The Soft Machine. William S. Burroughs

When Gysin saw the page proofs in November he bluntly stated that the result of Burroughs’ revisions was “of course, no longer SOFT MACHINE.”41 Speaking of the long appendix article that lambasted U.S. drug policy, Gysin protested: “The apomorphine material—if you will excuse me and I presume you won’t—absolutely does not belong in the same book with the rest.” He was surely right: the article made an odd ending to The Soft Machine, where the drug is mentioned only once.42 Gysin thought Burroughs had lost his way, not just at the end but from the start of the revised edition: “Please, if you can, switch back to the original opening. That’s what the book is about, isn’t it?”

      Gysin’s suggestions to restructure The Soft Machine were impractical then and would be misguided now. The evolutionary logic of the book can’t be put into reverse, any more than it can remain frozen in time or turned toward perfection. But his objections are revealing for the response Burroughs made to them. Instead of arguing over what his book was “about,” he spoke at length of the trilogy’s complex manuscript history and of having been right to choose “straight narrative” for the beginning because of what others found more “readable” (ROW, 243). At the time of revising The Soft Machine in September 1962, Burroughs defined “straight narrative” in terms of Naked Lunch (114)—not a definition anybody else would use—and in that context it made sense to begin the book with “Dead On Arrival,” a chapter originating in early Naked Lunch manuscripts. What’s strange is Burroughs’ persistence in using the term straight and his application of it to “Dead On Arrival,” since the text is an object lesson in the queering of narrative, which makes it an ideal start to The Soft Machine, a sort of guidebook to what follows.

      The first line of “Dead On Arrival” (“I was working The Hole with The Sailor”) returned The Soft Machine to the realist, autobiographical world of Burroughs’ first novel, Junky, and echoes the moment in it when William Lee begins to support his heroin habit by rolling drunks on the subway: “The H caps cost three dollars each and you need at least three per day to get by. I was short, so I began ‘working the hole’ with Roy.”43 The hole is an underground term for the underground itself, and the joke in Junky is that Lee and Roy (the Sailor) work there to support their habits, in a parody of the straight, above-ground working world. The narration is realistic and trustworthy, even though its values are subversive. For Naked Lunch, Burroughs had also taken an innocent-looking paragraph from Junky set on the subway, and twisted it to create the opening passage where Lee vaults a turnstile and catches an uptown A train to escape the law. In Naked Lunch, instead of narrating in a straight deadpan, however, Lee puts on the voice of a brazen hustler, a con man literally taking the reader for a ride and implying that’s all anybody ever does. It’s an invitation to suspect our own motives as much as his: he’s on the hustle, but what are we looking for?

      Just as the beginning of Naked Lunch went back to rewrite Junky, so too The Soft Machine went back to rewrite Naked Lunch. “Dead On Arrival” takes the process of rewriting a step further by visibly re-writing itself, cutting up its own words in a beautifully judged poetic structure that queers not just the straight world but straight reality. “Dead On Arrival” is not more readable as narrative than the book’s original beginning (“The War Between the Sexes split the planet into armed camps”); it is about readability itself, about exposing our reading habits and the fixed narratives by which we live. Tracing a tragic orbit around the narrator, the chapter’s melancholic roll-call of the dead—deaths by overdose, drowning, hanging, stabbing—all come from Burroughs’ biography and point to our common narrative towards death. The premise of The Soft Machine is that, individually and as a species, we’ve been conned into embracing as natural a fatal realism. Although the scenario is elliptical and the tone elegiac, the message of “Dead On Arrival” is defiant: “No good. No Bueno.” The example of the text implies that cut-up methods look to chance as the only way out, a last desperate chance, sola esperanza del mundo.

      The Soft Machine was always difficult, and Burroughs’ decade-long efforts to straighten it out and make himself clear were perhaps doomed to radiant failure. In the end, he too was an inefficient guide: “I make no claims to speak from a state of enlightenment,” he once wrote Jack Kerouac, “but merely to have attempted the journey, as always with inadequate equipment and knowledge (like one of my South American expeditions), falling into every possible accident and error, losing my gear and my way . . .” (Letters, 226). Burroughs’ messianic side is always redeemed by his humour, which is also an act of defiance, a refusal to be just another soft machine: You win something like jelly fish, Meester?

      Oliver Harris

      September 16, 2013

1. Joan Didion, “Wired for Shock Treatments,” Bookweek (March 27, 1966); 2.

2. Burroughs, The Yage Letters Redux (San Francisco: City Lights, 2006), 21.

3. References are to David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985) and Richard A.L. Jones, Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).

4. Undated typescript, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library; 43.27. After, abbreviated to Berg.

5. The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 (New York: Viking, 1993). After, abbreviated to Letters.

6. Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Ecco, 2012). After, abbreviated to ROW.

7. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: the Restored Text (New York: Grove, 2003), edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, 249.

8. Carroll to Burroughs, August 17, 1960 (The Paul D. Carroll Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; 1.18). After, abbreviated to Chicago.

9. Burroughs to Carroll, August 23, 1960 (Chicago, 1.18).

10. Burroughs to Bowles, October 8, 1960 (Paul Bowles Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; 8.10). After, abbreviated to HRC.

11. Kerouac, in Beat Writers at Work, edited by George Plimpton (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), 132; Corso, in Minutes to Go by Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, (Paris: Two Cities Editions, 1960), 63.

12. Burroughs to Carroll, January 20, 1961 (Chicago, 1.18).

13. Minutes to Go, 43.

14. Nine-page typescript, ca. late 1959 (Berg 7.44).

15. All citations in block capitals in this and the next paragraphs are from un-sequenced typescripts, circa 1960 (Berg 48.22).

16. That this phrasing originates in openly anti-Semitic material is clear from several 1960 texts, including: “I RUB OUT THE WORDS OF MARX LENIN EINSTEIN FREUD FRAUD FOREVER. I RUB OUT THE WORD JEW FOREVER” (Berg, 48.22).

17. Nine-page typescript (Berg 7.44). See notes on the “Where You Belong” chapter for Luce’s presence in the “1962 MS” of The Soft Machine.

18. Undated typescripts (Berg 3.52; 49.14; 49.32; 9.24).

19. Parts had appeared in “Brief History of the Occupation,” which Burroughs started to write in October 1960 and which he described as “FROM WORK IN PROGRESS: ‘MR BRADLY MR MARTIN’”—his earlier title for The Soft Machine (Berg 10.47).

20. Ginsberg to Kerouac, September 9, 1962, in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2008) 270.

21. Bowles to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, July 24, 1962 (City Lights Books Records, Box 1, University of California, Berkeley).

22. A six-page typescript sequence,