a potentially new revolutionary class that could be mobilized to take over the means of reality-production, as indicated in his play on Marx’s rallying cry: “Carry Corders of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your prerecordings.”
Immediately after completing his revised manuscript of The Ticket in October 1966, Burroughs told Gysin that his aim was “to get the children exchanging tapes.”6 That was also why he wrote a further expansion of this material as “the invisible generation,” an essay appended to The Ticket that was first published in The International Times, the major British underground newspaper. Confirming the media-crossing circularity of influence, IT was launched that same October with a gig in London featuring Pink Floyd and a recently formed band named after another book in the Cut-Up Trilogy, Soft Machine. Although now in his early fifties, Burroughs was being ironic in stressing the generation gap, aware as he was of his rising cult status in the 1960s youth counterculture. The revised edition of The Ticket was published in June 1967, the same month the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—with Burroughs’ now iconic face on Peter Blake’s Pop Art album cover.
“AT THE FAIR”
The Ticket That Exploded is a pastiche and bricolage of materials including fragments from “the Shakespeare squadron,” especially Joyce and Eliot, whose own major works were pastiches and bricolages of materials. But since The Ticket was part of a larger experimental project whose means were multi-medial and whose research goals were as scientific or political as they were artistic, the literary frame of reference is in some ways misleading. This is one of the genuine peculiarities of a Burroughs book; that it can seem both literary and viciously anti-literary at the same time, and the same goes for his cut-up methods. On the one hand, they were scandalous chance operations that seemed to reduce artistic creativity to the “writing machine” described in The Ticket, which “shifts one half one text and half the other through a page frame on conveyor belts.” On the other hand, while the results were still uneven, the many hundreds of archival draft pages prove how hard Burroughs worked to make the cut-up machine serve his writing.
In a 1960s context his methods resemble those of Pop Art, and The Ticket references James Dean and the recently dead Marilyn Monroe, while for Nova Express Burroughs felt a “pop art cover is definitely indicated.”7 But the cut-up text both parallels the mechanical genius of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen factory and exceeds it. Whether using fragments of Rimbaud or old song lyrics, The Ticket demonstrates a manipulation of material whose precision has never been recognized. The book’s original title, “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair,” is a representative case, the nursery rhyme ballad condensing a complex intertextual network that shows how signs get around on what Burroughs called “association lines.” It takes a while to realize it, but in training us how to read his text—which all experimental writing has to do—Burroughs is training us how to read the culture around us, or rather the culture inside us.
Just two words of “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair” occur a single time in The Ticket: “the fair.” Is this really an allusion? It’s ambiguous since what fascinated Burroughs and in turn makes his own work so fascinating is the subliminal or contingent message, communication that slips beneath consciousness or seems to arise by chance from the material itself. In broad cultural terms, he promoted cut-up methods as strategies of détournement, as the Situationists called their contemporaneous response to the emerging “Society of the Spectacle,” the all-pervasive sign systems of the news media and consumer capitalism. Burroughs’ didactic political writing often made explicit calls to action, as in one early 1960 typescript: “TEAR THEIR ADVERTISEMENTS FROM WALLS AND SUBWAYS OF THE WORLD.”8 Such direct statements were necessary because his creative counter-measures were, by definition, experimentally indeterminate: the results of writing with scissors were impossible to predict and exemplary in function, opening up new possibilities rather than serving fixed outcomes. Burroughs therefore identified his methods with asymmetrical warfare rather than political programs—The Ticket cites part of Mao’s formula for guerrilla tactics (“Enemy advance we retreat”)—and he categorically differentiated his methods from those of commercial advertising: “I’m concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action,” he told an interviewer in 1965, “not to go out and buy a Coca-Cola, but to create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness.”9
In this context, “the fair” is a necessarily ambiguous sign. In fact, even if it is recognized as a subliminal trace of lyrics, a molecule of music, the ambiguity of the allusion remains: since there are two mentions of the city’s name in the same paragraph, the “fair” must also reference the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. That fair inspired another song, “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” and forty years later the Hollywood film directed by Vincente Minnelli. Located in the city of Burroughs’ birth—which is named over twenty times in The Ticket—the St. Louis World’s Fair was famous for its 265-foot-high Ferris wheel, and such wheels return repeatedly in The Ticket, their rotary motion coinciding with the circularity of the songs’ lyrics. Because “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair” and “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” share the same theme—the broken promises of desire—as well as the same seductive sign of “the fair”—the merry carousel of capitalism—it perhaps doesn’t matter whether Burroughs was referring to Johnny or Louis, but a cut-up source typescript confirms it was actually both: “Oh oh what can the matter be, John?—Our revels now are ended—These our actors at St Louie Louie meet me at spirits and are melted into air.”10 Mixing in the two song titles with Prospero’s great speech from The Tempest, Burroughs turns Shakespeare’s valediction to stage magic into a farewell to the fair.
These unused lines from the manuscript also confirm Burroughs’ working methods in The Ticket, specifically his editorial process of redaction, as he cut and re-cut his source materials to make the external referential function of words ever more cryptic. However, once we’ve learned to read on lines of association and juxtaposition, the accumulation of allusions makes his larger theme clear enough. Whichever way we identify “the fair,” as a musical or historical reference, the cut-up method makes the words operate in a chain of internal cross-referencing that recycles the genetic code of the Burroughs oeuvre from text to text.
At the end of Naked Lunch there’s a passing, enigmatic allusion to one person watching another while “humming over and over ‘Johnny’s So Long at the Fair,’” and in 1960 Irving Rosenthal asked Burroughs about it as he helped edit the book for its American publication: “Come now Irving,” Burroughs replied. “You have heard that tune a thousand times. We all have.”11 Rosenthal seemed to have forgotten not only the song from childhood but also that the opening of Naked Lunch had set it up and implied its significance. Early on Burroughs introduces a drug pusher who “walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up,” peddling such songs as “Smiles” or “I’m in the Mood for Love” (both of which appear in The Ticket). A drug in itself, the music of love is used to sell other drugs, and this nexus of addiction, contagion, subliminal advertising and brainwashing through popular culture is captured in the seemingly mundane act of humming a tune. As the original title of what became The Ticket That Exploded, “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair” signifies both the enduring pain of personal loss—nostalgically for childhood innocence, melancholically for love—and its manipulation according to the false promises and addictive kicks of consumer capitalism. “O dear, what can the matter be?” Johnny’s so long at the fair because, like a hypnotized chicken, he’s been hooked.
The intertextual thread of the fair leads back from The Ticket via Naked Lunch to Burroughs’ early novel, Queer, a vital point of origin for both biographical and aesthetic reasons. Here, it’s the sinister Skip Tracer, a psychic Repo Man dreamed up by William Lee to track down Eugene Allerton, the lover that has abandoned him, who “begins humming ‘Johnny’s So Long at the