentences dissolves into play and fragmentation, all the while crisscrossing the New York School and other lineages: “Berkson’s concern is . . . feeling moist and grammar on the telephone. He likes to be insufferable inscrutable discastic cigarettes (Frank O’Hara, Edmund Spenser) no thanks, you are more tender” (1965a: 93). “Know who I am?” Berrigan asks wryly at the end of the review, a question lifted from Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded. Berrigan also published a faux review of Norman Mailer’s novel The American Dream in the final issue of Ed Sanders’ Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, a mimeo magazine akin to C that had published multiple texts by Burroughs. Berrigan’s Mailer review is his most visually radical Burroughs-style cut-up, a two-column text made from stray Burroughs lines, Berrigan’s own litany of appropriated oneliners (like his parodic rallying cry “Get the Money!” lifted from Damon Runyan), and a wild amalgam of fragments, half-narratives, and Fuck You-style literary rowdiness. Berrigan begins where he left off the Berkson review before spiraling into a Burroughsian scene of disarrayed time and language that rewrites the opening sentence of Mailer’s novel. Know who I am? “Hey Rube!” “Doc goofed here, Hohn—Something wrong—Too much English.” Know where I am? Well, here I am, 2 pm, What day is it? November 1946? I first met Jackie Kennedy in November 1946. . . . Something wrong— Someone goofed the works here Jack— Shift digits—it’s 1964, I first met Norman Mailer in a dream I had in November 1964, a drift of newspaper clippings overflowed his lap and swirled about the floor. (Berrigan 1965b)

Mailer’s The American Dream quickly dissolves as Berrigan dresses up Mailer as a Burroughs-like figure in a transposed dream-time, his own kind of Burroughsian “American Dream.” Berrigan’s mock review is a celebratory romp through the book review as a genre that dismisses linear analysis in favor of a performative New York School-style textual infection of Burroughs’ methods and obsessions. Berrigan even echoes Corso’s Dwight Eisenhower cut-up in Locus Solus and cites Ginsberg’s epic visionary critique of American exceptionalism.

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Images: Cut! Cut! Shift there, Dwight? How’s yr ass, You read Howl?, well, read Lwoh! (Berrigan 1965b)

Berrigan joins Burroughs’ assault—“Drop the Times! Make war on time,” he writes— and launches an intertextual infiltration. “[I]t’s 5:15 a.m.,” the review announces, “Know who I am?” This question became surprisingly relevant in another of Berrigan’s cut-up texts, “An Interview with John Cage.” Originally published in Mother in spring 1966, “An Interview with John Cage” is actually a faux interview that Berrigan built out of existing interviews with Cage, Warhol, Bob Dylan, and other sources. When the piece won a $1000 prize and was slated to be republished in the annual National Literary Anthology, Berrigan found himself in the bizarre position of explaining to The Paris Review editor George Plimpton, a member of the award committee, that the interview had more wayward, experimental origins. “George, I hate to tell you this,” Berrigan recalls saying to Plimpton, “but I made it all up” (1991: 101). Plimpton’s response—“Oh my God!”— was even funnier to Berrigan considering he had not imagined anyone would read the interview as genuine in the first place: “It seemed to me that it was perfectly clear in the interview that this wasn’t really an interview with John Cage. A lot of the material I used was material that had appeared in famous interviews very recently before, six months before, interviews with Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol. I changed very little of it” (1991: 101). Indeed, the interview is a raucous conversation made in the style of Cageian aleatoric methods where “Cage” becomes the conceptual space for announcing a range of conflicting and humorous statements. Most importantly, “An Interview with John Cage” carries forward the intertextual network of Berrigan’s other mid-1960s cut-ups when Cage enthusiastically yells “Get the Money!” and, later, when Michaux’s lines from The Sonnets echo in Cage’s aesthetic pronouncement, “Some artists prefer the stream of consciousness. Not me. I’d rather beat people up” (Berrigan and Padgett [1967] 2012: 66). As in each of Berrigan’s cut-up experiments, Burroughs appears as an instigating voice. In this case, Berrigan alters sentences from Nova Express—“To speak is to lie. To live is to collaborate”—which he had also used in his cut-up review of the novel in Kulchur. The full exchange, which begins the interview, is as follows: INTERVIEWER: What about Marshall McLuhan? CAGE: Just this: the media is not a message. I would like to sound a word of warning to Mr. McLuhan: to speak is to lie. To lie is to collaborate. (Berrigan and Padgett [1967] 2012: 62)

Couched in a critique of McLuhan’s popularized media theory, Berrigan’s slight transposition of Burroughs’ wording from “live” to “lie” in the second sentence acknowledges the “lie” of the interview’s origins and also creates an equivalency between speaking, lying, and collaborating that playfully surrounds Berrigan’s larger collage project. Mistranslation, appropriation, cut-up, and collage swirl together

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 247 as kinds of literary “lies,” an avant-garde performance in the lineage of Duchamp, Ashbery, and Cage. As Berrigan says about the Cage interview, “[I]t was a hoax. [But] it wasn’t a hoax . . . the interview was made up by me” (1991: 101). The process of “making” and “making it up” is what is authentic for Berrigan—an imaginative act in which the poles of Burroughs-Berrigan’s statement, “to speak” and “to collaborate,” become synonymous via the surface methods of the “lie.” Like Burroughs, Berrigan’s devoted attention to his sources becomes an experiment in which all writing (i.e., “speaking”) is an inherently collaborative act. The inability to imagine this kind of polyphonic assemblage is what makes the interview’s performativity inaccessible to a reader like Plimpton. Other readers, however, were able to discern Berrigan’s methods more intuitively. As Berrigan describes, “Kenneth Koch told me that while he was reading it he said to his wife, ‘John Cage is not this funny, I know he’s not this funny.’ He really thought it was by John Cage until right in the middle he came to a line of his own which I had interspersed into the middle of the interview. Then he really started laughing” (1991: 33). Berrigan also used this array of experimental methods to write poems in the mid-1960s, especially the sequence of poems collected as Great Stories of the Chair that expand on the collage methods of The Sonnets. The long cut-up poem “A Boke” is one of the most singular works Berrigan made during this time. Like the Cage interview, the use of the cut-up method generates a comedic effect. Published in the same issue of Kulchur as his cut-up review of Berkson’s Saturday Night: Poems 196061, “A Boke” is composed almost entirely by cutting up an essay in The New York Times by poet James Dickey, “Barnstorming for Poetry,” a third-person narrative of Dickey’s recent poetry reading tour in the upper Midwest. Just as Burroughs mocks Greene and Capote, Berrigan would have seen Dickey, a poet of the same generation as Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch, and Schuyler but within a divergent traditional heritage, as the antithesis of the avant-garde lineages he was writing through. Having emerged from a career in corporate advertising to win the National Book Award in 1965, the stuffy lyric traditionalism and Southern settings of Dickey’s poems made him a stark embodiment of the most conservative kind of literary establishment. His position at the apex of poetic careerism is carried over into “Barnstorming for Poetry” where we follow a solitary poet through the discomfort and nausea of a university reading tour. Dickey’s poet protagonist is portrayed as hopelessly out of place in the middle of a decade whose liberatory cultural aesthetics are unrecognizable to him: It is time. He gets out of bed and stumbles toward the alarm; just as he reaches it, rock-and-roll music bursts into his face. Rather than fool with trying to shut it off, he pulls out the plug, feeling that he has had his revenge. He turns on the light and dresses, not quite able to believe he is where he is: some place in Wisconsin, where he has given a poetry reading at a small college; he is, in fact, in the middle of a tour of such readings. (Dickey 1965)

In the essay, Dickey’s narrator struggles with the false identity he invents for himself as a spontaneous, guitar-playing, gregarious poet, admitting that his own performativity

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is half-inspired, a kind of schtick to get him through the day. He feels alienated and unrecognizable as he putters from campus to campus, his alienation amplified by never having considered his poems fit for public readings. Minor epiphanies—a kiss from a female undergrad, finding himself hitchhiking in the snow—mark his progression toward a new bardic presence where he is seen by adoring students as “a messiah or a Beatle.” This transformation is quickly abandoned as he forgoes the “intensity” of his journey for a welcome return home. As Dickey writes, “He might live more vividly in this condition, but he cannot write in it. He must calm down and work” (1965). For a reader like Berrigan, Dickey’s profound uncoolness made the essay an ideal source for appropriative mockery. As scholar John Steen writes, “Unlike the borrowing in The Sonnets, which signaled admiration for its sources, Berrigan’s use of Dickey’s lines is vicious, accusing the author of egregious grandstanding in the name of poetic diplomacy” (2018: 111). Indeed, Berrigan spoofs Dickey’s career-oriented earnestness and watered-down existentialism by remaking the journey of “Barnstorming for Poetry” into a different kind of “long trip,” a psychedelic one. Reanimating the rock ‘n’ roll radio that the poet fussily defends himself against, “A Boke” begins with these radio announcer-like lines that also include a reference to Burroughs: “You’re listening to a man who in 1964 un- / knowingly breathed in a small quantity of / LSD powder, remember the fragrance of Grandma’s / kitchen?—and at the college he reads, sleeps” (Berrigan 2005: 98). Having microdosed Dickey’s text, Berrigan absorbs and deranges “Barnstorming for Poetry” into a nonlinear narrative that more resembles the otherworldly juxtapositions of French New Wave films like Last Year at Marienbad than Dickey’s original text: “ever cognizant / of his bodiless staring audience, and of / the skull beneath his own skin / he has taken to doing some curious / things” (2005: 99–100). Such “curious things” include the narrator’s poems animating themselves as “he pulls / out his manuscripts. One whispers to / another” (2005: 102), a kind of magical textual agency that recalls Berrigan’s own recombinatory poetics. Again, the time of The Sonnets enters Berrigan’s intertextual network when the poet “reaches a stage, / mounts, looks at the last of the clocks, / and leaves. It is 5:15 a.m. It is / time” (2005: 103). The last lines of “A Boke,” “He has definitely been / another person” (2005: 111), recall Burroughs’ line from TIME that “he once lived in the imagination of another novelist,” a shared displacement into textuality as identity. Such fluid agency accumulates through both writers’ radical creative reading methods as much as from their writing. Building energy out of juxtapositions is what drew Berrigan to Burroughs’ prose in the first place, what he described as the exciting “hallucination[s]” of Naked Lunch. But Berrigan’s experiments in collage and cut-up methods were not restricted to occasional pieces or only to poems. If Burroughs was the Beat Generation’s experimental novelist, Berrigan, though many might not expect it, was the New York School’s equivalent prose experimentalist. Throughout his correspondence and collaborations with Burroughs, Berrigan composed a series of extended experimental prose projects, including an unpublished cut-up novel, Looking for Chris, and a collaged Western erasure novel, Clear the Range. Though the latter book was published in 1977, both of these prose works, which Berrigan composed in 1964 and 1965–6, respectively,

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 249 have received virtually no scholarly attention.14 The history of Berrigan’s work as a novelist is completely unaccounted for. However, he was deeply familiar with the avant-garde tradition of prose writers that his own novels were in conversation with, and it is crucial to consider Berrigan’s prose as a central part of his creative practice in the 1960s. In fact, in 1964, the year he was composing Looking for Chris, through the support of Kenneth Koch, Berrigan nearly found himself teaching a course called “Experiments in Fiction” at the New School for Social Research. Though Berrigan ultimately did not teach the class, his proposed course description reveals the lineage of prose experimentalists that he was writing through. As always, Burroughs is one influence among many for Berrigan. Examination of experimental techniques in works of fiction by writers such as Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, Dr. Williams, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Harry Mathews and Tom Veitch; discussion of the possible origins of these techniques, the possible reasons behind their employment by these writers; and the examination and discussion of their influence and implications of Dadaism and Surrealism on contemporary writing.15

From the modernist novelists to the Beats to Olipou to his New York School peers, “Experiments in Fiction” is effectively a crash course in the origins and techniques that generated Looking for Chris and Clear the Range. For example, Looking for Chris shows Berrigan experimenting across genres with a range of compositional methods. Made of five ten-page sections, four of which survive, parts of Looking for Chris appeared in small magazines throughout 1965, including Art & Literature, Mother, and Berrigan’s own C.16 As Berrigan describes in an interview, Looking for Chris is “an autobiographical sort of portrait of the artist as a young man in gibberish, a great pleasure to write” (1991: 28). Though composed before meeting Burroughs, Looking for Chris is Berrigan’s most Burroughsian text in both technique and form. An extant manuscript of the book’s first section shows that Berrigan composed the novel by physically cutting-up and taping together sections of his own disserved autobiographical prose writings, none of which seem to survive in their original form. However, as Berrigan’s description suggests, Looking for Chris is an experiment in genre just as much as in compositional methods. As Berrigan writes, “We seem to be in a large room in a section of somebody’s autobiography.”17 This New York School bildungsroman cut-up can be read as the follow-up prose companion to The Sonnets, “a novel of adolescent love not necessarily in that order,” as the book describes itself, a gesture that embodies the novel’s nonlinear cycling through characters, locations, and abstract narrative imagery.18 Berrigan’s signature self-referential icons—the 5:15 a.m. timestamp, the year of his birth—1934, the names Joe, Dick, Pat, Marge, and the titular Chris—all recur in the novel. “We are the main characters, one of us always the narrator,” as Berrigan writes. Like The Sonnets, Looking for Chris simultaneously arcs and fractures around this series of spliced autobiographical and literary references. The two books even conclude similarly, suggesting that Berrigan was locked into a shared methodology across these texts. Sonnet LXXXVIII, “A Final Sonnet, for Chris,” ends

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with eight lines lifted from a well-known speech by Prospero in The Tempest. Similarly, Looking for Chris ends with a section from Sir Gawain’s letter to Sir Lancelot in Le Morte d’Arthur, which Berrigan copied from the final essay in The Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, published in 1964. In each case, these are the longest pieces of unbroken sourced text in both books. While appropriating so wholly and clearly from Shakespeare to end The Sonnets allows Berrigan to merge the autobiographical spiral of the poems with the canon and anti-canons built across the text, concluding Looking for Chris on Sir Gawain’s letter shows Berrigan parsing English literary mythology via Ford’s modernity. Citing Ford’s citation of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, an iteration of the Arthurian legend produced through Malory’s own recombinatory methods of appropriation and contemporary splicing, is a quintessential example of Berrigan’s keen awareness of his experimental methods’ long histories in the literary tradition. Within Looking for Chris, a reader is surrounded by an enigmatic verbal environment where the influences of French New Wave films, Burroughs’ novels, and the “literary cubism” Berrigan had read about in the Art of Assemblage MoMA catalog blend in a kaleidoscopic remaking of the coming-of-age novel. Dedicated to Veitch, with whom Berrigan was collaborating with on a now-lost novel Malgmo’s End, and featuring an epigraph from Kerouac’s The Lonesome Traveler—“I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City”— Looking for Chris produces the same pleasurable bentness and sonic arrangement of non sequiturs as The Sonnets, but in a prose form that plays with and resists narrative coherence. Berrigan’s personal geographies repeat across the novel, including Providence, Rhode Island, where Berrigan was born; Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he attended graduate school and met Padgett, Gallup, and Brainard; and New York City, where the group moved in the early 1960s. Like Burroughs, Berrigan builds a network of self-referential descriptions of the book’s compositional process into Looking for Chris so that these processes become a subject of the book itself. Examples of this kind of gesture appear in each of the four extant sections: “I planned to cut in all interference” (Part I); “The first time I wrote this, I wrote it” (Part II); “This was written with good reason unlike that other” (Part IV); “I don’t have time to make revisions (connections)” (Part V). Looking for Chris abandons narrative realism to create a collaged, filmic self-portrait as a novel. “There is no relation to life here,” Berrigan writes, “although there is life.”19 Looking closely at the cut-up taped version of the manuscript, we can track Berrigan’s compositional process as he remade his autobiography in Looking for Chris. For instance, one manuscript page is composed of fourteen different cut-ups (a sonnet-like formal resonance), a section of which reads as follows. The forward slashes indicate a break from one cut-up piece to another: to get another book of great / ght, a curse and blasphemy quite / page paper on everything about / guid arm in a sleepy gesture / in his get-up, sort of like a / with a suggestion of tenseness / itated by Donald O’Conner. / er burning heavy-lidded eyes20

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 251 In the published version, this passage is transformed into these sentences: “To get another book of great curses!” Paper blasphemy is everything! Oh. Good arm of a sling sleepy gesture he resembles in his get-up a sort-of suggestion of tenderness (tenseness), an imitation in heavy lidded burning bright eyes.

As with Burroughs’ novels, the cut-up technique is a generative method for unexpected sentence construction and nonlinear narrative movement. The actual cut-ups are rarely transcribed directly from the taped-together version (although TIME does notably retain this formal derangement). The transcription from the raw cut-up to the published text is its own form of collaged mistranslation consistent with Berrigan’s “imitation/translation” of “The Drunken Boat” and his homophonic translation of Michaux. Words and phrases are dropped, added, and rearranged while other word combinations emerge from sonic associations. One thing that stands out immediately about this passage is that Berrigan changes “tenseness” to “tenderness” but then includes the original word after it in parentheses, as if typing “tenderness” were a mistake, or as if both words are compatible, or, to go further, as if the choice is supposed to remain unresolved. The extended use of parentheticals to create these sonic and substantive echoes, a kind of open revision, occurs repeatedly in the book. The technique is reminiscent of many of Brainard’s drawings in the 1960s where something is scratched out with an arrow then pointing to that scribbled-out “mistake,” solidifying the necessary inclusion of the experiment’s process in the final work. As with Burroughs’ TIME, there are “no typographical errors” in Berrigan’s novels. Berrigan’s Clear the Range, an erasure of the 1931 paperback Western novel Twenty Notches by pulp writer Max Brand, is another prose experiment in seriality, repetition, and genre. An idiosyncratic and little-known publication in Berrigan’s oeuvre, the erasure process that animates Clear the Range is a serial deformation of the pulp Western, a poetic spin-off of the cowboy novel. Berrigan was enthusiastically invested in an aesthetic of vivacious, often kitschy appropriation from the cultural vernacular, and the Western was one of his favorite genres. One of the more singularly elusive lines from The Sonnets, “we discuss the code of the west,” seems to find its novelistic embodiment in Clear the Range as Berrigan switches that code to critically derange the conventions of the Western. Berrigan erases Brand’s text, changes characters and adds words, and then rearranges the order of the chapters, all of which gives the book an imagistic, mythic shapeliness and lush, disjunctive flair not unlike the syntax and rhythm of The Sonnets. Padgett, who composed his own pulp erasure in the early 1960s, Motor Maids Across the Continent, was a constant peer experimenter with Berrigan during this time. As Padgett recalls about the use of erasure techniques, “He and I never talked much about the procedure, it was just something we did. [I]t seemed like a normal thing to do.”21 Erasure is, after all, another form of collaboration, an activity so varied and casual for Berrigan and his friends that the sources often went undocumented, as is the case with Brand’s novel behind Clear the Range. In a 1964 letter to Padgett, Berrigan playfully alludes to just how “normal” the process was as he describes a fake prose work that he has stolen from Padgett: “I’ve been working

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. . . and have almost finished my great new work, MOTOR MAIDS ACROSS THE CONTINENCE. It’s sort of a “Finnegan’s Wake” for girls. Hope you like it if I ever show it to you (you plagiarist!)” ([1967] 2012: 168). Berrigan’s pun on Padgett’s title and humorous performance of authorial disobedience, reminiscent of Looking for Chris and as energized by appropriation as Burroughs’ methods, give a sense of the multifaceted literary antics that Berrigan was engaged with as he approached creating his novels. In the simplest sense, Clear the Range is an enigmatic, humorous, often lyric “cowboy” novel that follows an (anti-)hero, The Sleeper, and a villain, Cole Younger, through a disorienting dreamlike Western landscape complete with a talking mule, Lucifer as a hotel owner, and shapeshifting female love interest as The Sleeper attempts to “clear the range,” a goal that is as much a joke about doing the dishes as it is a nod to the text’s cross-out composition. It is worth noting that Berrigan adds the character Cole Younger to his deformation of Brand’s text, fellow Jesse James Gang member and the brother of Bob Younger whose picture Burroughs collaged into TIME. Even in these subtle alignments in genre and appropriation, Burroughs’ textual influence on Berrigan shows through. Comparing a selection from Twenty Notches with the “cleared out” version in Clear the Range illustrates Berrigan’s erasure process. What was his immediate object? To deliver a letter to the great Parmenter. Why had he not done so, after arriving at his goal through very considerable peril and strange adventures? Because at the first glimpse of those brilliant sky-blue eyes of Parmenter, he knew that no woman should be condemned to life with him. Therefore, the letter had been destroyed undelivered—an act of perfidy, perhaps, yet he did not find it on his conscience. (Brand [1931] 1990: 143)

Brand’s prose is formulaic, even relentlessly stereotypical. In the remade passage, Berrigan’s transformation adds a metaphysical flair, extracting the language from its narrative confines and unmooring the character’s stereotypical masculine heroism. What was his immediate object? To live great. Well, why not? Because of the brilliant sky-blue eyes of Cole Younger. No woman should be condemned to life with Cole Younger. Therefore, The Sleeper destroyed Cole Younger. Then he destroyed science. (Berrigan 1977: 77)

The resemblance of Berrigan’s prose to the original, like Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles and Brainard’s C Comics, is founded on a humorous, playful displacement of genre conventions. The resulting prose seduces by sheer poetic abundance rather than

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 253 narrative movement. Other passages are reminiscent of the translucent narrative movements of Giorgio de Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros drenched in American Western imagery. For example, take this passage from Clear the Range: The way to the top was long. A snake brought The Sleeper into a tree, either end of which looked out through the signs of a rifle into the blue, thin void of air, and beyond this arose on one hand the crowd and on the other the gap. Watermist thickened the air in that direction. On one side of this tree there was a string of little rooms. The walls were backwards, and the lower bricks were turning. One could feel the weight of time on them. Their souls were yards behind them. The Sleeper turned on the ash. It was twenty-five feet high, and round, and covered with ice. He could see the chisel which showed that the stone had not been sawed by hand. He stepped closer. He saw that the joints were filled with exquisite hair. (Berrigan 1977: 106–7)

With a trace of narrative in the prose’s ambient background, the fantastic details of the scene fade in and out, never totally stabilizing, pleasantly enigmatic. Though Burroughs was not engaged in erasures, the focus on simultaneity and time that dominates the collaged plot of Clear the Range is part of Berrigan’s attention to the range of experimental sources, from Stein to Burroughs to Veitch, that he cites in his “Experiments in Fiction” course description. As with the other Berrigan texts described earlier, Clear the Range continues to build on the intertextuality of Berrigan’s work through the inclusion of the 5:15 a.m. timestamp and the recycling of the line “Many things are current,” one of the most vital statements about temporality in The Sonnets. An important point accumulating across this chapter is that the intertextual network within Berrigan’s work in the 1960s matches and in some ways is modeled on the immense intertextuality of Burroughs’ cut-up project. Like Faulkner, Burroughs’ work continues to attract readers and scholars for the ways the reconfigurations of the Nova universe across his novels activates various postmodern considerations of narrative, genre, and seriality. This complex feature of Berrigan’s work continues to be overlooked. While there is a particular density to this intertextuality in his texts from the 1960s, there is a broader kind of intertextual network that extends from The Sonnets all the way to the posthumously published A Certain Slant of Sunlight. To consider Berrigan’s full oeuvre, including Looking for Chris, Clear the Range, and his other uncollected prose writings, is to consider a vast example of cross-genre intertextuality, including poetry, novels, reviews, and interviews, that is unparalleled in twentieth-century American poetry. While Berrigan is a vivid example of how the New York School internalized and remade Burroughs’ influence, his work acts as a larger hinge between Warhol’s burgeoning Pop surfaces and the experimental virus of Burroughs’ cut-up project. Berrigan sat for a screen test at The Factory in February 1965, the same time that he was collaborating with Burroughs and assembling TIME. What links Berrigan, Burroughs, and Warhol is an interest in interdisciplinary experiments with repetition,

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time, and simultaneity embodied, variously, in the oeuvres of all three figures. It is vital to more productively describe the texts and techniques of New York School poets like Berrigan in order to deconstruct the generational and aesthetic divisions that have prohibited their work from being considered together. For instance, the work of Tom Veitch has been left completely unstudied, though his prose experiments in proximity to Burroughs in the 1960s are instrumental to Veitch’s pivotal role in the underground comix scene of the 1970s. His novel Eat This!, published by Angel Hair Books in 1974 on pink paper, is an English-to-English sonic translation of Truman Capote’s novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, a radical experiment in canonical critique that deforms Capote’s revision of the Southern gothic novel into a Burroughsian universe of abject strangeness. Not only does Eat This! activate Burroughs’ notion in TIME that “he once lived in the imagination of another novelist,” it also continues the critique of what Burroughs calls “Truman Capotes music across the golf course” (1965b: 21). Or consider Veitch and Padgett’s collaborative novel Antlers in the Treetop, published by Coach House Press in 1973, that was composed over a decade via mail as Padgett and Veitch exchanged paragraphs wholly appropriated from hundreds of different sources. The resulting novel is an ambient montage of genres, styles, and characters with no narrative continuity that erases the context of its sources. Such novels toggle interestingly between Burroughs’ cut-ups and Warhol’s Pop appropriations, helping us to realign the avant-garde lineages of the 1960s through a set of yet-unstudied poets’ novels. Throughout Berrigan’s life, he would continue to intersect with Burroughs in various literary and social forms but never as intensely as in the 1960s. References to Burroughs regularly pop up in Berrigan’s poems from this time, including his beautiful open-field long poem “Tambourine Life,” though those allusions drop off after the poems of In the Early Morning Rain, published in 1971. As I have suggested, it is useful to remember that Burroughs was never Berrigan’s sole precedent for any technique or text. The reissue of The Sonnets with Grove Press in 1967, the same publisher as Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, Koch’s Thank You and Other Poems, and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch—all classics in Berrigan’s personal canon—confirms the shared avant-garde lineage that his work inhabited beyond classifications such as New York School and Beat. Like so many of the younger New York School poets, the decade was resoundingly full for Berrigan, including making what he jokingly refers to as his “rookie of the year” (1991: 160) appearance at Berkeley Poetry Conference in July 1965, just after he had published TIME. Berrigan, Padgett, Veitch, and their friends continued to experiment among themselves and across traditions in ways that complicate not only New York School and Beat, but also any hardand-fast distinctions across the poetics of Umbra, Black Mountain, Black Arts, and Language. Their classification as the so-called “Second Generation” of the New York School belies the inability of such distinctions to group these writers effectively. Just as Burroughs’ texts exceed the generalized descriptions of what defines a writer of the Beat Generation, Berrigan’s work—which maps an idiosyncratic attention that helps us reread the poetic lineages of the 1960s—is ultimately best described through

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 255 the formal choices that generate his texts. Repeatedly appropriated by Berrigan, Burroughs’ question “Know who I am?” is best met without an answer, or better yet, a chorus of interdisciplinary avant-garde voices. The cut-ups, fold-ins, intersections, and collages experimented with by Burroughs and remade by Berrigan are the place to look to unravel those entangled identities. As Berrigan writes in Looking for Chris, “I am here, in these techniques.”22

Notes 1 Oliver Harris’ recent essay in William Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century (Indiana University Press, 2019) describes Burroughs’ antipathy toward Luce’s Time and how it led to his TIME cut-up, though analysis of the context of its publication is limited. 2 Burroughs, Manuscript, n.d, 1:10. Ted Berrigan Papers. Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries. 3 See David Lehman’s translation of “Mes Occupations” by Henri Michaux on The Best American Poetry blog, originally published in Conduit: https​:/​/bl​​og​.be​​stame​​rican​​ poetr​​y​.com​​/the_​​best_​​ameri​​can​_p​​oetry​​/2013​​/06​/m​​y​-pas​​times​​-by​-h​​enry-​​micha​​ux​-tr​​​ ans​-d​​avid-​​lehma​​n​.htm​​l. 4 Burroughs, correspondence to Ted Berrigan, dated July 8, 1964, Carl Weissner Archive, MS 22, Box 1, Folder 18. McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University. 5 Ibid. 6 Burroughs, correspondence to Ted Berrigan, dated September 10, 1964, Carl Weissner Archive, MS 22, Box 1, Folder 18. McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University. 7 Ibid. 8 “Giver of Winds is My Name” appears in C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 No. 9, Summer 1964, edited by Ted Berrigan. 9 Ted Berrigan, “December 11, 1964 entry,” Journal 1963–5, Series II: Journals, 1961–1975, Ted Berrigan papers, 1961–75, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 10 Burroughs, William S. and Ted Berrigan, T. Veitch. “The Moving Times” c. 1965. General Manuscript File, McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University. 11 Joe Brainard, Time: A Book of Words and Pictures, promotional materials, 29:16, Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. 12 “Poetry in English: 1945-62” (1962). 13 Berrigan’s review of Burroughs’ Nova Express is published in Kulchur 18, Summer 1965, 97-99. Berrigan’s review of Berkson’s Saturday Night: Poems 1960-61 is published in Kulchur 19, Autumn 1965, 93. 14 An essay by Edmund Berrigan on Clear the Range is forthcoming in a book of essays on the poets’ novel edited by Laynie Browne.

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15 Berrigan, “February 1964 entry,” Journal 1963–5, Series II: Journals, 1961–75, Ted Berrigan papers, 1961–75, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 16 Berrigan published the following sections from Looking for Chris: Part I in Splice, edited by Tom Clark (1967) [an abbreviated part of the same section was published in Art & Literature, edited by John Ashbery]; Part IV in Mother, edited by Peter Schjeldahl (1965); Part V in C: A Journal of Poetry, edited by Berrigan (1965). Part III was not published, and the manuscript is lost. 17 Berrigan, “Looking for Chris, Part II,” from a copy of Berrigan’s original manuscript in the possession of Alice Notley. 18 Berrigan, “from Looking for Chris, Part IV.” Mother, edited by Peter Schjeldahl, No. 6, Thanksgiving 1965, 34. 19 Ibid., 43. 20 The original cut-up manuscript of “Looking for Chris, Part I” is in the possession of Alice Notley. 21 Ron Padgett, email to author, 14 April 2014. 22 Berrigan (1965).

References Primary Berrigan, Ted. Journal 1963–1965, Series II: Journals, 1961–1975, Ted Berrigan papers, 1961–1975, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Berrigan, Ted (Summer 1965), “Looking for Chris, Part V,” C: A Journal of Poetry 2(11): n.p. Burroughs, Williams S. Correspondence from William Burroughs to Ted Berrigan. Carl Weissner Archive, MS 22, Box 1, Folder 18. McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University. Burroughs, William S. Manuscript, dated 1961. William S. Burroughs Papers, The Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Box 62 Folder 9; item 47. Burroughs, William S. Manuscript, n.d, Box 1 Folder 10. Ted Berrigan Papers. Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries. Burroughs, William S., Ted Berrigan, and T. Veitch. Manuscript of “The Moving Times,” c. 1965. General Manuscript File, McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University.

Secondary Ashbery, J. (2004), Selected Writing of John Ashbery, edited by Eugene Richie, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Berrigan, T. (1965a), “Review of Saturday Night: Poems 1960–1961,” Kulchur 19(Autumn): 93. Berrigan, T. (1965b), “Book Review: An American Dream by Norman Mailer,” Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts 5(9): n.p.

 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition” 257 Berrigan, T. (1977), Clear the Range, New York: Adventures in Poetry / Coach House South. Berrigan, T. (1991), Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan, Oakland, CA: Avenue B / O Books. Berrigan, T. (2005), The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, Berkeley: University of California Press. Berrigan, T. (2010), Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan, edited by Sandy Berrigan and Ron Padgett, Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Berrigan, T. and R. Padgett ([1967] 2012), Bean Spasms, New York: Granary Books. Birmingham, J. (2015), “#23: The Dead Star, Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker,” RealityStudio, 7 November. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​ phic-​​bunke​​r​/the​​-top-​​23​-mo​​st​-in​​teres​​ting-​​burro​​ughs-​​colle​​ctibl​​​es​/23​​-the-​​dead-​​star/​ (accessed April 10, 2020). Brand, M. ([1931] 1990), Twenty Notches, New York: Berkley Books. Burroughs, W. (1965a), “The Art of Fiction No. 36,” The Paris Review 35 (Fall). Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​paris​​revie​​w​.org​​/inte​​rview​​s​/442​​4​/the​​-art-​​of​-fi​​ction​​-no​-3​​6​-w​il​​ liam-​​s​-bur​​rough​s (accessed April 10, 2020). Burroughs, W. (1965b), TIME, New York: “C” Press. Burroughs, W. (1985), “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars,” in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 47–51, New York: Arcade Publishing. Burroughs, W. and G. Corso (1961), Locus Solus II, edited by Kenneth Koch. Special Collaborations Issue, France (Summer), 148–9. Corso, G. (1961), Locus Solus II, edited by Kenneth Koch. Special Collaborations Issue, France (Summer), 152. Cumming, J. (1883), “Voices of the Dead,” in Otis Henry Tiffany (ed.), Gems for the Fireside Comprising the Most Unique, Touching, Pithy, and Beautiful Literary Treasures, 298–300, Springfield, MA: Bay State Publishing Company. Dickey, J. (1965), “Barnstorming for Poetry,” The New York Times, 3 January. Available online: https​:/​/mo​​vies2​​.nyti​​mes​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/9​​8​/08/​​30​/sp​​ecial​​s​/dic​​key​-b​​​arnst​​ormin​​g​ .htm​l (accessed April 10, 2020). Harris, O. (2019), “Cutting Up the Century,” in Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (eds.), William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century, 28–49, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kane, D. (2003), All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, Berkeley: University of California Press. “King of the YADS,” (1962), Time, November 30, 80(22): 96–8. Koch, K. (1961), “A Note on This Issue,” Locus Solus II Summer: 193–7. Miles, B. (2014), Call Me Burroughs, New York: Twelve. Morgan, B. (2012), Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959–1974, New York: HarperCollins. “Poetry in English: 1945–1962,” (1962), Time, March 9, 79(10): 92–5. Rifkin, L. (2000), Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Rimbaud, A. (1957), Illuminations, New York: New Directions. Seitz, W. (1961), The Art of Assemblage, New York: Doubleday. Steen, J. (2018), Affect, Psychoanalysis, & American Poetry: This Feeling of Exaltation, London: Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics.

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Sturm, N. (2015), “The Pollock Streets: Ted Berrigan’s Art Writing, Part 1,” Fanzine, 7 December. Available online: http:​/​/the​​fanzi​​ne​.co​​m​/the​​-poll​​ock​-s​​treet​​s​-ted​​-berr​​igans​​art-​​​writi​​ng​-pa​​rt​-i/​ (accessed April 4, 2020). Veitch, T. (2009), “Interview with Tom Veitch on William S. Burroughs,” RealityStudio, 23 March. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/bun​​ker​-i​​nterv​​ iews/​​inter​​view-​​with-​​tom​-v​​eitch​​-on​-​w​​illia​​m​-s​-b​​urrou​​ghs/ (accessed April 4, 2020).

8

“I Spent Months in the Morgue” William S. Burroughs’ Appropriation of Time Magazine Tomasz Stompor

In 1919, the early German Dadaist champion of collage Hannah Höch entitled one of her most noted works with the rather convoluted line “Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchepoche Deutschlands” (Engl.: “Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany”) (Höch 1919). With this title she in fact formulated a political program in which she defined the postwar zeitgeist of the Weimar republic as an adversary. The positioning and drawing of lines between friends and foes is a recurring characteristic of most avantgarde movements and a foundation for their strategies of détournement, appropriation and alienation. These strategies of cultural critique found their prime expression in the medium of collage that resurfaced again after 1945 in such movements as Lettrisme, Situationism, and in the cut-up experiments of William S. Burroughs that had a lasting influence on popular culture (cf. Harris 2014, Introduction; Sobieszek 1996, chap. XV). Similar to Höch, but in a much more personal fashion, Burroughs stylized the media mogul Henry R. Luce and his idea of the American Century, propagated in the publications of his Time-Life media empire, as an ideological antagonist, and its media, as one of the central sources for his cut-ups. In his extensive analysis of this asymmetrical, but nevertheless personal enmity, Oliver Harris highlights the little-noticed fact that Burroughs used articles from Time and Life magazines for his experiments right at their onset in 1959, as can be seen in the launching manifestoes Minutes to Go and The Exterminator and in various accounts of the founding myth of the cut-up project (Harris 2019: 32–3). Furthermore, Luce’s media empire remained a continuing inspiration for Burroughs’ ideas of verbal and visual control within the narrative of the Nova Conspiracy that structures his so-called cut-up trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express). The conspiracy is based on a scenario, in which humanity is infected with the word virus by an outer power that has managed to stay undetected by way of a parasitic symbiosis and which exerts total control over a society. The virus metaphor has its roots in Burroughs’ first cut-ups where he uses newspaper articles on the discovery of the

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DNA as the central genetic molecule. The discovery of the biomolecular mechanisms behind the transcription of the DNA was facilitated by viruses. At this early stage of the discovery of the DNA scientists involved in this research often referred to the DNA as “the language of life” (Schmeck 1960; Pollard 1961: II:44; Kay 2000: 31). Burroughs in turn appropriated this scientific metaphor for his purposes and reversed it as a conceptualization for his experiments: “The entire message of life is written in four letter words with our genes” (Burroughs et al. 1960a: 60–1). The way out of this deterministic logic, he concluded, was to cut yourself out of the standardized patterns of language: “Cut the Word Lines with scissors or switch blade as preferred The Word Lines keep you in Time.. Cut the in lines.. Make out lines to Space” (Burroughs and Gysin 1960a: 5). During the first three years of his cut-up experimentations, Burroughs became fascinated with the idea of not only using newspaper texts but also applying newspaper layouts and images as grids and templates for his own cut-up content, thereby adding a visual component to the sequential linearity of text. An important outlet for these formats was Jeff Nuttall’s mimeographed little magazine My Own Mag to which Burroughs contributed regularly a three-column format section entitled The Moving Times (Burroughs 1964b). His pamphlet TIME (Burroughs 1965b), published five years after his initial experiments can be regarded as their epitome showcasing the variety of formats developed during this brief period, and might therefore be used as a point of departure for establishing a long-sought-for taxonomy of cut-up formats that has been long overshadowed by the reception of the so-called cut-up trilogy. A closer look at Burroughs’ TIME will reveal that the cut-up experiments and their resulting formats are more than a literary device, but also an interactive framework aimed at a select avant-garde audience that demands reader participation and self-experimentation. The title of the pamphlet can be understood both as a direct reference to Time magazine and in its literal meaning. What Burroughs sought to achieve in these layouts was nothing less than a radically subjective alternative temporal dimension contrary to the imperial time propagated by Luce’s news media under the trope of the American Century. It is ironic that Burroughs’ TIME was published just one year after Henry Luce retired from his function as editor in chief at Time Inc.1 This chapter attempts to shed light on this significant yet unnoticed cut-up work from a comparative perspective that contrasts Burroughs’ pamphlet against the original publishing context of its source material. Such comparisons reveal a logic of contagion behind the cut-up experiments, whereby the original contexts from which the fragments were lifted effect a reciprocal influence in their constellations by sheer proximity, thus echoing Burroughs’ concept of language as a virus (Burroughs 2001: 5). In more contemporary terms, Burroughs’ handling of found print material from Time magazine could be compared to the exchangeable frames used in viral memes that circulate today on social media, where a template is taken out of its original context and filled with new content until only its basic common semiotic denominator is left.2 Before the endless possibilities of permutation and manipulation provided by digital technologies, most artists of the twentieth century working within the multifaceted framework of montage and collage techniques relied on the printed

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 261 matter available in their time for thematic purposes, and in order to embrace certain political positions. The artist’s material choices were often guided and influenced by the advertising graphics and the content of popular print publications at hand (see: Ernst 1970: 258; Varnedoe 1990: 15; Drucker 1994: 93–4). One of the central sources for the aforementioned Hannah Höch were the publications of Ullstein Bilderdienst, one of the largest photo agencies in Germany at that time, for which she worked as a pattern designer (Lavin 1993: 10–11). Although this dependence on the reuse of popular print material seems self-evident, it needs to be emphasized, since the choice of material is both at the very center of the effects produced by such works of art and also the offending object of critique within the discourse on montage. Proponents and practitioners of montage such as Höch and Burroughs are convinced that the reused fragments produce uncanny and comical effects in their recombination because they still carry remnants of their original contexts. This position is countered by critics represented by such thinkers as Adorno, who argue that montage lacks originality, since it only reproduces the effects of its original context, and therefore has neither critical nor analytical potential (Adorno 1970: 90–1). In other words, the critics posit that the recombined fragments that make up a montage-based work of art tell the same thing, yet, in a different guise, while most artists would counter that new meanings emerge from the juxtaposition of old contexts and that they indeed can be used for critical and political purposes.3 Similarl to Höch, Burroughs made conscious decisions in choosing his material with a clear intention to offer an antagonistic position to Luce’s hegemonic idea of an American Century by exploiting the output of his media. Given the fact that Burroughs’ attitude toward Luce was discussed extensively by Oliver Harris in his aforementioned essay (Harris 2019), I will only summarize the ideological flash points at the grounds of their discord in brief, and rather focus on the examination of the cut-up poetics of the overlooked pamphlet TIME that can be regarded as a showcase of the variety of cut-up formats. With their massive print runs and a global distribution network, Luce’s magazines can be considered as influential heralds of the Pax Americana that contributed to the consolidation of the cultural hegemony of the United States after 1945.4 As Harris acutely observes, the titles of the magazines Time, Life, and Fortune, as the third big title in Luce’s portfolio, are examples of a will to monopolize universal terms and to infuse them with a clear-cut version of American exceptionalism (Harris 2019: 31). Just a brief look at a copy of random choice of Time magazine of that period gives an idea of what this meant visually. The articles are interspersed with advertisements for the latest cars, images of hearty dinners accompanied by the right choice of alcoholic beverages, only to be complemented by advertisements of the latest achievements of such companies as Lockheed, Boeing, or Douglas. The opulence of consumer goods and a sense of security to appreciate them in the face of nuclear annihilation at the height of the Cold War is thus ensured by the military prowess provided by the corporations of the military-industrial complex.5 While being appalled by the praise of conservative values and consumerism on the pages of Time-Life media, Burroughs was also fascinated by the framing of images and

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text, especially the advertisements. In a letter to Brion Gysin from 1964, a period in which his experimentation with layout formats was at its peak, Burroughs shares the conviction about the subliminal influence of the simultaneity of contiguous content in print media on the reader: The New York Times for September 17, 1899 came through a few days ago. I saw at once that the message was not of content but format. Newspapers are cut up by format. You read the adjacent columns while you read this column. You read cross-column whether you notice or not—start noticing. The newspapers and newsmagazines are cut ups. This is the secret of their power to mould thought feeling and subsequent events. (Burroughs 2012: 139–40)

Naturally, newspapers are not cut-ups in the sense of avant-garde poetry, but their mission relies on the paradox to present a coherent image of the world through an assemblage of heterogeneous text and image items. Burroughs was right in the sense that the arrangement of content can convey specific meaning. In graphic design terms, the arrangement of stories on the newspaper page is called the makeup, and this arrangement is used to make political judgments and to set opinion-making priorities (Barnhurst 1994: 193–6). The conclusion that the proximity of content on a page produces effects of crosscontamination corresponded with Burroughs’ idea of language as a virus, and this conviction was only reinforced by the experience of being personally framed and insulted by journalistic treatment in content and form. He was faced with slandering portrayals of his Beat writer companions and himself in Luce’s media on multiple occasions that subsequently even led to a legal confrontation.6 But Burroughs did not only go to court to counter the libels he had to endure on the pages of Luce’s magazines, he also fought back by cutting them up and contaminating their layout and content with input of his own. It is no coincidence that he chose the copy of Time magazine from November 30, 1962, as a template and source for his own TIME pamphlet, since it contained an anonymous scathing review of Naked Lunch entitled “King of the YADS,” which provoked him to sue Time magazine (Burroughs 2012: 120). This review not only derided Naked Lunch as a “grotesque diary of Burroughs’ years as an addict,” mocked the cut-up and fold-in experiments, but also attacked him in personal terms, calling him various epithets, such as “a grey eminence in a leaky lifeboat” (Time 1962). The piece boils down to the suggestion that not only is he a bad person but also he cannot seriously assume to be a writer. Burroughs’ conviction that newspapers are cut up by format is further confirmed by the placement of an advertisement on the opposite page of the review for a futuristic Boeing missile with the slogan “capability has many faces at Boeing” creating a stark contrast between the “ex-junkie” and the capable engineers at work in securing the American dream. The imbalance of power between a mass publication and an avant-garde pamphlet like TIME is self-evident. Still, Burroughs pursued the personal settling of scores on an imaginary level and as a creative engine within the limited circle of a like-minded audience. The idea of contamination and of the influence through contiguity used in his

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 263 appropriation of Luce’s media formats has its roots not only in Burroughs’ fascination with newspapers but also in his early experiments with photography. In the early stages of cut-up experimentation, after having published two programmatic pamphlets in 1960 (Minutes to Go and The Exterminator) (Burroughs et al. 1960b; Burroughs and Gysin 1960b) that defined the aim of this undertaking as an attempt to subvert verbal conditioning and to defy the linear time of language, Burroughs was simultaneously expanding his experiments into photography and various collage formats, thereby also exploring the interrelations of word and image. His experiments with photography and the use of layout beginning in 1961 show that from the onset the cut-up experiments included a variety of media and resulted in a similar variety of forms, a fact that is often overlooked as the majority of scholarship was focused on textual works and the so-called cut-up trilogy. In the process of adaptation of the cut-up texts into a marketable novel form, most of the traces of production and the graphic elements that accompanied the dynamics of the process were lost to uniform paragraphs. The dominance of the perception of the cut-up experiments through the lens of the trilogy has pushed the corpus of small-press formats and photographic experiments into an almost-apocryphal position. Their hitherto limited availability and their ephemeral nature have further contributed to this development. Today with the availability of archival collections and an increasing access to digitized versions of these ephemeral materials, it has become easier to track the processes behind Burroughs’ experiments. The engagement with photographic montages began during a stay in Tangier in the months from April until August 1961 with Ian Sommerville, where they experimented with photographic procedures (multiple exposures, serial replication, assemblages of prints). In a letter to Brion Gysin from Tangier, dated May 8, 1961, Burroughs evokes a memorable image from that period that is emblematic for the openness of his experimentation and the unexpected outcomes that the fragmented cut-up pieces were to effect in the future: “I have made a lot of drawings like the one I sent you. Drawings For The Wind I call them. And tear most of them up and scatter to the Levanto which is blowing now”(Burroughs 2012: 75–6). Burroughs’ gesture appears like a piece of performance art that does not leave an artifact behind but feeds its liveness from the fleeting here and now, and might have been practiced by the contemporaneous artists of the Fluxus movement. Yet, the ephemeral moment is not exclusively what Burroughs was interested in by scattering his drawings to the wind. It is rather the dissemination, the random spread of information to an unexpected location with an unexpected effect that Burroughs was fascinated by, similar to the motto of the Larousse dictionary “Je sème à tout vent”(Lamoureux 2005: 178–82). Although we do not know what these drawings represented, whether they contained words or images, their fragments were most probably carried West into the Atlantic Ocean by the Mediterranean wind to be lost or picked up by someone along the way. In order to observe the effects of heterogeneous fragments interacting with each other, Burroughs needed to confine them within a limited framework. In his textual experiments, pieces of writing were recombined into constellations of shifting variables either through grid structures on the page or by shifting pieces of text against

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each other as in the fold-in method. During his experimentation with photography, Burroughs must have realized that the act of positioning rectangular photographic prints on a plane surface was very close to the production of textual cut-ups, where cut blocks of text are shuffled into new combinations. Both procedures create performative arrangements of geometric variables that are not fixed but can be repositioned any which way. Only when one constellation of textual material is finally transcribed, it becomes fixed as one version of many possible constellations. In the process of transcription of textual cut-up material, the material gesture of cutting is erased as the chunks of words are moved and fused into new homogeneous lines onto another surface. Similar to this textual process, Burroughs began to rephotograph the various constellations of his photographic composites, thus fixing their multiplicity on a single surface. What is unusual about these montages is the fact that they are very much unlike the photomontages of the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century that have come to stand as paradigms for this genre. While such model artists of photomontage as John Heartfeld or Alexander Rodchenko manipulated their composite layouts through crops, paste-ups, and multiple exposures, bringing their works often into close affinity to collage, Burroughs, conversely, preserved the photographic prints in their original appearance. The montage aspect that Burroughs was interested in, in these formats, was not the fragmentation into details of the single photographs, but rather their constellation as a spatial layout and the interrelatedness of several images in their entirety: “I spread some photos out on the bed with a grey silk dressing-gown from Gibraltar along with several other objects and I photographed the ensemble. During that summer I made many of these montages in different ways and combinations”(Burroughs 1986: 12). The significance of this procedure lies not only in its variable multiplicity but also in a process of condensation that compounds the content into an amalgamate that might lose its readability but is still considered to contain a hidden meaning and to be an active agent in viral terms. The rephotographing of the composites creates a likeness of a likeness, one photo of an arrangement of other photos, a reproduction of visual information, but also a symbolic reproduction of the medium itself—a photograph within a photograph—this operation simultaneously creates a container in which the spatial arrangement is fixed and stored in a condensed form. The image turns into a copy of several other images, and they are thus compacted into an ensemble in which they act on each other by way of their proximity. Burroughs and Sommerville even went so far that they repeated the operation serially to the nth power until the original content within the rephotographed assemblages was indiscernible but gave way to new abstract patterns that resembled aerial maps.7 The dust jacket for the Olympia Press first edition of The Ticket That Exploded from 1962 designed by Sommerville is a good example of this format.8 To underline the idea of a compacted essence within these formats, Burroughs calls them “collage concentrates” in a letter to Gysin of May 16, 1961 (Burroughs 2012: 77). By taking up two copies of Time magazine and remodeling them into a single one according to his own design, Burroughs repeated the same process as with the

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 265 drawings for the wind and the collage concentrates with the significant distinction that the distribution of fragments happened within a defined, enclosed, and prefabricated environment. The magazine layout with its columns and image inserts thus became a petri dish in which Burroughs was able to initiate his viral contamination of Luce’s media. Burroughs’ TIME pamphlet was published by “C” Press, a small-press operation founded by Ted Berrigan, a second-generation New York School poet. Besides the publishing of poetry collections by such poets as Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, among others (Clay and Phillips 1998: 160–5; Diggory 2009), “C” Press was also known for C: A Journal of Poetry, a little magazine that appeared between 1963 and 1967. Burroughs contributed three pieces to two issues of “C” in 1964 and 1965 (Schottenlaender 2012: “C” 67, “C” 98). These contributions show two important distinctions between the so-called cut-up novels and the publication context of the small-press magazines that Burroughs made already at an early stage in his experimentation. During the writing of The Soft Machine in 1960, Burroughs makes the distinction between cut-ups as “fact assessing instrument” and as “poetic bridge work” in a letter to Allen Ginsberg (Burroughs 2012: 44–5). By “fact assessing instrument” Burroughs probably meant the cutting up of newspaper reports, and the rearrangement of their fragmented factual information, from which he deemed would surface alternative versions of reality, which he in turn used to confabulate his pataphysical (as in Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics) scenarios. His piece “Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch,” published in C no. 9, could be sorted into this category, as it underlines the social exchange involved in its production. Veitch’s book Literary Days was the first “C” Press publication, which Burroughs probably received as a review copy to which he reacted with a cut-up that might include passages from the book and intersecting fragments from newspapers at hand (Birmingham 2009). The term “poetic bridgework,” on the other hand, has to be seen precisely in the contemporaneous context of the cited letter to his work on The Soft Machine, which he announced to his potential publisher as nothing other than a novel. But some of Burroughs’ cut-ups within the small-press context could be more than just bridgework that supported a skeletal narrative. They are in fact poems in their own right that bear resemblance to visual poetry, such as his piece in C no. 10 “Fits of Nerves With a Fix” (Burroughs 1965a) or his contributions to Diane di Prima’s and LeRoi Jones’ Floating Bear No. 24, 1962 (Burroughs in: di Prima and Jones 1973: 265–6). The influence of such poets as Rimbaud or St. John Perse on Burroughs and his use of their texts as material for cut-ups are well documented by Oliver Harris (Harris 2005). The distinction is insofar helpful in understanding the content of TIME as the pamphlet is targeted at a niche audience of poets and artists. It contains poetic fragments, but it also offers a glimpse into Burroughs’ workshop on how to use cut-ups as “fact assessing instruments.” TIME involves the reader in an interactive search for hidden meanings, but it is also an invitation to put these methods to the test. Craig Saper has described such communication networks as “intimate bureaucracies” (Saper 2012: 1). This oxymoron describes how such collaborative networks under the

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banner of democratic participation, and the underlying premise that everybody is an artist, create communication channels, in-jokes, and a specific jargon that caters to a select group of participants. In the context of the cut-up experiments, Davis Schneiderman contextualizes such participatory poetics as practiced in My Own Mag and other publications as an early form of today’s “user-generated interventions” (Schneiderman 2013: 54) that has become a pervasive practice and aesthetic of social networks and sharing platforms on the internet. In this sense, Burroughs’ TIME begins with an instruction for a psychogeographic exploration, which can be read as a user’s manual for the entire book: Now try this: Take walk a bus a taxi. Do a few dreary errands in these foreign suburbs here. Sit down some cafe drink a coffee watch the TV look through the papers listen around. Now return to your trap one way or another and write what you have just seen heard felt with particular attention to intersection points: “Do you have the time, sir?” (Burroughs 1965b: 3)

In a similar fashion as the flaneur in this instruction is asked to pay attention to points of intersection or patterns within their environment, the reader must try to relate the fragments within the pamphlet to each other and/or to their own time: “PROCLAIM PRESENT TIME OVER. CLAIM PRESENT. PRO TIME OVER AND DOBLE ON SUNDAY” (Burroughs 1965b: 5). This headline that runs across page five of the pamphlet can be regarded as its programmatic motto. It is a call to erase the monopolized temporal regime of Time magazine by a radically subjective conception of time that is open to variations of chance. TIME cannot be read in a linear direction, and it does not carry a consistent and coherent message. The readers must make their own sense in their own time out of the pieces that they are offered. That is also why it is not possible to approach this work with the traditional hermeneutic tools of literary scholarship such as close reading or reader response theory and so on. Instead, one can trace the poetics of Burroughs’ experiments and the traces of his fictional mythology that appear throughout the work, and that is what I am attempting here. The cover of Burroughs’ TIME is a compound fitted together from the upper half of the original Time magazine cover from November 30, 1962, with the cut-out of a painting portraying a seaside scene serving as the lower half. The original cover from 1962 announces “India’s Lost Illusions” with a diagonal headline and an image of India’s prime minister Nehru. The background is gray with a reddish-brown face of Mao Zedong looming behind Nehru with slightly downcast eyes, as if eyeing the back of his adversary. While the cover refers to the magazine’s reporting on the Sino-Indian border war, the cutout of the painting is taken from the September 13, 1963, issue of Time magazine from a piece on Tuscan impressionism in the art section. The painting entitled “Seascape with Cloud Effect” is by Vincenzo Cabianca, a member of the Macchiaioli, a group of anti-academic painters that preferred bucolic scenes and the depiction of simple people to compositions conceived in the studio (Troyer 2003). Burroughs chose the image most certainly for the aesthetic program that struck a chord with his own convictions.

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 267 The caption summarizes this program in brief: “Tuscan painters fought against academism, tried to probe depths of reality by taking apart and reassembling colors and form” (Time 1963: 53). This is not the only element that Burroughs transplanted from this issue of Time magazine, but it must have had substantial relevance to be used on the cover of his own TIME. It is a strange coincidence that the preceding piece in the art section is on Georges Braque and the Cubist invention of the papiers collés, an early form of the collage. The two pasted elements that form the cover of Burroughs’ TIME merge into an image where Nehru’s face is removed from the picture, while Mao remains lurking in the background glancing down on Cabianca’s seaside landscape that is marked with black capitals “William Burroughs.” Although the context and Cabianca’s aesthetic program is only known to Burroughs, he still believes that the inherent qualities contained in the painting will produce effects even in a masked form as an effective agent reassembled within a new collage context (Burroughs 1965b).  By aligning Mao Zedong’s image and his own name under the logo of Henry Luce’s Time magazine, Burroughs stages an unfriendly takeover of the publication suggesting an alliance with Luce’s declared foe, thus waving a red cape at the press magnate. Born in China to missionary parents, Luce had a personal interest in the country’s political development, a stance which was boldly displayed in his editorial policies. Especially during the Chinese civil war and its aftermath, Luce’s press promoted an anti-communist agenda in reporting on China (Haygood 2009: 98–9). The publication of Burroughs’ TIME in 1965 falls into an epochal change in Chinese politics after the failed policies of the Great Leap Forward that resulted in double-digit millions of famine victims and other atrocities on top (Dikötter 2011), and on the eve of the Cultural Revolution which inspired wide circles of the Western left (Wolin 2010; Zeng and Duan 2018; Lovell 2016, 2019). Burroughs’ stance on the Cultural Revolution and on Chinese communist politics is very inconclusive and difficult to pin down. Archival findings and letters indicate that Burroughs had a rather ambivalent fascination for Maoism. Before the turbulent year of 1968, with its global eruption of protests and a surge of youth counterculture movements, there were few promising revolutionary movements in the West. This might explain why Burroughs was looking at China for a model of radical change. In a collage for an unfinished scrapbook from the period 1966–8, Burroughs admires the alleged freedom offered to young people under Mao: “The only government in the world today that has all out support of its young people is Red China. Why? Because the Red Guards are being offered the challenge and adventure of making their own world” (Burroughs 1966).9 At the same time, Burroughs was worried about the antiChinese sentiment, that he observed in US media, and the danger of escalation into another war, as he mentions in a letter to Ian Sommerville in May 1965, shortly before TIME was published: “Obviously they are waiting for a nod from Russia whereupon they will attack China set up an emergency government and teach these bums beatniks and dirty writers to act like decent Americans” (Burroughs 2012: 191). In one of the few articles that discusses Burroughs’ TIME, Jed Birmingham approaches the pamphlet with a view through the Chinese lens (Birmingham 2010),

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Figure 8.1  Burroughs, William S. TIME. New York: “C” Press, 1965. re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​ /bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​​r​/tim​​e/. and interprets China as a menacing symbol for the Chinese opium trade to the United States in Burroughs’ pamphlet. Birmingham does a great job in untangling the intertextual references to Chinese-American history with references to the collective fears stirred by the propaganda against the Yellow Peril and the drug hysteria that it entailed. Still, valid as it may be, I am convinced that the intertextual background of

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 269 the opium wars and the war against drugs in the United States is secondary to what Burroughs aimed to achieve with TIME. First and foremost, it is a showcase of cut-up formats. Maoist China, who won a war with insurgent means, is but one important theme that structures the pamphlet as a port of entry for Burroughs’ viral tactics. Both issues of Time magazine used by Burroughs as shells for his pamphlet feature China related title stories. So, he uses China as the receptor within the journalistic content, where his viral cut-up can enter Time magazine, thus exploiting Luce’s emotional investment with the fate of China. The prominent role of Maoist China in Burroughs’ TIME is further based on his fascination with the country as a cultural other that he believed was immune to Western indoctrination and the conditioning through mass media. In a letter of January 4, 1969, to Brion Gysin, Burroughs expresses the provisional idea that Chinese language might be immune to propaganda, or that it at least possesses the key to a new precise language: Old Chinese in his shop clicking the abacus kid in the Chinese laundry reading the Chinese paper you notice they all speak and read Chinese after many generations so what is the secret of their equanimity how can the most unimportant Chinese calmly possess his inner space when in the West such self possession is monopolized and doled out for services rendered to the monopoly. The secret can only lie in the linguistic structure of spoken and written Chinese which forms a magnetic shield around Chinese in foreign countries. So we recommend as an interim measure that everybody's kids learn Chinese without delay pending more precise linguistic experiments to develop a language that will make the verbal confusions, obsessions and impasses of western languages simply incapable of formulation. (Burroughs 2012: 319)

It is difficult to judge whether the ideas expressed in this letter had any influence in the writing and assembling of TIME, since it was written four years after its publication and after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but in sum, the prominent presence of China in the pamphlet might be described as a thematic positioning of a powerful antagonist against America’s hegemony after 1945. Further references to China appear on three pages of Burroughs’ TIME.10 In all instances, Burroughs recycles material from a copy of Time magazine from September 13, 1963, which features a title story entitled “RED CHINA: The Arrogant Outcast.” The issue’s title page displays a caricature that reproduces stereotypical racialized tropes about China that resound the collective hysteria of the Yellow Peril. China is represented allegorically as a red wooden ship with a dragon masthead crowned by Mao and his entourage, while below on deck an overcrowded mass of pale and faceless people raises red flags, images of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and a rocket ready to be ignited. The cover says quite bluntly that Red China is to be feared for its size, the number of its people, and the unpredictability of its leader(s). Burroughs abstains from using material from the cover in his pamphlet, but rather selects portions from the title story.

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In many instances, Burroughs’ reuse of material from this issue of Time magazine is difficult to decipher, since the symbolism it employs is deeply enmeshed in the fictional world of his Nova conspiracy. Page 9 of the pamphlet features a photograph showing people among furnaces, relics of the Great Leap Forward, which were supposed to heighten the production of steel through small rural manufacturing units. The original caption “Commune Blast Furnaces, 1958. Setting everything back five years” (McLaughlin 1963: 31) is cropped by Burroughs and appears in its pamphlet without any contextual framing. The image of the furnaces was most probably used by Burroughs for symbolic reasons referring to his trope of “the ovens” in the Nova Trilogy, where they represent a torture mechanism that molds individuals according to patterns of verbal control (Burroughs 2014: 89).11 In analogy to the Nova symbolism, Luce’s media empire with his monopolizing titles Time, Life, and Fortune could be equaled with the ovens as media works in which a version of reality rooted in an imperial version of American exceptionalism is molded and cast onto the public sphere. The image is further complemented with a text fragment featuring “Mr. Bradly Martin,” a character from the Nova mythology, who is an allegory for all repressive powers, or in Burroughs’ own words: Mr. Bradly-Mr. Martin, in my mythology, is a God that failed, a God of Conflict in two parts so created to keep a tired old show on the road, The God of Arbitrary Power and Restraint, Of Prison and Pressure, who needs subordinates, who needs what he calls “his human dogs” while treating them with the contempt a con man feels for his victims—But remember the con man needs the mark—The Mark does not need the con man . . . (Burroughs 1962: 8)

This character appears in a text above the image of the ovens in an apocalyptic scenery: “Ash streaking his cheek/with the lives of millions . . . ‘Mr Bradly Martin’ stood there footsore on dead stars heavy with his dust answer from the ‘glass box’. . .” (Burroughs 1965b: 9). As the text is fragmented and allows multiple readings, the aforementioned transcription is mine. The points of intersection between the text and the image of the ovens are of a semantic nature, as they carry meanings of burnt out remains: ashes, dust, dead stars. The aforementioned example illustrates what Burroughs called to “think in association blocks” in an interview from 1965 with Conrad Knickerbocker in the context of his scrapbooks. This interview is especially revealing in terms of what Burroughs says about the various techniques used in his experiments. In this context Burroughs also uses the term “time travel,” which is crucial in understanding the epistemology behind TIME: I do a lot of exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about at the time, what I was reading and what I wrote; all of this to see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in time. . . . The scrapbooks and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words. (Knickerbocker 1967: 150)

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 271 This radically subjective form of record-keeping and creating of one’s one temporal dimension might seem hermetic at first, but Burroughs believed that through the search for clusters of meaning, the discovery of patterns and points of intersection, external readers of such layouts were able to gain access and to use these templates for their own purposes. Although Burroughs speaks of taking coordinates, these layouts were not meant to be static. They rather served as dynamic templates to be reused and refilled with new content, or to serve for exercises in free association. For some of his scrapbooks, Burroughs wrote commentaries that read like descriptions of landscapes (Burroughs 1978). A recurring and constant structural element of most of the formats in TIME is the magazine’s three-column format, which he discovered as especially predisposed for his layout experiments for My Own Mag. The multicolumn structure, sometimes also a grid, are devices used by Burroughs as tools for recording the temporal simultaneity of perception and a thematic filter for ideas in his travelogues and scrapbooks (Knickerbocker 1967: 157–8). There are two main reasons for the choice of the threecolumn layout. First, it was the standard layout of Time and Newsweek magazines, which Burroughs often used as source material. On a metaphorical level, the number three reflects also the production of new meaning inherent in the montage principle, where two distinct pieces of information are juxtaposed to produce a third meaning from their contiguous relation. This feature corresponds also conceptually with Burroughs’ and Gysin’s idea of artistic collaboration, whereby two minds join to form a third mind, as their subsequent book of methods was to be titled. In fact, Burroughs produced in this period two three-column layouts as variations on this subject: “WHO IS THE THIRD THAT WALKS BESIDE YOU” (1964) and “WHO IS THE | WALKS BESIDE YOU | WRITTEN 3RD” (1965) (Burroughs 1984: 50–2, 72–6).12 Furthermore, the three columns were often attributed different dates suggesting differing time tracks, as used in such recording media as audio tape and film. Beyond the metaphorical and intermedial references, the three-column structure has also a less obvious architectural correlative in the structure of monumental arches, as alluded to on page 8 of TIME. A three-part illustration, most probably inserted into the Time magazine template from a guide book on etiquette, displays the correct manners during social visits under the header “Modern Living” (Burroughs 1965b: 8). The three photographic vignettes presenting encounters between a lady and a gentleman are framed by arched structures with floral ornaments. Pasted between two original columns from Time magazine’s article on China and a third typewritten column with Burroughs’ text, the image offers points of intersection in its structure but also in its content in relation to the cut-up text. The fragment “Music fading in the East St Louis night . . .” is an allusion to Burroughs’ birthplace that he visited in late 1964. During this trip, Burroughs prepared a journal of which two pages were reproduced in the interview with Conrad Knickerbocker. One of these pages features a collage with images of elegant members of upper-class social circles that corresponds thematically with the vignettes in TIME (Knickerbocker 1967: 151). The cut-up column ends with the date “Sept. 17. 1899 over New York.” This date recurs on numerous occasions in

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TIME, as well as in other Burroughs’ cut-ups, and is a key to the understanding of the correlation between the three-column structure and the monumental arches. The column rulings separating the distinct timelines serve as support for the inscription of the date as usually seen on the friezes of arches or portals. In most of his contributions to My Own Mag, Burroughs makes repeated reference to three cities New York, Gibraltar, and St. Louis. All three cities played a significant role in his life: St. Louis as his place of birth and childhood, New York as a place where he made consequential encounters with people, and entered into the world of heroin addiction, and Gibraltar, as a space of limbo and mystery, where he would travel to take care of his finances and to renew the stamp in his passport. All of the three mentioned cities contain arches, New York and Gibraltar even more than one. The precise intersection point linking these arches and three-column layout can be found in a copy of the New York Times from September 17, 1899, which Burroughs uses as a template and source for cut-ups in the first edition of The Moving Times and to which he refers in the already-cited letter to Gysin, where he concludes that all newspapers are cut-ups. The first point of intersection in the date is a numerical one, namely between the date of the New York Times issue and one of the side portals of the Southport Gate in Gibraltar. Burroughs mentions the Southport Gate in a postcards to Nuttall and to Ian Sommerville, and must have considered them so relevant as he even took some snapshots of them (Burroughs, n.d.). The year 1899 can also be linked to another arch, namely the Dewey Arch built in 1899 in New York for Admiral George Dewey returning from his victorious campaign in the Philippines. This arch was inaugurated with a parade, the preparations for which are extensively reported on in the September 17 issue of the New York Times (New York Times (1857–1922) 1899). The third arch which is not explicitly referred to, but can be rather speculatively linked to this experimental period, is the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, which was built between 1963 and 1965, and of which Burroughs must have become aware during a trip to his home town in late 1964, writing the cut-up piece “St. Louis Return.” The Gateway Arch symbolizes the city as an important point of departure for the exploration of the American West. Burroughs regarded himself as a writer journeying into new territories, and it is not without coincidence that one of his final novels is called The Western Lands. One must also not forget Tangier as the city where most of the three-column layouts were produced. These layouts can be linked formally to Tangier’s architecture by the structure of the arch, which is omnipresent in the Medina, as it is an essential element of Islamic architecture. Similar as the arch provides passage between streets, or symbolizes historical events in its monumental version, the outlines of the columns on a page provide a passage into an imaginary geography. As final intersection point, one could cite the fact that Burroughs’ first address in Tangier was 1 Calle de los Arcos. A location that has disappeared and remains a blank space despite great efforts to track it down by Oliver Harris (Harris 2013). These three arches can be regarded as portals, just like the open grids in Burroughs’ layouts, making possible the contemplation of the contingency of temporal flow, and the contingency of remembering the passage of and in time.

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 273 The most emblematic conceptual metaphor for the epistemology of the cut-up experiments in Burroughs’ TIME, that is also linked to movements of passage, is a collage made from a Johns-Manville advertisement for industrial filters that appears on page 36 of the Time magazine September 13, 1963, issue (Burroughs 1965b).  The original advertisement shows a triangular blue figure, speckled with black dots, whose concentration increases at its apex, and points toward a plane covered with a grid pattern. Located underneath the plane is a drop-shaped form in a lighter-blue color. The upper part of the image symbolizes the contaminated medium, which passes through a filtering sieve and is cleansed in the process, which is symbolized by the light blue drop of a fluid. The accompanying text is set in a column on the right third of the image against a white background. Burroughs modifies the advertisement only slightly on page 9 of his TIME, by pasting over the lower part of the image with the cut-out of a drawing portraying a Christmas ball. The surfaces of such balls are often coated with a lacquer which reflects light, and thus turns these objects into convex mirrors, that give a distorted reflection of their surroundings. The image reflected on Burroughs’ paste-up Christmas ball shows a port scene: a waterfront with skyscrapers, pilot vessels, and a steamship approaching the harbor. Burroughs’ understanding of the grid is more ambiguous than the one portrayed in the advertisement. While the mechanism of the filter functions unidirectionally, Burroughs opens it to a reading in which the grid is permeable in both directions. It might be read as a version of the word virus scenario, according to which the Nova Conspiracy, or more generally control assembles the biological film in the Reality Studio, symbolized by the filter grid. In other words, a controlling entity gathers information and channels it to form a biased and interest-driven version of reality. In this sense, the dotted triangle in the advertisement is filtered and fused into a shiny but distorted image of the world. The original text of the advertisement, which Burroughs has preserved in his détournement, says appropriately: “How Johns-Manville filter aids help you control clarity.” A reading in the reverse direction of the arrangement would then suggest that the image of reality can be fragmented into its prime components, which after passing through the grid become suspended in a noncoherent constellation on the other side. In an additional step, this fragmented reality needs a new filtered interpretation. In Nova Police terminology, this operation would correspond with the call to “shift coordinate points” (Burroughs 1964a: 38–9) in navigating through the snares of a controlled version of reality. The nautical image in the Christmas ball evokes furthermore associations of travel, navigation, and, in consequence, mapping as other essential conceptual concerns of the cut-up project. This allusion does not seem surprising, considering the fact that before the grid became a pervasive element of twentieth-century art, and painting in particular, it was mainly used as a device for measurement and transfer in such fields as cartography and perspective drawing (Elderfield 1972; Krauss 1979). The collage of the filtering advertisement is a cogent metaphor for the cut-up procedure applied in the production of Burroughs’ detournement of Time and for his cut-up experiments in general. Following its logic, he retains portions of the magazine’s original grid and passes his own filtrate through its evacuated containers that might be

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Figure 8.2  Burroughs’ modification of the Johns-Manville advertisement in his cut-up pamphlet TIME. New York: “C” Press, 1965. [unpaginated] 9. reali​​tystu​​dio​.o​​rg​/bi​​bliog​​ raphi​​c​-bun​​​ker​/t​​ime/.​ regarded as a sieve. The information yielded from such a procedure is unpredictable, but still subject to his selection, and although Burroughs engages in a second stage of filtering, by selecting portions that he deems relevant, the filtered substrate still remains open to interpretation and might suggest different meanings to different people. Burroughs’ own allusions and conclusions do not necessarily remain readable.

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 275 One could argue that the cut-up passages used in the trilogy as literary devices are the result of multiple filtering stages, while the cut-up texts in the small-press publications retain a raw quality. This ambiguity is desired and even encouraged, when, for example, Burroughs instructs the readers of My Own Mag to “Put any picture that fits from your time into this time space. W.B.” (Burroughs 1964c), referring to an empty grid within his layout. This example demonstrates that within the small-press context the cut-up project was intended to be an interactive undertaking from the start. How successful it became is an entirely other question. Besides its metaphorical function, the collage of the filtering ad is placed strategically within the first third of the TIME, and it is striking how the degree of fragmentation within the cut-up texts diminishes toward the last third of the pamphlet. As a graphic break, the middle part contains a section of Brion Gysin’s calligraphic drawings on pages 15–18. Gysin’s calligraphies were abstract shapes that resembled written signs, and their placement after Burroughs’ fragmented layouts might be read as a culmination point in which language is silenced in its reduction to an abstract shape (Hoptman 2010: 62–4). The following pages feature Burroughs’ linear cut-up formats that allow a more continuous reading than the multicolumn layouts. The pamphlet can thus be structured roughly into three parts: highly fragmented newspaper layouts with the filtering ad that take up almost half of the space, Gysin’s calligraphies, and twelve pages of linear cut-ups, or, in other words, analysis—silence—synthesis. Burroughs’ appropriation and modification of a copy of a major American newsmagazine seems futile as a political gesture. Still, it can be read as a symbolical act of resistance that he hoped to amplify and spread among the small magazine community. An ambition that has yielded very moderate results, but attracted a few like-minded artists and writers, like Jeff Nuttall, Ed Sanders, Carl Weissner, Jürgen Ploog, Claude Pélieu, and Mary Beach that adopted many of his methods. In this sense, Burroughs’ TIME is a crucial publication that sheds new light on the variety of his methodology that extends well beyond the Nova trilogy and proves that the cut-up experiments were not only open in an aesthetic sense, but also invited a practice of social exchange.

Notes 1 Haygood argues that the change in leadership at Time magazine resulted in a more balanced style of reporting (Haygood 2009). 2 An archaeology of these processes is provided by the website https://knowyourmeme​ .com​/about 3 Prime examples for the use of montage as a tool of political activism are the works of John Heartfield or Klaus Staeck. 4 For a detailed discussion of the term “cultural hegemony,” see (Lears 1985). 5 I am referring here to random choices from Time Vol. 80 No. 22, November 30, 1962, and Vol. 82 No. 11, September 13, 1963, two issues which Burroughs used extensively as templates for his TIME pamphlet.

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6 For an in-depth analysis of the portrayal of Beat authors in LIFE November 30, 1959, see: (Harris 2019: 35–7) Not only was Naked Lunch on trial for obscenity since its publication in the United States in 1962, but Burroughs himself sued Time magazine for libel after a hateful review in the same year. For a detailed discussion of the censorship trial, see cf. (Goodman 1981; Whiting 2006). 7 For further details on the technical aspects of the procedure, see (Miles 2013: 26–8). 8 A scan of this rare collector’s item can be viewed on realitystudio​.or​g: (“The Ticket That Exploded | RealityStudio” 2020). 9 (Lovell 2016: 638) underlines that the Maoist Cultural Revolution not only influenced anti-imperialist movements in the Western world but also had an empowering impact on youth and student movements. 10 For the lack of pagination, I will refer to the page order in the pdf-file available from realitystudio. 11 Joanna Harrop analyzes this motif extensively through Burroughs experiences with the drug DMT (Harrop 2010: 208–15). 12 The former layout was originally published in Art and Literature 2, Summer 1964. and reprinted in various other small magazines. The latter was published in Darazt, July 1965.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1970), Ästhetische Theorie. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1707, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Barnhurst, Kevin G. (1994), Seeing the Newspaper, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Birmingham, Jed (2009), “Interview with Tom Veitch on William S. Burroughs | RealityStudio,” Realitystudio, March 23. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​ iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/bun​​ker​-i​​nterv​​iews/​​inter​​view-​​with-​​tom​-v​​eitch​​-on​-​w​​illia​​m​-s​-b​​urrou​​ ghs/ Birmingham, Jed (2010), “Time and China | RealityStudio,” Realitystudio. September 27. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/tim​​e​​-and​​-chin​​a/ Burroughs, William S. (1962), “Censorship,” The Transatlantic Review 11. Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation, 5–10. Available online: https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/41512076 Burroughs, William S. (1964a), Nova Express, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1964b), “The Moving Times,” My Own Mag 5(May): 3–4. Burroughs, William S. (1964c), “The Burrough: Afternoon Ticker Tape,” My Own Mag, July. Available online: http:​/​/rea​​litys​​tudio​​.org/​​bibli​​ograp​​hic​-b​​unker​​/my​-o​​wn​-ma​​g​/my-​​ ow​n​-m​​ag​-is​​sue​-6​/ Burroughs, William S. (1965a), “Fits of Nerves With a Fix,” C: A Journal of the Arts 10. Available online: https​:/​/rs​​pull-​​super​​vert.​​netdn​​a​-ssl​​.com/​​image​​s​/bib​​liogr​​aphic​​_ bunk​​er​/c_​​journ​​al​/ws​​b​/wil​​liam-​​burro​​ughs.​​fits-​​of​-ne​​rves-​​wi​th-​​a​-fix​​.c​-jo​​urnal​​-10​.p​​df Burroughs, William S. (1965b), TIME, New York: “C” Press. Available online: https​:/​/re​​ ality​​studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​​r​/tim​​e/. Burroughs, William S. (1966), “P.S. to ACADEMY 23 & NEWSWEEK Picture,” Collage. Box 31, Folder 39, Item 6, William S. Burroughs Papers: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library.

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 277 Burroughs, William S. (1978), “Scrapbook no.562,” Scrapbook commentary. William S. Burroughs Papers, Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, Ohio State University. Available online: https​:/​/li​​brary​​.osu.​​edu​/f​​i ndin​​g​-aid​​s​/rar​​ebook​​s​/bur​​ro​ugh​​s40​.p​​hp. Burroughs, William S. (1984), The Burroughs File, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Burroughs, William S. (1986), The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, New York: Seaver Books. Burroughs, William S. (2001), Die elektronische Revolution/Electronic Revolution. 11. Aufl. Expanded media editions, Bonn: Pociao’s Books. Burroughs, William S. (2012), Rub out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan, New York: Ecco. Burroughs, William S. (2014), The Soft Machine: The Restored Text, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (n.d.), Snapshots of Southport Gate in Gibraltar. Photography. Series IV, Photographic Files, Box 90, Item 4, William S. Burroughs Papers: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Burroughs, William S., Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin (1960a), Minutes to Go, Paris: Two Cities Editions. Burroughs, William S., Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso (1960b), Minutes to Go, Paris: Two Cities Ed. Burroughs, William S. and Brion Gysin (1960a), The Exterminator, San Francisco: Auerhahn Press. Burroughs, William S. and Brion Gysin (1960b), The Exterminator, San Francisco: Auerhahn Press. Clay, Steven and Rodney Phillips (1998), A Secret Location on the Lower East Side : Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980: A Sourcebook of Information, New York: New York Public Library: Granary Books. Diggory, Terence (2009), “Berrigan, Ted (1934–1983),” in Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets, 53–5. New York: Facts on File. Dikötter, Frank (2011), Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962, London: Bloomsbury. Drucker, Johanna (1994), The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elderfield, John (1972), “Grids,” Artforum 10(9): 52–9. Ernst, Max (1970), Ecritures, Avec Cent Vingt Illustrations Extraites de l’oeuvre de l’auteur, Paris: Gallimard. Goodman, Michael B. (1981), Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Harris, Oliver (2005), “‘Burroughs Is a Poet Too, Really’: The Poetics of Minutes to Go,” Edinburgh Review 114: 24–36. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.keel​​e​.ac.​​uk​/de​​pts​/a​​s​/sta​​ff​/ Ha​​rris/​​harri​​​shome​​page.​​htm Harris, Oliver (2013), “Naked Lunch @ 50 » 1 Calle de Los Arcos,” http:​/​/nak​​edlun​​ch​.or​​g​/ nak​​ed​-lu​​nch​/s​​pace-​​time-​​trave​​l​/nak​​ed​-lu​​nch​-i​​n​-tan​​gier/​​1​​-cal​​le​-de​​-los-​​arcos​/ (accessed January 2). Harris, Oliver (2014), “Introduction,” in William S. Burroughs (ed.), The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text, ix–lv, New York: Grove Press. Harris, Oliver (2019), “Cutting Up the Century,” in Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (eds.), William S. Burroughs: Cutting up the Century, 28–49, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Harrop, Joanna (2010), The Yagé Aesthetic of William Burroughs: The Publication and Development of His Work 1953–1965, London: Queen Mary, University of London. Haygood, Daniel Marshall (2009), “Henry Luce’s Anti-Communist Legacy,” Journalism History 35(2): 98–105. doi:10.1080/00947679.2009.12062790. Höch, Hannah (1919), Schnitt Mit Dem Küchenmesser Dada Durch Die Letzte Weimarer Bierbauch-Kulturepoche Deutschlands, Karton/Collage. Available online: https​:/​/ ww​​w​.bil​​dinde​​x​.de/​​docum​​ent​/o​​bj025​​10954​​?medi​​u​m​=ng​​2625_​​007 Hoptman, Laura J. (2010), “Disappearing Act: The Art of Brion Gysin,” in Laura J. Hoptman, John Geiger, and New Museum (eds.), Brion Gysin, Dream Machine : [New Museum, New York, July 7–October 3, 2010; Musée d’Art Moderne de La Ville de Paris, June–October 2010], London: Merrell. Kay, Lily E. (2000), Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Writing Science, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Knickerbocker, Conrad (1967), “William Burroughs,” in George Plimpton (ed.), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 141–74, New York: Viking. Krauss, Rosalind (1979), “Grids,” October 9(Summer): 51–64. Available online: http:// www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/778321. Lamoureux, Johanne (2005), “Médium, réferent et fonction dans les illustrations du Petit Larousse illustré,” in Monique Catherine Cormier and Aline Francoeur (eds.), Les Dictionnaires Larousse: genèse et évolution, 177–98, Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal . Lavin, Maud (1993), Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch, New Haven: Yale University Press. Lears, T. J. Jackson (1985), “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” The American Historical Review 90(3): 567–93. doi:10.2307/1860957 Lovell, Julia (2016), “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective,” The China Quarterly 227, 632–52. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/S0305741016000722 Lovell, Julia (2019), Maoism: A Global History. First United States Edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. McLaughlin, Robert (1963), “Red China,” Time, September 13. Miles, Barry (2013), “The Future Leaks Out: A Very Magical and Highly Charged Interludes,” in Colin Fallows, Synne Genzmer, and Kunsthalle Wien (eds.), Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs, Vol. 2, rev. ed., 22–31. Nürnberg: Verl. für Moderne Kunst. New York Times (1857–1922). (1899), “STANDS FOR DEWEY PARADE,” ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851–2009), September 17. Available online: http:​/​/sea​​rch​.p​​roque​​st​.co​​m​/doc​​view/​​95746​​340​?a​​cc​oun​​tid​=1​​1004 Pollard, Morris (ed.) (1961), The Gustav Stern Symposium on Perspectives in Virology (1960), Vol. II, Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Co. Prima, Diane di and LeRoi Jones (eds.) (1973), The Floating Bear, a Newsletter. Numbers 1-37, 1961-1969, La Jolla, CA: Laurence McGilvery. Saper, Craig J. (2012), Intimate Bureaucracies: A Manifesto, Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books. Schmeck, Harold M. Jr. (1960), “Mutation Agent Held Clue to Life,” New York Times (1923-Current File), January 26. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2009). Available online: http:​/​/sea​​rch​.p​​roque​​st​.co​​m​/doc​​view/​​11507​​4834?​​acco​u​​ ntid=​​11004​

 “I Spent Months in the Morgue” 279 Schneiderman, Davis (2013), “The Miraculous and Mucilaginous Paste Pot: ExtraIllustration and Plagiary in the Burroughs Legacy,” Journal of Beat Studies 2: 53–79. Schottenlaender, Brian E. C. (2012), “Anything But Routine: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of William S. Burroughs, v. 3.0,” Available online: http:​/​/www​​.esch​​olars​​ hip​.o​​rg​/uc​​/item​​​/63k9​​k1gf Sobieszek, Robert A. (1996), Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Thames and Hudson. “The Ticket That Exploded | RealityStudio” (2020), Available online: https​:/​/re​​ality​​s tudi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phy​/b​​ooks-​​and​-b​​roads​​ide​-p​​rints​​/the-​​ticke​​​t​-tha​​t​-exp​​loded​/ (accessed May 5). Time. (1962), “King of the YADS,” November 30. Time. (1963), “Tuscan Impressionism,” September 13. Troyer, Nancy Gray (2003), “Macchiaioli,” in Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press. doi:10.10​93/ga​o/978​18844​46054​.arti​cle.T​05272​8 Varnedoe, Kirk (1990), High & Low : Modern Art, Popular Culture, New York: Museum of Modern Art : Distributed by H.N. Abrams. Whiting, Frederick (2006), “Monstrosity on Trial: The Case of Naked Lunch,” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 52: 145–74. Wolin, Richard (2010), The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Zeng, Jun and Siying Duan (2018), “Maoist Aesthetics in Western Left-Wing Thought,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 20(3). doi:10.7771/1481-4374.3250

9

Digitizing the Word Hoard Remediating Countercultural Archives after the American Century Alex Wermer-Colan

it all keeps pouring out of him in an absolutely brilliant horde of words & in fact his new book is best thing of its kind in the world (Genet, Celine, Miller, etc.) & we might call it WORD HOARD . . . he, Burroughs, (not “Lee” any more) unleashes his word hoard, or horde, on the world which has been awaiting the Only Prophet, Burroughs—His message is all scatological homosexual super-violent madness—his manuscript is all that has been saved from the original vast number of written pages of WORD HOARD which he’d left in all the boy’s privies of the world. —Jack Kerouac (“Letter to Lucien and Francesca Carr,” February 28, 1957, Tangiers, Morocco) Within contemporary scholarship on William S. Burroughs, a half-century debate remains unresolved over the exact nature of Burroughs’ “word hoard,” the mythic set of texts purportedly composed during the 1950s, eventually published in Naked Lunch (1959), and recycled in his 1960s cut-up novels. These by-products of the “word hoard” amounted to substantial works of post–Second World War American literature, surreal visions of future control societies exploiting the viral mechanisms of consumer society. Burroughs’ premier editor and scholar, Oliver Harris, after decades of archival research, has suggested that the major library archives, including a file at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, entitled “Word Hoard” (Berg 19.22), constitute nearly the entirety of Burroughs’ original “word hoard” (see Oliver Harris’s introduction to The Soft Machine: The Restored Text (2014)). Although a scholarly consensus has formed around the idea that the “word hoard” refers to this body of texts, approximately 1,000 typewritten pages, which Burroughs produced between 1954 and 1958, many collectors, archivists, and researchers nevertheless retain hope that another batch of archival manuscripts may still exist in private holdings, implying that the currently cataloged papers are only the tip of the iceberg.

 Digitizing the Word Hoard 281 The first mention of Burroughs’ writings as a “word hoard” appears in the astonishing letter, excerpted as the epigraph to this chapter, written by Jack Kerouac to Lucien and Francesca Carr on February 28, 1957, the time period when Kerouac, along with Ginsberg, transcribed Burroughs’ disorganized papers into a first draft of the “novel” for which Kerouac would also coin the eventual title, Naked Lunch (1959). Just as Kerouac undoubtedly adopted the phrase from Burroughs’ drafts of Naked Lunch, where Burroughs repeatedly threatens to “unlock his word hoard,” so Kerouac’s description of Burroughs’ feverish 1950s prose adopts the novel’s caustically clairvoyant style. Kerouac’s letter revels in the subversive myth of Burroughs’ “word hoard” being proliferated via “all the boy’s privies of the world.” His portrait captures the multiple meanings that the term may bear for Burroughs, gesturing toward its assonance with “barbarian hordes,” as well as the word’s etymology in Old English. By the twentieth century, the original meanings of “word hoard” remained largely unchanged from the original in Old English. Representing a poet or speech-bearer’s valuable raw materials, the term “wordhord” usually appears alongside the verb “onleac,” “unlocked.” The Oxford English Dictionary provides the following useful definition of “hoard”: (a.) “An accumulation or collection of anything valuable hidden away or laid by for preservation or future use; a stock, store, esp. of money; a treasure.” A “word-hoard,” then, represents a poet or speech-bearer’s valuable raw materials. The warrior Beowulf, for instance, is said to “unlock his word-hoard” (Beowulf, ll. 258–9). The root word in Old English, “hord,” can mean not only “treasure,” but, in a phrase perhaps uniquely compelling, “hidden inmost place.” In the wide-ranging materials housed in archives across the nation, scholars have encountered such a “hoard” of treasure, a horde that, created through Burroughs’ writing in the 1950s, and his cut-up process in the 1960s, served to archive, map, reveal, and challenge the American Century’s “hidden inmost place,” the dark underside of American imperial power. Whereas Burroughs’ writings in the 1950s, especially Naked Lunch, have typically been associated in scholarship with the “word hoard,” while the sci-fi cut-up novels of the 1960s have been understood as the products of a reprocessed, original “word hoard,” I argue in this brief chapter that Burroughs’ post-1965 writings and scrapbook projects invite a reconsideration of the idea of the “word hoard,” not referring to a set of materials originating from a circumscribed time period, but rather offering a conceptual framework for understanding Burroughs’ writing’s political potential for the future. If Burroughs collected his first word hoard in the 1950s while writing the fragmented visions that became Naked Lunch, it was his cut-up process in the 1960s that he honed into a means of processing and disseminating his remaining hoard of words. When Burroughs was writing Naked Lunch, as well as in his experimental cut-up works (ranging from Minutes to Go (1960) to Nova Express (1964)), his project was oriented toward the present. During the revolutionary excitement of the early 1960s, Burroughs sought to disseminate his “viral anti-bodies” throughout the various mainstream and underground print and multimedia networks. But after 1965, and especially after 1968, a period that remains a relative blind spot in Burroughs’ archival scholarship, Burroughs became a prominent spokesperson in mainstream magazines and media

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venues for radical strains of the rising counterculture, while also collecting enormous quantities of cut-up material that he was never able to share publicly. Burroughs’ cut-up process can be better understood as, in part, an archival practice involving the development of filing systems and databases, to compensate for his growing obsession during the 1960s with artistic practices of “hoarding.” In Oliver Harris’s essay, “Cutting Up the Century” (2019), he notes that after 1964, Burroughs “very consciously developed his own verbal and visual filing systems as rivals to those of Henry Luce,” the editor of TIME, LIFE, and Fortune (William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century, 44). In his essay, as Harris elaborates on the definition of the word hoard and the role of archival systems in Burroughs’ writing, his critical prose runs up against ambiguities similar to those underlying Kerouac’s epistolary description. Harris writes: While it might be said that the matrix of late-1950s manuscripts mythologized as the “Word Hoard” was Burroughs’ original “database”—“a structured collection of data organized for search and retrieval,” as Jed Birmingham puts it—his 1960s cut-up files were assemblages on a completely different scale (Birmingham 2014, 16). More than that, insofar as they consciously rivalled the word and image banks of the global news media, rather than arose organically as a literary work-inprogress, Burroughs’ 1960s archival systems naturally coordinated not only texts and images in multiple and hybrid formats but also work across a range of media and technologies, from photomontage to scrapbooks, film to audiotape.

As evident in this critical passage, and in Kerouac’s contemporaneous description of Burroughs’ original word hoard, it is a difficult task to delineate the difference between Burroughs’ 1950s prose and 1960s cut-ups, between the “word hoard” his writing process serves to preserve and the “word hoard” his writing process serves to unlock. In other words, does the original “word hoard” constitute a set of texts Burroughs composed in a state of exaltation during the 1950s that then served as a database for Burroughs’ 1960s cut-up novels? Or does the prose Burroughs generated in the 1950s serve as a seed for the “word hoard” database Burroughs’ cut-up archival practices bring into fruition for the future from the jumbled chaos of the present? Undoubtedly, the “word hoard” still casts a long shadow over Burroughs’ reception, embodying his works’ slipperiness and messiness, the uncategorizable monstrosity of his mutating prose, its multimedia manifestations, and the multifaceted purposes they served. Unlike most figures in the 1960s counterculture, Burroughs was deeply pessimistic about the Left’s chances against a rising, virulent right wing willing to stop at nothing. He recognized 1968 as a turning point not toward revolution but toward reactionary takeover, indicating the possibility that his own time would not be the ripest era for progressive change. Commissioned by Esquire to report on the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago with Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, and Jean Genet, Burroughs’ satirical perspective showed little surprise at the police brutality on display. Only a year later, after the failure of international revolutionary movements, in a letter from London dated November 3, 1969, Burroughs wrote matter-of-factly: “We

 Digitizing the Word Hoard 283 are witnessing a worldwide reactionary movement comparable to the reaction of 1848” (Rub Out the Words, 307–8). In light of global reactionary movements, as evidenced by his theoretical manifesto, The Electronic Revolution (1973), Burroughs became deeply concerned that the right would manipulate new media communication technologies to control the populace through surveillance, consumerism, and propaganda. In reaction to the changing ecosystem of reactionary discourse and ideology increasingly prevalent in post-1968 mainstream American culture, Burroughs adapted the cut-up method to compile and archive a hoard of media images and news clippings, numbering in the thousands, preserved in collage juxtaposition for a time and place more fertile for revolutionary action and change. Even if Burroughs composed the original “word hoard” with a contemporary audience in mind, the politics of his writing, and the cut-up method by extension, should not be seen as only a direct assault on the present; rather, the cut-up represents a multifaceted engagement with the reader’s temporality, finding in speculative modes of writing (especially the science fiction genre) a means of remixing the present cultural sphere as an archive for future modes of resistance. Burroughs sought to create templates and instructions for adapting methods and artworks originally designed to disturb media moguls like Henry Luce, but capable of undermining those who would come to inherit his mantle, such as the Murdoch family of today’s right-wing news media empire. By the late 1960s, Burroughs’ cut-up method became increasingly a means of creating a new “word hoard,” as he sought to stock up in preparation for what he knew would be an increasingly reactionary time in American politics. The archival elements of Burroughs’ cut-up method, then, should not be too simply conflated with Walter Benjamin’s modernist archival project, The Arcades Project (1940). Whereas Benjamin used the collage method to juxtapose historical texts that can illuminate the dialectical truths of late capitalism, what makes Burroughs’ countercultural archival project of the American Century properly postmodern is that he was never truly writing for the present, but for the future. As Burroughs put it in his essay, “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” in The Third Mind (1965): “when you cut into the Present the Future leaks out.” Unlike Benjamin’s archeological project to uncover the material history of the modernist spectacle of the Parisian arcades (symbolized by Paul Klee’s angel of history), Burroughs’ cut-up practice serves primarily to archive, recontextualize, and short-circuit the postmodern spectacle of contemporary mass media increasingly saturating post–Second World War consumer society, while prophecizing methods and materials of resistance for the future. In Naked Lunch, although a series of uncontextualized dialogue can make it difficult to tell who is speaking, it seems that it is the character of the Prophet who receives the honor to proclaim, “And now I will unlock my Word Hoard,” warning “nothing shall stem the rising tide,” before declaring: “So I got an exclusive why don’t I make with the live word? The word cannot be expressed direct. . . . It can perhaps be indicated by mosaic of juxtaposition like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer, defined by negatives and absence” (Naked Lunch, 97). By the end of the 1960s, Burroughs’ cut-up method had developed into just such a politically committed archival practice: by cutting up

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hegemonic discourse to let the future leak out, Burroughs created a countercultural archive he hoped could be of use for the 1970s resistance movements and beyond. Although a few scholars have explored Burroughs’ engagement with print culture in the early 1960s, less has been written about Burroughs’ shifting attitudes toward revolutionary practices and countercultural activities after the reactionary turn of 1968, from his convoluted process of compiling his “word-hoard” to his cut-up interventions into the changing landscape of print magazines. By mining the archive, Burroughs’ misunderstood role at the vanguard of the counterculture can better come into focus, especially in the light of of his most idiosyncratic, unpublished projects, such as his post-1965 scrapbooks. After exploring Burroughs’ cut-up archive as part and parcel of his progenitive quest to “unleash the word hoard,” this chapter briefly considers the theoretical ramifications of digitizing Burroughs’ archive, exhibiting materials on the web, and adapting his methods to emerging technologies. Burroughs’ cut-up project was a radical archival project, one that can only be made available, much less comprehensible, through digitization, computational analysis, and multimedia, interactive exhibition. Such tools can aid scholars in the analysis of Burroughs’ archival typescripts to demonstrate both shifts in the material he uses for his cut-ups, and to try to trace the unconscious algorithms by which he selected, permutated, and transformed his cut-ups. By cutting up the mass media and reappropriating disparate materials into his cut-up archive, especially through his queering of the feminist practice of scrapbooking and keeping dream diaries and calendars, Burroughs created a countercultural archive of the American Century, one that offers a valuable opportunity to rethink what the digital humanities can offer for the fields of textual criticism, literary history, archival studies, and the politics of aesthetics. A Burroughsian digital archive would not only present his original work with extensive editorial contextualization and curation, but would also provide innovative digital tools to adapt and apply his cut-up methods to contemporary forms of new media.

Scrapbooking the American Nightmare: Toward a Countercultural Digital Archive of the American Century Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word hoard. . . . Gentle Reader, the Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and toes like an opportunistic land crab, it will hang you and catch your jissom like a scrutable dog, it will coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid ectoplasm. —William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959) Although thousands of pages of Burroughs’ papers have been available to scholars for decades at a few libraries across America, the opening of Burroughs’ archive at New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Special Collection has transformed Burroughs scholarship in the last decade. The manuscript materials, totaling 11,000

 Digitizing the Word Hoard 285 pages, were originally cataloged by Barry Miles and annotated by Burroughs in the early 1970s in order to sell the materials to Roberto Altman. Altman “wanted to create a cultural center where the archive, and others like it, could be studied,” but due to financial difficulties, the center’s construction was stalled, and “the archive remained in storage for the next decade before being sold to an American book collector” (Miles 2014: 500–1). After the materials were sold, neither Burroughs, nor anybody else, saw any of these materials again, that is, until the NYPL purchased the collection in 2010. The Berg archive testifies to the significance of Burroughs’ title for Folio 58: “What Is Rejected For The Final Typescript Submitted To Publisher Is Often As Good Or Better Than What Goes In.” Since the Berg materials were made available to scholars, Oliver Harris’s archival research has culminated in restored editions of the misnamed “Nova trilogy,” as well as, recently, in volumes of Burroughs’ earlier experimental works like Minutes to Go (1960) and The Exterminator (1961). Harris’s arguably unparalleled editorial project for a postmodern writer involves meticulous genetic scholarship to restore an authoritative edition of the text while providing in the endnotes a multiplicity of alternative or supplementary texts from the archive. His restoration project has illustrated how Burroughs’ cut-up method and collage form served as a means of resisting the ruling class and their propaganda machine, the Reality Studio, especially as it manifested in the postwar era through the magazine trilogy, TIME, LIFE, and Fortune that broadcast Henry Luce’s imperial vision of the American Century. Harris’s restoration project represents a significant strain in a wider field of Burroughs’ textual criticism, which seeks to correct original publications in new reprints. The only risk with approaching Burroughs’ archive for the purpose of such restorative projects, at least when deployed through the traditional publishing industry, is that it is inevitably necessary to prioritize, even overvalue, the codex, or book, as the primary format for Burroughs’ composition practices, practices that actually involved a wide array of material methods and media forms for dissemination. Burroughs’ canonization in the literary field has been largely dependent on publications of his books; as a result, Burroughs’ vision in Naked Lunch of his writings as having grotesque lives of their own, outside prepackaged, consumable bites, tends to get lost in translation. Beyond the restorative project at the heart of Burroughs’ scholarship since his death, a secondary, embryonic project remains to adapt Burroughs’ archival materials and give them the life they were intended to possess in a new media ecosystem. Harris’s own work in restoration has provided a foundation for this second stage in Burroughs archival scholarship, represented by a wide range of recent and forthcoming scholarly editions, including Harris’s own BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS (2020), collecting Burroughs’ unpublished, outstanding cut-up experiments from the early 1960s that were typewritten entirely in uppercase. Over five years ago, I began conducting exploratory research in the NYPL’s Berg archive. With support from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center’s Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a journal dedicated to recovering “lost” works of New American writing, I edited a collection of Burroughs’ cut-up experiments with canonical writers, from William Shakespeare to Arthur Rimbaud,

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Jean Genet to James Joyce, entitled The Travel Agency is on Fire (2015). The collection’s title, a phrase absent from Burroughs’ published oeuvre, serves as an alternative mantra to Burroughs’ oft-repeated “Storm the Reality Studio.” Burroughs discovered the phrase while cutting up and splicing together his own writing, especially The Soft Machine (1962), with Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962). My research in the Berg archive, as well as at Arizona State University’s and Ohio State University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Libraries, has culminated in multiple publications and adaptations, including the Experiments in Opera’s musical adaptations of The Travel Agency is on Fire pieces, dramaturgical contributions to director Mallory Catlett’s multimedia theatrical work, Decoder (see Catlett, Crane, and Wermer-Colan, PAJ 42.2 (2020)), corpus-building and data analysis projects with available digital versions of Burroughs’ oeuvre, and, most of all, a critical anthology on the cut-up, William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century (2019), containing Burroughs’ scholarship and archival materials that showcases the range and breadth of Burroughs’ cut-up archive. A huge amount of Burroughs’ most relevant archival materials could not be included, even as excerpts, in Cutting Up the Century, such as Burroughs’ profound lectures on his theory of the virus at the City College of New York from 1974, published for the first time in the appendix of this volume. Nevertheless, even the lecture notes appearing in this volume are only excerpts; it would require intensive in-house archival research or the digitization of these records en masse to create an adequate critical edition of Burroughs’ voluminous teaching materials. Of all the cut-ups in the Berg archive, Burroughs’ post-1965 scrapbooks, dream calendars, and newspaper cut-ups best demonstrate the way his cut-up method transformed during the 1960s. Burroughs’ works from the 1960s include scrapbooks bearing such enigmatic titles as “All The Sad Old Showmen And Young Action As Well,” “Observer Time File,” “The Captain’s Log Book,” the “Analog File,” as well as various dream calendars, such as “The Dickens Calendar” and the “Wordsworth Dream Calendar.” In one of his most provocative scrapbooks from 1969, entitled “An Unfinished Scrapbook: The Order and the Material is the Message,” Burroughs splices newspaper reports from around the world to create a documentary collage of late 1960s anti-colonial movements in Vietnam and race riots in America. In the 1970s and 1980s, as represented in the Ohio State University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Burroughs’ scrapbooking became even more intimately associated with his own personal fantasies and visions, pointing toward his increasingly queer engagement with an artistic practice historically associated with feminist practices of rewriting historical trends from the bottom-up, intimately collecting cultural detritus and souvenirs to create counter-narratives against patriarchal hegemony (for more information on Burroughs’ scrapbooks, see my essay on Burroughs’ lifelong scrapbooking practice and their current status in the archives, “The Order and the Material is the Message,” American Book Review, 2020). Yet again, until these materials are digitized, it will be nearly impossible for scholars to properly piece together, much less exhibit, Burroughs’ under-examined, queer practice of multimodal, temporal collaging of political journalism and personal history.

 Digitizing the Word Hoard 287 Burroughs’ scrapbooking of contemporary news, dream calendars, and notes about his daily life offer unusually fitting material for new media technology. Of all the material in the archives, Burroughs’ post-1965 scrapbook projects make most apparent the necessity of not only rethinking Burroughs’ cut-up process as an archival practice, but of creating a Burroughsian digital archive. The various “scrapbook” projects are particularly difficult to describe, sometimes consisting of hundreds of numbered pages of cut-up newspaper photos and text. The library catalogs and finding aids are often unreliable in their identification of the “scrapbooks,” such that a variety of folios contain disorganized files, unbound, that may have been originally created as “scrapbooks.” The work required to properly index and sort these materials is enormous; furthermore, in the NYPL’s Berg archive, many of these materials have only been accessible to researchers a single page at a time, so researchers cannot easily compare two leaves closely. It is for such reasons as these, not to mention the cost of publishing full-color art books in print today, that digitizing Burroughs archive, as laborious and costly as it may be, should be considered the necessary next step in advancing scholarship on his work and generating new art out of his methods. The materials collected in classic books like Robert Sobieszek’s Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts (1996), as well as more recent collections like William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century (2019), testify to Burroughs’ attempts to transcend the written word, making apparent the need for an innovative digital collection of Burroughs’ works. Burroughs would have looked down upon the relative disorganization of his own archival papers, and their disaggregation across multiple repositories; indeed, he would’ve been most disturbed by the way his materials have been “hoarded” away for the purposes of long-term preservation or to gain value on the marketplace. His vision was always for avant-garde works of counterculture resistance to be proliferated through all available communication technologies by any means necessary. The Burroughs archive requires levels of engagement from researchers, then, that are arguably beyond the scope of traditional textual scholarship and literary criticism, including the need for a deeper dive into archival theory, archival studies, and archival practices, as well as a reconsideration of the way these materials can be remediated through emerging digital technologies. Burroughs’ late 1960s scrapbooks and dream notes, and the rest of Burroughs’ unmined archive, offer a vital cultural resource for a time with new technological means, digital tools for textual and network analysis, as well as for interactive digital exhibitions, to unlock Burroughs’ word hoard of the American Century. RealityStudio​.o​rg offers a foundation for imagining what a “web 2.0” website featuring Burroughs’ materials might look like, showcasing work by a constellation of authors orbiting Burroughs from 1950 to 1973. Jed Birmingham’s blogposts on RealityStudio​.o​rg constitute a collector’s diary and book history that chronicles Burroughs’ early years, from 1959 to 1965, experimenting with the cut-up at the vanguard of the mimeo magazine revolution, as documented in Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing (1960-1980) (1998). Birmingham’s work since 2005 on RealityStudio​.o​rg resembles what Abigail de Kosnik, in Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (2016), calls a “rogue archive,” exploring “the potential of digital technologies to democratize cultural memory” (2). De Kosnik

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focuses on archival projects, such as the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and Open Library, that use “digital tools and networks” to “construct repositories that are accessible by all Internet users,” preserving either “vast quantities of information” or “highly specific materials (such as the documents of subcultures or minority groups) that have been consistently excluded or ignored by traditional memory institutions” (2). What stands uniquely interesting about Birmingham’s project is that he uploads bootlegs of copyrighted texts (somewhat like UbuWeb), but does so specifically by scanning his own collector’s editions of rare issues of little magazines. For a proper digital collection of such bootlegs and related archival papers, however, these materials would need to be indexed, organized, catalogued, and transformed through optical character recognition into machine-readable, encoded datasets for text curation and analysis. Beyond fan-sites like RealityStudio​.org​, the digital archive by Stanley Gontarski’s team at Florida State University takes this next step of curating Burroughs’ work as data. Since 2012, Gontarski has led a team of graduate students working with FSU’s Special Collections and Archives to digitize their physical archive of Burroughs materials, including early drafts of Blade Runner (a movie) (1979), the short essay “Sects and Death” (1979), Burroughs’ column for Crawdaddy magazine, and 106 unique cutups. The text encoding project traces a genetic history of Burroughs’ drafts at a more detailed level than available in Harris’s restored editions of Burroughs’ cut-up books, taking advantage of computational methods to systematically identify variations in drafts from the published texts, encoding the text files with annotated information about Burroughs’ composition process, and thereby providing a template for a future digital archive of Burroughs’ larger corpus. Any future Burroughs digital archive will not only make accessible some of Burroughs’ most vital literary and artworks, but will provide an overarching platform and hub for disparate work on Burroughs, his contemporaries, and the material history with which he engaged. A Burroughsian digital archive will also expand our understanding of what a digital archive and website can be. In an ideal world, such a digital artefact would seek to make visible its own states of mutation, while, in the collaborative spirit Burroughs advocated, also providing an opportunity to continuously annotate and contextualize Burroughs’ works. As just one example of the innovative exhibitions that emerging web technologies can make possible for writer’s papers, Princeton University’s Center for the Digital Humanities has created a digital archive of Jacques Derrida’s annotated library entitled Derrida’s Margins, allowing for dynamic faceting between citations and commentary. A Burroughsian version of such a resource would complement high-quality digital images (when given permission by the Estate) with encoded text documents (and related metadata) for structured digital queries and analyses, while also providing his multifaceted corpora disaggregated into extracted features to bypass restrictions imposed by copyright and enable nonconsumptive forms of research in cultural analytics. A future Burroughsian digital archive, therefore, will ideally situate Burroughs’ cut-up texts, collages, scrapbooks, faux newspapers, and multimedia films within their historical context, traced and hyperlinked to their most relevant source texts on other digital archives. The online site could also serve as a platform for scholars

 Digitizing the Word Hoard 289 to computationally analyze Burroughs’ cut-up materials with topic modeling and vector space modeling, while tracing genetic histories of cut-ups back to their original sources in mass media newspapers and genre fiction. By developing, furthermore, an online interactive platform for visitors to create their own cut-ups of contemporary media sources and political propaganda, such a digital project would aim to present a “Burroughsian” model for the digital humanities, one finely tuned not just to document but to intervene into our era of media echo chambers, discursive feedback loops, and polarized politics. A modern web-based cut-up application, based upon the 1990s, “web 1.0” cut-up machines that recycled and resorted free text would, for instance, allow visitors to take advantage of recent innovations in natural language processing and machine learning to “cut up” myriad online content, producing mock newspapers and memes like Burroughs made of TIME, guiding users to reverse engineer available digital tools and hack other media discourses, slipping in subliminal messages and détournements. Such a multifaceted, interactive digital archive is, clearly, still in the stage of its conception, but, in the next decade, as digital technology and scholarship transforms, a Burroughsian digital archive will hopefully become the focus for scholars and fans alike, providing a long-term project for collaboration and the generation of new scholarship, as well as a venue to compile and “unlock” Burroughs’ cut-up “word hoard,” a treasure trove for rethinking the past of the American Century and for reusing in multimedia interventions into public discourse and media in the new millennium.

References Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (2000), translated by Seamus Heaney, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Benjamin, Walter (2002), The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, New York: Belknap Press. Burroughs, William S. (2001 [1959]), Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (2014 [1964]), Nova Express: The Restored Text, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1989 [1969]), The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs, New York: Penguin. Burroughs, William S. (1993), The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Viking Penguin. Burroughs, William S. (2012), Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1959–1974, New York: Ecco. Burroughs, William S. (1973), The Electronic Revolution, Cambridge: Expanded Media Editions. Catlett, Mallory, G Lucas Crane, and A. Wermer-Colan (May 2020), “Decoding the Reality Studio,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 42(2) (125): 1–20. Harris, Oliver (2014), “Introduction,” in The Soft Machine: The Restored Text, New York: Grove Press.

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Hawkins, Joan and Alex Wermer-Colan, eds. (2019), William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,. Kerouac, Jack (2000), Selected Letters: Volume 2: 1957-1969, edited by Ann Charters, New York: Penguin. Kosnik, Abigail de (2016), Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Miles, Barry (2014), Call Me Burroughs: A Life, New York: Twelve.

10

Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism Digesting Naked Lunch Rona Cran

The working title of William Burroughs’ seminal but infamously difficult 1959 novel was originally Naked Lust, but a misreading by the author’s friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg resulted in the title becoming Naked Lunch. In June 1960, Kerouac wrote a letter to Ginsberg, in which he remarked: “Don’t hear from Burroughs [lately] but was pleased he mentioned I named Naked Lunch (remember, it was you, reading the ms., mis-read ‘naked lust’ and I only noticed) (interesting little bit of litry history tho)” (Burroughs 2005: 235). Burroughs, for whom error was always evidence of intellectual progress rather than a limitation, characteristically embraced the misreading, and wrote in his “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” (appended to the novel in 1960 partly by way of introduction and partly as an attempt to head off potential attempts at censorship): “the title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” (2005: 199). Following Burroughs’ lead, this chapter also embraces the error, this time in order to reassess and move beyond the “gastronomic criticism” inspired by Burroughs’ affective text, whereby readers and critics (myself included) find themselves inexorably drawn to gastronomical metaphors when discussing Naked Lunch and other works. Given the extent to which our visceral sense and experience of taste is determined by our social and cultural sensibilities, if we encounter Naked Lunch in the guise of a meal, it is all but inevitable that we will be disgusted; such an approach to the novel only emboldens what Anthony Burgess diagnosed as “a squeamishness about subject-matter that sickens [our] capacity to make purely literary judgments” (Times Literary Supplement, January 2, 1964: 9). It is impossible not to experience Naked Lunch affectively (in other words, to experience it sensually or corporeally, and even, to an extent, nonlinguistically). It is a text deeply preoccupied with the human and nonhuman body—primarily with the body’s ability (and lamentable inability) to act and the mind’s parallel ability (and inability) to think,1 but also with embodying the gut reactions (pun intended) that occur when we encounter discursive forces which lie outside the hegemonic representative paradigm. But encountering Naked Lunch as a gustatory phenomenon, as a text inherently bound up in literary and literal taste—rather than an interaction more

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akin to motion sickness, as I will discuss—discourages or prevents many readers from fully recognizing the significance of Burroughs’ ingenious compositional experiments and techniques to the wider study of literary editing and the materiality of texts, and, indeed, to the affective turn, with its focus on new configurations of bodies, texts, and matter. This chapter therefore offers a way in which readers might move “beyond the tongue” in order to mitigate this problem in reading Burroughs’ groundbreaking work (both Naked Lunch and his later cut-up texts), arguing that attending to the form of Naked Lunch, rather than focusing primarily on its distractingly lurid semantic content or misleading gustatory premise (namely, that it is a midday repast conducted in the nude), is crucial to understanding it. An iconic—and iconoclastic—figure of the Beat Generation, Burroughs took his experiments with collage and cut-up text further, and more seriously, than any other artist working in the twentieth century. Following the publication of Naked Lunch, a highly experimental collage-esque text whose numerous component parts were collaboratively assembled on Burroughs’ behalf by a handful of his friends, including Allen Ginsberg and Sinclair Beiles, as well as the publisher Maurice Girodias, Burroughs devoted much of the 1960s to developing what he called the cut-up technique, a form of collage involving slicing or folding up pages of text, before rearranging them in a new order, often combining quasi-mathematical grids with intuitive but random selections of chunks of text. The aim of his cut-up work, which resulted in several novels and hundreds of shorter pieces of writing, as well as film, photography, and audio recordings, was “to form new combinations of word and image,” and to avail to writers a version of “the collage used in painting for fifty years” (Burroughs, qtd. in Miles 1993: 119).The lasting value of this work lies as much in the realm of experimental art in the European traditions of Cubism, Surrealism, and Dada as it does in the realm of literature: it forces a reassessment of the rules of reading and viewing, and actively dismantles the barriers between scholarly disciplines.2 Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Burroughs nurtured and advocated for an increasing mistrust of the written word, which he conceptualized as a treacherous, viral entity that was intrinsically defective—indeed dangerous—as a method of communication. The reasons for this paranoia are manifold, and have been discussed at length elsewhere.3 Broadly, Burroughs’ view was that language exercises extreme control over human beings, trapping us within repeated patterns of perception that enable the manipulation, by the government and the media in particular, of our social, cultural, and environmental interactions and encounters. Naked Lunch, and the numerous cut-up texts which followed it—including the novels The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964)—embody and enact this paranoia. In them, Burroughs uses the cut-up technique in an attempt to decondition and deliberately disorient both himself and his readers from their “mindless mechanical responses” to the written word (Lydenberg 1985: 60) by exposing its ability—like drugs and sex—to control both our bodies and minds. In forcing readers to confront his “word hoard”—pages of text that taken at face value make very little logical sense—he aimed to achieve “even ten seconds of inner silence” (Burroughs 1962: 43), or even, somehow, to “rub out the word forever” (Burroughs 1962: 10 and 1964:10).

 Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism 293 The problem was (and, indeed, still is) that many critics and readers found themselves collectively distracted from Burroughs’ compositional and philosophical experiments by the semantics and subject matter of his work—which consists primarily of sex, drugs, and “bad” language (his novels feature a dizzying array of expletives). This, of course, proved the point that he was trying to make, as readers submitted uncritically to the visceral power of his words, but in doing so simultaneously negated much of their intended impact. Burroughs’ arrival in the literary mainstream, in the early 1960s, was marked by a savage review of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Dead Fingers Talk by British critic John Willett in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Following Willett’s lead, numerous critical and readerly responses to Burroughs’ work thereafter, on both sides of the Atlantic, were widely characterized by distaste and frequent references to eating, smelling, and purging. Focusing primarily on the subject matter of his writing, and the so-called offensive language and imagery in which it was expressed, rather than on his groundbreaking compositional methods or striking formal originality, readers and reviewers tended to emphasize the nausea and disgust provoked by his work, and turned repeatedly to gastronomical metaphors in order to articulate their affective encounters with his novel. In particular, reviews recurrently indicated the powerfully anacathartic effect of Burroughs’ writing. Raymond Walters of the New York Times, for instance, highlighted the “spicy content” (September 16, 1962: 8) of Burroughs’ work, while Willett of the TLS likened his writing to “grey porridge,” which “tastes disgusting” (TLS, November 14, 1963: 919). In the same article, he went on to envision vomiting jurors at the book’s anticipated obscenity trial (which never materialized—at least not in the UK). Engaging in a communal act of consumption of Burroughs’ work over the three-month period that followed the publication of Willett’s review in November 1963, numerous TLS correspondents sent spirited letters to the editor to remark that Burroughs’ writing “certainly smells very poisonous” (Day, January 9, 1964: 27), to lament that his work is “spiritually as well as physically disgusting” (Gollancz, November 25, 1963: 4), and to wonder, with a classic blend of British self-deprecation and conceit, if “perhaps American stomachs [are] stronger than ours? Perish the thought” (Carter, January 23, 1964: 73). Perish the thought indeed. Burroughs himself described his work to his friend and cut-ups collaborator the artist Brion Gysin as “sickeningly painful to read” (Miles 1993: 126), and, in the “Deposition” to Naked Lunch, was perfectly candid about the fact that his novel was “not for weak stomachs” (2005: 209). Positive reviews and critical responses, both at the time of the novel’s original and rather drawn-out publication and particularly since, have sustained this admittedly tempting but ultimately rather limiting metaphorical tendency toward gastronomic criticism. Among clear advocates of Burroughs’ work, it has also proven irresistible not to capitalize on the metaphors of ingestion suggested so seductively by the title of Naked Lunch—at once his most celebrated and notorious work. Anthony Burgess, praising the novel, likened it to “a ghastly meat which he suddenly shows us to be cannibalistic” (Guardian, November 30, 1964: 9). “The meat on the end of every fork,” Burgess continues, “is revealed as the guts and blood of our fellow-men. It is a revelation which will please nobody and may spoil a few appetites.” J. G. Ballard’s blurb

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for the book praised Naked Lunch as a “feast of a novel” (2005: n.p.). Kurt Hemmer suggests that Burroughs “is showing us the naked truth on the end of the fork—and maybe he wants us to be sick” (2009: 70). James Campbell endorses Burroughs’ writing as “good reading if taken in small doses” (Guardian, March 23, 2012: n.p.). Richard Doyle observes that although “the cuisine might not be to everyone’s taste,” Naked Lunch is nonetheless “the work of a master chef ” (2009: 238). Finally, in a relatively rare example of the metaphor of consumption being put to more energetic critical use, Ian MacFadyen argues that in Naked Lunch, what is consumed is regurgitated, appetite becomes sensual greed fed by procured sickness, the feast requires an emetic, repletion is bypassed in favour of endless consumption. . . . What is finally eliminated is nothing less, nothing more, than ourselves, used up, the literal end product, lunch for worms. It is the idea of devourment which gives the book its title—we are Naked / Meat / Lunch / Eaters, consuming and rejecting ourselves endlessly until death. (2009: 91–2)

To a degree, such metaphors are apt, if not always terribly dynamic: Burroughs’ novel is, indeed, a luncheon of sorts. It is, partially, an extended act of consumption (or “devourment”) and regurgitation—partly of literary traditions, but also of a number of contemporary societal “health problems,” as diagnosed by Burroughs. These include reactionary and unpalatable attitudes toward queerness (John Willett’s TLS review, for example, referred with manifest and unimaginative distaste to “the detailed but always callous homosexual scenes and the unspeakable homosexual fantasies” in Burroughs’ work (1963: 919)); moral panic relating to drug use and addiction (“the hysteria that drug use often occasions in populaces who are prepared by the media and narcotics officials for a hysterical reaction” (Burroughs, 2005: 211)); and mass unthinking consumption of ubiquitous press outputs in the form of another kind of societal addiction, to “that long newspaper spoon” itself (Burroughs, 2005: 205), particularly Henry Luce’s media empire (including his globally circulated and perennially popular magazines, Time, LIFE, and Fortune). Burroughs justifiably felt that Luce and his reporters repeatedly undermined or deliberately failed to properly engage with influential Beat figures and their writing, ideas, politics, and lifestyles. In September 1959, for example, LIFE published an article juxtaposing residences in the town of Hutchinson, Kansas, with Venice, California, under the title “Squaresville USA vs. Beatsville.” Stereotypes and caricatures abounded, from the saccharine Midwestern family photographs to the strategically placed trash of the Californian “pad.” LIFE followed this article up in November 1959, in “The Only Rebellion Around,” a sardonic piece by staff writer Paul O’Neill, which called the Beats “sad but noisy rebels” and once again focused disproportionately on their apparently decrepit living spaces. Burroughs would later turn his full vitriol on LIFE and Time via his experimental cut-up texts of the 1960s.4 Just as readers are encouraged, in the novel’s “Atrophied Preface,” to “cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point” (2005: 187), so the novel deliberately, chaotically, and to startling effect, cuts into and devours the

 Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism 295 prevailing imperialist, consumerist, and capitalist thinking of the mid-century United States and much of Western Europe—thinking to which Burroughs, demonstrably, was implacably opposed. Naked Lunch is replete with mouths, cooking smells, assholes, lunchrooms, restaurants, and repugnant yet “unspeakably toothsome” delicacies (2005: 50). Characters are depicted indulging in such gastronomic luxuries as “The Worm,” an Egyptian kidney-dwelling parasite esteemed above all other fare by “intrepid gourmets” (50); “the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede” (45), which “is like a tainted cheese, overpoweringly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted” (47); and, most disturbingly of all, the boy Johnny’s face and genitals, vigorously consumed by the cannibalistic Mary at A. J.’s Annual Party. A. J., an “international playboy and harmless practical joker” with a propensity for putting lethal ingredients in everything from cocktails to swimming pools (123), brings about the demise of a famous gourmand, Robert, at the jaws of “a hundred famished hogs.” Robert’s insane brother Paul takes over his restaurant and before long “is serving literal garbage, the clients being too intimidated by the reputation of Chez Robert to protest.” Sample dishes primarily involve excretions, waste products, and creatures that feed on live and dead organic matter, and include “The Clear Camel Piss Soup with Boiled Earth Worms” and The After-Birth Supreme de Boeuf cooked in drained crank case oil, served with a piquant sauce of rotten egg yolks and crushed bed bugs. (124–6)

Burroughs’ visceral approach to consumption goes far beyond any straightforward representation of what he calls, in the novel, “the long lunch thread from mouth to ass all the days of our years” (192). The depiction of food and acts of eating in Naked Lunch is consistently and deliberately nauseating, partly because Burroughs’ characters find what they eat inexplicably and unnervingly “toothsome,” and partly because the novel is set up to be, before the first page is turned, a meal to which the reader has been invited. For some readers, the novel’s affective “forces of encounter” (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 2) are, to borrow from MacFadyen, “perverse, repugnant, and possibly delicious” (2009: 92). Like the novel itself, MacFadyen campily suggests, “it’s true defilement, and really, you haven’t lived until you’ve swallowed that, my dear—and swallow it you must” (2009: 92). And yet many readers, including the majority of those provoked by Burroughs’ work into the aforementioned epistolary frenzy in the TLS (a furor so protracted it eventually earned its own nickname: “The UGH Supplement”5), find themselves unable or indeed unwilling to swallow Naked Lunch—particularly readers who, like Edith Sitwell, may feel disinclined to spend their lives with their noses “nailed to other people’s lavatories” (TLS, November 28, 1963: 993). Furthermore, although gustatory imagery is certainly on Naked Lunch’s menu, it is by no means the signature dish (the urge to discuss the novel in terms of devourment is overwhelming). Naked Lunch is predominantly composed of vignettes or “routines” involving lurid, diagrammatic, and bleakly satirical depictions of sex, drugs, surgical

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carnage, erotic hangings, and ectoplasmic fatalities, largely collaged together out of Burroughs’ surroundings and experiences at the time of writing: his narcotized sensations, experiences gained while living and traveling in South America, Europe, and North Africa, letters from his friends, and sexual encounters in Tangier with what he problematically referred to as “that pure, uncut boy stuff.”6 But Naked Lunch is arguably no harder to stomach than many other novels published in America for the first time during the roughly the same period—and yet it produced and continues to produce a much more visceral response in readers than other equally groundbreaking, experimental, or conceivably shocking texts including Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Alex Trocchi’s Cain’s Book (1960), Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), or Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964). Similarly, many novels written since (often by writers who seem to be actively emulating Burroughs’ iconoclastic punk persona), such as Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), Will Self ’s My Idea of Fun (1993), J. G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights (1996), and Stewart Home’s 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (2002), while by no means meeting universal acclaim, have not found themselves likened to “grey porridge” or “ghastly meat.” Such is the singular influence of the title of Naked Lunch, and the seemingly noxious conflation of literary with literal taste. This disparity requires more explanation than mere changing sociocultural tastes or the metamorphic and inherently cultural nature of disgust. As Burroughs wrote in his own letter to the TLS: is his work actually disgusting “or does it just disgust the reviewer?” (January 23, 1964: 74). Because nauseated responses to Naked Lunch are often predicated on a key, and fundamentally distracting, misconception (the title of the novel), readers might have responded differently (in other words, with less squeamishness and sensory disgust) had the title more explicitly indicated an encounter with sex (Naked Lust) rather than with food (Naked Lunch). After all, none of the other provocative novels of the era, none of which have a food-related title, elicited gastronomic responses. By viewing Naked Lunch as an embodied experience of taste, in which literary appetites are inextricably enmeshed with literal ones, critics and readers are effectively encouraged to express a shared disgust at its flavor through a series of puns, gags, and witticisms which often have very little to do with the text itself. The result, as Anthony Burgess pointed out when he weighed in on the protracted war of words in the TLS letters pages, is that “too many people who should know better protract a squeamishness about subject-matter that sickens their capacity to make purely literary judgments” (January 2, 1964: 9). This is because, as Ben Highmore points out, Eating food . . . might necessarily privilege taste, yet to concentrate on taste to the exclusion of other senses means to fail to recognize that the experience of eating [or, in this case, reading] is also dependent on the haptic sensitivity of tongues and mouths, on our olfactory abilities, and on sight and sound. (Highmore 2010:120)

In light of this, the sense of violation experienced by readers of Naked Lunch, who expect it, on account of its title, to “taste” very different, is profound. When readers

 Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism 297 encounter the novel for the first time, the expectations created by its title, and by the wealth of “gastronomic criticism” that has arisen on its account, are not met. All over the world, we tend to think of meals as shared occasions—people tend to like to eat the same thing as a group, as families, friends, co-workers, or inhabitants of a shared, sometimes celebratory, situation. By viewing Naked Lunch as a meal, therefore, critics were able (indeed, encouraged) to express a shared revulsion at its unexpected taste, supplanting the “highly personal” nature of disgust (Wilson 2002: xix) with a common response that has the effect of making the experience of reading Naked Lunch feel collective, though rarely convivial. The feelings of disgust commonly experienced when reading the novel are made all the worse for the reading experience itself being likened repeatedly to the ingestion of food, an activity that is to a very significant degree bound up in a sense of trust toward its provider. Eating in a group is an intimate, often exposing encounter; it is also, particularly from the late eighteenth century onward (as the restaurant and the attendant concept of “eating out” grew in popularity), an inherently trusting activity. On the whole, we tend to trust the individuals who have produced and prepared the food we plan to eat, on matters from flavor combinations to hygiene and food safety. We also trust our own prior expectations and experiences, give or take certain parameters, of what the food presented to us will taste like: indeed, expectations and a sense of familiarity are in many important ways inherent to the enjoyment of food, the whetting of one’s appetite having its basis in stimulation and anticipation based on the likelihood that our gastronomic hopes for the meal in question will be realized. Consequently, mismatched or unmet expectations with regard to food can be profoundly off-putting, with the resulting emotions ranging from disappointment to dissatisfaction to disgust. The title of Naked Lunch sets up expectations of a communal (and potentially slightly titillating, given the implied nudity) repast to be eaten and digested in the middle of the business of the day.7 Given the short-lived but well-publicized international trend for naked restaurants in countries including the United Kingdom and France, in which the dining experience is contingent on voluntary group nudity, twenty-first-century readers could even be forgiven for expecting a mildly erotic, seductively organic encounter, shared by like-minded diners and servers, surrounded by bamboo and candlelight (as at The Bunyadi in London, for example). What materializes instead, in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, is a carnival of gruesome, mercurial episodes, often predicated on sexual violence or substance abuse and conducted on “hostile terms of seduction and exploitation” (Harris 2003: 50–1). Approaching the novel on gastronomic terms, therefore, leads to a sense of profound disappointment or disillusionment, at best, or, at worst, grave violation, when the promised refection only partially materializes, and, more seriously, is fantastically far from what was expected. In such a context, feelings of disgust are inevitable. Clearly, given the multiple references to stomachturning delicacies that punctuate the novel, discussed earlier, this is partly the point. But only partly. After all, we should remember that Burroughs never intended to call his novel Naked Lunch. In conflating literary taste with literal taste, largely on account of a title which Burroughs, while writing the book, had not planned to use, reviewers invoked literary squeamishness (taking the idea of “lunch” as their critical point of

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departure) rather than, as they might otherwise have done (had “lust” remained focal), arousal. As I have already suggested, it is likely that readers might have responded rather differently to a text entitled, as was Burroughs’ original, more straightforward intention, Naked Lust. Burroughs, to borrow from Robert W. Jones II, is a “philosopher of the body” (2014: n.p.). He accused his fellow Americans of having “a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference” (2005: 179). “They would,” he continues, “like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out” (179). The character of the psychopathic surgeon, Dr. Benway, in Naked Lunch—a violent and manipulative “expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control” (2005: 19)—represents Burroughs’ contempt for the weaknesses of the body and the tyranny of the mind. Benway carries out operations which, he boasts, have “absolutely no medical value”; and he does so in front of packed auditoriums, describing them as “pure artistic creation” (2005: 52). Burroughs further enacts this contempt through language, turning his disgust onto— as well as into—words. His conception of the human creature as an inexorably binary structure, forever bound in conflict with itself, is depicted and ridiculed throughout Naked Lunch, as the verbal capacity of his characters is increasingly disabled and the body (conceptualized as “the soft machine”) incapacitated. His preoccupation with human anatomy—particularly with medical attempts to control, manipulate, or alter it, and with its defenseless role as the focal point of societal impulses to judge and punish8—is demonstrated in his tendency to dismember the “scandalously inefficient” (2005: 110) human form, and to transform his characters into talking assholes (110), “blind, seeking” mouths (8), and innumerable amorphous ectoplasms. The word “anatomy,” which derives from the Greek meaning “to cut up,” is, as Jonathan Sawday observes in Emblazoned on the Body, “an act of partition or reduction . . . associated primarily with medicine,” in which “there lurks . . . a constant potential for violence” (1996: 1). In Naked Lunch, Burroughs uses language to perform a violent metonymical dissection on the idea of the body, cutting it up with all the virtuosity of a seventeenthcentury surgeon performing a public autopsy in order to teach his viewers how to do it themselves.9 The self-reflexivity inherent in this act of didactic literary masochism, as Burroughs performatively carves into the body of his own text (and requires that the reader join him in doing so—before asking them to consume what he has cut up), exposes “the violence and domination inherent in the dualism of body / mind; the use of language as a basic weapon in that struggle for supremacy; and the inevitable outcome of the struggle in silence and death” (Lydenberg 1985: 59). It follows, therefore, that Burroughs’ work is designed not just as an assault on the mind, but as an assault on the body and its capacities—on the reader’s bodily and emotional senses, taste-buds, and upchuck reflexes. While the work of writers like Miller, Burgess, and Selby Jr. is perhaps equally as nauseating to the average reader in terms of subject matter as Burroughs’ work, in terms of form and style, it all makes for relatively straightforward reading (perhaps with the exception of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange). Naked Lunch, however, as well as the cut-up novels and other texts that came after it, does not make for straightforward reading at all: for one thing, as

 Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism 299 previously noted, readers are encouraged to “cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point” (2005: 187), thus totally disrupting the time-honored concept of reading a book by beginning at the beginning and ending at the end. Instead, the novel operates on the associative premise of “objects abandoned in a hotel drawer,” the author having abdicated all responsibility with regard to “‘story,’ ‘plot’ [and] ‘continuity’” (2005: 184). The narrative is chaotic, confusing, and manipulative, and the action of any plot is “defined by negatives and absence” (2005: 97). Opaque and unnerving, it takes place in a lurid but recognizable alternate reality in which, as Robin Lydenberg suggests, “we cannot locate the author or the ‘truth’” (1987: 12). Burroughs made clear as it took shape that the novel was written in “a sort of madness where only the most extreme material is available to me” (letter to Ginsberg, February 7, 1955, qtd. in Harris 1993: 262). Made up, to a large extent, of numerous fragments lifted more or less directly from the letters he cast as “lifelines . . . across continents and oceans, converting the isolation of addiction and exile into the workshop of creativity,” Naked Lunch embodies what Oliver Harris terms “the fusions and reversals of past and future, fact and fantasy that came about from transcribing, cutting, and selecting from a mass of fragmentary material” (Harris, 1993: xvi–xxxv). To the unschooled eye, therefore, Naked Lunch is a mess—and a “bad mess” at that, according to David Trotter’s taxonomy—namely, one which figures “the world’s opacity in and through the disgust [it] provoke[s] . . . [It does] not irritate us, or frighten us; [it] makes us sick” (2000: 16). In other words, the nausea experienced by many readers of Burroughs’ work operates on two modalities of affective encounter: as disgust or distaste with regard to his semantics and subject matter, but also as motion sickness, or kinetosis, experienced as an involuntary response to the chaos of his form and structure. Perhaps, then, like the vomiting associated with the ingestion of the hallucinogenic South American vine yagé, the nausea invoked by his subject matter should be viewed less as a distraction or hindrance than as a crucial part of the experience of reading the novel. Burroughs conducted a sustained search for the fabled drug yagé (“vine of the soul” or “vine of the dead”—also known as ayahuasca) during a seven-month expedition into the jungles of South America in 1953. The drug, which was traditionally used as a religious sacrament by the indigenous people of the Amazon, was made known outside of these cultures in 1851 by naturalist Richard Spruce, but it remained highly obscure prior to the 1960s. Effects include hallucination, perceived telepathy, spiritual revelation, and extreme nausea. During his expedition, Burroughs kept notebooks and wrote frequently to Allen Ginsberg, and City Lights Books published his experiences in the collaborative epistolary work The Yage Letters (Burroughs and Ginsberg) in 1963. Although “a wineglass full of the stuff ” apparently “sent him completely off his rocker: violent vomiting every few minutes, feet almost numb & hands almost useless, unable to walk straight, liable to do anything one would not dream of doing in a normal state” (Burroughs and Harris 2006: xix), he nonetheless maintained that yagé revealed “a new state of being” (xxiii) that forced him to the realization that “I must change my whole method of conceiving fact.” To put it another way: “preliminary yagé nausea is motion sickness of transport to yagé state” (Burroughs 2005: 92),10 or, indeed: “the way OUT is the way IN” (2005: 191).

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Naked Lunch is not a novel in the traditional sense. It is essential, therefore, to reassess the distaste, and accompanying gastronomic criticism, that it provokes. The nauseated response of many readers is better understood as a combination of motion sickness and revulsion caused by a combination of textual mess and textual offensiveness (however subjective the latter may be). As Robert Rawdon Wilson argues, disgust is “both physical and moral, concrete and metaphorical” (2002: 12). Clearly, Burroughs deliberately set out to evoke disgust, but, more importantly, he also intended his novel to defamiliarize and illuminate the problems around traditional or recognizable processes of reading and interpretation. Jacques Rolland’s description of the feelings of disorientation evoked by motion sickness—particularly seasickness— speaks to the disorientation evoked by the tactics of defamiliarization present throughout Burroughs’ novel. Rolland writes: “we have seasickness, because we are at sea, that is off the coast, of which we have lost sight. That is, again, because the earth has gone, the same earth into which, ordinarily, we sink our feet . . . Seasickness arrives once the loss of the earth is given” (2003: 17). Readers expecting the familiar style and structure of an ordinary novel—literary traditions into which they might reassuringly sink their feet, familiar horizons around which they might orient themselves—are left feeling all at sea upon learning that everything they thought they knew about reading has been lost to sight. For many readers, the feelings of disgust they experience when reading Naked Lunch obscure the significance of those processes of defamiliarization, but for Joan Didion, the reverse is true, and her interpretation of Burroughs’ work remains useful in our efforts to productively engage with the two kinds of nausea associated with his writing. For Didion, Burroughs’ subject matter was “in no sense the point.” Instead, she argued, evoking Marshall McLuhan, it was the sound of his voice—“hard, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American”—that was important: The medium is the message: the point is not what the voice says but the voice itself, a voice so direct and original as to disarm close scrutiny of what it is saying. Burroughs is less a writer than a sound, and to listen to the lyric may be to miss the beat. (1966: 2–3)

Indeed, close scrutiny of what Burroughs is saying does not always prove rewarding. Like the character of A. J., in Naked Lunch, Burroughs is an unrepentant practical joker in perennial bad taste. His writing, on philosophical terms, is not necessarily unconvincing, but it often fails to argue for anything that has not been argued for more convincingly elsewhere. Fragmented and frenetic, his arguments are too often obscured by his methods. But his readership, to borrow from Roland Barthes, is the “one place where this multiplicity is focused” (1967: 148), and furthermore, as James Campbell argues, “everything in Naked Lunch emanates directly from its basic energy, which is the energy of a convulsion attempting to shake off a sickness” (2003: 224). In other words, beneath or beyond the willful obscenity that marks the surfaces of the novel’s pages lies the point that Burroughs spent his life trying, in various ways, to make: we cannot and should not trust words; we should not take them at face value; we should

 Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism 301 not unthinkingly believe what we read. As Eric Mottram suggested, Burroughs’ “collage and cutting methods are deliberately built into a program of revolt against authority” (1963: 993). If his readership is to follow Joan Didion’s advice and listen to the beat instead of focusing on the lyric, we might succeed in overcoming our motion sickness, our “preliminary yagé nausea.” Readers can consequently be transported “to yagé state,” where, with Burroughs acting as shaman, we will find it possible to think of his writing less as a sequence of words which inevitably signify meaning and therefore evoke disgust, and more as a collection of images, a graphical ensemble over which our eyes may roam, empowered by our ability to choose the direction in which to move. To borrow from the composer John Cage, collage affords “the possibility of looking anywhere, not just where someone arranged you should,” so that “you are then free to deal with your freedom just as the artist dealt with his, not in the same way but, nevertheless, originally” (1961: 100). By focusing on what words signify, and by responding with predictable disgust to their connotations and associations, readers fall directly into Burroughs’ trap, demonstrating to be true his warnings that language is as powerful and manipulative a force of encounter as addictive narcotics or sexual impulses. But if readers look beyond the dominant representative paradigm and succeed in not “listen[ing] to the lyric”— by responding to the form of Naked Lunch rather than to its rhetorical and semantic content—the novel will cease to propagate the false and off-putting expectations of an insalubrious midday repast, and become (forgive me) infinitely more digestible.

Notes 1 See Hardt (2007: ix–xiii). 2 I have discussed this in detail in chapter two of my 2014 book, Collage in TwentiethCentury Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan (Farnham: Ashgate), 85–133, and in my 2013 article, “‘Everything is permitted’: William Burroughs’ Cut-up Novels and European Art,” Comparative American Studies 11, no. 3 (September 2013): 300–13. 3 See in particular Harris (2003) and Lydenberg (1987). 4 For Burroughs’ use of cut-ups in relation to the Luce empire, see Harris (2012: 3–29). See also Cran (2014b). 5 The controversy was named after the byline of John Willett’s initial review, entitled simply “Ugh . . .” (November 14, 1963). Eventually one reader sarcastically proposed that “suitable recognition” be “given to the public that waits impatiently each week for the latest instalment of ‘Ugh,’” arguing that “just as The Times in its magnanimity gave the literary public its own organ at the turn of the century, so it is appropriate now for the Literary Supplement in its turn to father a new and independent Ugh Supplement” (Ullman, 9 January 1964: 27). 6 Tangier, as Harris notes, was itself a “strange collage of histories and cultures,” Letters 1945–1959, xxxiv–xxxv. Quotation is from Burroughs to Ginsberg, October 13, 1956, Letters 1945–1959: 329. 7 By contrast, Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964), a collection of poems which the poet mostly wrote on his lunch breaks while working at the Museum of Modern Art

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in New York City during the early 1960s, comes much closer to meeting readerly expectations. Delectable and infinitely digestible, as well as featuring typical lunch foods including sandwiches, a cheeseburger, Coca-Cola, a chocolate malted, and a glass of papaya juice, Lunch Poems is even, on occasion, collectively read aloud in its entirety, around a table, over lunch (the most recent live reading was at the Poetry Library at the Royal Festival Hall in London, in July 2016, organized by the Sitting Room collective). 8 For an extended treatise on the surveillance of the body and questions of control and power, see Foucault (1975). 9 See for example Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632). 10 This quotation also appears in Burroughs and Harris (2006: 97).

References Ansen, Alan (1991), “Anyone Who Can Pick Up a Frying Pan Owns Death,” in W. S. Burroughs, The Burroughs File, 2nd ed., 17–23, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Ballard, J. G. (2005), “Introduction to Burroughs, W. S. (2005),” in Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, n.p., London: Harper Perennial. Barthes, Roland (1967), “The Death of the Author,” in R. Barthes and Stephen Heath (1977), Image, Music, Text, 142–8, New York: Hill and Wang. Burgess, Anthony (January 2, 1964), “Letter,” Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, 9. Burgess, Anthony (November 30, 1964), “On the End of Every Fork,” The Guardian, 9. Burroughs, William, Ginsberg, Allen, and Harris, Oliver, (eds.) (2006), The Yage Letters Redux, 4th ed., San Francisco: City Lights. Burroughs, William (October 28, 1957), Letter to Allen Ginsberg. Allen Ginsberg Papers, Box 2, fol. 3. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, 1943–1991 (bulk 1945–1976). Burroughs, William (2005 [1959]), Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, London: Harper Perennial. Burroughs, William (1987 [1962]), The Ticket That Exploded, London: Paladin. Burroughs, William (1978 [1964]), Nova Express, London: Granada. Cage, John (1961), Silence: Lectures and Writings, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Campbell, James (2003), Exiled In Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank, Berkeley: University of California Press. Campbell, James (March 23, 2012), Review of Bill Morgan (ed.), Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959–1974. The Guardian (online). Available at: http:​/​/www​​.guar​​dian.​​co​.uk​​/book​​s​/201​​2​/mar​​/23​/r​​ub​-ou​​t​-wor​​ds​-wi​​lliam​​-burr​​oughs​​-r​ evi​​ew​?ne​​wsfee​​d​=tru​e (accessed March 29, 2012). Carter, J. (January 23, 1964), “Letter,” Times Literary Supplement, 73. Clough, Patricia Ticineto and Halley, Jean, (eds.) (2007), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham: Duke University Press. Cran, Rona (2013), “‘Everything is permitted’: William Burroughs’ Cut-up Novels and European Art,” Comparative American Studies 11(3): 300–13. Cran, Rona (2014a), Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan, Farnham: Ashgate.

 Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism 303 Cran, Rona (2014b), Report: Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs. Available at: https​:/​/eb​​sn​.eu​​/scho​​larsh​​ip​/eb​​sn​-re​​views​​/taki​​ng​-sh​​ots​-t​​he​-ph​​otogr​​aphy-​​ of​-wi​​lliam​​-s​-bu​​rroug​​hs​-ex​​hibit​​ion​-a​​nd​-be​​yond-​​the​-c​​ut​-up​​-will​​iam​-s​​-burr​​oughs​​-and​​the​-i​​​mage-​​confe​​rence​​-revi​​ewed-​​by​-ro​​na​-cr​​an/ (accessed August 6, 2016). Day, Dorothy (January 9, 1964), “Letter,” Times Literary Supplement, 27. Didion, Joan (March 27, 1966), “Wired for Shock Treatments,” Bookweek, 2–3. Doyle, R. (2009), “Naked Life: William S. Burroughs, Bioscientist,” in O. Harris and I. MacFadyen (eds.), Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, 1st ed., 238–49, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Foucault, Michel (1975), Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, Paris: Gallimard. Gollancz, Victor (November 28, 1963), “Letter,” Times Literary Supplement, 993. Grant, D. J. (January 23, 1964), “Letter,” Times Literary Supplement, 73. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory Seigworth (2010), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael (2007), foreword to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ix–xiii, Durham: Duke University Press. Harris, Oliver, (ed.) (1993), The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, New York: Viking, 1993. Harris, Oliver (2003), William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Harris, Oliver (2012), “Minute Particulars of the Counter-Culture: Time, Life, and the Photo-poetics of Allen Ginsberg,” Comparative American Studies 10(1): 3–29. Hemmer, Kurt (2009), “‘the natives are getting uppity’: Tangier and Naked Lunch,” in O. Harris and I. MacFadyen (eds.), Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, 1st ed., 65–72, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Highmore, Ben (2010), “Bitter after Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics,” in M. Gregg and G. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, Durham: Duke University Press. Jones II, Robert W. (2014), “Image, Text and Body: William S Burroughs and Visceral Communication,” Unpublished conference paper. Beyond The Cut-Up: William S. Burroughs and the Image, London: The Photographers’ Gallery. Lydenberg, Robin (1985), “Notes from the Orifice: Language and the Body in William Burroughs,” Contemporary Literature 26(1): 55–73. Lydenberg, Robin (1987), Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. MacFadyen, Ian (2009), “Dossier Three,” in O. Harris and I. MacFadyen (eds.), Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, 1st ed., 92–7, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Mailer, Norman (1959), “Evaluations - Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” Big Table 3: 88–100. Reprinted in Mailer, N. (1994), Advertisements for Myself, 417, London: HarperCollins. Miles, Barry (1993), William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, London: Virgin. Miles, Barry (2009), “The Naked Lunch in My Life,” in O. Harris and I. MacFadyen (eds.), Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, 1st ed., 114–22, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Morgan, Bill, (ed.) (2012), Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959–1974, London: Penguin. Morgan, Ted, (1988), Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, New York: Henry Holt.

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Mottram, Eric (November 28, 1963), “Letter,” Times Literary Supplement, 993. Mottram, Eric (1971), William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need, New York: Intrepid. Poore, Charles (November 20, 1962), “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 33. Rolland, Jacques (2003), “Getting Out of Being by a New Path,” in On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sawday, Jonathan (1996), Emblazoned on the Body: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Sitwell, Edith (November 28, 1963), “Letter,” Times Literary Supplement, 993. Trotter, David (2000), Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ullman, Stephen (January 9, 1964), “Letter,” Times Literary Supplement, 27. Walters, Raymond (September 16, 1962), “In and Out of Books,” New York Times Book Review, 8. Willett, John (November 14, 1963), “Ugh . . .,” Times Literary Supplement, 919. Wilson, R. Rawdon (2002), The Hydra’s Tale: Imagining Disgust, Alberta: University of Alberta Press.

Part III

Performance

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11

Performance in the Work of William S. Burroughs John M. Bennett

Arte Inobjetual propone . . . actuar sobre la realidad y no sobre un sustituto de esa realidad como son los lenguajes artísticos conocidos. [Nonobjective Art . . . proposes acting upon reality and not on a substitute of that reality as are the established artistic languages; JMB translation] —Clemente Padín (Arte Inobjetual: De la Representación a la Acción, 1975) Why is William S. Burroughs (WSB) such a controversial author? There are many reasons for this, but the one I wish to discuss here has to do with the difficulty any reader has in identifying when WSB himself is speaking in his work. A fundamental characteristic of that work is the use of what WSB early on called “routines”; that is, scenarios or little stories, very often involving dramatic dialogue between two or more characters, to present a particular point of view or attitude toward a personal or social situation. The use of these “routines” is deeply ingrained in his writing and is present in his earliest texts. For example, in the highly personal notebook he kept on his 1953 solo trip through Mexico, Central, and South America (Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs, ed. by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Oliver Harris, the Ohio State University Press, 2017, rev. ed.), he brushes off a pimp by inventing a false persona: “I told him. ‘She’s middle aged already. I want that 6 year old ass. Don’t try palming your old 14 year old bats off on me’” (p. 107). This is followed by a detailed routine, a performance, about the “Friendly Finance Co.,” an entity which appears again, more than once, in later writings. It is significant that these passages about the pimp and the loan shark are separated by two phrases about paranoia, which are themselves paranoid: “Everyone here is telepathic on paranoid level. If you look at anyone he knows at once he is being observed and gives evidence of hostility and suspicion and restlessness.” Paranoia is in large part a feeling that people and things in the world are looking at and judging you, creating in turn an enhanced and distorted awareness of those people and things. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to consider that the psychological basis of

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much of WSB’s work is paranoia, the work itself being a way of understanding and/or controlling that paranoia. Another passage in Everything Lost shows a mix of personal pain blending into theatricality, as if he were performing a melodrama as a metaphor for his feelings, as a way of controlling or framing those feelings, and in which he seems to be referring to himself [“Bill”] as a character in this brief drama, a drama probably affected by the influence of some drug or other: G’s hide-out—Not much way down yonder in the green field—Missouri cruelty —I’m from Mo,—I gotta be showdby Oh Lord. When I AM HeRE IN this. PLACe Bill, I CAN NOT LeaF PleASe—Do not write Me, BUT COMe here when yoo Receive this T—AS I Need your professionAL AttentionAL Kindees of Measure FOR Measure this is A Real bad deal, Bill, I AM CONTIN ON YOUR BONTY MUTINY ON the Bell string Who ever you are now it is timely Aid IN I MUSt HAVe light oR eLSe? (p. 119)

In another passage, he seems to be describing a process such as the aforementioned: [Approach to complete interchangeability is approach to no contact]. if I can’t No one can. it is precisely your own hysteric confusion you want to contact. Is in fact part of yourself. (p. 115)

One of the overlying themes of Everything Lost is WSB’s loneliness. He mentions person after person who is “gone,” and concludes, “Everybody gone” (p. 121) “people just disappear” (p. 118). Even “Joan,” his dead wife, has disappeared, in one of WSB’s rare references to her. Could this sense of isolation and disconnectedness have been one of the conditions that pulled WSB toward the invention and re-creation of characters and to performing them? Anyone familiar with the bulk of WSB’s work will be aware that from Naked Lunch on, the creation of routines and scenarios, often satirical, grotesque, angry, and/or absurd, is a fundamental characteristic of his writing. They are rather like the esperpentos created and developed by the Spanish writer Ramón del ValleInclán, which exaggerated and distorted social situations and scenarios for satirical effect. Many of WSB’s “performances” are repeated, developed, and expanded upon throughout his books. In the case of the 1960s’ cut-up trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express—first edition 1961–4), one could say that the very act of cutting up and reassembling his texts is a kind of performance, one in which WSB himself, the creator and voice of so many colorful characters, has himself become one of his own characters, slicing up and rearranging texts in an attempt to create a kind of universal text that might remake the world into a better place by destroying the veils of illusion that blind humanity. To think of the act or process of writing itself as performance is a good way to start to understand WSB’s relationship to the ideas, attitudes, situations, and characters in his work. To some extent, this is a useful approach to any work of art, but in WSB’s

 Performance in the Work of William S. Burroughs 309 case it is especially useful and appropriate. It would also be useful to consider WSB’s relationship to the international literary avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, when numerous experimental techniques circulated for producing text, including cut-ups, an old surrealist and Dada technique reimagined by Brion Gysin and WSB. Writers and artists like Henri Chopin, Bernard Heidsieck, even St-John Perse (who WSB refers to on occasion) were all experimenting with sound, visual, textual, and other procedures to generate text. WSB was part of that cultural milieu. The idea of manipulating and transforming language is not unique to WSB and Brion Gysin in literature. I am reminded of a short piece by Salvador Elizondo from his book El Grafógrafo (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1972; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013), which proposes calling things not by their names, but by a different name: for example, calling a butterfly a flower and saying that a dog purrs. This would effect the things themselves, and “cross the threshold toward new logical or real avatars” (p. 16, 2013 ed., JMB translation). Around 1970, WSB was writing pages that became, eventually, The Revised Boy Scout Manual (RBSM), or Bulletin 23. In his introduction to the 2018 edition of RBSM (William S. Burroughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution, ed. by Geoffrey D. Smith and John M. Bennett, with a foreword by Antonio Bonome and an afterword by V. Vale, the Ohio State University Press, 2018), Bonome discusses the fluid and unstable nature of these pages as a “book,” a situation that applies as well to most of WSB’s work. One could say that WSB performed as a writer, but left to others the consolidation of his writings into books. I should note that this represents a kind of collaboration, another practice widely used in the avant-garde circles WSB moved in or was associated with. With respect to RBSM, it is significant that part of WSB’s editing and revising process involved reading out loud—that is, performing—his typescript into a tape recorder. Listening to those recordings, one is especially struck by two things: he comments at times on matters of punctuation and other copy editing details (“full stop,” for example), and, most striking, he at times takes on accents and dramatic voices and timing, as if the taping were a performance: a performance such as those he did in numerous venues in the 1970s into the 1990s. In other words, the process of editing and creating his text is partly a performance of that text. Whereas Naked Lunch can be thought of as a series of performance routines, and the cut-up trilogy as a kind of literary performance, RBSM is an extended literary performance/routine of a somewhat different kind, a social satire used to detail very specifically how one might overthrow or destabilize a civilization. Of course, social satire is a fundamental dimension of Naked Lunch, but it is not so clearly directed at suggesting a means of social change. It is only at the very end of RBSM that WSB very clearly seems to lift the curtain and speak as himself. For example, in the first section of RBSM, WSB lays out specific techniques and equipment needed to destabilize the state. In his “General Plan” (p. 12), he discusses the need for a “reform party” that would “stay within the law,” a “terrorist underground,” and a “terrorist Right” as essential elements of a strategic plan, and then describes in some detail the functions of each, and how their activities would lead to a slaughter of “the shits of the world.” This is done largely through a “routine,” an imagined

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scenario with colorful characters invading English elite clubs, shouting “Bugger the Queen,” and with much bloodshed. He follows this scenario by calling it “a utopian fantasy” and then proceeds to detail some techniques to train people through the use of “speech scramblers” (p. 25) and other cut-up-related procedures, including the use of “E meters” to detect infiltrators. (E meters are devices used by the scientologists, Scientology being a bogus cult with scientific pretenses, in which WSB seemed to believe for a time. Although this presence of Scientology in RBSM might just as well be another routine or spoof, with WSB it is always hard to tell, which is one of the things that makes his work so fascinating.) RBSM continues with this mix of serio/satiric “routines,” in which WSB delights in taking on roles and voices of colorful and often murderous characters, and scientific, historical, and technical discussions. Even Sherlock Holmes makes an appearance, as a possible target of “narks,” who could “beat his door in with sledge hammers, rush in waving their guns ‘WHAZAT YOU’RE SMOKING?’” (p. 39). There is extensive discussion of how the “scrambling technique [i.e., cut-ups] could work on a mass scale” (p. 48), with references to scientific articles he has read. At the end of RBSM, WSB summarizes some of the techniques for the revolution he details and dramatizes throughout the book. He also discusses how they might be counterproductive: Undoubtedly random individual assassination could be highly effective but random group assassination could provoke such countermeasures and such a reaction on the part of a terrified populace that the revolution would be in danger of total suppression. (p. 72)

He also applies these reservations to other techniques in the book, such as “Mass Assassination,” and “assassination by list,” partly by noting that they are techniques that have “usually been taken over by precisely the undesirable” elements of the power structure. (p. 72–3) WSB concludes RBSM with an observation that sounds like it might be one of the few moments in which he is speaking without masks, and without performance— although, considering the passage that follows, also quoted here, the very last words in the book, it is impossible to know for sure: The weapons I wish to advocate are weapons that change consciousness—cutups, scrambling, use of videotapes, etc. The weapons of illusion. “Nothing is true and everything is permitted.” Last words of Hassan-i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain.

12

Burroughs, Bowie, and the Reshaping of the Counterculture William S. Burroughs Meets “Ziggy Stardust” Barry J. Faulk

In October 1973, the American writer and visual artist William S. Burroughs paid a visit to the Beckenham flat of singer David Bowie, who achieved star status in England the year before in his androgynous alien persona, “Ziggy Stardust.” Burroughs lived on Duke Street near Piccadilly in the early 1970s: which is not to say that this meeting was an everyday occurrence; Rolling Stone magazine was responsible for the summit. Founded by Jann Wenner and noted jazz music critic Ralph J. Gleason in San Francisco in 1967, the monthly quickly gained national attention for its coverage of popular music and its political journalism, most famously the “Gonzo” journalism of Hunter S. Thompson. Still a standard bearer at the time for the 1960s counterculture, the magazine published the discussion between the two men, as reported by staff journalist Craig Copetas, early in the following year. The contrived nature of the event says something about the changing nature of rock culture and the degree to which it was being captured by PR and advertising industries. The meeting between a literary outlaw and the gender-bending rock star promised to deliver high drama; perhaps Rolling Stone’s editors hoped that each of the subjects would try to outdo the other with spectacular personal revelations or tales of decadence. However, the conversation that followed was cerebral and unfailingly polite, even when hot button topics like sex, violence, and revolution were addressed. Mainly the dialogue returns to issues relating to contemporary art and society. Burroughs, whose experimental writing incorporated science fiction elements such as alien beings and time travel, is intrigued by Bowie’s futuristic lyrics about space men and world apocalypse. He wonders aloud whether the popular interest in the singer suggests a new taste on the part of younger audiences for more unconventional subject matter. Both men reflect on whether song lyrics are poetry, and have an independent life outside of their musical setting; both also express a keen interest in the possibilities offered by new media technologies that situate images within immersive soundscapes.

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Repeatedly, the conversation returns to the subject of the teenager, real and imagined. It is not shocking that a rock star might obsess about the nature of their primary audience: but it is a bit surprising to find an avant-garde writer equally interested in contemporary youth. Moreover, it becomes clear over the course of their conversation that both men connect youth, especially the young rock audience, with weighty topics such as the future of art and the possibility of revolutionary social change. My chapter seeks to explain why these two very different men came to such an immediate accord. The short answer is that circumstances conspired to prepare Burroughs for his meeting with the rock star long before it occurred. The writer had been preoccupied with the possibilities of the cut-up method, and its possible social impact ever since he adopted the method from his friend and collaborator Brion Gysin in the early 1960s. When Burroughs, Gysin, Antony Balch, and Ian Sommerville began applying the cut-up method to filmmaking and tape recording experiments a few years later, Burroughs substantially altered his theories about the cut-up. He began theorizing how the technique might be put to subversive use by a generation of radical youth. The writer may not have been familiar with Bowie before the Rolling Stone summit, but he clearly grasped that Bowie was immersed in the counterculture of the day and that his art reflected that intense relationship. To fully understand the 1973 Burroughs-Bowie dialogue, I propose we take our cue from Burroughs’ experimental novels and do some imaginative time traveling. First, we return to 1961 and the writer’s initial statements on the cut-up method. Next, we flash forward a few years, to the late 1960s and Burroughs’ major statements regarding his cut-up tape experiments, “The Invisible Generation” (1966) and “The Electronic Revolution” (1970). These later declarations reflect the writer’s new aim of weaponizing the cut-up, in direct response to the growing resistance movement of youth against military, governmental, and bureaucratic elites. The Wild Boys, Burroughs’ utopian fantasy about an army of young queer men on a global rampage relates to the writer’s reconceptualization of the cut-up and merits discussion in this context. Then, finally, we can set the time machine ahead to 1973, and take the full measure of the BurroughsBowie summit. * * * William Burroughs credited the discovery of the cut-up technique to his friend, the artist Brion Gysin. Derived from Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara’s practice of creating poetry by the chance operation of drawing words from out of a hat, the method involved cutting up and folding sections of written texts and rearranging them in different permutations. The results, Burroughs found, created new juxtapositions which in turn provided new directions for thought to travel. Despite its roots in Dada and Surrealism, Burroughs insisted that the method was not exclusive to the avantgarde; on the contrary, it was meant to be used by anyone and everywhere: Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. (Burroughs 1961)

 Burroughs, Bowie, Counterculture 313 Burroughs moved to London in the mid-1960s and began to apply the cut-method to film with the assistance of English director Antony Balch. In 1965, Burroughs collaborated with Ian Sommerville to make cut-up tape recordings using reel to reel equipment. Oddly enough, there was a Beatle behind the endeavor: Paul McCartney had recently rented Ringo Starr’s apartment at 34 Montagu Square in Marleybone and hired Sommerville, a Cambridge-educated electronics technician, to set up and operate a home studio. The invention of the portable tape recorder and cassettes that same year coincided with the growth of a youth counterculture worldwide; these twin developments transformed both the theory and practice of the cut-up. Increasingly, Burroughs’ statements on the method would focus on the potential for tape-recorded cut-ups to transform social reality, as well as alter individual consciousness. The writer also begins to explicitly target the youth audience, especially anti-establishment youth, in his remarks on the cut-up. In “The Invisible Generation,” the first statement on the cut-up published after Burroughs began applying the method to nonprint media, the writer’s ideal tape operator moves from out of the study into the streets, exploiting the portable technology of the cassette player. Easy to conceal and carry, the machine provides a world of new opportunities to the cut-up provocateur, as this passage suggests: yes any number can play anyone with a tape recorder controlling the sound track can influence and create events the tape recorder this is the invisible generation he looks like an advertising executive a college student an american tourist doesn’t matter what your cover story is so long as it covers you and leaves you free to act. (Burroughs 1989: 162)

The ideal tape operator is also an undercover agent, inserting new sounds by furtive means: “You need a philips compact cassette recorder handy machine for street recording and playback you can carry it under your coat for recording looks like a transistor radio for playback playback in the street will show the influence of your sound track in operation. Of course the most undetectable playback is street recording.” The passage also suggests a persistent modernist strain in Burroughs, the presumption being that the metropolis is where the action is, and constitutes the front life of reality. Yet there is an even more significant aspect of “The Invisible Generation” essay; it consists of Burroughs’ playful but determined efforts to address a younger generation of readers and persuade them to incorporate the cut-up within their everyday practice. The writer presumes that rock music plays an important role in the lives of these younger audience, and he makes a concerted effort to target rock fans in the essay, attempting to appropriate the new “psychedelic” rock culture for his own ends, as evident in this passage: [t]ake a prerecorded sound track into the street anything you want to put out . . . play back two minutes record two minutes mixing your message with the street waft your message right into a worthy ear some carriers are much better than others you know the ones lips moving muttering away carry my message all over

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london in our yellow submarine working with street playback you will see your playback find the appropriate context. (Burroughs 1989: 162–3)

“Yellow Submarine,” the Beatles’ first single release from the Revolver album (1966), was a massive chart hit just prior to the original publication of “The Invisible Generation” in the new London alternative press newspaper, the International Times. The phrase “our yellow submarine,” casually inserted into Burroughs’ directives, is a rather blatant attempt to bridge the generation gap and enlist the young rock audience into the fold of the “invisible generation” of tape provocateurs. In fact, any young troublemaker seems a potential recruit for the new cut-up army, as seen here in Burroughs’ fictional snapshot of Tory MPs outraged by young delinquents with tape recorders filtering noise and creating havoc in the more affluent areas of London: “conservative m.p. spoke about the growing menace posed by bands or irresponsible youths with tape recorders playing back traffic sounds that confuse motorists carrying the insults recorded in some low underground club into mayfair and piccadilly” (Burroughs 1989: 164). Burroughs’ programs for tape-generated subversion grow more ambitious with the rise of the “hippie” movement; for a time, this younger audience becomes both the writer’s surrogate and his ideal collaborator in the cut-up project. If nothing else, the potential size of the rock audience makes it a force for the establishment to reckon with: “think what fifty thousand beatle fans armed with tape recorders could do to shea stadium several hundred people recording and playing back in the street is quite a happening right there.”1 While the passage suggests that rock music by itself is no cultural threat, the writer hints that rock concerts could become dangerous, provided the rock audience became active participants in the event, and not only spectators. And as Burroughs reminds his younger readers, new technology now makes it possible for rock culture to become a genuine force for change. Between writing “The Invisible Generation” and “The Electronic Revolution” (1970– 1), Burroughs had his own dramatic run-in with history. Esquire magazine assigned the writer to cover the Democratic Party convention, held in Chicago in August 1968. Street demonstrations turned violent, and the Chicago police clashed with the “Yippies,” the youth revolutionary group headed by Abbie Hoffman. In the midst of the fray, broadcast to millions of television viewers across the nation, Burroughs put his theories about the disruptive power of the tape cut-up to the test, recording and playing back the sounds of street battles at random intervals (Grauerholz 1998: 358). The experience seems to have confirmed Burroughs’ intuition that the youth counterculture now constituted a major force for change. In The Job, a collection of interviews with the writer published immediately after the incidents in Chicago, the writer declares his sympathy with youth revolution, and insists on the value of violent protest: There should be more riots and more violence. Young people in the West have been lied to, sold out, and betrayed. Best thing they can do is take the place apart before they are destroyed in a nuclear war. . . . Young people pose the only effective challenge to established authority. . . . The student rebellion is now a worldwide

 Burroughs, Bowie, Counterculture 315 movement. Never before in recorded history has established authority been so basically challenged on a worldwide scale. (Burroughs 1989: 81)

It is a forceful expression of Burroughs’ new conviction that young people have replaced the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. As the youth movement becomes more militant, Burroughs accordingly retools the cut-up into a potential weapon for their arsenal. “There is nothing mystical about [prepared tapes],” he writes in “The Electronic Revolution”: “[r]iot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation” (Burroughs 1989: 175). He encourages the underground press corps to stroll throughout the city playing back their own “fake news” headlines, subliminally planting anti-government messages into the minds of passers-by in the hope of “[n]ullifying associational lines put down by mass media.”2 Burroughs’ ideas here about media subversion both anticipate the practice of audio sampling and the proliferation of internet news sites that seek to circumvent the “mainstream media” from both the left and the alt-right. Burroughs’ greater esteem for the counterculture seems to have brought with it greater respect for the emerging underground rock scene embraced by a growing number of young people. Whereas the writer’s remarks on the Beatles in “The Invisible Generation” attempt to hijack rock culture for his own purposes, Burroughs’ comments in “The Electronic Revolution” on outdoor festivals, a brand new aspect of rock culture, are far less high-handed. Now the emphasis is on how the tape cut-up might enhance aesthetic aspects of the festival event: Imagine a pop festival like Phun City scheduled for July 24th, 25th, 26th, 1970 at Ecclesden Common, Patching, near Worthing Sussex. Festival area comprised of car park and camping area, a rock auditorium, a village with booths and cinema, a large wooded area. A number of tape recorders are planted in the woods and the village. As many as possible so as to lay down a grid of sound over the whole festival. Recorders have tapes of prerecorded material, music, news broadcasts, recordings from other festivals. At all times some of the recorders are playing back and some are recording. (Burroughs 1989: 181–2)

“We can carry it further,” Burroughs adds, with projection screens and video cameras. Some of the material projected is pre-prepared, sex films, films of other festivals, and this material is cut in with live TV broadcasts and shots of the crowd. Of course the rock festival will be cut in on the screens, thousands of fans with portable table recorders recording and playing back, the singer could direct play back and record. (Burroughs 1989: 182)3

There is no sense here that rock culture exists in strict opposition to art; on the contrary, Burroughs casually situates rock in a longer history of avant-garde attempts to oppose the idea of performance as a uniform event. In so doing, he anticipates the efforts of a

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host of rock musicians from the 1970s and beyond, from Bowie to Throbbing Gristle, to equalize relations between performers and their audience. The same charged nexus between the youth underground, revolution, and the tape cut-up is present in The Wild Boys, completed in 1969 (although not published until 1971). Although the book contains sci-fi elements including time travel and simulated reality, its utopianism constitutes a departure from the authoritarian regimes depicted in the cut-up trilogy. Burroughs’ hope for the future lies in an invading army of feral, queer teenage boys who seek to liberate the planet from the forces of control, by any means necessary. The wild boys live a tribal existence, outside of institutions and authority; women are also sidelined in this militantly homosocial text (Murphy 1997: 156). As an anonymous operative of the youth army declares at one point, the goal of the wild boys’ campaigns is not mere conquest but complete and total liberation: Despite disparate aims and personnel of its constituent members, the underground is agreed on basic objectives. We intend to march on the police machine everywhere. We intend to destroy the police machine and all its records. We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems. The family unit and its cancerous expansion into tribes, countries, nations we will eradicate at its vegetable roots. We don’t want to hear any more family talk, mother talk, father talk, cop talk, priest talk, country talk or party talk. (Burroughs 1992: 139–40)

Despite the violent reprisals of every national army against the wild boys, the novel’s enigmatic but affirmative final sentence—“the Wild Boys smile”—hints that the eventual victory of the young rebels over the establishment is assured. As we’ve seen, Burroughs’ utopian optimism regarding a global revolution is in large part based on the reality, and unprecedented scale, of the new youth rebellion. Within this charged context, with history seeming on the verge of a decisive turn, Burroughs’ imagined multitude of young tape operators now morph into a global youth strike force, eager to take on the armies of the world in a full frontal assault. The Wild Boys extends into a future beyond the 1960s, into 1988, the moment when the wild boys regroup and undertake another global strike, with a cadre of covert operatives now joining the fray. In this passage, the revolt to come is carefully crafted so that it becomes impossible to distinguish from media images of the Yippies laying siege to Chicago “back” in 1968: Loft room, map of the city on the wall. Fifty boys with portable tape recorders record riots from TV. They are dressed in identical grey flannel suits. They strap on the recorders under gabardine topcoats and dust their clothes lightly with tear gas. They hit the rush hour in a flying wedge, riot recordings on full blast, police whistles, screams, breaking glass, crunch of nightsticks, tear gas flapping from their clothes. They scatter, put on press cards and come back to cover the action. Bearded Yippies rush down a street with hammers breaking every window on both sides, strip off the beards, reverse collars and they are fifty clean priests

 Burroughs, Bowie, Counterculture 317 throwing petrol bombs under every car WHOOSH a block goes up behind them. (Burroughs 1992: 139)

Not surprisingly, the tape machine is the link in the chain that binds youth revolt in the time of Burroughs’ writing with the future apocalypse. The Wild Boys closes the loop opened in “The Invisible Generation,” with its joyful image of young people with tape recorders playing Beatles songs in the streets of London. This time the tapers drop their disguise and reveal themselves for what they are: the last revolutionary army. * * * Timothy S. Murphy maintains that Burroughs spent most of the 1970s trying to write himself out of his late 1960s obsession with student riots and counterculture revolt. Burroughs’ next novel, Cities of the Red Night (1981), published a decade after The Wild Boys, is no longer animated by apocalyptic visions of total revolution. As Murphy puts it, the revolutionary’s sole task in The Wild Boys is restricted to the energetic “destruction of historical authority,” and his “only real characteristic is also negative since he is merely an inversion of the good citizen” (Murphy 1997: 171). In contrast, Cities of the Red Night and the two novels that would follow it, The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987), explore a nonbinary notion of liberation where, in Murphy’s words, “the fantasmic negation of repressive history coincides with the fantasmic affirmation of freedom without giving that affirmation any distinct or positive content” (Murphy 1997: 172). Burroughs’ new focus is on the form of revolution itself, with its reversal of hierarchies rather than with a particular content. Yet at the same time Murphy notes that Burroughs was equally obsessed with “[reconstituting] the fantastically active and actively fantasizing audience, that he lost at the end of the sixties” (Murphy 1997: 169). But is it the case that the counterculture Burroughs pinned his hopes for aesthetic and social change on was “lost” to him, at the decade’s end? Burroughs’ many projects in 1972, just prior to meeting Bowie, suggest the contrary: that the synergy between the writer and the counterculture was growing; most of his work directly intersects with different strands of the new youth culture. Music journalist Robert Palmer interviewed Burroughs for Rolling Stone in May 1972; later that year, Palmer would join the writer on assignment for Oui, on a trek to the Moroccan hill country of Joujouka to report on the Sufi trance players known as the “Master Musicians” (Grauerholz 1998: 361).4 Brion Gysin would join them on this junket. Gysin already had close contact with celebrities in the rock world, and acted as the liaison between the Master Musician group and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones when Jones traveled to Morocco four years before. The 1972 expedition to Joujouka would have a lasting impact on Palmer, and through his writing, to youth culture of the day. A frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, Palmer would continue to explore what James Grauerholz neatly describes as the “nexus of three worlds: rock’n’roll, avantgarde literature, and ancient North African trance music,” popularizing Burroughs and

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Gysin as well as the Master Musicians to rock audiences in the Anglophone world (Grauerholz 1998: 361). Back in London in the following year, Burroughs would complete the collaboration he began with artist and illustrator Malcolm McNeill in the previous year, Ah Pook is Here. A Conradian tale of a greedy tycoon who journeys to the Mayan temples in Yucatan in search of immortality, Burroughs described the project as “something between a comic book and an illustrated book” in his Rolling Stone interview with Robert Palmer (George-Warren 1999: 181). The hybrid text predates the science fiction comic magazine Metal Hurlant by two years, the American Heavy Metal comic by four years, and the graphic novel by about two decades.5 At the same time, Ah Pook is Here, a fantasy tale about the Mayan god of death that includes lengthy meditations on technology as a means of mass control, shares the futuristic themes and radical politics that were standard fare in the “underground comics” that, by 1972, were indelibly associated with the counterculture worldwide. * * * We can now flash forward to the Fall of 1973 and the Burroughs-Bowie interview that appeared early in the following year in Rolling Stone. Given that this was the first meeting of the two men, it is no surprise that their dialogue is short on personal matters. The two mainly engage with ideas, on a range of topics relating to society and the arts. They discuss the creative process and craft, while remaining mindful of the gap separating songwriting from fiction writing. What holds the dialogue together is the shared faith of both men that the counterculture remains a going concern, even if the demonstrations that were such a prominent part of the late 1960s underground movement had diminished. Both artists take it as given that the counterculture is still vital and not merely on the defensive, but evolving in accord with its initial program for radical social change. David Bowie had already developed his own distinct notions of the counterculture well before his meeting with the Beat writer. The musician’s speculations were similarly apocalyptic, based on his reading of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the early twentieth-century American fantasy writer, H. P. Lovecraft: an unlikely pairing that became commonplace in the 1960s, when the two writers became required reading in counterculture circles. Nietzsche proclaimed the coming reign of “Supermen,” who would cast off conventional Christian morality and create a new system of values for humankind. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu” stories also have a prophetic quality, predicting the return of an ancient race of extraterrestrials who were the gods of myth and who will become earth’s final rulers. Bowie made Lovecraft’s Cthulhu myth his own, reimagining the current-day clash of generations into a cosmic contest, where youthful rebellion becomes an apocalyptic final reckoning. Bowie skyrocketed to fame in Britain with the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust concept album (1972). The singer-songwriter adopted the alter ego of “Ziggy Stardust,” an androgynous rock star who was also a messenger for alien beings. Bowie sang in character as the “Starman,” who brought news about the

 Burroughs, Bowie, Counterculture 319 coming end of the earth to his teenage audience. Bowie’s cosmic fantasies about youth were already the subject of several songs on the artist’s previous record, Hunky Dory. As Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr observe, “Oh! You Pretty Things” proclaims the “impending obsolescence of the human race” and predicts an imminent “alliance between arriving aliens and the youth of the present society” (Carr and Murray 1981: 41): Look out at your children See their faces in golden rays Don’t kid yourself they belong to you They’re the start of a coming race (Bowie 1972a)

Perhaps these were among the lyrics that Rolling Stone journalist Craig Copetas passed on to Burroughs in advance of the interview and that caused the writer to remark, “It is rather surprising that they are such complicated lyrics, that can go down with a mass audience” (George-Warren 1999: 198). Although Bowie’s take on youth apocalypse bears some resemblance to the destructive fantasies that feature in The Wild Boys, the writer takes issue with the core idea of the Ziggy Stardust project: that there are only “five years” before the end of the earth, as announced in the opening song of the record. By now an old hand at imagining world destruction, the writer “corrects” Bowie’s speculation with the matter-of-fact observation: “Of course, exhaustion of natural resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the population by about three-quarters,” young and old alike (George-Warren 1999: 195). A surprising takeaway from the interview is that Bowie imagines himself to be an observer of youth culture, in the mode of Burroughs, more than a participant. The point is easy to miss in retrospect: the Terry O’Neill photograph of Bowie and Burroughs that accompanies the interview captures the singer in character as “Ziggy,” the alter ego now permanently associated in the collective mind with the young Bowie, now that the singer has passed.6 Despite their age difference between the two men, they share essentially the same distanced, highly cultivated view of the young. Bowie often emphasizes in the interview his personal remove from the younger generation that constitutes his core audience. Moreover, he claims that the growing generation gap between the preteen audience for rock and the slightly older cohort of British rock bands is central to understanding the new shape of the counterculture. Bowie had already commented on the distance he perceived between British rock stars and a preteen audience too young to have directly participated in the social movements of the 1960s in “All the Young Dudes.” Written in 1972 and arguably Bowie’s most durable song from the era, the singer never recorded it, gifting it instead to one of his pet recording projects at the time, the English rock group Mott the Hoople. “All the Young Dudes” remains the definitive statement of this covert struggle between preteens and their older brothers and sisters, expressed in these key lines: “And my brother’s back at home with his Beatles and his Stones/Never got it off on that revolution stuff/What a drag/Too many snags” (Bowie 1972b). Naturally, Bowie

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manages to leverage this in-group contest to his own advantage, securing his alliance with preteen record buyers while taking a shot at the very notion of rock “elders.”7 In the interview, Bowie takes special pains to explain to Burroughs how “All the Young Dudes” fits into the larger Ziggy narrative (George-Warren 1999: 195).8 It is not a youth anthem, the singer asserts, but rather a song of apocalyptic despair. The song is set amid a worldwide catastrophe, in a future world without electricity. As Bowie explains, although “Ziggy’s [alien] adviser tells him to collect news and sing it . . . [but] there is no news.” However, the backstory that Bowie provides, and indeed, the song’s central message that 1960s’ style protest is over and that the “hippies” have been replaced by a truly lost or “wasted” generation of apolitical preteens, is fully at odds with the general tenor of the Burroughs-Bowie exchange. Repeatedly, Bowie provides vivid examples that suggest the counterculture revolution is not over but merely changed its shape. Youth revolution no longer expresses itself in guerrilla action, the singer suggests; its new locus is sexual politics. “You see,” Bowie observes, [T]rying to tart up the rock business up a bit is getting nearer to what the kids themselves are like, because what I find . . . [is that] the kids are a lot more sensational than the stars themselves. The rock business is a pale shadow of what the kids’ lives are usually like. The admiration comes from the other side. It’s all a reversal, especially in recent years. Walk down Christopher Street and then you wonder exactly what went wrong. (George-Warren 1999: 201–2)

This observation effectively flips the message of “All the Young Dudes.” The younger generation have not given up on revolution; they are actually more genuinely subversive than their older brothers and sisters. In Bowie’s view, the new promotional and advertising machines that had developed in recent years around rock music had yet to impact its youngest audience. They were already living the revolution that their older siblings could only imagine. The clear implication is that the counterculture is evolving in ways that remain faithful to the radical impulses that marked the youth upheaval of the 1960s. Burroughs makes a similar point in his contributions to the dialogue, that the counterculture had simply shifted its focus. Neither artist suggests that the change indicates a betrayal of the counterculture or its appropriation. In a 1972 Rolling Stone interview with Robert Palmer, Burroughs makes it clear that he regards the general retreat of activists from a violent confrontation with the military or police to be a strategic move rather than a concession to authority. As Burroughs explains to Palmer, the decision to put aside violence as a means to revolutionary ends is simply a realistic assessment of the situation on the ground, at least in America: “They may talk about the guerilla movements in the large cities, but they’re just not talking in realistic terms. . . . [An] underground army must have popular support. They don’t have the potential for much support in America. So that would not seem a viable tactic at present”(George-Warren 1999: 190). Recognizing that the United States is not currently in a “state of revolution” is not the same thing as abandoning radicalism,

 Burroughs, Bowie, Counterculture 321 nor does it entail renouncing violence on principle. The writer is emphatic on this last point: “I don’t take back what I said in The Job,” he adds, “that there should be more riots and more violence, because at the time—May 1968—they were indicated [sic]. They accomplished something, there’s no doubt about it.” As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that both men regard the struggle for sexual liberation to constitute the new front for counterculture struggle, and that the battle for freedom in this realm is no less necessary than the resistance to the Vietnam War. Bowie’s reference to Christopher Street, the neighborhood in New York’s West Village that became a symbol of gay pride after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, and Burroughs’ remarks on the new adult film theaters in New York’s Times Square suggest their tacit agreement on this point. During a visit to New York in 1970, Burroughs was both surprised and deeply impressed by the new adult film theaters that had opened in New York’s Times Square. He regarded the new porn movie industry, including gay porn films, as far more than a liberal concession to sexual minorities. In its own way, it represented a phenomenon as new and subversive as the decision of drag queens of color to fight back against the police officers who harassed them at the Stonewall Inn. “Did you see any of the porn films in New York?” Burroughs asks Bowie; “when I was last back, I saw about thirty of them. I was going to be a judge at the erotic film festival” (George-Warren 1999: 199). Burroughs seems to have flashed on the role that public screenings of gay porn might play in creating what Samuel Delany later named “contact communities” that crossed race and class boundaries in a pregentrified Times Square. For Burroughs, both Stonewall and gay movie theaters seemed like portents of the apocalyptic queer future the writer had imagined in The Wild Boys.9 At times, Burroughs and Bowie are in such common accord that one has to doublecheck the name listed before the response to make sure exactly who is speaking. In response to a query from Bowie about his current projects, Burroughs describes his plans for a projected institute of advanced studies to be located in Scotland. The writer’s list of core curriculum amounts to a catalog of counterculture hot topics, including alternative medicine, mindfulness therapies, and, of course, space exploration: [The academy’s] aim will be to extend awareness and alter consciousness in the direction of greater range, flexibility, and effectiveness at a time when traditional disciplines have failed to come up with viable solutions. You see, the advent of the space age and the possibility of exploring galaxies and contacting alien life forms pose an urgent necessity for radically new solutions . . . [including] [t]hings such as yoga-style mediation and exercises, communication, sound, light and film experiments, experiments with sensory deprivation chambers, pyramids, psychotronic generators and Reich’s Orgone accumulators [etc.]. (George-Warren 1999: 199)

On his part, Bowie echoes Burroughs in insisting on the central role that media will play in the future of the species. “The media is either our salvation or our death,” Bowie declares at one juncture: “I’d like to think it’s our salvation” (George-Warren 1999: 201). He goes on to predict the full incorporation of holograms in everyday life “in

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about seven years,” and urges media consumers, a la Burroughs, to take a more active role in their regimen. The singer-songwriter calls for software that allows for the mass storage of visual data; in the meantime, citizens need to become their own curators: “[l]ibraries of video cassettes should be developed to their fullest. . . . You can’t video enough good material from your own TV. I want to have my own choice of programs. There has to be the necessary software available.” Again, we can attribute the mindmeld evident in the interview to the shared faith of the two men in the continuing vitality of counterculture praxis. Throughout the interview, Burroughs remains a careful and courteous listener, often deferring to the younger man and showing a polite respect that must have deeply impressed the singer-songwriter.10 However, the writer eagerly steps into the role of mentor in response to Bowie’s remarks on the “politics of sound,” which must have struck Burroughs as superficial. It is Burroughs who first uses these words; Bowie’s response to the phrase references rock music and what he claims to be a typical misunderstanding of the music by rock critics: “[I] can reel off at least ten sounds that represent a kind of person rather than a type of music. The critics don’t like to say that because critics like being critics . . . but when they classify they are talking about people not music. It’s a whole political thing” (George-Warren 1999: 202). Burroughs’ reply subtly redirects the conversation, away from rock music to a deeper consideration of the political uses of “pure” sound: “Like infrasound, the sound below the level of hearing. Below sixteen Hertz. Turned up full blast it can knock down walls for thirty miles. You can walk into the French patent office and buy the patent for forty pence.” The remarks serve as a courteous but clear reminder for Bowie to broaden his thinking about politics beyond music and focus on the larger struggle, against the state. * * * I have argued here that the Burroughs-Bowie dialogue was not just a celebrity meeting but an intellectual event. The meeting was certainly transformative for David Bowie. A case can easily be made that the interview constituted a turning point in Bowie’s musical career. By his own admission, Bowie’s knowledge of the Beats prior to the meeting extended only as far as reading Jack Kerouac’s bestselling On the Road. After meeting Burroughs, and reading Nova Express and later on The Wild Boys, Bowie’s approach to making music changed in fundamental ways. He had already conceived of the rock musical, The 1980 Floor Show, a theatrical program that grounded music in literature, specifically George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, but also Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Denied the stage and film rights to 1984 by Sonia Orwell, Bowie fundamentally altered the project so that Burroughs became the major literary inspiration. Released in May 1974, Diamond Dogs is a concept album about urban dystopia that melds elements of Orwell’s narrative with scenes of youth violence obviously inspired by The Wild Boys and once again, A Clockwork Orange. Meeting Burroughs also facilitated a major change in Bowie’s songwriting practice. He is seen demonstrating the cut-up in the 1975 television documentary on Bowie, directed by Alan Yentrob for the BBC’s Omnibus program. Bowie would continue

 Burroughs, Bowie, Counterculture 323 to use the cut-up technique for the rest of his career; the cut-ups he used to create the lyrics for “Blackout” (1977) were on display in the 2018 “David Bowie Is” exhibit. Diamond Dogs not only draws on the subject matter of youth gangs and images of urban chaos featured in The Wild Boys; it also contains the fragmented forms, both musical and lyrical, characteristic of Burroughs’ earlier cut-up fiction. Although there is little evidence that Burroughs’ personal interest in rock music came close to matching the fascination of many rock performers with the writer, one could still challenge Simon Warner’s assertion that the writer’s attention to “the 1960s counterculture was severely restricted”(Warner 2012: 41). The existence of The Wild Boys might be enough to dispute Warner’s claim, but it is also interesting in this regard to compare Burroughs’ dialogue with Bowie in Rolling Stone with another rock summit between the writer and Jimmy Page, the guitarist for the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin, arranged by the rock magazine Crawdaddy in 1975. Burroughs died in 1997, and he never allowed this later interview to be reprinted or anthologized. Rock journalist Stephen Davis knew the author, and speculates that this is because the writer felt “ashamed of, or embarrassed by, the association with Led Zeppelin” (Davis 2013: 55). Perhaps: but the nature of the exchange between Burroughs and Bowie might suggest another reason for the writer’s relative indifference to the fate of his writing on Jimmy Page. I’ve argued that Burroughs and Bowie identified with the counterculture, and their commitment to the movement fostered their dialogue and overcame the potential awkwardness of their contrived meeting. Although Jimmy Page and Burroughs both lived in London during the 1960s and shared many of the same interests and acquaintances, among them the filmmakers and self-professed magicians Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, Led Zeppelin’s massive commercial success may have placed the hard rock band too close to the mainstream for the writer’s taste, and thus at a remove from the alternative culture that inspired and sustained both Burroughs and Bowie. Unlike Zeppelin, commercial success in the United States came late for Bowie; the artist struggled to make a dent on the American charts until 1975, when he released Young Americans, an album of r&b and soul music that marked a significant departure from Bowie’s previous recordings. Back in 1972, Burroughs had explained to Robert Palmer how “the dividing line between establishment and non-establishment is breaking down”: People tend to say that if an underground paper succeeds and makes money, that it is now part of the establishment, or if pop singers make a lot of money and their records make a great deal of money for big companies that they are now part of the establishment, but the underground or any movement is not going to succeed by not succeeding. (George-Warren 1999: 180)

The writer’s assignment to cover Led Zeppelin may have caused Burroughs to reconsider his last point about the paradox of success; perhaps there was such a thing as too much of it, after all. In his Crawdaddy article, Burroughs described his feelings of euphoria on seeing the band play, complete with the razzle dazzle of a

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laser light show and smoke machines, at Madison Square Garden in 1975. However, the writer suggested to Stephen Davis at the time that the band was not living up to their creative potential. “[What] power they (Led Zeppelin) have,” Burroughs observes; “they have a real hold on their audience, which was quite young when I saw them last week . . . maybe they could get some real magic going . . . heh heh . . . instead of all that goddamned dry ice and laser beams” (Davis 2013: 54). Perhaps the joke conceals a deeper disappointment on Burroughs’ part that rock music was losing the experimental edge that was evident during the mid-1960s moment when Burroughs first began to write about it. Whereas Bowie is intrigued by Burroughs’ suggestions about incorporating infrared sound in rock music, noting that “there was a band experimenting with stuff like that; they reckon they could make a whole audience shake,” Jimmy Page responds with a diffident “Hmm,” suggesting his indifference to the topic (Burroughs 1975).11 Although Page is interested in changing the musical vocabulary of rock, he draws the line on experimenting with Zeppelin’s mass audience: “We don’t want anything bad to happen to these kids—we don’t want to release anything we can’t handle” (Burroughs 1975). The Burroughs-Page summit takes places only two years after the writer’s dialogue with Bowie, but there are already signs that some of the radical possibilities of rock culture that had opened up in the 1960s were being shut down. The reasons for this are obvious: whatever Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin’s experimental inclinations, the fact remains that they were also a massive profit-making enterprise. In this context, innovations are either discouraged or quickly formalized. While David Bowie clearly aspired to reach mainstream success, he’s still only marginally successful, the quintessential “cult” artist, when he meets Burroughs. For this reason, the BurroughsBowie dialogue freeze-frames a crucial moment, perhaps the last such before the Anglophone punk rock insurgency of the late 1970s, when 1960s counterculture energies still fueled cutting edge work in both literature and popular music.

Notes 1 The Beatles’s concert at Shea Stadium in August 1965 was memorable for setting a new record for concert attendance in the United States that would stand until another British rock group, Led Zeppelin, broke that record in 1973 at Tampa Stadium, Florida. 2 Burroughs was not above putting the tape cut-up to more personal use; in 1971, he targeted the Moka Bar in Soho for selling him a bad piece of cheesecake and played a tape-recorded hex outside their premises. He was delighted when the establishment soon went out of business. See Miles (2014: 494–5). 3 “The Electronic Revolution,” p. 182. Burroughs in fact attended the science fiction convention (sponsored by the International Times) that was part of the “Phun City” festival. Mick Farren, rock journalist and lead singer of the Deviants, recalls Burroughs “requiring hippies (in the audience) to talk into his portable tape machine while he baffled them with instant cut-ups”; see Miles 2014: 485.

 Burroughs, Bowie, Counterculture 325 4 The commission from an adult magazine is not as surprising as it might seem. The French adult magazine Oui had just been acquired by Playboy enterprises. Playboy editor Hugh Hefner had published Burroughs’ friend Jack Keroauc in the 1960s, and many other counterculture heroes or fellow travelers, including Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Richard Brautigan. 5 The title of the magazine is taken from the character, “The Heavy Metal Kid,” in Burroughs’ cut-up novel, The Soft Machine—which also inspired the name of the 1960s Canterbury psych-group, with Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers. 6 In the Terry O’Neill photograph that accompanies the interview, Bowie is dressed in a manner best described as “Ziggy casual,” wearing a woman’s bowler hat, dress pants, and a leather jacket, strategically left open to reveal the face of the “Alex” character from A Clockwork Orange as depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s film on his t-shirt. The image of Alex is also depicted with a bowler hat, the characteristic headgear of the English working class. Meanwhile, Burroughs already assumed in the early 1970s the distinct look—comfortably middle-aged, elegant suit and tie, stylish hat—that became his celebrity image in the 1980s and 1990s. 7 This is despite the fact that only four years separate Bowie from Mick Jagger. 8 The backstory Bowie provides in the interview bears little or no connection with the story presented by the first-person narrator of the song. It seems like Bowie’s attempt to up the dystopian “ante” on the older writer, even if that means contradicting the story provided in his own lyrics. 9 In 1972, shortly after The Wild Boys was published, Burroughs entered in negotiation with director Fred Halstead to produce the writer’s screenplay into a gay hardcore film; see Grauerholz (1998: 360). 10 The fact that Bowie would work with photographer Jimmy King to recreate Terry O’Neill’s original photo shoot for the interview, with a mature Bowie, dressed to resemble Burroughs and sporting the writer’s trademark hat, suggests as much. 11 Bowie is likely referring here to the pioneering space rock band Hawkwind, another band influenced by Burroughs’ writings and a mainstay of the London Underground community of the 1960s, who boasted not one but two members, Del Dettmar and Dik Mik, who played the audio generator, using frequencies that caused audience members to lose control of consciousness or their bodily functions (George-Warren 1999: 202).

References Bowie, David (1972a), “Oh! You Pretty Things.” Available online: https​:/​/ge​​nius.​​com​/D​​ avid-​​bowie​​-oh​-y​​ou​-pr​​etty-​​th​ing​​s​-lyr​​ics Bowie, David (1972b), “All the Young Dudes.” Available online: https​:/​/ge​​nius.​​com​/D​​avid-​​ bowie​​-all-​​the​-y​​oung-​​du​des​​-lyri​​cs Burroughs, William (1961), “Cut-Ups,” Quedear, YouTube video, 3:13, May 21, 2011. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=Rc2​​yU7OU​​McI​&f​​eatur​​​.e​=em​​ b​_log​o Burroughs, William (1975), “William Burroughs . . . on Led Zeppelin!” Arthur. Available online: https​:/​/ar​​thurm​​ag​.co​​m​/200​​7​/12/​​05​/wi​​llima​​-burr​​oughs​​-onl​e​​d​-zep​​pelin​/ Burroughs, William (1989), The Job, edited by Daniel Odier, New York: Penguin Books.

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Burroughs, William (1992), The Wild Boys, New York: Grove Press. Carr, Roy and Charles Shaar Murray (1981), David Bowie: An Illustrated Record, New York: Avon Books. Copetas, Craig ([1974] 1999), “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman: Burroughs and David Bowie,” in Holly George-Warren (ed.), The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, 193–203, New York: Hyperion Books. Davis, Stephen (2013), William Burroughs/Local Stop on the Nova Express, Providence: Inkblot Publications. Grauerholz, James (1998), Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, edited by James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg, New York: Grove Press. Miles, Barry (2014), Call Me Burroughs, New York: Grand Central Publishing. Murphy, Timothy S. (1997), Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs, Berkeley: University of California Press. Palmer, Robert ([1972] 1999), “The 1972 Rolling Stone Interview: William S. Burroughs,” in Holly George-Warren (ed.), The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, 177–93, New York: Hyperion Books. Warner, Simon (2012), Text and Drugs and Rock and Roll, New York: Bloomsbury Press.

13

All the News Not Fit to Print Blake Stricklin

Keep the news coming. steady, you have 70 years of media conditioning to combat . . . —Diane di Prima (“Revolutionary Letter #15”1) Punk President, eat up the FBI w/ your big mouth —Allen Ginsberg (“Punk Rock You’re My Big Crybaby”2) In his keynote address to the 1978 Nova Convention, Burroughs explained that he was “beginning to realize that the readings [he had] given in the last three years while seemingly apolitical are in many cases very definite political statements.” In his opening remarks, Burroughs invoked the image of Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth before adding that we might also see the planet as a lifeboat. In our lifeboat situation, “it is vital concern for everybody on the boat if the crew or the passengers start polluting the supply of food and water, distributing supplies on a grossly inequitable basis . . . or worst of all trying to blow the boat out from under us.”3 The nova conspiracies Burroughs identified at the 1978 event concern the potential destruction of the planet from ecological disaster and nuclear war. Burroughs noted later in the convention how a “mediocre elite” caused and accelerated these crises. Yet, as he explained three years earlier in his lecture at the Schizo-Culture conference, there are limits to their control. Burroughs recounted another lifeboat scenario at “The Limits of Control,” where he imagined two armed “self-appointed leaders” force the other eight passengers to do the majority of the work. Burroughs explained how the hostages could easily overtake the two, but the armed “leaders” have found a way to exert effective control despite their weapons. They might make concessions to the eight on the lifeboat like increasing food rations or water. But these concessions, where “force is supplanted with deception and persuasion,” are a means to maintain their control (1985a: 146). Later in the talk, Burroughs extended his lifeboat analogy to the “Ship of State” and explained how no government can “withstand a sudden all-out attack by all their underprivileged citizens.” Much like the two self-appointed leaders on the lifeboat, governments must make allowances to retain control over their citizens.

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Burroughs, however, suspected that once governments started to make concessions, it would be especially difficult to take them back. Governments might decide to impose stricter censorship, but Burroughs doubted it would happen. As he finds: “with the breakdown of censorship and the freeing of the Word, the New York Times has to print four-letter words used by the President of the United States” (1985b: 75). Burroughs, of course, had his own battles with censorship when he published Naked Lunch. Yet to read him as a writer that wrote four-letter words and skits about talking assholes often overlooks the critique Burroughs’ writing makes on the developing communication and media industries of the twentieth century. What we call obscene now is not the repression or censorship of speech, but its opposite: an incessant demand that we speak. Jean Baudrillard calls this new obscenity an “ecstasy of communication,” in which “all events, all spaces, all memories are abolished in the sole dimension of information.” The ecstasy to communicate is obscene in the sense that “there is a pornography of information . . . a pornography of circuits and networks, of functions and objects in their legibility” (2012: 28). For Baudrillard, “to counter the acceleration of networks” requires “something more rapid than communication: the challenge, the duel” (2012: 82). While Burroughs’ cut-up experiments in the 1960s attempted to block or hijack communication, the publication of his clear political statements in the parapublication networks of the underground press offered a direct challenge to the communication strategies of the “mediocre elite.”

Time-Life-Fortune On November 30, 1962, Time magazine printed their review of Naked Lunch, which had just been published in America by Grove Press. The review, entitled “King of the YADS (Young American Disaffiliates),” begins with a brief dismissal of Beat writers, wherein the reviewer notes how Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac might have written something worth reading if they “had not been lured by the sirens of faucet composition and second-growth Dada” (1962: 96). The reviewer then prefaces his criticism of Naked Lunch with reference to Burroughs’ biography. Burroughs, as the reviewer writes, “is not only an ex-junkie, but an ex-con, and by accident, a killer” (96). The review even mentions Burroughs’ time in the army, but notes it was cut short after Burroughs cut off his finger joint. The critic concludes that Burroughs’ life presents itself “as proof that the universe is foul,” and thus “achieves the somewhat honesty of hysteria” (96). Burroughs was so incensed with the Time review that he sued the magazine for libel. He won the case and was awarded five pounds. Burroughs’ antipathy toward Time, however, exceeds any mere personal slights. In his 1965 interview with The Paris Review, Burroughs noted that he has no admiration for Henry Luce, the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune (2001a: 73). As Oliver Harris explains, Burroughs opposed Luce “because he took their titles literally.” Luce and his media empire “projected a world that would embody the American way of life, that would run on American time, and that would define fortune in terms of the American Dream” (Harris 2019: 30). Yet the total takeover of Life, Time, and Fortune was not accomplished

 All the News Not Fit to Print 329 with military force. Harris rightly notes that Luce “had faith in the soft sell of an empire of images” (30). In the control era, the “Ship of State” enacts softer measures to maintain its power. As Burroughs detailed in “The Limits of Control,” behind these concessions are “techniques of psychological control” that mass media operators are especially deft in creating. For Burroughs, Henry Luce “has set up one of the greatest word and image banks in the world,” which he compared to the Mayan calendar. Time, Life, and Fortune have “nothing to do with reporting.” Burroughs instead saw Luce’s media outlets as more of a “police organization” (2001a: 73). In a short essay entitled “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars,” Burroughs writes how media operators, such as Luce and William Randolph Hearst, can write the news before it even happens, which explains “why [Time] print[s] so many false statements that they have to retract” (1985b: 60). Yet, as Burroughs states in his Schizo-Culture lecture, mass media is “a very twoedged control instrument,” as it proves to be “a unreliable and even treacherous instrument of control” due to “its need for NEWS” (1985a: 147). The underground or alternative press, then, threatens the monopolies of Hearst and Luce because it will publish news their respective monopolies do not see fit to print. Whereas “Time, Life, Fortune applies a more complex, effective control system than the Mayan calendar,” Burroughs finds that “it is also more vulnerable because it is so vast and mechanized” (2001a: 81). Burroughs locates the vulnerabilities in such a large abstract machine. To resist the control mechanisms of corporate media, Burroughs instructs us “to wise up [to] all the marks everywhere. Show them the rigged wheel of Life-TimeFortune. Storm The Reality Studio. And retake the universe” (1964: 60). Burroughs, however, finds the bombardment of police stations and government buildings an outdated revolutionary strategy. The effective tactic in the control era concerns “the use of mass media.” Burroughs states, “If you could take over mass media, you could take over the country” (2001b: 151). Burroughs called for “Carry Corders of the world [to] unite.” When he reported on the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire, Burroughs walked around Chicago recording the crowd and riot noises (Miles 2014 475). The personal tape recorder, then, became a potential weapon: “And think what several hundred people with Carry Corders could do at a political rally . . . Sublimate the subliminators” (Burroughs 2014 [1962]: 189). When Marshall McLuhan wrote his review on Nova Express in 1964, he explained how Burroughs’ book served as a “kind of engineer’s report” on “the new electronic environment.” McLuhan also claimed that Burroughs was “not asking for merit marks as a writer.”4 His project instead brings readers’ attention to the “button of an active and lethal environmental process.” As Burroughs details in The Soft Machine, nova agents “fold writers of all time in together and record radio programs, movie sound tracks, TV and juke box songs of all the words of the world stirring around in a cement mixer and pour in the resistance message” (2014 [1966]: 147). Burroughs prints a resistance message in books and broadcasts it on the airwaves in order to attack linguistic control through a manipulation of mass media effects. If the medium is the message, Burroughs suggests that alternative uses of media will produce alternative messages. Burroughs hijacks all communication technologies in order to create alternatives to the institutional discourses of a mediocre elite. Yet while he experimented with film and

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tape cut-ups, Burroughs finds in “The Limits of Control” that modern control systems still depended on writing and literacy. In the “Revised Boy Scout Manual,” Burroughs notes how “the underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power and more sophisticated techniques used by mass media to falsify, misquote . . . and block out of existence data, books discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interests” (2018: 45). To combat Luce and his media monopoly on Time, Life, and Fortune, Burroughs turned to the underground press. In 1965, Burroughs and Gysin recreated an issue of Time in a small avant-garde press. American poet Ted Berrigan published Burroughs and Gysin’s version of Time magazine in his “C” Press. Burroughs and Gysin’s Time incorporates the cover from the November 1962 Time issue, but he cuts the image in half with an illustration. The rest of the text, as Robert A. Sobieszek describes, includes “four drawings by Gysin, and twenty-six pages of typescripts comprised of cut-up texts and various photographs serving as news items” (1996: 37). Burroughs reproduces the three-column structure used in Time magazine, but his imitation serves to disrupt any sequential reading of the editorial. On one page of the C issue, Burroughs inserts his writing over a September 1963 Time article on Mao Tse-tung. And while the cut-up text overwrites the third column of the article, Burroughs adds an advertisement on “Modern Living” in the middle of the page further obscuring the initial message. Burroughs and Gysin use the cut-up method and visual collage to “cut the word lines” from Luce’s magazine.

“Rock and Roll Adolescent Hoodlums Storm the Streets of All Nations” Burroughs continued to publish his work with smaller presses in the 1970s. The publication of the Schizo-Culture issue in 1978 coincided with the Nova Convention, and includes “The Limits of Control.” Established four years before the Nova Convention, Semiotext(e) continued the aesthetic sensibilities and political commitments of the underground press. François Cusset gives an accurate description of Semiotext(e) when he notes how the 1970s were “the decade of French theory’s countercultural, its anarchic expansions, by way of alternative journals and rock concerts” (2008: 54). If we examine the contents in the Schizo-Culture issue, Burroughs’ writing rubs against the radical Left politics, post-1968 French theory, as well as interviews from New York artists. Such connections were one of Sylvère Lotringer’s goals when he organized the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference at Columbia University. In addition to Burroughs and John Cage, the four-day event included talks from Michel Foucault, Jean François Lyotard, and Ti-Grace Atkinson. It was also the first time Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari spoke to an American audience. The 1975 Schizo-Culture symposium was an attempt to find connections between an American postwar avant-garde and post-1968 theory. Yet Lotringer insists the “issue is not the same as the conference.” The 1978 text instead “consummated [Semiotext(e)’s] rupture with academe” by turning toward the art world and the energy of the New York downtown scene (Lotringer 2014: v).

 All the News Not Fit to Print 331 The Nova Convention featured many New York City (NYC) artists and musicians. In addition to James Grauerholz and poet John Giorno, Semiotext(e) founder Lotringer helped organize the 1978 event. Lotringer admits that the publication of Schizo-Culture occurring the same week of the Nova Convention was “a strange coincidence,” but a few artists featured in the issue performed at the Entermedia Theater. John Cage read from his second writing through Finnegans Wake while Merce Cunningham danced, and Philip Glass played a section from Einstein on the Beach. In addition to these performances from New York’s venerated avant-gardes, rock and punk musicians made an appearance. And while the Schizo-Culture issue did include lyrics from Ramones “Teenage Lobotomy” and an interview with no-wave musician Boris Pearlman (a.k.a. Policeband), the Nova Convention moved Semiotext(e) closer to the punk scene. Lotringer booked a Nova concert at Irving Plaza with performances by Blondie and the B-52s, and Frank Zappa. He remembers how The Stimulators, a NYC punk band Allen Ginsberg recommended, “broke the arm of one of [his graduate] students.” Recalling the comment Foucault made at the Schizo-Culture conference, Lotringer said the event was “the last ‘countercultural meeting’ . . . and this time it would have been true” (2014: xxiv). The musicians who performed at the Nova Convention prefaced their performances by noting their admiration for Burroughs and his work. Before Frank Zappa read “The Talking Asshole” routine, he told the audience that he was not much for reading books but that he made an exception for Naked Lunch. Patti Smith likewise began her performance of “Bumblebee” with a statement on Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Before her voice dissolved into noise, Smith noted how “the thing they’ve given me is the foresight and the freedom to communicate with the future through sound.”5 Laurie Anderson was another performer at the Convention, and she continued to work with Burroughs both directly and indirectly after the Nova Convention. On her United States Live album, Anderson repeats the Burroughs line, “language is a virus.” In 1981, she collaborated with Burroughs and Giorno on a tour that was later released as the album You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With. In 1984, Burroughs spoke on the closing track of Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak, and his voice pairs well with her trancelike instrumentation. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler writes how Burroughs’ collaboration with Anderson “maximizes all electro-acoustic possibilities, occupies recording studios and FM transmitters, and uses tape montages to subvert the writing-induced separation into composers and writers, arrangers and interpreters” (1990: 110–11). How musicians or experimental writers use these electronic technologies differ significantly from their initial use by governments. As Kittler explains in his history of the gramophone, broadcasting information “came about for the purpose of the mass transmission of records” between government officials (94). Electronic technologies likewise aided in the Second World War, as radio allowed “Luftwaffe bombers to reach their destinations without having to depend on daylight or the absence of fog” (Kittler 1990: 100). Kittler, however, explains that when rock musicians used this technology after the war, they misused army equipment in order to create their music. Rock and punk, then, can work as a “mass interception” that “amount[s] to mobilization” (Kittler 1990: 111). In

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his “Revised Boy Scout Manual,” Burroughs invokes the military origins of electronic media. However, he seeks to find alternative uses for these technologies to directly oppose the “mediocre elite” who seek to maintain their control. Burroughs and his rock n’ roll hoodlums storm the reality studio to abuse old army equipment. Nova agents “ride music beam[s]” as they broadcast “the message of Total Resistance on [the] short wave of the world” (1964: 69).

The Fuck You Press Semiotext(e) often published Burroughs’ work. The 1987 Semiotext(e) USA issue defined the journal as the “Sears ‘n’ Roebuck catalog of th’American Underground” (4). Yet even in the 1980s, the journal faced censorship from the government. On the back of the USA issue, a statement proclaims Semiotext(e) as “the journal denounced in the U.S. Senate for its advocacy of animal sex.” The curious advertisement references an earlier issue, entitled Polysexuality (1981), which included an essay from Deleuze and Guattari on “A Bloated Oedipus” and appeared under the heading “Animal Sex.” Semiotext(e) USA likewise encountered censorship problems when several printers refused to print it. A note stamped on the back cover of the issue reads: Calling it “subversive” and “obscene,” five book printers in the spring of 1987 refused to print Semiotext(e) USA. A sixth printer agreed to do all but four pages, which we have printed separately and included here.

The back cover, however, includes a plastic pocket with the obscene pages that the sixth printer refused to print. The corresponding pages within Semiotext(e) USA indicates that these “subversive” and “obscene” texts were censored.6 Burroughs had his own censorship battles. And while the case against Naked Lunch is well known, the government equally went after his writings in the alternative press. Both the Polysexuality and USA issues include texts from Burroughs. The latter features a short Burroughs essay entitled “Sects and Death.” And while the short text was not one of the pages the sixth printer refused to print, its bibliographical history gives insight into how Burroughs’ texts circulated outside mainstream publishing networks. Before the editors of Semiotext(e) USA selected “Sects and Death” for the 1987 issue, the short essay appeared in Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities, which City Lights published in 1979. In the introduction to the book, Burroughs notes that the titular atrocity, “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” was “deleted from The Yage Letters [in 1963] by the English printers.” This was perhaps not without reason, as Burroughs explains how “Roosevelt After Inauguration” was “first published in Floating Bear # 9 by Leroi Jones,” which resulted in an obscenity case against Jones “when copies were sent to someone in a penal institution” (1978: 10). “Roosevelt After Inauguration” first materialized in a 1953 letter to Allen Ginsberg, wherein Burroughs instructs Ginsberg to read the enclosed routine. The skit, however, would not appear in The Yage Letters until the third edition was printed in 1988. Yet a note to the 1965 edition tells readers

 All the News Not Fit to Print 333 “copies of a new pirated edition of [“Roosevelt After Inauguration”] are obtainable from City Lights at 50c postpaid” (1963: 42). The routine thus circulated in pirated editions and a small newsletter before City Lights published it with “other atrocities” in 1979. Floating Bear was a small semi-monthly newsletter coedited by Amiri Barka— then LeRoi Jones—and Diane di Prima. While Baraka admits Floating Bear had a small circulation of around 300, he explains how “those 300 were sufficiently wired for sound to project the Bear’s presence and ‘message’ (of a new literature and a new criticism) in all directions” (1984: 251). In the newsletter, Baraka and di Prima published texts from Black Mountain College writers, such as Robert Creely and Charles Olson, as well as texts from the New York School and the Beat Generation. Floating Bear thus created a wide and diverse network of writers. When Baraka and di Prima published “Roosevelt After Inauguration” in the ninth issue, Burroughs’ text appeared between a Philip Whalen poem and an excerpt from Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell. It was Burroughs’ routine that brought FBI agents to Baraka’s house in the middle of the night, where he was later charged with sending obscene material in the mail. At the trial Baraka defended himself and “read all the good parts of Joyce’s Ulysses and Catullus aloud to the jury and then read Judge Woolsey’s decision on Ulysses, which described obscene literature as being arousing ‘to the normal person.’ [Baraka 1984] went on, saying, ‘But I know none of [the grand jury] were aroused by any of these things’” (251–2). The case against Baraka was soon dismissed, but the routine would appear again in another small mimeograph press in 1964. The American printer and Fugs musician Ed Sanders published “Roosevelt After Inauguration” in his Fuck You Press three years after the Floating Bear issue. While Jones and di Prima remove the epistolary context from the text, the Fuck You “Roosevelt” reinserts Burroughs’ 1953 letter to Ginsberg. The issue also includes sketches and illustrations from Ginsberg, which further emphasizes the collaborative element in Burroughs’ writing. A brief bibliographical note on the text appears beneath the letter, which reads: “This routine was bricked out of the City Lights Volume by paranoid printers in England. It was first stomped into print in Floating Bear # 9.” While Sanders did not face any legal consequences for printing the routine, he differentiated Fuck You from the “paranoid printers” in mainstream publishing. The title page of the issue notes what the press prints is more of an “ejaculation” than a publication, and it serves as a “TOTAL ASSUALT ON THE CULTURE!!” The routine published in Baraka and di Prima’s Floating Bear and Sanders’s Fuck You centers on the imagined actions that Roosevelt took shortly after his inauguration. In Burroughs’ text, Roosevelt appointed “a veteran panhandler” as the secretary of state, who “solicited nickels and dimes in the corridors of the State Department.”(1978: 16). When the Supreme Court rejected “some of the legislation perpetrated by this vile rout,” Roosevelt “forced that august body . . . to submit to intercourse with a purpleassed baboon” (1978: 18). Roosevelt later appointed the baboon to replace a Justice on the court. Yet while the 1953 letter to Ginsberg literally dates the text, Burroughs sees the routine as prediction of the Nixon administration. In the introduction to

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the 1979 City Lights edition, Burroughs felt that “Roosevelt After Inauguration” was “prophetic of Watergate” (1978: 10). Nixon was, of course, obsessed with total control. Burroughs finds that this “perhaps explains why the Nixon Administration is out to close down sex films and reestablish censorship of all films and books” (Burroughs and Odier 1989 [1969]: 16). It also might explain why his administration went after the underground press in the early 1970s. In Geoffrey Rips’s comprehensive report on the campaign against the underground magazines, he notes that the FBI and CIA frequently harassed publishers and journalists. Rips writes how “records were lost, typewriters destroyed, and staffs disbanded as a result of police raids” (1981: 51). The report also finds that “recording tape, the computer, and the silicon chip have brought new sophistication to the control of the written word” (1981: 47). In the 1978 Schizo-Culture issue, pictures of security cameras and other devices of clandestine surveillance frequently appear in the magazine. These images not only reinforce the commentaries from Burroughs on control, but the cameras are a consistent reminder on how alternative presses that published tracts from the Left were subject to Cointelpro. Yet, as Burroughs told Angelo Lewis in 1975, they were then in the middle of a cultural revolution that saw “the breakdown on censorship and the phenomenon of Watergate” (2001: 324). In an interview with Le Monde, Burroughs again notes how Watergate showed there were limits to the administration’s control, as “the media that were supposed to support the system completely went around it.” In the lecture reprinted in Schizo-Culture, Burroughs finds that mass media has “spread any cultural movements in all directions” (2014: 42). If a magazine or newspaper were seized by the post office, another small press likely printed the text. Burroughs, then, finds that mass media was “uncontrollable owing to its basic need for NEWS. If one paper or even a string of papers owned by the same person tries to kill a story that makes that story hotter as NEWS. Some paper will pick it up” (2014: 42). For Burroughs, “the underground press is at the root of this” since they publish all the news unfit to print (2001: 324). In his fiction, nova agents use media to break open all closed control systems. He details a plan for resistance in “Playback from Watergate to Eden,” wherein he explains: Any number can play. Millions of people carrying out this basic operation could nullify the control system which those who are behind Watergate and Nixon are attempting to impose. (Burroughs and Odier 1989 [1969]: 20)

Kittler, who cites this Burroughs essay as a case study in media manipulation, writes how if control “is the key to power in this century, then fighting that power requires positive feedback” (110). Michel Foucault too discussed the workings of power in an interview with Jean Pierre-Boru, which opens the Schizo-Culture issue. Foucault characterizes power as a multidirectional force in The History of Sexuality, where “discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power.” Yet it can also serve as a “hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (1978: 101). Or as Burroughs concludes: any machine can be redirected

 All the News Not Fit to Print 335 since “nobody can control the whole operation” (2001: 82). Just as anyone can make a cut-up, anyone with a mimeograph machine can publish. Mimeograph machines and other technologies of textual reproduction proliferate the number of publishers so that “any number can play.” Di Prima remembers how she and Baraka used a Gestetner mimeograph to print the Floating Bear newsletter. They would “mimeograph it at the [Phoenix] bookstore, and mail it out to people who mattered” (2001: 244). Ed Sanders too bought a mimeograph machine when he started Fuck You Press, and he imagines “a network of mimeographs steadily publishing, coast to coast, city to town to bookstore to rebel café.” The Roosevelt routine, which was initially cut out by “paranoid publishers” and deemed not fit to print, first circulated outside mainstream publishing networks. The underground press’s more decentralized publication network breaks the mediocre elite’s media control. If a major publisher refused to publish Burroughs’ work, some printer with a mimeograph would send it out. Burroughs’ own fugitive bibliography7 in the underground press implies a strategy against those that published only one side of the reports. The mimeographed essays printed in underground publications in the 1960s and 1970s offered a counterdiscourse to American hegemony. Todd Gitlin recalls how underground publishers had “regularly reported on the Black revolt, on GI movements and later, on the women’s movement, on police strategies and attacks, most of it news which was not deemed fit to print in most respectable organs” (1981: 22). Semiotext(e) was one of these less “respectable organs.” The introduction the Semiotext(e) USA states that the essays published in the issue are “meant for a great battlefield” in a “new planetary civil war.” The editors, then, assembled an issue that would offer a different vision of America, in which “a government that offs the people, buys the people, forks the people, shall soon perish.” The earlier Semiotext(e) issue, Schizo-Culture, also includes texts that try to radically rethink the world. The issues features text from a 1974 speech by the Red Army Faction (RAF) cofounder Ulrike Meinhof, where she addressed the “GUERILLA” and called militant liberation movements “the avant-gardes of the world proletariat” (1978 [2014]: 153). Meinhof then proceeded to explain the tactics against imperial and fascist governments and concluded her speech with a comment on the 150,000 state personnel who moved against the RAF. Such a large police presence, Meinhof found, “meant that at this point all material and personnel forces of this state were in motion because of a small number of revolutionaries.” It was immediately obvious to Meinhof that “the force monopoly of the state is limited, its powers can be exhausted” (1978 [2014]: 153). Gilles Deleuze makes a similar point in an essay that follows Meinhof ’s. In “Politics,” a short excerpt from his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze notes how “the State no longer has the political, institutional or financial means to combat or resist the social counterattacks of [a more dispersed] machine” (1978 [2014]: 162). This is why the insistence on revolution and its “eternal impossibility” will distract from the real concern: “the stages of popular, germinal, revolutionary activity in every place and at every level.” For Deleuze, “all types of mutant machines are living, engaging in warfare, coming together to trace out a plan of consistence, to undermine the organizational plan of the World and its States” (162). Meinhof and Deleuze’s

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conclusions echo Burroughs’ claim earlier in the Schizo-Culture issue, wherein he notes how “mass media” reveals the limits of state control. Anyone with scissors can make a cut-up. Anyone too with a mimeograph machine can publish. If Burroughs imagined himself as “el hombre invisible” in Naked Lunch, the underground press allowed for a similar kind of disappearance. In “Politics,” Deleuze writes how “there is no subject of enunciation, but every proper name is collective” (1978 [2014]: 160). The format of the Semiotext(e) issue supports this type of collective enunciation, as Burroughs’ appearance in the underground press connects his work to a disparate network of artists and political thinkers who theorized alternatives to the mediocre elite. Lotringer, however, recalls that when he brought Burroughs a pamphlet of Meinhof ’s “Armed Anti-Imperialist Struggle” to the Bunker in 1981, the writer impatiently skimmed it before he stated it was “the same logic used by their enemies, the same fucking abstract language” (2001d: 527). Burroughs seemed less annoyed when he read galleys for an interview with another German urban guerilla, HansJoachim Klein. Burroughs’ relief might have come from the lack of pretension in Klein’s interview. Lotringer identifies Klein as an “authentic prole,” which was a “rarity among the German terrorists” (2001d: 527). Later in the interview, which was published with Klein’s text in Semiotext(e)’s German issue, Burroughs compares guerilla terrorists to intellectuals who want “to prove that their theory is right.” Burroughs, then, was not one of the New York artists Lotringer associated with who “had the tendency to glamorize terrorism from a safe distance, confusing punk anti-aesthetics with spectacular violence” (2001d: 526). Yet while Burroughs has clear contempt for all political parties and politicians, Semiotext(e) orients his definite political statements with post-1968 French theory and militant anti-fascism. The underground press disperses any singular authorial voice into a collection of texts. The cracking of an authentic authorial voice was not only evident in the pages of Semiotext(e). With his Dial-A-Poem Poets LPs, Giorno used the recording to studio to produce “multiple voices [and] feedback” that “refused listeners’ identification of the given poem as a static text brought to life by the poet’s own voice” (Kane 2017: 156). As Daniel Kane finds, “any number of people” on a Giorno track “could give voice to the text simultaneously” (156). While the Nova Convention LP is more of conventional record of the event, the tracks do feature different artists and thinkers who comment on Burroughs’ definite political statements. And as Kristen Galvin writes, the Nova Convention “encouraged different art forms, genres, histories, and identities to crosspollinate” (2019: 84). Even before the Nova Convention LP, Burroughs collaborated with sound engineers and producers to cut up his work with other artists and musicians. In 1965, Burroughs worked with Sommerville on the album Call Me Burroughs. The six tracks include selections from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and Nova Express, and begins with Burroughs reading from the “Bradley, the Buyer” routine in Naked Lunch. And though Call Me Burroughs does not feature much experimentation with tape recorders, Sommerville does plug Burroughs’ writing into rock music. The album garnered attention from Paul McCartney when it was released, and Burroughs would later appear on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. Barry Miles recalls how McCartney wanted to set up a small recording studio in 1966 and

 All the News Not Fit to Print 337 rented Ringo Starr’s apartment on Montagu Square to house the audio equipment. McCartney, who asked Sommerville to watch over the equipment for him, remembers that he “thought about getting into cut-ups and things like that and [he] thought [he] would use the studio for cut-ups. But it ended up being of more practical use for [McCartney]” (Miles 2014: 452). Before McCartney met Burroughs, he first “heard Burroughs’ cold, flat MidWestern voice reading from Naked Lunch” before even reading the book (Miles 1988: 233). In the liner notes to Call Me Burroughs, Emmett Williams notes that his voice sounds “like a slow but faithful old Ford.” This mechanical authorial voice was already present in Naked Lunch, where Burroughs states that he is more of “a recording instrument,” and does not “presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ [or] ‘continuity’” (184). With Sommerville and Giorno Poetry Systems, Burroughs fed his voice into a tape recorder so that there would be nothing left but the recordings. Davis Schneiderman hears this double resonance in Burroughs’ voice in his recordings with other musicians. In his collaboration with Material, Burroughs reads from his last novel The Western Lands. Yet at least three of the tracks on the album are reworked on the LP. Schneiderman explains that “Burroughs finds his flickering persona fed into the recording machine in so many iterations, both through his own instrumentation and that of other likeminded collaborators, that it is cut backward and chopped apart until the computer sample of ‘his’ voice, the recording of the recording, implodes” (2004: 157). Just as the underground press used mimeograph machines to reproduce and distribute his writing in all directions, rock musicians cut-up and disperse Burroughs’ recorded voice. To focus then on Burroughs’ texts with major publishers like Grove or Olympia misses his more rhizomatic bibliography in the alternative press. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari note how certain American writers like Burroughs “manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND . . . do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings” (1987: 25). Robin Lydenberg similarly concludes that Burroughs’ “texts resist finality by being constantly reissued in different versions, fragments large and small surfacing in new works and new contexts” (1987: 52). A routine about Roosevelt that Burroughs wrote for Ginsberg in 1953 first circulated in di Prima and Baraka’s Floating Bear and then Sanders’s Fuck You before City Lights published it in 1979. In his study on Burroughs’ amodernism, Timothy Murphy explains how Burroughs strategically constructs “a false unity” in order to find “alternatives to the constituted socius.” These alternatives, Murphy adds, “can inspire revolutionary subject-groups capable of undertaking the transformation of material practices” (1997: 42). Burroughs adapted the routine to new political contexts during the next two decades. As he told the audience when he read the routine at the 1978 Nova Convention, the “piece written twenty years ago appear[ed] designed to devalue the whole presidency, which was consummated at Watergate.” Yet while Burroughs saw cut-ups as anticipating future events, we should be skeptical of such prophetic statements. As Deleuze wrote in the Schizo-Culture issue: “Political activity is an active experiment because we never know in advance what direction a line is going to take” (1978 [2014]: 158). Burroughs

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reinterprets his older routine to fit the politics of the 1970s: a total implosion of the presidential image post-Watergate. The “planetary civil war” against the mediocre elite, who continues to poison the planet for their profits, remains an ongoing battle. The publication histories of both “Roosevelt After Inauguration” and “Sects and Death” show how the underground press reconfigured Burroughs’ work to produce counter-discourses to a political establishment that hoards resources and wealth. Though Burroughs ends “Sects and Death” calling Nixon a “folk hero” for destroying “the Presidential image,” his resignation was already fifteen years in the past when the short essay appeared in Semiotext(e) USA. What might seem like old news, however, gets a new context in an issue where the editors, Jim Fleming and Peter Wilson, declare a “new planetary civil war.” Nixon was a folk hero for Burroughs because he called all leaders and their basis for authority into question. In a 1975 interview with Angelo Lewis, Burroughs said Nixon had so thoroughly “destroyed the whole diseased concept of the revered image of the Presidency” that he doubted “it will ever make a come back” (2001c: 324). Yet when Semiotext(e) USA published the essay in 1987, the cult of the presidency and religious fanaticism intensified under Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. In “Sects and Death,” Burroughs questions the leaders of churches, armies, and nations who all claim to possess the answers. “Anyone,” Burroughs writes, “who believes he owns all the answers is a lunatic” (1987c: 63). If, as Burroughs concludes, the “old poisonous old-time religion” of the New Right “constitutes a menace to Spaceship Earth” (1987c: 63), then it makes sense that they look at space as an exit strategy. Autonomist Marxists George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici begin their essay for Semiotext(e) USA with a similar question: “Why this urge to get out of Earth? To simultaneously destroy it and transcend it?” (1987d: 55). Their essay, “Mormons in Space,” appears just before Burroughs’ “Sects and Death.” And while both take the rise of religious fanaticism seriously, Caffentzis and Federici are more explicit about the Moral Majority’s religious zeal for free markets. The New Right might have produced “a revival of religious tendencies and moral conservatism that one would have thought was buried once and for all with ‘our’ Puritan Founding Fathers,” but Caffentzis and Federici find that the movement seems just as evangelical for technological innovations that will keep capital in the hands of a very small mediocre elite. So, When it comes to [the] economic and political, all shreds of difference drop off and both souls of the New Right pull money and resources towards their common goals . . . U.S. capitals’ ownership of the world and setting “America” to work at the minimum wage (or below) are the goals for which all the New Right would swear on the Bible. (Caffentzis and Federici 1987d: 56)

To continue their commitment to perpetual economic growth, free-market evangelists needed a figure like Falwell. Caffentzis and Federici remind us how “all capital’s utopias are predicated on an infinitesimal micropolitics of the body” (1987d: 58). Even with developing high-tech industries, the “human machine” is still a problem for management.

 All the News Not Fit to Print 339 For Caffentzis and Federici, sermons on abstinence and self-control prepare workers for the mediocre elite’s space program. At the conclusion of “Mormons in Space,” they quote NASA’s disapproval for high monetary incentive. Their reason: it attracts misfits and other wrong types of people. “Work without a wage,” Caffentzis and Federici write, “is the essential capitalist utopia where the work and repression becomes its own reward, and all the refusers are cast out into the cold stellar night” (61). Yet if religious fundamentalism provided the New Right with the means to increase their capital, Burroughs offers a solution in “Sects and Death.” Churches should not only lose their tax-exempt status, but they should be “taxed double . . . taxed right out of existence” (1987c: 63). Another response in opposition to the mediocre elite and their control over the “human machine” appears earlier in the issue. If Caffentzis and Federici see a future where workers are denied a wage in exchange for a spot in space, Bob Black imagines a time where we cease working altogether. In “The Abolition of Work,” Black calls for a “ludic revolution,” which “is totally incompatible with existing reality” (1987b: 15). Burroughs’ short essays with anti-fascists, anarchists, and theorists in Schizo-Culture and Semiotext(e) USA form a collective enunciation against the realities of a ruling political class. A reality that Henry Luce sold using images from his media empire. In contrast, the editors of Semiotext(e) USA describe their issue as A huge compendium of works in AMERICAN PSYCHOTOPOGRAPHY—Areas not found on the official map of consensus perception—Maps of energies, secret maps of the USA in the form of words and images.

Baudrillard serves as one the travel guides in the issue. In his notes for “Desert Forever,” he calls America “hopeless,” and he finds its trash “clean, its traffic lubricated, its movement pacified” (1987a: 135). Burroughs similarly describes America in Naked Lunch as “old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting” (11). However, the “psychotopography” of the Semiotext(e) USA issue attempts to map other spaces to American hegemony. The speculation on secret maps and alternative spaces brings us back to the 1978 Nova Convention, where Burroughs claimed: “This is the space age and we are here to go.” In a roundtable with Gysin and Timothy Leary, Burroughs found that “the human race might be in a state of neoteny,” where it seems impossible to conceive of a time beyond arrested development. Space, however, will help us find a way to move out of cultural and political stasis. Burroughs reminds us “there are many roads to space” (1985c: 168). The images of America created in Luce’s reality studio can be cut up. Their nova mob might have “sewed up the planet,” but Burroughs commands us to “now unsew it.” In Burroughs’ work, rock-and-roll hoodlums storm the reality studio to retake the universe. By end of the 1970s, captains of the ship of state increased their austerity measures that would ensure increasing inequality. Yet from his Bunker in New York, Burroughs continued to align his writing with French theorists, militant anti-fascists, and punks who mapped a different America.

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Notes 1 di Prima (1971: 27). 2 Ginsberg (1979). 3 William S. Burroughs, “Keynote Commentary & Roosevelt After Inauguration,” The Nova Convention, http://www​.ubu​.com​/sound​/nova​.html (accessed May 15, 2020). 4 “Notes on Burroughs.” Media Research: Technology, Art Communication, 91. In a letter to Gysin, Burroughs said, “McLuhan wrote one of the very few intelligent and appreciative reviews on Nova Express,” in Rub Out the Word, 244. 5 Patti Smith, “Bumblebee,” The Nova Convention, http://www​.ubu​.com​/sound​/nova​ .html (accessed May 15, 2020). 6 The pages in question include ads for “Swingers Updates,” as well as images of erect and flaccid penises with a quote from Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography—Men Possessing Women.” 7 Barry Miles describes Burroughs’ texts as “fugitive,” where “no fixed text seems possible” Call Me Burroughs, 542.

References Baraka, Amiri (1984), The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, New York: Lawrence Hill Books. Baudrillard, Jean (1987a), “Desert Forever,” in Semiotext(e) USA, 135–7, New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, Jean (2012), The Ecstasy of Information, New York: Semiotext(e). Black, Bob (1987b), “The Abolition of Work,” in Semiotext(e) USA, 15–26, New York: Semiotext(e). Burroughs, William S. (1962), The Ticket that Exploded, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1963), The Yage Letters, San Francisco: City Lights. Burroughs, William S. (1964), Nova Express, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1966), The Soft Machine, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1978), Roosevelt after Inauguration and Other Atrocities, San Francisco: City Lights. Burroughs, William S. (1985a), “The Limits of Control,” in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 143–8, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1985b), “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars,” in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 59–64, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1985c), “It is Necessary to Travel…” in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 168, New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William S. (1987c), “Sects and Death,” in Jim Fleming and Peter Lamborn Wilson (eds.), Semiotext(e) USA, 63–4, New York: Semiotext(e). Burroughs, William S. (2001a), “White Junk,” in Sylvere (ed.), Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews 1960–1997, 60–81, New York: Semiotext(e). Burroughs William S. (2001b), “Rapping on Revolutionary Techniques,” in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews 1960–1997, 150–7, New York: Semiotext(e). Burroughs, William S. (2018), “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Burroughs, William S. and Daniel Odier (1969 [1989]), The Job, New York: Penguin. Burroughs, William S. and Angelo Lewis (2001c), “White Threat,” in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews 1960–1997, 324–6, New York: Semiotext(e).

 All the News Not Fit to Print 341 Burroughs, William S. and Sylvere Lotringer (2001d), “Exterminating,” in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews 1960–1997, 526–44, New York: Semiotext(e). Caffentzis, George and Silvia Federici (1987d), “Mormons in Space,” in Semiotext(e) USA, 55–61, New York: Semiotext(e). Cusset, Francois (2008), French Theory: How Foucault, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1978 [2014]), “Politics,” in Sylvere Lotringer and David Morris (eds.) Schizo-Culture: The Book, New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. di Prima, Diane (1971), Revolutionary Letters, 27, San Francisco: City Lights. di Prima, Diane (2001), Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, New York: Penguin. Foucault, Michel (1978), The History of Sexuality Volume 1, New York: Vintage. Galvin, Kristen (2019), “The Nova Convention Celebrating the Burroughs of Downtown New York,” in Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (eds.), Cutting Up the Century, 80–95, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Ginsberg, Allen (1979), “Punk Rock and Old Pond,” in The Nova Convention, New York: Giorno, Poetry Systems, http://www​.ubu​.com​/sound​/nova​.html (accessed May 15, 2020). Gitilin, Todd (1981), “The Underground and Its Cave-In,” in Anne Janowitz and Nancy J. Peters (eds.), The Campaign Against the Underground Press, 21–30, San Francisco: City Lights. Harris, Oliver (2019), “Cutting Up the Century,” in Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (eds.), William S. Burroughs: Cutting-Up the Century, 28–49, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kane, Daniel (2017), “Do You Have a Band?” Poetry, and Punk Rock in New York City, New York: Columbia University Press. “King of the YADS” (1962), Time, November 30, 80(22): 96–8. Kittler, Friedrich (1990), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lotringer, Sylvere (2014), “Notes on the Schizo-Culture Issue,” in Sylvere Lotringer and David Morris (eds.) Schizo-Culture: The Book, i–xxv, New York: Semiotext(e). Lydenberg, Robin (1987), Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William Burroughs’s Fiction, Carbondale: University of Illinois Press. Meinhof, Ulrike (1978 [2014]), “Armed Anti-Imperialist Struggle,” in Sylvere Lotringer and David Morris (eds.), Schizo-Culture; The Book, New York: Semiotext(e). Miles, Barry (1988), Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, London: Holt. Miles, Barry (2014), Call Me Burroughs, New York: Twelve. Murphy, Timothy (1997), Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William S. Burroughs, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rips, Geoffrey (1981), Unamerican Activities: The Campaign Against the Underground Press, San Francisco: City Lights. Schneiderman, Davis (2004), “Nothing Hear But the Recordings: Burroughs’s ‘Double Resonance’,” in Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh (eds.), Retaking the Universe: Burroughs in the Age of Globalization, 146–60, London: Pluto Press. Sobieszek, Robert (1996), Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

342 

Appendix A Evergreen on the Air: Barney Rosset on Censorship and Publishing Naked Lunch1

The closing act [of the conference] was a jam session between [Barry] Miles, [Bradford] Morrow, and [Barney] Rosset. The star was literary giant, king of shock rock, Barney Rosset, spinning tales about publishing Naked Lunch for Grove Press. For me it was as good as Woodstock or should I say the Isle of Write.2 —Jed Birmingham One, two. There is the old saying, attributed to former Mayor Jimmy Walker3 of New York, that he never knew a girl who was ruined by a book. It’s a very sweet saying, and I’m sure that it was meant to comfort publishers, readers, and newsstand proprietors. I’m inclined to disagree with that statement, and to hope that it’s wrong. Who knows? Maybe a girl might even be sent off in the right direction by a book. However, insofar as publishers are concerned, I’m quite certain that a book can ruin a publisher, or reverse, be his making. As one of the [gap] had this to say about Naked Lunch: We are richer for that book, and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that book and sell it in an open bookstore, sell it legally, sell it legally. It even offers a hint that the great society, which Lyndon Johnson speaks of, may not merely be merely a politician’s high whim, but indeed may have the hard seed of a new truth, for no ordinary society could have the bravery and moral honesty to stare down into the abyss of Naked Lunch, but a great society can look into the chasm of its own potential hell, and recognize that it is stronger as a nation for possessing an artist who can come back from Hell with a portrait of its dimensions.

And I think what Mr. Mailer had to say about Naked Lunch goes for many other books, indeed. 1:37 So, thus, we have stated our position; we do not wish to be held back from publishing a book because of fear of censorship, and we wish to publish that which is original, and of our time.

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The publisher, as opposed to the lawyer, or the librarian, or the author, has his own special problems. We are also businessmen, and in my case, a small one, and of course the decisions made can influence our very existence. Perhaps we might look at the problem chronologically, in terms of the way the book comes into being. Before we get to the receipt of the manuscript, I might put the . . . the . . . anticensorship publisher’s position in the business community in this sense: If one deliberately sets out to sell marijuana, I think it is safe to assume that you know beforehand you are committing an illegal act, you are taking the chances there . . . attached thereto, you will try to avoid capture, knowing that somebody’s going to try to catch you. Or, you may be selling the old-fashioned kind of cigarettes, have your licenses to do so, have your dispensing machines, or your drugstores, or wherever it is. You know what price you have to charge, you know that . . . all of the various financial factors involved, but . . . and you know, that is, that it’s not too difficult to stay within the boundaries of the law. You are engaged in an honorable and legal profession. You may run a liquor store, or a shoe store, whatever. You know your legal limits, you know what you can do, what you can’t do, if you mind your business properly, correctly, you will not get into trouble. The book publisher I’m thinking of is in a slightly different position. He is more or less entering into a conspiracy with an author to put out a commercial project, uh, product, which may or may not be legal, and there is no way of his knowing whether or not the product is legal, or where the product is legal, or when the product is legal, or who may object to it. And this is where this . . . this tantalizing, uh, guessing game comes in. Should we publish the book, even though we like it? Should we ask the author to change it? Should we reject it because it is too dangerous? Should we worry about whether or not to do it in an expensive hardcover edition? Should we decide to sell it in Los Angeles, or not? And so on. This is a particularly cogent problem of today, because it is at least our experience that the young writers who are sending us manuscripts tend to deal, or a great percentage tend to deal, with sexual problems, interracial problems, problems of homosexuality; tend to deal graphically with sex. It seems to be one of the areas of human experience which is still of great interest to the author, and, I might add, to the audience; no matter what some parts of that audience may claim to say, there is no doubt in my mind that there is a common meeting place between the author and the audience when the problems and descriptions and insights, uh, into sex, are, uh, brought into being. Grove Press has published and distributed, I would say, at least 1,000 books in the last twelve years or so, and yet of those, and of those thousand, I would say a very tiny minority deal with sex; that it is for that minority that we are known, and quite often categorized. If this does not indicate the interest of the audience, I don’t know what else can. 5:56 But now let us say that we have a manuscript. We like the manuscript very much, but that it deals with, and, and let’s say this in particular instance, with sex in a way that has never before been published, in a way that is shocking, to anybody who reads the book, and which might be considered obscene, non-publishable, by a great segment

 Appendix A 345 of the armed forces of our country. But, we are unable to stop ourselves from buying the book because we like the book, and we want to publish it, without really thinking too carefully as to just when we will be able to do so, when we will have the [gap] book was published in hardcover, and then, the terrible thing happened. Various other paperback firms, who had put nothing into the book, taken no risks, done nothing, realized the book was out of copyright, and they jumped in, and did their own versions in paperback before the original publisher could do so. And thus the, not only the original publisher, but also the authors, have been deprived of their royalties. We have been faced with exactly the same problem before, and fortunate—and [laughs] I was about to say “fortunately,” but I retract that statement, um, Lady Chatterley’s Lover,4 uh, exactly the same fate befell us as has befallen Candy,5 but on some other books, we were able to beat the competitors to the, uh, punch, and reap the, uh, rewards of our own efforts. However, by so doing, we, and the paperback publishers of Candy walked straight into legal problems. For one reason and another, paper bound books are much more subject to harassment, to, and to actual legal action in this country, than hardcover books. I believe the theory is that poor people should not be subjected to these bad influences, but that it’s all right for rich k—for rich children and wealthy old ladies. So thus, again, the publisher’s, even his choice of moment of publishing can be very much influenced by the needs of the author; by a, uh, copyright problem. 8:12 Now let us say that we have gone through that problem, and we have published the book, and in the case I would like to mention, a magazine. Last spring, uh Grove Press published an issue of The Evergreen Review. This issue was printed in a small town in Nassau County in Long Island, and [laughs] after the magazine had been printed, apparently, and this is a, still a bit vague, apparently a lady who was a temporary worker in the factory, or the printer’s shop, and who also happened to be married to a detective on the vice squad, went to her husband and complained that there were some photographs in the magazine that she didn’t like. She didn’t know if they were . . . female, or male, or if they were together, or if they were not together, but she didn’t like them. Her husband took up the, uh, gauntlet from there, and he went to the District Attorney’s office, and the District Attorney got a warrant from a judge, who had not seen the magazine, he got a warrant for arrest and seizure. The detectives, police, went to the printing plant, and seized the unbound copies of the magazine, and carted it off to jail, where all of these poor pieces of paper languished for a number of weeks, uh, and then we stepped in, and had to file a suit against the District Attorney claiming a violation of our Constitutional rights. Well, the legal case was a difficult one, was a complicated one, was an unusual one, but we won it. One of the Federal Judges made a statement to the, our opposition, that went like this. This is a judge speaking to the representative of the District Attorney’s office: Is it your suggestion that you are going to follow a procedure, that is will be sufficient if somebody says that he heard from a worker whose name he doesn’t give, and the

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worker in turn heard from some other workers that there were some figures which may or may not be male or female, that are intertwined, you are going to pick up twenty-one thousand copies of that magazine, and you are going to deprive all the libraries, from the East Coast to the West Coast, of an opportunity to get the magazine that they have subscribed for?

As I’ve said, and as you can judge form that tone, we won the case. I might think that, that our troubles ended there. Well, our newspaper publicity ended there, uh, we were finally able to extricate our magazine from the police station, in a rather mangled condition, we were able to get it to another bindery, where, with tremendous difficulty, we were able to finally get it bound up, and we went out and we sold each and every one of those copies, and the sale almost paid for the legal fees. Then, we wanted to continue in business; we had won a case, and we thought we shouldn’t have any other such troubles. Little did we know. We then went to another printer for the next, uh, printing of the next issue, a very large printer, and one with whom we had done a tremendous amount of business in book printing and binding. This printer immediately agreed to do the job, and in fact seemed quite happy to have it. Everything was proceeding very nicely, when suddenly we received a telephone call saying that the printer just absolutely refused to go ahead with the job, very sorry, they’d made a mistake, they couldn’t do our magazine. We demanded to know why, and they finally said, well, we had some photographs as an insert, they happened to be photographs of sculpture, uh, that were being inserted in the magazine when it was bound, they had been printed elsewhere, uh, special photographic printer, uh, and they absolutely could not put in the, uh, photographs. Workers representing the Union in the plant had complained. Well, we said that they had committed themselves to doing the magazine; we couldn’t go anyplace else at that stage, but that we would take the photographs out of the magazine, something which we had never agreed to do before. But we said, we’ll take the photographs out, please go ahead and finish the job which you’ve completed halfway. The printer then said, all right, fine, very sorry and embarrassed, but that’s the way it is. Then, the following day, we got a phone call saying that, well, one of the poems in the magazine was objectionable, and really it was only one line in the poem, and really if we remove that line, everything would be all right, and the line didn’t matter anyway. Then we, uh, felt we had backtracked as far as we could, and we said no, the poem had to go as it was, and they just simply had to finish the printing and binding, and the printer said, all right, but, uh, we’ll never do another issue for you. So, they finished the issue, and then, off we had to go to find another, and we sold the magazine, and no trouble, I mean, we didn’t sell so many copies this time, but at least we had no legal problems. 13:26 Then, we were faced with finding yet another printer. We did so, but this printer said he would only be our printer providing we were associated with a very large national

 Appendix A 347 distributor. Why, I don’t know exactly, because it wasn’t a matter of payment of his bill or anything, but somehow this gave him a feeling of confidence and security. He printed the magazine, and then it went out to be distributed. Then, the distributor ran into problems, not of his own making. In the United States, most cities have only one large wholesaler, or perhaps a large one and a small one. Our particular distributor, a national distributor, had contracts, exclusive contracts, with various citywide wholesalers, and he could not go beyond that wholesaler. When some of these wholesalers in key cities in the United States refused to distribute the magazine, our distributor could then not go to a competitor, and this meant that a large section of the United States was eliminated from sale.

Obviously, this was a totally impossible situation, and so on perfectly good terms, we had to give up our distributor, and start to distribute the magazine ourselves, less efficiently, but at least with the right to deal with any wholesaler in any city. This meant we lost our printer. And I’m now bringing you fairly up to date. We have had again to go out and find a printer, I believe we have one, now we have lost our national distributor because, as good as they are, without their ability to distribute in the major cities of the country, we obviously were in a hopeless position. So we are faced with

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a constant struggle to find a printer, we are faced with, with the necessity of having a built-in bad distribution system, and if there’s an answer to this problem, I will be happy to hear it. Now let us get to another situation where the harassment comes in. And that is in bookstores. A bookstore will say, and with a certain amount of apparent logic on the surface, that just as the publisher has the right to publish any book he wishes, the bookstore has the right to sell any book it wishes, and it is not being a censor when it refuses to handle a book. This argument may have some merit, but the outcome of the argument is a very bad one. For example, and I have a specific case in mind, where one of the most famous bookstores in this country refused to sell a book of ours. When a c—uh, when a book which was selling at a rate worthy of having it put on the bestseller list, a list which it actually reached on both Time magazine and the New York Post, a book which had serious and large reviews from all review media in the United States, and of all those large reviews, at least 95 percent were favorable, 15 or 20 percent of them were favorable to an incredible degree, uh, and the author of the book was also considered worthy of personal interviews in the Saturday Review and the New York Times. This particular bookstore, when it receives an order for the book from an out-of-town customer, it is the kind of store that gets out-of-town customers to write in, sends back a written fo—a form, saying that the book is not available in the store, that it is out of stock, and that the book cannot be supplied by the local wholesaler, and therefore, if the person really, really wants to buy the book, uh, the customer can write directly to the publisher. That is how I found out about the situation concerning this book. By being deprived of being sold in a key store, this means that our chances of getting into the important bestseller list, the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, are very much lessened. Because the lists are made up from stores reporting bestselling books. Obviously if a store does not report a book, it cannot if it refuses to sell a book, and that book will get a zero rating from that store, and it will take a great deal of tremendous help from other stores around the country to make up, uh, for the, for the blackball. If you do not get on a bestseller, on the Times, Tribune bestseller list, the unfortunate thing is that the sales of a book in this country are severely restricted. So, in effect, whether the store believes it or not, or wishes to think of itself as a censor, it is acting in that s—, in that way, and we have run into that very specific problem as recently as right now. 18:11 Another way to sell a book, and a very important way, is to advertise. When we published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there were two publications in this country which refused to accept adver—[gap] was the New York Times. It was perfectly all right for the Herald Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and Saturday Review, et cetera, et cetera, but, unf—, again, the primary source of book advertising, good book advertising in this country in the New York Times. After the New York Times. After the New York Times one can go to the others, but you start there. We have had similar experiences with many other books. Not only are we faced with the problem of having the ad turned down completely, but we are faced with a

 Appendix A 349 problem of writing it in such a way as to please the, uh, newspaper. Here again, it’s like not knowing beforehand what is legal and what isn’t. We can spend a great deal of our own time, and the advertising agency’s time trying to figure out, not the ad which we think will sell the book, but which will please the legal staff of the New York Times. However, let us assume that the book is printed, it is on sale, it is in the bookstore, we’ve advertised it. Then, of course, we run into the, then we begin to get to the more normal channels of stoppage, the District Attorneys, the local police force, uh, the citizens’ groups, uh, amongst whom I would like to mention the Citizens for Decent Literature.6 This group has come to realize that when you go to the higher courts in this country, truth seems to win out, and psychotic and idiotic desires for censorship tend to lose. But these people also know that just winning a case in a high court does not necessarily mean a victory. I would like to quote from a letter which the head of the committee for decent literature, Mr. Keating, uh wrote. This letter was in the, was put into evidence in a trial in California. Mr. Keating says, and he’s speaking about a Supreme Court decision on a, in this case, a motion picture, uh, he says: My reason for writing this letter is to emphasize that the law is basically the same after the June 22, 1964 US Supreme Court decision. That is, you can still arrest, prosecute, and convict. If the Court wants to act as a supreme board of censors, let them. Let them, however, know that communities across the length of this land are not going to swallow the depravity that is currently on the newsstands. And they can do this by insisting to local officials that the arrest and prosecution of obscenity peddlers wherever and whenever they are found. If the Supreme Court at its level wants to reverse the convictions, the effect of many prosecutions will nevertheless be felt.

And Mr. Keating is quite correct in his statement, and it is also vary true to say that harassment and minor arrests continue after the major battles have been won. I think this is absolutely parallel to the problem found concerning desegregation in the South, and also in the North. A typical and specific example is Tropic of Cancer. We’ve had well over a hundred individual cases on this book. We fought our way up to the Supreme Court of various states, some of the states gave us a favorable decision, some of them a negative one. We finally, after a longtime and fantastic expense, were able to get one case to the Supreme Court of the United States, where we won. You would think that that would end the matter, forthwith. It most certainly did not. We are still not allowed to sell the book in Philadelphia, for example. The judge there issued an injunction against the sale of the book, and that injunction still holds. In Los Angeles, only recently, a man was arrested for selling Tropic of Cancer. It is alleged that he sold an obscene book to a minor. 22:37 Not only did we win before the Supreme Court of the United States, but in courts in the state of California. The Supreme Court of that state voted seven to nothing in our favor on the book, and went much further than on practically any previous court decision in not only saying that not only was Tropic of Cancer a great book, but that it should

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never have gotten into the courts in the first place, because the courts were not meant to deal with literary matters. And yet we have an arrest in the city of Los Angeles. We know that that case will eventually be answered in our favor; it has to be. But how many untold hours of work and anguish and irritation and fear can be fought through before we prove again, on the basis of the courts of its, of that state, and of the Supreme Court, that we are right? That is the major tactic which is now being used to prolong censorship in this country. We had a case in the state of Wisconsin, where after we had won a favorable judicial, uh, decision, the judge ran for political office and narrowly averted defeat, and the campaign against him was almost solely based on the fact that he had voted to uphold the right of the book Tropic of Cancer to be published and sold in the state of Wisconsin. There are other side irritations, uh, that one is confronted with on the problems of censorship. As already mentioned, of course, there is the problem of legal fees to be paid on the actual cases, but then, after a certain kind of reputation is built up, it can become difficult to obtain financing; the financial community gets a little worried about somebody who is constantly getting into legal problems. Not because they are against our fight on censorship, not at all. But because they worry about somebody who might be running up big legal fees. And this can make it, and I have found this out to be a true fact of life, that publishing a book can frighten a would-be financier who considers himself to be of the highest so-called liberal, uh, ilk. In addition to this, once a book has gotten a reputation, as being a potentially dangerous book, one of the main sources of revenue for the average successful book can be withdrawn. A hardcover publisher, such as ourselves, brings out a book and hopes that he will make a success of the book, and then obtain or make a sale to a mass-market reprint house. This is the usual course, and when a hardcover book has become a bestseller, or a good seller, the fees can be very high, and provide the entire profit on the operation. We have found out that the normal course of events does not always take place. On several books of ours, which have achieved large hardcover sales, large critical acclaim, no legal trouble, we have failed to obtain one single offer for reprint rights because the reprint companies were afraid that the paperbound edition would bring down the forces of the law upon them. We have thus been forced into doing these books ourselves as paperbacks, [laughs] and in this way, without in any way meaning to do so, changed the entire nature of our business. That is more or less the, uh, [laughs] the nature of the beast, the problem we’re up against. I certainly do not in any way wish to imply that all of this is negative. As a matter of fact, it is most certainly not so; it is a matter of great delight and satisfaction that we come upon such things as the recent Naked Lunch trial, where the District Attorney or the Attorney General’s office extolled Tropic of Cancer to the high heavens, as being a great and brilliant book, in order, in this particular instance, to show the bad-ness of Naked Lunch. And this is most amusing. Because when we published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it was denounced by the various attorneys as a wicked perverse, terrible, degrading work, et cetera, et cetera. Then, when we published Tropic of Cancer, we were told that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a fine book of great aesthetic, creative merit,

 Appendix A 351 absolutely should be published, but that with Tropic of Cancer we had gone beyond the bounds of decency, that it was a corrupt, perverse, disintegrated mess. And now, with Naked Lunch, we go to court, and are told that Tropic of Cancer is a brilliant, cohesive, creative work of great merit, a modern classic, et cetera, et cetera; it is only Naked Lunch that is a bad book. Somehow, looking back I am able to project forward and imagine the day, in the not too far distant future, when Naked Lunch7 will be the modern classic, and it will be yet something else which will be beyond the bounds of decency, wherever that boundary may be. 28:26 Censorship, the situation, is a dynamic one and a fluid one. It is very much like the racial problem in this country. There most certainly is progress, if, like I, you consider progress to be integration, there most certainly is progress, but the progress can also be slow. And if it is too slow, there can be setbacks. We can go back of the starting line. Nothing is that assured and definite, that we know the situation will get better and better if we merely let it go by its own momentum. I believe that the racial situation and the censorship situation on sex, although certainly I don’t want to carry the analogy too far, but they have many things in common. In fact, you might say that two great bugaboos of today might be that “I don’t want my daughter to marry one,” and “I don’t want my daughter to read one.” This was brought into sharp relief a few weeks ago in the city of Chicago, where the Herald Tribune waged a virulent campaign against James Baldwin’s book, Another Country, by saying—and the main complaint about it was that it advocated interracial sexual relationships. The tide, the two forces had finally really come together, and the, it was a huge outcry against a poor professor in a local college for allowing the book to be on a reading list for college students. Much to the, uh, credit of that professor, he refused to take the book off of the list, and to my also great satisfaction, all of the Chicago Tribune, uh, articles, and local aldermanic sayings resulted in a greatly increased sale of the book in, to the general public in the city of Chicago. However, such is not always the case, and we know of only too many instances where a book has been removed from libraries, from schools, uh, from bookstores, from newsstands, and so on. In other words, we have our Alabamas, and we have our so-called citadels of freedom in the North. An interesting, if rather technical problem is the manner in which the more civilized proponents of censorship now are taking their stand in the courts. I would make the comparison there, not so much as with racial problems, but as with the kind of situation which happened when abstract painting became a vital force to painters a number of years ago, especially in this country. I remember in 1948, 47, clipping out of the newspaper statements by Stalin, the pope, and President Truman, which could be absolutely interchanged. All three were dead-against this formlessness, this something, this, this evil force, and something which could not be understood from merely looking at it on the surface. It is true that there were different philosophical reasons for the sayings of all three of these people, the, Stalin’s and the pope’s especially well-formulated and, uh, in

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conformity with their other ideas and President Truman’s a little bit more reckless, but nevertheless, I felt that this was the beginning of peace for the world when we could have a co—, when we could have a compact between, pact between three of the world’s great leaders. In this country, of course, abstract painting was not evil and vicious enough to make it illegal, as it actually was in Soviet Union. In this country, we just, we . . . and speaking of certain segments of the population, merely scorned it, hooted at it, screamed, and yelled. But, still in the very fact that we couldn’t pinpoint the subject matter, we couldn’t take it into the courts. Now, we have an amazingly similar situation coming up with books, only this time, because book use words, and even if these words are strung together in a sequence which is meaningless, more or less, to the prosecution, at least they are words, which when you make, take them one at a time, deliver a certain emotional impact. And this is the problem that we are having specifically, are having now with Naked Lunch. The District Attorney quotes the author himself to prove his point. The District Attorney entered into the record this statement by Burroughs: There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. I am a recording instrument. I do not presume to impose story-plot continuity. Insofar as I succeed in direct recording of certain areas of psychic process, I may have limited function.

That statement, to the District Attorney is self-condemning and sufficient into itself to ban the book. How can we have something which does not have story, plot, or continuity? That, on the face of it, means that the author must have written a book which has no artistic or social merit whatsoever. It was done unconsciously. And as the District Attorney would like us to believe, he says, “The book is a series of unconnected scenes and descriptions, characters with wildly improbably names appear throughout, but none is developed to any degree.” 34:16 That’s terrible. I mean, all of us would agree, I’m sure that we must be able to start with Little Red Riding Hood, and have the beginning, the middle, and the end, and not upset ourselves, and not be shocked by a strange progression of images, words, and ideas. It is very much as if we were to go to the Guernica of Picasso, and say, Well, this painting apparently has something to do with a war, and as it has a name, Guernica, supposedly of a town in Spain, and we knew that a war was going on, it must have something to do with that. However, the colors are displeasing, discordant; the story is difficult to unfold, and therefore the painting should be banned. Unless the author agrees to rearrange the figures, make the horse look more like what we all know a horse really looks like, and so forth and so on.

 Appendix A 353 Or perhaps we wouldn’t like a Chagall because a person is mysteriously floating up in the air, and a blue person at that, and we know that things are not that way, and the character is not well-defined, and we don’t like these brief, fleeting images. Well, this is the sort of dilemma that district attorneys have now found themselves in. They must now constitute themselves to be literary critics on a very high level, indeed, and have the bravery, and temerity, to tell an author that pages 115 to 122 should really have preceded pages 79 to 84, instead of being in the position which they are now arbitrarily placed in. And so on. That is the ludicrous, the Alice-in-Wonderland area where we now find ourselves uh, vis-à-vis censorship on the high judicial level. I do not say this all in a negative sense, either, against these brave men of the law, because, in a gentlemanly way, they are trying to find, and rather desperately trying to find, a basis for the continuance of censorship. I of course heartily disagree with their efforts, and am rather amused by their plaintive, rather plaintive squirmings and reaching for some sort of justification for their uh, evil acts. As a matter of fact, on the Naked Lunch case, it was very difficult for the Attorney General’s office to find precedent cases to quote, and at the very end of their brief, they quote a dissenting opinion, and opinion which therefore does not carry too much weight, with the court, and this dissenting position I find to be one of the more pathetic ones. I quote it: Sometime and somehow we will return to the historical meaning of “freedom of the press.” On that awaited day the courts will find it possible, in at least some extreme cases, not only to announce, but to apply their oft-repeated holding that obscenity is an exception to the First Amendment’s protections.

In other words, sort of the last sad hope is that we will go back to the good old days, when you could really tell a clean book from a dirty one, we will go back to the good old days when the Negro knew his place in the South and didn’t cause anybody any trouble, and so on. 37:18 In any event, there are many forces at work today, for and against censorship. Having once made a basic decision, the decision as to whether or not one wants to live in a free society, and take the risks therein, or to choose a closed society, such as, to a great degree, the Soviet society is, or the Spanish society, and have a kind of patriarchal guidance given to the people, but having made a decision between the two, and if we choose a free society we know that there are pitfalls, dangers; it is true, children might be hurt by reading things that should not have come to their attention, a great deal of garbage may be published under the guise of “literature,” and so forth, and so on. But if we choose a free society, that’s a chance we’re going to take, in order to get the other, richer rewards, the richer human rewards, which come when one is allowed to do as one wishes without damaging the physical presence of another.

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In this free society, or would-be free society, and I might say I think we have the closest small beginnings to that, in this country, there will be these various forces at work, and fortunate is he who has people with him, behind him, in front of him, helping and pushing. In the battle for racial freedom in this country, for the right of the Negro to integrate into the society, we are fortunate to have such organizations such as CORE, NAACP, and others, who are forthrightly fighting for what they believe to be right, taking physical chances, they’re taking financial chances, and they are aggressively pushing in their desired direction. Unfortunately, in the publishing area, insofar as our immediate censorship problems are concerned, we do not have as large or as aggressive groups fighting for our cause. There are certainly very great exceptions to be made to what I’ve just said. Foremost are the efforts of the librarians, through their American Library Association, and various other local, uh, groups, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which very valiantly fights not only in our area concerning books, but in many other areas concerning and dealing with human freedom, not least of which is the racial situation. It would be very nice if we can strengthen the efforts of the American Library Association, and the Civil Liberties Union, and get others, many, many others, to sit up and say what they think about censorship, and to prove it by not backing down to small, dissident irritants within a community, not letting groups such as the Citizens for Decent Literature tell a community what it can read and what it cannot read. We don’t want to be a nation or a group of know-nothings, of people who could only read a certain printed word, rather than any printed word. Thank you. 40:58

Notes 1 Transcript of radio broadcast in which former owner and editor of Grove Press, Barney Rosset (1922–2012), discusses the desire of publishers to print books representative of the time in which they were written without a fear of censorship. He also discusses the challenges and risks associated with publishing books that may or may not be objectionable. He details the problems a lack of freedom in written expression causes for a publisher from printing to distributing. Specific examples from the history of Grove Press are used to illustrate these problems. The focus is placed on what was then the current publication of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. [Transcribed and edited by Michael Shea, (with S. E. Gontarski) as part of the Florida State University URCA [Undergraduate Research and Creativity Award] program, 2010, for the study of Grove Press radio broadcasts, 1957-1962. Much of the oral present has been retain. 2 “Fifty Years of Naked Lunch: From the Interzone to the Archive . . . and Back,” Jed Birmingham on the conference at Columbia University, October 9, 2009. https​:/​/re​​ality​​ studi​​o​.org​​/bibl​​iogra​​phic-​​bunke​​r​/the​​-top-​​23​-mo​​st​-in​​teres​​ting-​​burro​​ughs-​​colle​​ctibl​​es​/ 1-​​a​-des​​cript​​ive​-c​​atalo​​gue​-o​​f​-the​​​-will​​iam​-s​​-burr​​oughs​​-arch​​ive/

 Appendix A 355 3 Mayor of New York City from 1926 to 1932. Known for being rebellious against social restrictions, Mayor Jimmy Walker generally opposed censorship. He openly opposed the censorship of movies by state government. 4 Lady Chatterley’s Lover was initially published privately—no copyright was issued— which allowed anyone to pirate their own editions. These pirated editions typically didn’t pay the D. H. Lawrence estate any royalties for the novel. 5 Due to a lack of proper copyright, Candy was pirated by several publishers. This cost the authors, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, thousands in royalty losses. 6 An organization founded by Charles Keating in 1958 which advocated reading books already considered classics and not so-called “smut.” 7 Naked Lunch is now, in fact, widely considered to be one of the most important books of the twentieth century.

Appendix B Lectures on the Virus, May 3–8, 1974, Burroughs Archive at Ohio State University William S. Burroughs

Editor’s Preface Alex Wermer-Colan However, using the virus as a prototype, we can arrive at a general field theory or description of evil. —William S. Burroughs (City College of New York, May 8, 1974) Burroughs’ writings about viruses transformed during his lifetime, and a proper critical history of Burroughs’ theory of the virus in all its forms has yet to be written. But beyond the published works, perhaps no archival document contains as much substance and profundity as Burroughs’ lecture on his theory of the virus, delivered in 1974 at City College of New York (CCNY), shortly after his return to the U.S. from twenty-five years of exile, just in time for the rise of the Downtown scene in New York City. During that spring of 1974, Burroughs taught a full-semester course on creative writing at CCNY. Although Burroughs hardly enjoyed teaching, subsequently turning down a position at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he did further develop these teaching materials and his pedagogical approach for a subsequent series of lectures he gave at Naropa University five years later. Video recordings and extracts of his lectures have been published or otherwise made available online, usually highlighting the famous writer’s thoughts on creative writing, even though his lectures covered a wide range of subjects. Burroughs’ CCNY lecture notes and files are contained in their entirety at Ohio State University’s (OSU) Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, offering a wealth of underexplored resources for Burroughs scholars. When I visited their special collections in February of 2018, I was mesmerized by the transcriptions of lectures that Burroughs gave in early May of 1974, near the end of his CCNY course, detailing his theory of communication in relation to the virus. In these lectures from May 3rd to 8th, 1974, Burroughs discussed his conception of the virus with more theoretical breadth and directness than arguably anywhere else in his work.

 Appendix B 357 Burroughs’ lecture notes from May 1974 on his theory of communication and the virus are primarily contained in OSU’s manuscript CMS.40 Box 46, Folders 447 and 448. The rest of Burroughs’ lecture files are distributed across a series of folders, including CMS.40 Box 44, Folders 428 and 429, and Box 45, Folders 440 and 443. Also held at OSU are the audio recordings of Burroughs’ lectures used by a transcription company, with the assistance of James Grauerholz, to render the lecture transcriptions that are preserved at OSU (the correspondence with the transcription company and other administrative files are contained in CMS.40, Box 45, Folder 443A; the virus lectures, meanwhile, are recorded on Tape N and O). Creating a comprehensive critical edition of Burroughs’ CCNY lectures would require listening to all the audio recordings and consolidating any errors with the previously composed transcriptions, as well as by comparison with drafts and extraneous notes that Burroughs compiled during the preparations of his lectures. Burroughs’ spoken lecture is remarkably coherent and organized, but these transcripts often include repetition, and some ideas represented in this published extract also appear in other sections of the lecture transcriptions, especially during the Q&A periods. This volume’s reproduction of Burroughs’ lecture notes has also been corrected for any glaring typos and grammatical errors that may impede its legibility; in other cases, the original parlance of Burroughs’ expository lecture style is still apparent. I am extremely grateful to the OSU Rare Books and Manuscripts librarians and archivists, who at multiple stages of my research have made this publication possible. When I visited the archive, Curator of Modern Literature and Manuscripts, Jolie Braun, welcomed and guided my perusal of the archive. During the Covid-19 pandemic, despite many obstacles OSU’s staff, especially Rebecca Jewett and Martin Orville, steadfastly aided my research and accurate transcription of Burroughs’ lectures by providing reproductions of the vast majority of these archival materials. I’m also indebted to the original OSU archivists, including Jane Falk and John M. Bennett, as well as James Grauerholz, for gathering, cataloging and preserving these materials. Finally, I’m thankful to the Burroughs Estate and the Wylie Agency for permission to acquire copies of these materials, and to publish these transcribed excerpts. Since the Burroughs archive is too massive to be republished in print books today, as I argue in my “Digitizing the Word Hoard” essay published in this volume, in the current moment we can only publish excerpts of Burroughs’ work, like dispatches from beyond the grave. Naturally, the priority of scholarly focus should be on the most immediately relevant material, which, in the current era of the Covid-19 pandemic is clearly Burroughs’ thinking on the virus. Even in just the two days of lectures that Burroughs theorized communication systems in relationship to virology, he produced dozens of pages of material, of which we can only publish a focused selection in this volume. Although some context is lost in translation, Burroughs’ pedagogical method of weaving together increasingly complicated concepts, and returning to similar motifs and ideas in a repetitious style, eventually culminates in a beautiful condensation of his theory of the virus and its relationship to systems of communication. In the twentieth century, viruses became central not just to fields of theoretical epidemiology or computer science but to the avant-garde of philosophy after the post-structuralist turn in critical theory. Burroughs’ own theorization of the virus synthesizes a range of significant mid-century influences, including Wilson

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Smith’s virological research, Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics, Wilhelm Reich’s psychoanalysis, and even ideas from the science fiction writer and founder of Scientology, L.Ron Hubbard. It is hard to understate Burroughs’ influence on and anticipation of post-1968 theoretical developments, such as Gilles Deleuze’s critique of neoliberal power’s reconfiguration of disciplinary systems in his essay, “Postscript on Societies of Control” (1992). As far back as Robin Lydenberg’s Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction (1987), Burroughs’ influence on continental theory has been well known. Indeed, at the Nova Convention in 1978, Burroughs was honored by Deleuze and Michel Foucault alike for his prophetic work. The importance of virology to post-structuralist theory itself remains to be explored further in the history of critical theory and philosophy. A compelling quote from Jacques Derrida makes it plain: All I have done . . . is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things. . . . The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. Even from the biological standpoint, this is what happens with a virus; it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding. On the other hand, it is something that is neither living nor non-living; the virus is not a microbe. And if you follow these two threads, that of a parasite which disrupts destination from the communicative point of view—disrupting writing, inscription, and the coding and decoding of inscription—and which on the other hand is neither alive nor dead, you have the matrix of all that I have done since I began writing. (Brunette and Wills, 12)

The American deconstructionist, J. Hillis Miller, especially in his famous essay, “The Critic as Host” (1977), continued this line of thought, applying virological theory to the meta-critique of critical discourse itself. Miller writes: One of the most frightening versions of the parasite as invading host is the virus. In this case, the parasite is an alien who has not simply the ability to invade a domestic enclosure, consume the food of the family, and kill the host, but the strange capacity, in doing all that, to turn the host into multitudinous proliferating replications of itself. . . . The genetic pattern of the virus is so coded that it can enter a host cell and violently reprogram all the genetic material in that cell, turning the cell into a little factory for manufacturing copies of itself, so destroying it. (Miller, 454)

In his essay, Miller echoes ideas dispersed throughout Burroughs’ writings and condensed in these 1974 lectures, especially regarding the need for the parasite to keep its hosts alive and replicating in order to survive, a concept Burroughs previously had explained in colloquial terms in interviews published in The Job (1968). Recent scholarship for further reading on the virus as organism and metaphor in the contemporary period with particular relevance to Burroughs’ virological theories include Michel Serres’s The Parasite (1980), Peta Mitchell’s Contagious Metaphor

 Appendix B 359 (2012), Tony D. Sampson’s Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012), and Dahlia Schweitzer’s Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (2018). Scholarship on Burroughs’ theory of the virus, meanwhile, like Burroughs’ writing on the topic, is both vast and sporadic—nearly every critic addresses it, but few very directly. In Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993), Scott Bukatman tackles the subject of the virus, writing that “The virus is a powerful metaphor for the power of the media, and Burroughs’ hyperbolic, and perhaps parodic Manichaeism does not completely disguise the accuracy of his analysis” (76). For Burroughs, the virus is not just a metaphor for the “power of the media,” but also for the logic of information circulation within new media networks, the mechanisms of power that, in Burroughs’ ethical universe, epitomize evil. Perhaps the most complex breakdown of Burroughs’ metaphorical uses of the virus in his fiction, at least in his early works, can be found in Douglas Kahn’s chapter, “Two Sounds of the Virus: William Burroughs’ Pure Meat Method” (from his foundational work Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (2001)). Yet a full account of Burroughs’ theory of the virus is still necessary, including a consideration of its intellectual origins and its influence on interdisciplinary theories of the virus in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, as well as an account of the trope and theory of the virus as it transforms across his published and unpublished oeuvre (from Naked Lunch (1959) and the cut-up novels (1962–8) to Electronic Revolution (1970, 1973) and Cities of Red Night (1981), a novel where Burroughs envisioned a virus similar to AIDs just before the onset of the epidemic. In the 1974 CCNY class sessions preceding his discussion of the virus, Burroughs covers a wide range of topics, but focuses on an analysis of communication technologies and their inexorable connections to power structures. This theory of communication underlies Burroughs’ theory of the virus; his theory of communication proceeds from his broader discussions of narratology and film theory in relation to the cut-up. After first overviewing some of his experiments with the cut-up method to show his theories through action, Burroughs transitions to a relatively clear statement of his theory and definition of communication: Well, in the last class I was considering control systems and the essential role played in control systems by communication. Here’s a definition of communication: it causes different effects with intention, attention, and duplication. Now communication is the action of propelling an impulse from a source point across a distance to a receiver point with the intention of bringing into being at the receipt point a duplication of that which emanated from the source point. I think that’s a fairly good definition. That is, when you talk, you’re trying to recreate a duplication of your meaning at the other end of the terminal. Now the source points can be words spoken, radio, T.V., images, gestures, odors, tactile communications. It doesn’t necessarily have to be verbal. However, we must have a source point for communication. There must be distance no matter however long or short, that is to say another terminal. There is, of course, a communication at all times within the body itself, but still involving distance.

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Say from the stomach back to brain communicating hunger and so forth. In fact some investigators have attributed cancer to a breakdown in the entire internal communications system of the body.

Burroughs goes on to clarify that “Now all control systems need communication. And by far, the most useful form of communication for control purpose is words.” It is in this light that Burroughs’ subsequent exploration of viral mechanisms in his class lectures can be seen as a critical framework for understanding his recourse to avant-garde methods of descrambling symbolic modes of control, artistic modes of resistance like détournement and culture jamming crucial to post-WWII activist and artistic practices. Much is left to be learned by looking back at Burroughs’ cut-up writings, and his virological analysis that anticipated the meme wars of our digital era. During two days of CCNY lectures in early May, Burroughs extrapolated from his oft-repeated critique of control societies to elaborate on his developing theory of the virus, tying his course’s theme of creative writing to communication systems, cinematic methods of montage, and literary methods of collage. These lectures represent at once his most concerted attempt to explain himself in colloquial terms, and some of his most trenchant discussions on the subject while being recorded. His speculations lead him to play with problematic ideas more befitting his fantastical satire, for example, by considering the potential for radioactive or virus-induced gene mutations to contribute to evolutionary changes in ethnic and linguistic diversity. Here we also see Burroughs most clearly articulate his theory of evil as a viral mechanism, as the antithesis of mutually beneficial relationships, as the fascist need for control and exploitation. Along with his analysis of viral mechanisms for ideological control and radicalization, Burroughs critiques the capitalist system for encouraging parasitic relationships, like a doctor motivated to keep his business alive by not curing the patient, or a communication technology that grows to depend on rewarding its users with ever more addictive consumer experiences and scandalous media. When Burroughs explores biological theories of the virus, he is always also probing structures of power for homologies between epidemiology and cybernetics. When Burroughs says cancer is a failure of the body to communicate with itself, he gestures towards an underexamined aspect of the human immune system and viruses that are central to his critique of communication networks under capitalism. This lecture series showcases Burroughs most thorough attempt to grapple with this complicated, vital problem. Is he guilty of what Susan Sontag would call a misuse of the metaphor of illness in her classic work, “Illness as Metaphor” (1978)? Burroughs’ exploration of the virus influenced Sontag’s own thinking, and it is so pervasive and central to his own work that answering such a question would require a wider reconsideration of his countercultural politics and aesthetics in both his twentieth-century context and in the twenty-first century that he envisaged. Hopefully the publication of these lectures will inspire further research into not just Burroughs’ archive, but also the influence of twentieth-century virological theories on our own era’s ideological contradictions around public health and epidemiology, especially as they continue to manifest in the media, politics, and our daily lives.

 Appendix B 361

Lectures on the Virus William S. Burroughs May 3, 1974, City College of New York Now consider an example of totally destructive communication where precise duplication is intended and, in fact, achieved. The example is virus infection which precisely fits the communication formula. Cause, distance, effect, intention, attention, and duplication. We can, I think, contribute intention, if nothing else, to a virus which certainly exhibits what Korzybski called intentional behavior. And it calls attention to itself in a way that cannot be ignored and duplicates itself precisely. Action of impelling particle. Hachoo—a sneeze across a distance to a receipt point. Sneeze reaches susceptible host, bringing into being after a receipt point a duplication of that which emanated from the source. Duplication of virus particles that were in the cell, released themselves, duplicated themselves with other cells, and finally released the host to infect other hosts. The virus has achieved a precision of communication with particular reference to duplication with that which emanated from the source point far in advance of human speech. Speech is a partial means of communication and, in most cases, designed and intended to be partial; in fact, most verbal exchange is concerned with concealment, misdirection, and evasion, and does not intend to deliver any precise duplication of what emanates from the source point. The actual intention may be concealed. Words are made to lie with. Despite this lack of precision with the effect produced, words are the most potent control instrument when used on a mass scale, as we can see through the mass effectiveness of propaganda techniques. Words are a partially effective control instrument and cut-ups, that is cutting up lines, provide a partial counter. [Editor’s note: Burroughs expostulates about his theory of hieroglyphics versus alphabetic languages in terms of their divergent relationships between signifiers and signifieds, as well as their differing effects. He argues that pictorial languages must occur in a specific order to produce their meaning.] A picture language sentence is a statement of events in a certain order in time. The word order is picked, and the picture language depends on the juxtaposition for sense and on a juxtaposition that does not change. Permutating this sentence you do not get new or altered meanings. . . The word order is the meaning. . . The grammar virus has the same unalterable order. Here’s the influenza virus exposure: susceptible host, attachment of the virus to a cell wall, penetration of the cell wall, replication within the cell, released from the cell to infect other cells, and finally released from the host to invade another susceptible host. Any alteration or permutation of this order, and the intention is lost. Infection does not occur or is arrested. Cut-ups are more devastating when used against a more precise form of communication. Now consider the use of cut-ups to nullify admittedly imprecise

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control systems, aiming for statistical rather than dramatic effect. It’s difficult to know how precise the control system is, as put down by the Daily Press. You cut the mutter line of the mass media and put the altered mutter line out in the streets with a tape recorder. Consider the mutter line of the Daily Press. It goes up with the morning papers and millions of people read the same words, chewing, swearing, chuckling, and reacting to the same words in different ways, of course, but all reacting. Emotion craving Mr. Callahan’s action in banging the South African critic. Tourist boiled the colonel’s breakfast. All reacting one way or another to the paper world of unseen events which become an integral part of your reality. [Editor’s note: Burroughs goes on a digression about speech scrambling as an extension of the cut-up method. He cites Richard C. French’s article in the New Scientist, “Electronic Arts of Non-Communication” (June 4, 1970). He discusses his experiments cutting up tape recordings with Ian Sommerville and Anthony Balch, speculating on the range of effects scrambled communication can achieve, from motivating acts of insurrection to inducing states of psychosis.] To what extent can physical illness be induced by scrambled illness tapes? Take, for example, a color and sound picture of a subject with a cold. Later when the subject is fully recovered, we take color and sound film of the recovered subject. We now scramble the cold picture and sound track in with present sound and image track. We also project the cold picture on further pictures. Could seeing and hearing this sound and image track scrambled down to very small units, bring about an attack of cold virus? If such a cold tape does lead to an attack of cold virus, we cannot say that we have created a virus. At best, we have merely activated a latent virus. Many viruses, as you know, are latent in the body and may be activated. We could try the same with a cold sore, with hepatitis, always remembering that we may be activating a latent virus, and in no sense creating a laboratory virus. However, we may be in a position to do this. Is a virus perhaps, simply very small units of sound and image? Remember the only image the virus has is the image and sound track it can impose on you, the effects it causes. The yellow eyes of jaundice, the pustules of smallpox that are imposed on you against your will. The same is certainly true of scrambled words and images. Its existence is the word and image it can make you unscramble. Pick a card, any card. This does not mean it is actually a virus. Perhaps to construct a laboratory virus, we would need both camera and sound crew, and a biochemist as well. I quote from the International Paris Tribune from an article on synthetic genes by Dr. Howard Carama, who made a gene synthetically, a gene particle. ‘It is the beginning of the end.’ This was the immediate reaction to the news from the science attaché from one of Washington’s major embassies. ‘If you can make genes, you can eventually make new viruses for which there are no cures. Any little country with good biochemists could make this biological weapon; it would take only a small laboratory. If it can be done, somebody will do it. For example, a death virus could be created to carry the coded message of death.’

 Appendix B 363 No doubt the technical details are complex, and perhaps a team of sound and camera men working with biochemists could give us the answer. Now the question is whether scrambling techniques could be used to spread helpful and pleasant messages. Perhaps. On the other hand, the scrambled word and tape act like a virus in that they force something on the subject against his will. More to the point would be to discover how the old scanning patterns could be altered so the subject liberates his own spontaneous scanning pattern, and this would give him a measure of immunity to scrambled speech. Now, all this is readily subject to experimental verification on control subjects. Neither need the equipment be all that complicated. The simplest scanning device is scissors and splicing equipment. You can start with two tape recorders. You could start scrambling words, make any kinds of tapes and scramble them, and observe the effects on friends and on yourself. The next step is sound film and then video camera. Of course, the results from individual experiments could lead to mass experiments. The possibility here for research and experiment is virtually unlimited, and I have made just a few simple suggestions. A virus is characterized and limited by obligate cellular parasites. All viruses must parasitize living cells for their replication. For all viruses, the infection cycle comprises of entering into a host, intercellular replication, and escape from the body of the host to initiate a new cycle in a fresh host. I’m quoting here from “Mechanisms of Virus Infections,” edited by Dr. Wilson Smith: “This will state that the virus is not truly a very adaptable organism. Some viruses burn themselves out, since they were 100% fatal and there were no reservoirs. Each strain of virus is rigidly programmed for a certain attack on certain tissues. If the attack fails, the virus does not gain a new host.” There are of course virus mutations, and the influenza virus has proved to be quite versatile in this way. Generally, it’s the simple repetition of the same method of answering. And if that method is blocked by anybody or other agencies, such as by interference, the attack will fail. By in large, a virus is a stupid organism. Now we can think for the virus and devise a number of alternate methods of entry. We have considered the possibility that the virus can be activated or even created by various small units of sound and image. So conceived, the virus can be made to order in the laboratory. However, for the tapes to be successful, you must have the actual virus. And what is this actual virus? New viruses turn up from time to time, but from where do they turn up? Well, let’s see how we could make a virus turn up. We plot now our virus’ symptoms and make a scrambled tape. The most susceptible subjects, that is, those who reproduce some of the desired symptoms, will then be scrambled into more tape until we scramble our virus into existence. This birth of a virus occurs when our virus is able to reproduce itself in a host and pass itself on to another host. I suggested that virus can be created to order in the laboratories from very small units of sound and image. Such a preparation in itself is not biologically active, but it could activate or even create virus in susceptible subjects.

May 8, 1974 The last class, I proposed the virus as a prototype of evil or rather as a prototype that gives some significance to the time that makes it useable. All writers have concerned

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themselves with the question of evil and what evil is. Because no evil, no conflict, and no conflict, no story. You’ve got to have bad guys and good guys. But as Korzybski points out, evil or any other more verbal formulation does not exist in a platonic vacuum. It can only be defined or described, and Korzybski says that descriptions are more useful since less rigid than definitions. Described then as something done at some definite time and place by and to definite person or persons. So people with different interests at definite times and places will consequently have different concepts of good and evil. The South African reaction to a recent book explicitly treating sex relations between white and black was that there was evil on every page. So what definition or description can emerge from this welter of conflicting interests? Every group or individual defining evil in terms of interests: this is an evil contract if it is not at all to my advantage. However, using the virus as a prototype, we can arrive at a general field theory or description of evil. Certainly most of the trouble on this planet is caused by people who cannot or will not mind their own business because they have no business of their own to mind. Their business is exploiting, oppressing, coercing, controlling, inflaming, and, in some cases, exterminating others. In other words, evil is essentially parasitic. The virus is an obligate cellular parasite, with no other business than invading host cells, replicating its image within the cells and then infecting another host. Admittedly, some are much worse than others. A cold is a minor evil compared with rabies. But who wants a cold? You do not need the virus; the virus needs you. You don’t need evil, evil needs you. Evil is basically parasitic. Now the Boers in South Africa need the Blacks; the Blacks do not need them. Evil may be considered, not as the knowledge of good and evil, as defined in the Bible, but good or evil, which is the conflict formula between men and nations. Not room for both of us in this space—either/or. This is the virus formula, you or me. If you are the smallpox virus, then the virus can only survive by imposing disadvantages and, in some cases, lethal conditions upon the host. So we now have a working definition to separate the good guys from the bad guys. By and large, the good guys are minding their own business and wishing others would do the same. And who are the bad guys? The bad guys are those who can’t mind their own business because they have no business of their own any more than the smallpox virus. And the hardcore opposition, the hardcore bad guys would be those who could find no business of their own to mind even if they were given the opportunity to do so. I’ve frequently spoken of words and images as viruses or acting as viruses in certain instances. And this is not in all respects an allegorical comparison. It will be seen that the falsification inherent in alphabetic Western languages are in point of fact actually virus mechanisms. If we can infer purpose from behavior, then the purpose of a virus is to survive, to be. Parenthetically, Mr. Hubbard says the purpose of life has now been discovered by him, and it is to survive. And he adds, “the rightest right a man could be would be to live infinitely long.” No comment on that. But certainly the virus survives infinitely long, as long as there are hosts to parasite on, unless the parasite gets greedy and kills all the hosts. And this has happened to several virus strains. For example, the sweats which decimated England in the fifteenth century was in all probability a virus

 Appendix B 365 and was 100 percent fatal. And it burned itself out. You have to keep that chain letter in operation. If the chain is broken, the virus has eaten itself out of a home. It’s better from the point of view of survival to be a simple cold sore, content with creating a petty annoyance rather than a spectacular epidemic. The virus then intends to survive, to feed, to be you, or be as much of you as it can be. Korzybski has proposed to build a language in which certain falsifications inherent to all existing Western languages will be incapable of formulation. The following falsifications need to be deleted from the proposed language: “The ‘is’ of identity”; you are an animal, you are a body. Now whatever you may be, you are not an animal and you are not a body, because these are verbal labels. “The ‘is’ of identity” always carries the implication of that and nothing else, and it also carries the assignment of permanent condition, to stay that way. All name-calling presupposes “the ‘is’ of identity”: that is, it assigns a definite identification with the implication that that is permanent. That’s what you are. This concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian or Mayan, and is in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun is in the sky; sun in the sky suffices. Now, the verb “to be” can easily be omitted from any language, and the followers of Count Korzybski have done this, eliminating the verb “to be” in English. However, it is difficult to tidy up the English language by arbitrary exclusion of concepts which remain in force as long as the unchanged language is spoken. You can, of course, omit the verb “to be” but it will sound very odd. Instead of I am here, I can say, “I here.” But the important thing is to just bear in mind that this is “the ‘is’ of identity,” even when you aren’t actually using it. In other words, this language could hardly be just a simply altered version; it would have to be a whole new language I think for it to be really effective. The definite article, “the”, contains the implication of one and only one, and a categorical no other. The God, the universe, the way, the right, the wrong. If there is another, then that universe, that way, is no longer the universe, the way. The indefinite article “a” will take its place. So, instead, you will have a God, a universe, a way, and so forth. Now the whole concept of either/or, right or wrong, physical or mental, true or false, the whole concept of “or,” will be deleted from the language and replaced by juxtaposition by “and.” This is done to some extent in any pictorial language where the concepts stand literally side by side. These falsifications, inherent in English and other Western languages, Western alphabetical languages, could be deleted, but as I said, it would be quite a job and you would have to create a whole new language rather than just tidy up the English language. Whatever I may be called upon to be or say that I am, I am not the verbal label “myself.” I cannot be, and I am not the verbal label “myself.” The word “be” in English then contains, as a virus contains, its precoded message of damage. The categorical imperative of permanent condition. To be a body, to be nothing else, to stay a body. To be an animal, to be nothing else, to stay an animal. The categorical “the” is also a virus mechanism locking you in “the” virus universe.

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If the virus produces no damaging symptoms, we have no way of ascertaining its existence, and this happens with latent virus infections. I have suggested a virus theory of evolution, which is that biologic changes were made by a virus illness which were then genetically conveyed, and the yellow races may have resulted from a jaundice-like virus, which produced a permanent mutation, not necessarily damaging, which was passed along genetically. That would be a virus of biologic mutation, which simply means that change was produced by a virus illness and this change was then genetically conveyed. This is possible I think but would also mean that the changes occurred quite suddenly rather than doing it slowly. And the word itself may be a virus which has achieved a permanent status with the host. However, no known virus in existence at the present time acts in this manner. So the question of a beneficent virus remains open. As I said, now there are almost no known viruses that have beneficent or useful effects. “The Mechanism of Virus Infection,” edited by Mr. Wilson Smith: now he’s a scientist that really thinks about his subject, instead of merely correlating his data. He thinks about the ultimate intention of the virus organism, speculating as to the biologic goal of the species. Taking the virus’-eye view, the ideal situation would appear to be one in which the virus replicates itself without in any way disturbing the hosts’ normal metabolism. This has been suggested as the ideal situation toward which all viruses are slowly evolving. And would you offer violence to a well-intentioned virus on its slow road to symbiosis? Consider the virus. It is an obligate cellular parasite, unlike organisms like the spirochete, or the malarial parasite, or unlike bacteria; there are many beneficent bacteria. In fact we can’t get along without them or bacillus. It is an obligatory parasite; that is, the virus is rigidly programmed to perform a certain operation. Now the existence of a computer program would certainly lead us to infer a programmer, since computers do not program themselves. Can we not infer a virus programmer? If so, we have an alien invasion of many years standing, because the virus is by its nature alien. A parasite must remain alien, that is, different and separate from the host; otherwise, it ceases to be a virus and ceases to be a parasite. It loses its separate existence. A virus without symptoms, that is, a virus which occasions no reaction to the body of the host, would not be noticed. And viruses seemingly must make themselves noticed, must call attention to themselves. Here again is the prototype of evil. Evil is not self-sufficient. Evil must make itself real and call attention to itself at all times. Real as a night stick, real as jail, concentration camps, and the convulsion of rabies. Otherwise the virus is absorbed and ceases to be a parasite, because it becomes part of the whole. Let’s stop here for questions or for anyone who feels he has a different or more workable description of evil than the virus. Question: Do you have any evidence that a virus caused the yellow races? It’s just a theory. It would be one explanation. There are no viruses that exist at the present time that act in this way, that is, to make changes which are then genetically

 Appendix B 367 conveyed. But it is possible a virus exposed to radiation of a certain type might do this. The effect of radiation on viruses has been very little studied. We know that radiation does not produce favorable mutations, at least the type of radiation that we’re now dealing with. Atomic radiation does not produce any beneficial or even useful conditions for survival. That is to say they’ve done a lot with fruit flies. But the effect of radiation on a virus has not been studied, or at least if it has, it has been top secret classified. There is some evidence of this. I saw in an article, I believe I mentioned it in a previous lecture, that the British created what they have called the doomsday bug already, which had been produced by exposing viruses to radiation. So we have a new factor in the whole situation that came in with the atomic bomb in August 1945 which might possibly produce a different strain of virus. Any other questions of this particular point before going on to something else? Question: [Inaudible] Yes, it’s a very complicated picture. Actually. of course, there are latent viruses which may cause no damage at all and they can be latent for years, but then something can activate the virus. The whole matter of a latent virus is very important in cancer, which may be a latent virus which is activated by an agent. [Editor’s note: The question-and-answer session digresses into a clarification of Burroughs’ typical description of those who don’t mind their own business, with the Boers of South Africa as a classic example of such a parasitic political entity, reiterated again below in this excerpt. A subsequent question also leads into a brief discussion of the other effects that atomic bombs can have on living organisms.] Question: Would it be possible that life survives with the viruses because you said man is in a way a virus? I say that he can act as a virus. He can behave in the same way as the virus, not that he is one. Question: Can we have a relative condition with viruses [inaudible] It is very complicated. I am saying that if a virus produced no symptoms, we would have no way of knowing that it was a virus. And if it had any kind of symbiotic relation to the host, it would probably not be recognized as a virus. Question: Do you think capitalism in the United States is a sort of virus? I don’t know. That’s such a difficult comparison. You can clearly see how certain people or even agencies can act as viruses. In other words, they are parasitic, they need the people which they exploit or oppress, and the people don’t need them. That is, they are acting in a purely parasitic manner. To speak of Capitalism as a virus, I think you’re going to run into too many complications and contradictions there. Certainly many individual capitalists and many manifestations of capitalism are parasitic and act as viruses.

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Question: You made a connection between language and virus. I wonder if you could find substantiation within cell memory, genes, and so forth. You mean for the speculation that the word might be a virus that has obtained a stable relationship with the host? Well, I would say that it would be very difficult: if you have a virus with a stable relationship with the host, which is even partially useful, the virus would not be recognized as a virus and would be very difficult to identify as such. You can see viruses under an electron microscope; they look like little blobs. Now, it is difficult to say whether this is actually what is causing the illness, or something that simply accompanies it, possibly like you might be seeing the program rather than the programmer; and if there were no symptoms, there would be no way of detecting the virus. Question: While the whites in South Africa are definitely parasitic and therefore evil, I still fail to see how that’s analogous to a virus, which is definitely evil. But a virus is an animal who has no choice between good and evil the way men do. If men could not make this choice, then I could see them as parasitic. I find it difficult to see the virus as a microcosm of humans who cannot actually make the distinction of good and evil. Well, we assume that the virus is an unintelligent organism, but on what basis do we assume that? That’s just because we have our own definition of intelligence. Certainly it seems to be a very purposeful organism and knows just exactly what it’s about, or could we say the message of what it’s about is built into its structure. That’s why I say we could infer by the presence of the virus some force that was programming the virus. This is difficult to see, how the virus could program itself; and we could take that force as a prototype of evil and in the same way that force could program individuals or people to act as viruses. As to how much choice the South Africans have, remember that he’s been brought up and exposed to certain ideas since infancy and, by in large, most people will follow their conditioning. Some of them don’t, of course. Question: [Inaudible] Mr. Hubbard said that, I didn’t. It is attempting to survive and willing to survive or able or programmed to survive at any expense to the host that it parasitizes. Exactly the same could apply to the whites in South Africa. They are willing to survive at any cost to the blacks that they are parasitizing. Comment: Yes, but they have the power to make the choice to relinquish their disputes and to work with the blacks, which they’re unwilling to do, and that’s what’s essentially wrong. I’m not speaking of free will or intention. I say that as Christ said, by their fruit she shall know them and not by their good and bad intentions, by what they actually do, by their behavior and not by their intentions, considerations, or choices. It seems to me that the worst bastards on this planet think that they’re absolutely right. In fact, to say that someone has to be right is about as wrong as they could get from my way of thinking. [Editor’s note: The question-and-answer session digresses into another extended conversation about the South African situation, with a further focus on the ethics of good and evil, and the subject of intention.]

 Appendix B 369 Question: Do you think this is the way societies have developed through an unconcious reinforcement of people along certain lines like a virus? I wouldn’t say it is an actual virus, but it is acting like a virus. Comment: The virus theory is one thing but it strikes me as very limited in the sense that it is very mechanical, and there has to be more consideration regarding cognisance, consciousness, and unconsciousness (inaudible). Well, insofar as a group is parasitic, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to alter their position. They are more committed to it, and if they gave up their position of advantage, they would lose not only the position but probably their lives as well. I mean, the South Africans, the white South Africans, have gotten themselves into a bind where they have to maintain their position by force. Where could they go? Certainly not back to Holland. That’s the problem with the virus. If it has a place to be alive [inaudible]. For example, for years they didn’t know how the rabies virus, being 100 percent fatal, could survive. And they found that it did have a reservoir, namely bats. Bats can have rabies without dying. It’s the only animal that can, and apparently that’s the reservoir of rabies. Unless a virus that’s 100 percent fatal can keep affecting new hosts, it will eventually burn itself out because it doesn’t have any place to exist, even in its latent or unalive form. Question: Don’t you think it’s very important to be satisfied with the definition, or working definition of good and evil? Yes, I don’t think that this is so difficult and my definition is very simple: Someone who minds his own business relatively well. I don’t think that is very hard. When you’re out and around you run into bastards and nice people and it’s not so hard to find what you mean by that. Question: Do you think that when people say they’re well intentioned that they are? A lot of people who say they’re well-intentioned, aren’t really. The whole Bible Belt think they’re right and well intentioned. Just in my experience, contact in other societies, it isn’t hard to pick out people who are alright and people who aren’t. I think we’re over our time.

Appendix C Burroughs Manifest, Burroughs Archive at Florida State University, September 12, 1980, purchase

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Appendix D Supplemental Bucher Burroughs Purchases, December 12, 1990

Appendix E Burroughs and Bucher, Correspondence and Notes 1978–9, 1984

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Appendix F “A 30-Year Wait. A 16-Mile Journey.” The Story of the “Lost” Burroughs Archive at Florida State University

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Contributors John M. Bennett has published over 400 books and chapbooks of poetry and other materials. He has published, exhibited, and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of publications and venues. He was the editor and publisher of Lost and Found Times (1975–2005), and is the founding curator of the Avant Writing Collection at the Ohio State University Libraries. Richard Kostelanetz has called him “the seminal American poet of my generation.” His work, publications, and papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, the Ohio State University, the Museum of Modern Art, and other major libraries. His PhD (UCLA 1970) is in Latin American Literature. His latest books are Select Poems, 2016; The World of Burning, 2017; Poemas visuales, con movimientos con ruidos con combinaciones (with Osvaldo Cibils), 2017; The Sweating Lake, 2017; Olas Cursis, 2018, and Sesos Extremos, 2018. He is coeditor, with Geoffrey D. Smith, of two works by William S. Burroughs: Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs and William S. Burroughs' “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution. Jed Birmingham writes occasional articles on William Burroughs, book collecting, and the Beat Generation for Beat Scene magazine. He is the contributing editor of RealityStudio​.or​g, the premier website dedicated to William Burroughs, as well as coeditor (with Kyle Schlesinger) of Mimeo Mimeo, a magazine about the Mimeograph Revolution. His essay on the Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch is available in Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays edited by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen. Ash Connell-Gonzalez is a PhD student and teaching assistant in the English Department of the University of Oregon. They hold a master’s degree in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio, where they served as an editor for The Sagebrush Review, and a New Media and Culture graduate certificate from the University of Oregon. Their research interests include comic, digital, and postmodern narratives, queer studies, and android sexuality. Rona Cran is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham and the Director of the University’s Centre for the Study of North America. Their research centers on the literature and culture of New York City, queer writing, and modern American poetry. They are the author of Collage in TwentiethCentury Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan (2014) and the creator of the website www​.makeyourownbrainard​.com. They are currently writing a second book, Everyday Rebellion: Poetry and Resistance

 Contributors 425 in New York, 1960-1995, which combines close reading, creative writing, and archival research to explore the relationship between poetry and infrapolitics from the counterculture to the AIDS crisis. Barry J. Faulk is Professor of English at Florida State University. His books include British Rock Modernism and Punk Rock Warlord: The Life and Work of Joe Strummer, coedited with Brady Harrison. A new essay on Bob Dylan and studio recording is included in Sound and Literature (Cambridge Critical Concepts), edited by Anna Snaith. S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, where he edited the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1989 to 2008. His recent books include (with editors Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison) Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (2013) and the follow-up Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism appeared in 2014. His critical, bilingual edition of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was published as Un tram che si chiama desiderio / A Streetcar Named Desire in the series Canone teatrale europeo/Canon of European Drama, 2012. He has also edited The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories, and Translations (2012) and The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014); his monograph, Creative Involution: Bergson Beckett, Deleuze, has appeared in 2015 to launch his book series “Other Becketts”; his Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett’s Late Modernism appeared in fall 2016. His Przedstawienie Becketta: Eseje o Becketcie. Wyb.r i opracowanie naukowe Tomasz Wiśniewski i Miłosz Wojtyna appeared in 2016. His most recent books are Beckett’s “Happy Day”: A Manuscript Study, 2017; Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn, 2018; and Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theatre, 2021. Oliver Harris is Professor of American Literature at Keele University. His life as a Burroughsian began in the Manchester music scene of the 1970s and led in 1984 to a PhD at Oxford that nobody would supervise. He has since gone on to publish fifteen books based on archival scholarship: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959 (1993), the critical study William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (2003), the collection of essays Naked Lunch@50 (2009), coedited with Ian MacFadyen, and new editions of three Burroughs trilogies: Junky (2003), Queer (2010), The Yage Letters Redux (2006); Restored versions of Nova Express, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded (2014); and Minutes to Go Redux, The Exterminator Redux and BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS (2020). As well as coediting Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2008), he has published new editions of Blade Runner: A Movie (2019) and Dead Fingers Talk (2020). While publishing essays on subjects ranging from the Beats to Film Noir and appearing in documentaries and podcasts, he has helped spread the word by organizing international conferences, since 2010 in his role as President of the European Beat Studies Network.

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Allen Hibbard is Professor of English and Director of the Middle East Center at Middle Tennessee State University. From 1985 to 1989, he taught at the American University in Cairo, and from 1992 to 1994, he was a Fulbright lecturer (in American literature) at Damascus University. His research and teaching interests include modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, the novel, translation, and transnational movement, with a focus on interactions between the United States and the Arab world. Hibbard has written two books on Paul Bowles (Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction, 1993, and Paul Bowles, Magic & Morocco, 2004), edited Conversations with William S Burroughs (2000), and published a collection of his own stories in Arabic (1994). His essays, stories, translations, and reviews have appeared in American Literature, Centennial Review, Cimarron Review, Comparative Literature Studies, Grand Street, International Literary Quarterly, Interventions, Jadiliyya, Middle East Studies Bulletin, Passport, and elsewhere. With his colleague Osama Esber, he is currently completing a translation of A Banquet for Seaweed, a novel by contemporary Syrian writer Haidar Haidar. Nathan Moore is a senior lecturer at Birkbeck College, School of Law, currently working on a book with the provisional title of The Decision: Between Political Theology and Cybernetics. He is also active on the London improvised music scene, and can be heard on the Matchless release “Darkened, yet shone” in a trio with John Edwards and Eddie Prévost. In April 2012, he organized the “Burroughs Called the Law” workshop (i.e., conference) at Birkbeck in association with the European Beat Studies Network and the Open University. Tomasz Stompor is a subject librarian at the Library of Anglo-American Culture and History (https://libaac​.de​/home/), Göttingen State and University Library. He earned his doctoral degree at Freie Universität Berlin, Graduate School of North American Studies, with the thesis “Precise Intersection Points. The Textual Materiality of William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Experiments.” Blake Stricklin is Instructor at the University of Houston, Victoria. Most recently, he has published “‘Word Falling . . . Photo Falling’: William S. Burroughs and the Word as Written Image” in William Burroughs: Cutting up the Century. His “I Have Nothing to Say—John Cage, Biopower, and the Demilitarization of Language” has appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, and he has contributed to and edited the American Book Review focus on Burroughs: “Burroughs Now.” His book American Paraliterature & Other Theories to Hijack Communication is published in the symplokē Studies in Theory series. Nick Sturm is a lecturer in English at Georgia State University. His poems and essays have appeared with The Poetry Foundation, The Brooklyn Rail, PEN, Jacket2, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, ASAP/J, Poets House, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The First Four Books of Alice Notley (2023) and, with Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan,

 Contributors 427 and Edmund Berrigan, coeditor of  The Selected Prose of Ted Berrigan  (2023).  His scholarly and archival work can be traced at his blog Crystal Set. Alex Wermer-Colan is a Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Temple University Libraries, where he directs pedagogical and research projects using emerging technologies across the humanities. He previously researched and edited The Travel Agency Is on Fire (2015), a collection of Burroughs’ cut-ups of other writers, and he coedited with Joan Hawkins the definitive book on the cut-up, William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century (2019). His writings on Burroughs, post–Second World War American literature and theater, and the politics of aesthetics have also appeared in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, American Book Review, Twentieth Century Literature, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, The D.H. Lawrence Review, and the L.A. Review of Books.

Index adaptation comics  95–8 addiction  125 Adding Machine: Selected Essays, The  3, 21, 26, 31, 66 n.26 Adorno, Theodor W.  261 affect  291–3, 295, 299 Ah Pook is Here (Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill)  89–104, 318 Allsop, Kenneth  122 Altman, Roberto  14–15, 17–18, 31 n.17, 285, see also Vaduz archive Amerika, Mark  122 Anacatharsis, vomiting, nausea  293, 295–6, 298–301 Anderson, Laurie  331 Anger, Kenneth  323 Ansen, Alan  123, 130, 131, 151, 163 n.39 apparatus  49, 51–3 archive  14, 17, 18, 20, 23, 26, 27, 32, 34, 54, 58, see also Berg Collection; New York Public Library; Nautilus Foundation for the archival saga of Burroughs’ work (see Vaduz Archive) Burroughs’ work as  7, 9–11, 13 Aristotle  55 On Interpretation  55 Arizona State University’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library  286 Artificial Intelligence (AI)  114 Ashbery, John  233–5, 237–8, 247 “assassination by list” (The Revised Boy Scout Manual, RBSM, Burroughs)  310 Atkinson, Ti-Grace  330 Atlantic Monthly  65 n.16, 66 n.30 authority  72–3 authorship  94 Balch, Antony  23, 32 n.24, 47–8, 312–13, 362

Ballard, J. G.  61, 293, 296 Baraka, Amiri  332–3, 335, see also Jones, LeRoi Barthes, Roland  132 Basquiat, Michel  11 n.12 BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS (Burroughs)  284 Baudrillard, Jean  25, 77, 328, 339 Beach, Mary  275 Beat Hotel  54, 129, 133, 162 n.25 Beatles, The   313–15, 317, 319, 324 Beats (Beat Generation)  11, 18, 230, 244, 248–9, 254 Beck, Julian  54 Becker, Howard  30, 54 Outsider: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance  30, 50, 54, 61, 63 Beckett, Samuel  2, 6, 36 n.39, 47, 49, 50 All Strange Away  47 All that Fall  49 Embers  49 From An Abandoned Work  49 Krapp’s Last Tape  47 Benjamin, Walter  283 The Arcades Project  283 Bennett, John M.  7, 19, 25, 32 n.23, 307, 309, 357 Beowulf  281 Berg Collection (New York Public Library)  6, 13, 18, 31 n.17, 32 n.22, 59, 110, 145, 148, 152, 161 n.12, 280, 284–6 Berkson, Bill  244–5, 247 Berrigan, Ted  35, 229–39, 244–55, 265, 330 biopower  61–2 Birmingham, Jed  7, 9, 14, 16–18, 26 n.5, 27, 31, 62, 66, 67, 282, 287, 354 n.2 Black, Bob  339 Black Mountain Review  167

 Index 429 Blade Runner (A Movie)  12, 50, 288 Bodies, anatomy  291–2, 298, 302 n.8 Body without Organs (BwO)  56–7, 115 Bolton, Micheal Sean  105, 115 Bonome, Antonio  309 Book of Breeething, The (Burroughs, Robert F [Bob] Gale)  26, 92, 102 n.5 Bowie, David  11, 12, 28, 311–12, 316, 318–25 “All the Young Dudes”  319–20 Diamond Dogs  12, 322–3 Hunky Dory  319 “Oh! You Pretty Things”  319 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars  318 Ziggy Stardust character  311, 318–20 Brainard, Joe  230, 234–7, 239, 241, 250–2 Braun, Jolie  357 British Journal of Addiction  169, 170, 174, 176, 182 Bucher, François C.  14–23, 29, 32 nn.19, 24, see also Vaduz Archive Bucher Folder  17, 20, see also Bucher François Bucher Papers  32 n.19 Bukatman, Scott  359 Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction  359 Bulletin 23  309 Burgess, Anthony  3–5, 8, 286, 291, 293, 296, 298, 322 A Clockwork Orange  286, 296, 322 Burroughs, William S., see also individual titles for works in C: A Journal of Poetry  231–2, 236–8 collaboration  233–4 composing TIME  229–30, 239–44 influence on Berrigan  234–5, 237, 244–9, 253–5 in New York City  230, 238–9 New York School, and the  232–3, 237, 239, 254 writing practices  106, 110–13

Cabianca, Vincenzo  266–7 Caffentzis, George  338–9 Cage, John  233–4, 301, 330–1 “An Interview with John Cage”  246–7 C: A Journal of Poetry  230–2, 236–8, 245, 249, 265 Calder, John  3–8, 13, 31 nn.6–7, 64 n.8, 109, 121–3, 129, 161 n.9 Call Me Burroughs (Burroughs Sommerville LP 1965)  8, 10, 14, 24, 35, 336–7 Call Me Burroughs: A Life (Miles 2013)  8, 14, 230, see also Miles, Barry Cammell, Donald  323 Campbell, James  7, 12 Capote, Truman  24, 36 Carama, Howard, International Paris Tribune, “It is the beginning of the end”  363 Casablanca (film)  49 Catlett, Mallory, Decoder  286 censorship  4–6, 25, 66 n.27, 328, 332 “Censorship” (Burroughs, Transatlantic Review)  6, 38, 276 chance  110–11, 113, 124, 138, 140, 143, 152 Chicago Review  8, 167 China  267–9, 271 Chopin, Henri  46, 48, 309 Christ, Jesus  368 Cities of the Red Night  12, 20, 23, 317, 359 City College of New York (CCNY)  286, 356–60 City Lights (bookstore)  62, 67, 332–3 Claisse, Frédéric  53 Clear the Range (Berrigan)  248–9, 251–3 Clockwork Orange, A  322, 325 Cobain, Kurt  63 Cointelpro  334 collaboration  229, 230, 232, 236, 242, 243, 252 “collaboration” issue of Locus Solus  233–4 collage  46, 49, 63, 229, 231, 234–9, 243–8, 250–3, 255, 259–60, 263–65, 267, 271, 273, 275, 292, 296, 301, see also cut-up; montage

430

Index

Collins Center  21–2 Columbia University, see under Vaduz Archive comics/x  89–104 “Coming of the Purple Better One, The” (Burroughs)  47 communication  76 competition  81–2 control  1, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 24–5, 30, 45, 48, 50–1, 53–6, 60, 61, 62–3, 63 n.6, 66 n.27, 74–5 control system, systems of control  12, 30 mechanisms  116 societies of  1, 5, 6, 24, 45, 52, 58, 61, 62 subject of  78 syntactical control  10 thought control  1, 5, 24 correspondence  293, 296, 299 Corso, Gregory  129, 133, 233–5, 244–5 Cortázar, Julio Hopscotch.  108 counter-culture  314, 317–19, 324 cover designs  125–9, 132–3, 136–7 “C” Press  229, 230, 232, 236–9, 265, 268, 274 Crawdaddy (magazine)  10, 12, 21, 26, 32–3, 323 Cusset, Francois  330 cut-up method, technique, cutting up  6–8, 10–13, 20, 23, 25–6, 28–9 n.29, 33, 45–50, 53, 55–9, 64 n.9, 64 n.10, 65 n.23, 100, 122–4, 128–9, 140–1, 143, 292–4, 298–301, 308, 309, 312–13, see also collage; montage Berrigan’s methods  231–2, 238, 244–51, 255 Burroughs’ methods  229–31, 233–41, 243, 253–5, 259–66, 269, 271–5 Cut-up novels  280, 281, 359 Dada  141 Dardot, Pierre & Laval, Christian  81–2 Dead Fingers Talk (Burroughs)  4, 7–14, 31 n.11, 50, 121–65 Dead Fingers Talk (Burroughs, Harris), restored edition  121, 123, 151–2

de Kosnik, Abigail, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom  287–8 Delany, Samuel R.  321 Delaune, Benoît  121, 160 n.1 Deleuze, Gilles  9, 24–6, 28, 30, 48, 51–2, 56–9, 61, 63, 66 n.31, 72–4, 80–2, 330, 335–7, 358 biopower  61 “Politics”  24–5, 30, 45, 48, 51–2, 56–9, 61, 63, 66, 335–7 “Postscript on Societies of Control”  358 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari  9, 24–6, 28, 30, 48, 53, 56–9, 61, 71, 82, 115, 330, 332, 337 Anti-Oedipus  115 “A Bloated Oedipus”  332 A Thousand Plateaus  56, 59, 115, 337 Democratic National Convention 1968  47, 48, 314 Dent, John Yerbury  48, 170 Derrida, Jacques  55, 65 n.24, 106 Deconstruction and the Visual Arts  358 “Living On”  168 Of Grammatology  55 On footnotes  167, 168, 175 “Plato’s Pharmacy”  55 “Desert Forever” (Baudrillard)  339 Dettmar, Kevin  47 Dialogues (Deleuze and Parnet)  57–9 Didion, Joan  300–1 digital texts  113–14 di Prima, Diane  265, 327, 333, 335 discipline  73 disembodiedness, of text  113 disgust  291, 293, 295–301 dispositif, see apparatus Domaine Poétique  46, 63 dreams  111, 112 drugs  48, 53–4, 60, 65 n.24 Drugstore Cowboy (film)  60 Dworkin, Craig  175 dystopia, dystopic  10, 11, 48, 61 Dystopic Modernism  5, 24, 48

 Index 431 eating: food, consumption  291–8, 301, 302 n.7 Ecstasy of Communication (Baudrillard)  328 Edinburgh Writers’ Conference/ Festival  1, 3, 4, 7, 37, 39, 129, 131, 132 editorial practices  107, 110 Egyptian language  365 Einstein on the Beach (Glass)  331 E meters  310 Electronic Elsewheres (Burroughs)  93 Electronic Revolution, An (Burroughs)  7, 29, 48–9, 53, 60, 63, 63 n.6, 80–1, 309 Electronic Revolution, The (Burroughs, reprinted in later editions of The Job)  7, 29, 49–50, 54, 60, 63, 283, 312, 314–15, 324 n.3, 359 Eliot, T. S.  6, 25, 47 Elizondo, Salvador  309 erasure  231, 238, 248, 251–3 Ernst, Max  46 frottage  46 surrealist novel in collage  46 Esperpentos  308 Esquire  26, 47, 282, 314, 329 Evergreen Club News  2, 5 Evergreen Review  2, 30nos.2, 4 Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs  307, 308 Experiments in Opera  286 Exterminator, The (Burroughs and Gysin)  131, 140, 141, 284 Falk, Jane  357 “The Fall of Art” (Burroughs)  32–3 Falwell, Jerry  338 Faulk, Barry  11, 28–9 Federici, Silvia  338–9 feedback  80–1 film, in Burroughs’ work  110 technique  58, 113 “Finger, The” (Burroughs)  133 Floating Bear (mimeograph)  332–3, 335 Florida State University  9, 14–15, 17, 21–3nos.19, 29

Florida State University’s Special Collections and Archives  288 Flusser, Vilém  75 Technical image  75–6 Fly, The (David Cronenberg film)  114 fold-in, fold-ins, fold-in method  6–8, 10–13, 55–7, see also cut ups footnote presence and absence in editions of Naked Lunch  168–71, 196–200 On “C’lom Fliday”  168, 174–5, 193–4, 200 On venereal disease  168, 175, 177, 192, 200 On whale drek  168, 171–3, 176, 177, 191, 200 On Yage  168–70, 173–6, 179–90, 196–200 Foucault, Michel  24–5, 27, 28, 30, 45, 51, 52, 54, 58, 61, 63, 72, 330–1, 334, 358 fragments of narrative  89–90, 93–7, 100 of text  89, 91, 96 freedom  114, 116 free speech movement  47–9 French, Richard C. “Electronic Arts of Non-Communication”  362 Freud, Sigmund  134 Friendly Finance Co.  307 Fuck You Press  21, 66, 333, 335 fugitive, fugitive texts  10, 23 Fuller, Buckminster  16, 327 Fulton, Robert  21 Street Film  21 “Future of the Novel, The”  4, 6 Gallup, Dick  232, 235, 250 Galvin, Kristen  336 gastronomic criticism  291, 293, 295–7, 300 Gazzo, Michael V.  54 A Hatful of Rain  53 Gebler, Jack  54 The Connection  54 Genet, Jean  282, 286 Geógrafo, El  309 Ghost of a Chance (Burroughs)  47

432 Ginsberg, Allen  7–8, 18, 19, 54, 65 n.16, 66 n.30, 66 n.32, 124, 162 n.25, 167, 170, 176, 177, 282, 291–2, 299, 327, 331–2 Ginsberg archive  19 “Great Marijuana Hoax: First Manifesto to End the Bringdown, The”  65 n.16, 66 n.30, 69 Giorno, John  29, 331, 336 Giorno Poetry Systems  62, 336–7 Girodias, Maurice  4, 8, 13, 128 Glass, Philip  331 Gontarski, Stanley (S. E.)  24, 32 n.29, 288, 354 n.1 Goodman, Michael  134 Grauerholz, James  3, 4, 8, 12, 15–17, 22, 26, 31–2, 64 n.6, 66 n.26, 123, 151, 170, 171, 331, 357 Intro to Interzone  111 Grove Press  2–4, 8, 30–1 Guardian, The  3, 6, 7, 122 Guattari, Félix  9, 25, 26, 28, 45, 53, 56, 59–63 Gunkel, David  123 Gysin, Brion  14–18, 21, 23, 29, 31 n.17, 35 n.30, 46–8, 54, 63 n.2, 111, 122, 128–9, 229, 236, 238, 239, 242–3, 262–4, 269, 271, 272, 275, 309, 312, 317, 330 and Burroughs, William S., works The Cut Ups  64 n.7 An Electronic Revolution 1970–1  48, 53, 60, 63, 63 n.6 “First Cut-ups”  48 “The Third Mind”  48 Harpers  46–7, 63 n.1, 64 n.6 Harris, Oliver  8, 10, 13, 15, 18, 26, 31 nn.10, 11, 80, 106, 171–2, 176, 280, 284, 307, 328–9 “Cutting Up the Century”  282 Intro to Junky  105, 107 Intro to Queer  108 Intro to The Soft Machine  108, 110 On Nova Express  108 Hassan-i Sabbah  310

Index Hawkins, Joan and Wermer-Colan William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century  282, 286–7 Hayles, Katharine  113–14 Hearst, William Randolph  329 Heidsieck, Bernard  46, 48, 309 Hibbard, Allen  106, 117 n.2 And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Burroughs, Kerouac)  106 Hitchcock, Alfred  133 hoard, word-hoard  1, 7, 14, 26, 31 n.17, 59, 280–9, 292, 357 Höch, Hannah  259, 261 Hoffmann, Abbie  314 Holmes, Sherlock  310 homophonic translation  236, 251 Hones, Sheila  124 Howl  167, 244, 246 Hubbard, L. Ron  358, 364, 368 Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin)  145 human virus  66 n.27 hypertext  113 identity, fluidity and survival  114–15 industrial music  50 Infinite Jest (Wallace, David Foster) endnotes in  174 International Times  314, 324 Internet Archive  288 intertextuality  130, 134, 139 “Interzone” (Burroughs manuscript)  144, 162 n.28 “The Invisible Generation” (Burroughs)  312–15 Jackson, Mark  123 Jackson, Robert  14, 17–19, 32 Jewett, Rebecca  357 Job: Interviews with Daniel Odier, The  7, 26, 48, 50–1, 53, 54, 58–60, 64 n.6, 65 n.21, 65 n.22, 314, 321 Jones, LeRoi  265, see also Baraka, Amiri Joyce, James  47, 286 Junkie [sic: Junky] (Burroughs)  125 Junky (Burroughs)  53, 106, 108

 Index 433 Kafka, Franz  112 Kahn, Douglas  359 “Two Sounds of the Virus: William Burroughs’ Pure Meat Method” (Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts)  359 Kane, Daniel  336 Kant, Immanuel  57, 66 n.29 Kerouac, Jack  10, 14, 18, 31, 32 n.25, 46, 237, 242, 244, 249–50, 280–2, 291, 322, 328 The Lonesome Traveler  250 On the Road  291, 322 Kittler, Friedrich  331, 334 Klee, Paul  283 Koch, Kenneth  233, 234, 236, 238, 243, 247, 249, 254 Korzybski, Alfred  358, 364, 365 Kristeva, Julia  116 Kulchur  244, 246–7 La Bohème  46, see also Chopin and Heidsieck on footnotes  174 Lacan, Jacques  78–9 mirror stage  78–9 Landow, George  174 Lathan, Sean  47 Latour, Bruno  83–4 Down to Earth  83–4 Leary, Timothy  339 Led Zeppelin  323–4 Léger, Fernand  49, 64 Lemaire, Gérard-Georges  160 n.1 “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” footnotes  169, 170 “Limits of Control, The”  55–6, 61, 327, 329, 334 Living Theater, The  54 Lloyd, Florida  16, 17, 22–3, see also Nautilus Foundation Locus Solus  233–6, 243, 245 London Athenaeum  172 London Literary Gazette  173 London Morning Chronicle  172 London Spectator  172–3

Looking for Chris (Berrigan)  231, 248–50, 252, 253, 255 Lopez, Ken  13–14, 31 Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here, The  100, see also McNeill Lotringer, Sylvère  61–2, 330–1, 336 Lovecraft, H.P.  318 Luce, Henry R.  259–63, 265, 267, 269–70, 328–30 American Century  259–61 Life magazine  259, 261, 270, 294 Time, Life, and Fortune  283, 284 Time magazine  259–60, 262, 264–72 Luhmann, Niklas  76 Lydenberg, Robin  62, 116, 128, 130, 167–8, 174, 176, 292, 298–9, 337, 358 On footnotes  167–8, 174, 176 Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction  167–8, 358 Lyotard, Jean-Francois  76, 330 McCarthy, Mary  3–5, 8–9, 24, 40, 66 n.27 McCartney, Paul  66, 336–7 McLuhan, Marshall  141, 172 nn.23, 24, 329 McNeill, Malcolm  26, 89–104, 318 magnetic tape, tape recorders/recordings, tape manipulation  5–7, 11, 12, 17, 28 Mailer, Norman  1, 2, 6 Malina, Judith  54 Mallarmé, Stéphane  105 Mao Zedong  266–9 “Mass Assassination” (The Revised Boy Scout Manual, Burroughs)  310 mass media  53, 60, 67 n.34 “Master Musicians” (of Joujouka)  317 Matson, Peter  106–7 May 1968  45, 50 “Mayan Caper, The” (section of The Soft Machine)  110, 114, 116 Mayan language  365 Maynard, Joe  8, 16, 31, 33

434

Index

Mbembe, Achille  84 n.3, 85 n.5 Meinhof, Ulrike  335–6 Melville, Herman  172, 173 mess  299–300 Miles, Barry  8, 10, 14–17, 21, 31 n.17, 33 n.27, 46, 51, 63 n.2, 160 n.2, 170, 171, 329, 336 Call Me Burroughs  284 Miller, Charles  2, 15, 18, 22 Miller, Henry  2, 167, 234, 249, 254, 281, 296, 298 Miller, J. Hillis  358 “The Critic as Host”  358 Mimeograph  21, 31, 61, 66–7, 335, see also Floating Bear Minutes to Go (Burroughs, Beiles, Corso, Gysin)  133, 141, 281, 284 Mitchell, Peta Contagious Metaphor  358 Moby Dick digressions in  172–3 Moka Bar  24, 50–1, 324 n.2 montage  260–1, 263–4, 271, see also collage and cut-up motion sickness, kinetosis  292, 299–301 Mott the Hoople  319 Mottram, Eric  151, 162 n.39 multiframe  89–104 Murdoch, Rupert  283 Murphy, Timothy S.  36, 67, 316–17, 337 My Education: A Book of Dreams  111–14 My Own Mag  229–30, 238 Nail, Thomas  61 Naked Lunch (Grove Press)  1, 3, 4, 8–14, 30 nn.2, 13, 24, 25, 28, 35 n.30, 54, 56, 58, 59, 66 n.27, 106, 114, 115, 280, 281, 283, 284, 308–9, 328, 359, see also obscenity, obscenity trial(s) footnotes in  168–9, 196–200 Naked Lunch (Olympia Press)  3, 4, 9, 14, 29, 30 n.2 footnotes in  167–200 Naked Lunch (Restored Text) 8–9, 24, 28, 31 footnotes in  169–71, 196–200 Naked Lunch (theatre production)  27 naked lust  291, 296, 298 Nancy, Jean-Luc  79–80

Naropa University  14–15, 23–4, 356 narrative coherence  109, 111, 113 Nauman, Bruce  49–50 Live Video Corrider  49 Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk)  50 Nautilus Foundation (Bucher)  16–17, 20–3, see also Gysin, Brion; Lloyd, Florida Navas, Eduardo  123 Negri, Antonio  45, 58 Nehru, Jawaharlal  266–7 neo-Dada  48, 51 New Journalism  47 New School for Social Research  249 newspaper format  260–3, 271–3 New York Public Library (NYPL)  6, 13, 14, 18, 19, 22, 31 n.17, 59, 65, 280, 284, 286, see also Berg Collection for acquisition of Burroughs work (see under Vaduz Archive) New York School (poets)  230–4, 237–9, 242–5, 248–9, 253–4 Nixon, Richard  60, 333–4, 338 No Medium On footnotes  175 Nova Convention  15, 17, 27, 29, 36 n.32, 61–2, 108, 327, 330–1, 337, 339, 358 Nova Express (Burroughs)  8, 13, 28, 108, 123, 128–31, 141, 150–1, 281, 308, 332, 339 footnotes  167–9 Nova Law  56 Nova Trilogy/Nova conspiracy  259–60, 270, 273, 275 Nuttall, Jeff  260, 272, 275 obscenity, censorship, obscenity trial(s)  1, 4, 13, 30nos.1, 2, 121, 124–5, 161 n.9 Ohio State University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, The  286, 356–7 Olympia Press  4, 13, 14, 29, 128–9, 139, 150 1%, the  82–3 Open Library  288

 Index 435 Orville, Martin  357 Padgett, Ron  230, 232–4, 236, 239, 246, 250–2, 254 Page, Jimmy  323–4 Palmer, Robert  317–18, 320, 323 paranoia  24–5, 71–7, 79–86, 307, 308 paranoid writing  76–7 The Paris Review  176 Parnet, Clare  58 pattern and randomness  114 Pélieu, Claude  275 Pennington, Roy  7 performance, performativity, see also Edinburgh Writer’s Festival; Naked Lunch (theatre); Nova Convention for Burrough’s influence on (see Rock and Roll and Bowie, David) Burroughs’s writing and archive as  1, 5, 8, 10–12, 27, 30 Gysin and Burroughs’  16–17 Perse, St-John  309 Pessoa, Fernando  116 “The Anarchist Banker”  116 photomontage  136, 151 pick-up  57–8 playback, playback session  24, 30, 45, 47–8, 50–1, 55, 58–60, 63–4 n.6 “Playback from Watergate to Eden” (Burroughs)  46, 48, 50, 334 Ploog, Jürgen  275 Pop Art  46 post-humanism  114 Postmodernism  132 power  2, 10, 15, 25, 30 Princeton University’s Center for the Digital Humanities, Derrida’s Margins protect  288 Project Gutenberg  288 propaganda  45 punctuation  136–41 Punk  50 “Purloined Letter, The” (Poe)  176 Queer  16, 18, 106–8 Rainey, Lawrence  47

The Ramones  331 Ray, Man  49 reader, role of in Burroughs texts  105, 116 Reagan, Ronald  338 RealityStudio​​.o​​​rg  287 recombinant aesthetics, recombination  7, 8, 10, 12 Reich, Wilhelm  358 Reich, Wilhelm (section of Queer)  107 remix aesthetic  122–4, 129–31, 134, 139, 141, 142, 149, 152 resistance  48, 50, 52, 58, 59, 61, 63 n.6, 65 n.21 Review of Contemporary Fiction  16, 20 reviews of Burroughs’s work  293–4, 296–7, 301 n.5 “Revised Boy Scout Manual” (Burroughs)  7, 330, 332 Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution, “The  309 Revised Boy Scout Manual The (RBSM)  7, 309 rhizome (rhizomatic qualities of Burroughs texts)  9, 26, 56, 58, 59, 115 Rimbaud, Arthur  285 “Rio Grande” (section of Queer)  107 Rivette, Jacques  85 n.5 Rolling Stone, The  311, 317–18, 320, 324 n.1 Rolling Stones  317 Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities (Burroughs)  21, 61, 67, 332–4 Rosenthal, Irving  8, 171 editing footnotes  171, 177 Rosset, Barney  2, 4, 5, 10 nn.2, 9, 30–1, 130, see also Grove Press routines  7, 12, 131, 171, 173, 177, 295, 307–10 Rub Out the Words  Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959–74  283 Sampson, Tony D.  358 Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks  358–9 Sanders, Ed  67, 236, 245, 275, 333, 335 Saturday Evening Post  174, 177, 181, 201–6

436 Savio, Mario  48–9 schizo-analysis  25 Schizo-Culture (1975)  61–2, 327, 330 Schizo-Culture conference (1978)  61–3, 330–1, 334–5 Schizophrenia  25 Schneiderman, Davis  70, 337 Schweitzer, Dahlia  359 Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World  359 Scientology  24, 310, 358 Scrapbooks (Burroughs)  281, 284, 286–8 Seaver, Richard  10, 31, 37, 107 Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing (1960– 1980) (NYPL exhibition)  287 Secret of Fascination, The (Harris)  171, 176 “Sects and Death” (Burroughs)  288, 332, 338–9 Semiotext(e)  61–2, 330–2, 335–6 Semiotext(e) USA  332, 335, 338–9 Serres, Michel  358 The Parasite  358 Seven Deadly Sins (Burroughs)  20–1, 30 n.43 Shakespeare, William  285 Smith, Geoffrey D.  307, 309 Smith, Patti  331 Smith, Wilson  357 “Mechanisms of Virus Infections”  357, 363, 366 Sobieszek, Robert  287 Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts  287 Soft Machine, The (Burroughs)  7, 8, 10, 13, 28, 55, 56, 65 n.23, 66 n.28, 105, 108–10, 112, 121–4, 128– 33, 136, 139–45, 147, 149–52, 162 n.26, 280, 286, 308 Soft Subversions (Guattari)  63 Sommerville, Ian  46–7, 122, 129, 151, 336, 362 Sonnets, The (Berrigan)  232, 234–9, 246–51, 253, 254 Sontag, Susan  360 Illness as Metaphor  360

Index South Africa  364, 367, 368 Southern, Terry  1–2, 282, 355 n.5 sovereignty  77 spaciality  112, 114 “speech scramblers”  310 State University of New York at Buffalo  356 Stonewall Riots  321 Streip, Katharine  117 n.1 “Talking Asshole, The” (Burroughs)  175–6 Tangier  46, 54, 129, 263, 272 “Tangier” (Burroughs)  47 tape recording experiments  46, 313–17 taste  291, 293–4, 296–300 temporality  112, 114 “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” (Burroughs)  329 “Text for Screening of Robert Fulton’s ‘Street Film’ art  1’, 3rd Aug  76.” (Burroughs)  21 textual fixity  105–6, 114, 116 textual fluidity  105–6, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 116 Third Mind, The (Burroughs and Gysin)  48, 80, 100, 122, 124, 131–2, 141, 161 n.15, 162 n.24, 229, 239, 242, 283 “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin”  283 Ticket That Exploded, The (Burroughs) The  8–10, 13, 50, 55, 58, 108, 121–4, 128–32, 134–6, 138, 140–2, 145, 146, 149–52, 308 Time (magazine)  7, 167, 229, 239, 242–4, 259–62, 264, 266–7, 269–71, 273, 275–6 TIME (William Burroughs)  229–32, 238–44, 248, 251–4, 259–75 “Time of the Assassins”  12, 21, 32–3 Times Literary Supplement (TLS)  121–2, 143, 151, 291, 293–6 Tomlinson, Hugh  58 Transatlantic Review  31 n.8 True Magazine  174, 177, 181, 207–28 Tzara, Tristan  141

 Index 437 UbuWeb  288 unconscious  46 underground press  328–30, 332, 334–6 Unspeakable Mr. Hart, The (2012 CD)  91–3 Vaduz archive  14–15, 18, 20, 23, 31, see also Bucher, François; Bucher Papers acquisition by Altmann  14, 18 acquisition by Jackson  19 acquisition by New York Public Library  19 n.17 (see also Berg Collection) proposed sale of Vaduz archive to Columbia University  14, 15, 18 proposed sale of Vaduz archive to Florida State University  14–18 Valle-Inclán, Ramón del  308 Veitch, Tom  230–1, 234, 237–9, 249, 250, 253–4, 265 virus  54, 65 n.21, 242, 253, see also word virus Wallace, David Foster  174, 176 Warhol, Andy  58, 129, 236, 239, 246, 253–4 Waste Land, The (Eliot)  129

Watergate  46, 48, 50, 59, 60 Watt, Stephen  47 Weissner, Carl  141, 275 Wermer-Colan, Alex “The Order and the Material is the Message”  286 The Travel Agency is on Fire  284, 286 Western Lands, The (Burroughs)  45, 272, 317, 337 Western Lands trilogy  106 Wild Boys, The (Burroughs)  50, 312, 316–17, 319, 321–3, 325 Willett, John  293–4, 301 n.5 Woolf, Virginia  47 word virus  54–6, 64 n.6, 65 n.21, 230, see also virus Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (eds. Grauerholz and Silverberg)  123 YADS (Young American Disaffiliates)  23, 35, 230, 243–4, 257, 262, 328 Yagé: ayahuasca  54 Yage Letters, The (Burroughs and Ginsberg)  108, 111, 139–40, 176, 299–300, 332 Zappa, Frank  331

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