The Soft Machine. William S. Burroughs

in terms of the archetypal American big con game (“THE BIG STORE. THE PROP BANKS”) as well as what he called a “new Mythology for the Space Age”: “THE SOFT MACHINE? AN OBSTACLE COURSE. BASIC TRAINING FOR SPACE.”18 Essential to the emerging science fiction scenario of his Nova Conspiracy was Burroughs’ conflation of his enemies into one all-embracing anti-human invader, against whom cut-up methods could be deployed by guerrilla forces of underground resistance. By early 1961 he had written the most explicit text he would publish on the subject, which appeared in the first issue of the New Orleans magazine The Outsider in fall 1961 as “Operation Soft Machine/Cut.” Laid out in newspaper-style columns—the precursor of many experiments in this format during the mid-1960s—the magazine version was never intended as part of The Soft Machine, but an earlier draft was.19 While the book is almost totally obscure about the big picture of the Nova Conspiracy and the meaning of Burroughs’ central term, the magazine text (included as an Appendix for this edition) is absolutely explicit: “The occupying power of this planet described as a soft MACHINE.”

      Equally important, the magazine piece overlaps not just the book but also Burroughs’ two manifesto pamphlets, Minutes to Go and especially The Exterminator, suggesting the larger network of publications in multiple formats of which The Soft Machine published by Olympia Press was only one element. Indeed, two parts of the book appeared in 1960 and five more in 1961 in a variety of little magazines ranging geographically from the United States (Big Table in Chicago, Metronome in New York, The Outsider in New Orleans) to England (International Literary Annual), Scotland (Sidewalk), France (Two Cities) and Belgium (Nul). Altogether, 5,000 words of The Soft Machine appeared in print before the Olympia edition in June 1961, and another 5,000 during the six months after, adding up to almost a quarter of the text. Burroughs showed his commitment to book publication throughout the decade-long cut-up project—he would not have bothered to twice revise The Soft Machine otherwise—but from the start he also recognized the unique importance of little magazines and the underground press. Olympia was in many ways the ideal publisher for him—small, foreign-based, controversial, ambiguous in its mix of high literature and bad taste, from Lolita (1955) to There’s A Whip in My Valise (also published in 1961). Nevertheless, it made more sense to cite “Mao Tse Tung on Guerrilla war tactics” and to declare “THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS,” in the crudely typed hand-printed pages of a counter-cultural magazine like The Outsider.

      “THE WORD-STRIP”

      The 1961 Soft Machine mixes elliptical episodes of science fiction fantasy with ethnographic travelogue, repetitious sex scenes, pulp genre parodies, and a variety of unclassifiable and uncompromising language experiments. The text is so relentlessly bizarre that it seems simultaneously impossible to read and yet—­unlike the second and third editions, where the reader is left confused by non-narrative sections—not in the least frustrating. Instead of a narrative scenario, it is dominated by long image-lists (redolent of, and sometimes cutting up, the prose poems of Rimbaud and St.-John Perse) that depict toxic landscapes—swamps, jungles, canals, rotting cities of concrete pillars and bamboo bridges—and whirling machinery—penny arcades, Ferris wheels, pinball machines, cable cars, elevators. Ginsberg described it as “page after page of heroic sinister prose poetry.”20 Although the polluted wastelands clearly develop out of Naked Lunch, the dominance of South American locations and the recurrent use of Spanish signals Burroughs’ vision of a new global colonialism, the planet’s occupation by an alien empire: Trak ­Utilities—the dominant corporation in The Soft Machine, precursor of the Nova Mob in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded—extends the imperial ambitions of sixteenth-century Conquistadors from the New World to the whole of reality. (“You can’t walk out on Trak,” Burroughs would clarify for the revised text; “There’s just no place to go.”)

      It therefore comes as less of a surprise to discover that in spring 1961 Burroughs planned to incorporate into The Soft Machine another type of stylistically anomalous material; his 1953 epistolary report on Central and South America, “In Search of Yage.” According to Paul Bowles, it was only because “Girodias was hurrying him towards the end” that about thirty pages of this material did not go into the book.21 Burroughs made up for it by creating overlaps between his revised edition of The Soft Machine and “In Search of Yage,” building into The Yage Letters a cut-up text (“I Am Dying, Meester?”) much of which he incorporated into the new Soft Machine. The connection Burroughs made across books was as much formal as geographic or thematic, associating the hallucinogenic yagé vine with cut-up techniques as twin methods of sensual derangement, linguistic transcendence, and visionary transport to other worlds. Archival typescripts confirm the association: Burroughs made an extensive cut-up of his 1953 “Composite City” vision, whose yagé-inspired montage poetics anticipated The Soft Machine by pointing to the organic fertility of words in recombination.22 The environmentalist politics implied by Burroughs’ use of South American topographies therefore coincides with an intriguing textual ecology. Rather than being made to express meaning, phrases spontaneously replicate, duplicate, permutate, animate. Burroughs had long wanted to “create something that will have a life of its own”—an ambition he opposed to writing a “novel,” which is “something finished, that is, dead”—and in The Soft Machine his mechanical methods do create a strange, stuttering version of autonomous life.23 What is most inspiring about the 1961 edition is therefore not its intermittent flashes of open insurrection but its use of language. For political ferocity it has nothing on Nova Express, and it lacks the pragmatic polemics of The Ticket That Exploded, but where else can we encounter the imperative “Walk scorpion hair. Room violets,” or “shredded clouds impregnated with flesh fur of steel”?

      In narrative terms, the 1961 text is virtually static, and at a sentence level it is paralyzed by the lack of active verbs. In other volumes of the Cut-Up Trilogy, Burroughs gave his fragmented writing forward momentum by using the em dash (—) and ellipsis ( . . .); here the dominant punctuation mark is the staccato period stop.24 Combined with The Constant Capitalization Of Words, the result is unreadable as a narrative. Instead, individual phrases possess an inspiring alien energy, the dynamic vitality of composites made from wildly incompatible terms: “Brass entrails from other twilights. Fur youths in glass hunger down the bones. Spit blood crystals of dawn. Masturbating broken mirror rocks.” It’s “unreadable” in the sense of being impossible to read without being forced to wonder what “reading” is at all. The effect is viscerally and philosophically bracing, for a while. The other volumes in the Cut-Up Trilogy also suffered a law of diminishing returns, but, unlike the first Soft Machine, they took advantage of their length to generate recurrent effects of déjà-vu, creating an uncanny dimension of disturbed memory missing from the 1961 text.

      Comparing the first to later editions, what Burroughs left out of The Soft Machine seems logical: from a paragraph where almost every sentence begins “And” to an 84-word long sentence punctuated by just one comma, and from pages of phrase permutations and word fragments to sections like “the word-strip,” which begins: “I am that I am yo soy lo que soy je suis ce que je suis Ich bin das Ich bin ana eigo io ese quello io eseyo soy ca je suis soy am est eso ana ist that eso am es ich das ce que bin am that quello eigo soy eso am ist ese quiego sat that am ce que ist is es am cat dam anoy iegos oys soys boys tat ta hat tama taick sick joys ass quam loy st ickythyyoanncnesnsosnnntatatamattatmattamaick-sick soy cn es n sos nnn.”

      The other key feature of the 1961 Soft Machine is its unique structural organisation into color Units (Red, Green, Blue, White), only traces of which would remain in later editions. The structure came from Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles” (minus black), and also reflected Burroughs’ intense preoccupation with color stimulated by other sources, including the drugs yagé and apomorphine and the orgones of Wilhelm Reich (all associated with blue), and the work of the British neurophysiologist, W. Grey Walter.