mocking feature article on the Beats from November 1959 returned the mockery with interest, in the vein of the comic cuts in The Drunken Newscaster tapes Burroughs loved. But the text also announced the future direction of a project that had begun just the month before, when Gysin sliced through newspapers and Life magazine advertisements while cutting a mount for a drawing in the Beat Hotel. It identified cut-up methods as a strategy of media détournement, as the Paris-based Situationsists called it. From here, it was a short step to The Third Mind and Electronic Revolution and The Revised Boy Scout Manual, handbooks to inspire future generations of media guerrillas, culture jammers, computer hackers, and pop-up subversives.
In the society of the spectacle, Burroughs understood that “the real battle” is over the production of reality itself: of what counts as real in the first place.38 Given the balance of power in his rivalry with Time, Life, and Fortune, cut-up methods were necessarily terroristic, waging asymmetrical warfare against a global media empire seeking to maintain what Luce had envisioned as a permanent American Century. In that context, Nova Express brilliantly dramatizes how cybernetic feedback could coincide with imperial blowback by reversing the function of Time magazine. For once the news is understood as not reporting the past but projecting the future, Burroughs reasoned that to physically reorder the news is to scramble the reality it produces, until “Insane orders and counter orders issue from berserk Time Machine”: “I said The Chief of Police skinned alive in Baghdad not Washington D.C.” The funniest as well as the most politically ferocious of Burroughs’ Cut-Up Trilogy, Nova Express includes within itself a sense of how ridiculous it was to oppose a media trilogy that in 1965 had a weekly circulation of more than ten million with a book whose print run was ten thousand: “Sure, sure, but you see now why we had to laugh till we pissed watching those dumb rubes playing around with photomontage—Like charging a regiment of tanks with a defective slingshot.” Or like fighting the Nova Mob with a pair of scissors and a Ping-Pong machine gun. Was it just self-delusion to declare that “a box camera and a tape recorder can cut lines laid down by Hollywood and life time fortune”?39
Burroughs started Nova Express as an “action novel that can be read by any twelve year old,” and constructed it both with deadly seriousness and in the adventurous spirit of “Johnny The Space Boy who built a space ship in his barn” (ROW, 112)—in other words, against a backdrop of apocalyptic darkness and overwhelming odds, in the doomed but undefeated spirit of eternal hope.
“COMPLETE INTENTIONS FALLING”
The relation between Nova Express and newspapers draws attention to a basic distinction for Burroughs between the book form and his newspaper experiments: his little magazine and small pamphlet texts in newspaper format were typically quick, rough, and unrevised productions where he deliberately let stand numerous typos and cancellations as signs of his process of composition. In absolute contrast, Burroughs fully expected his book manuscripts to be professionally typeset and copyedited. He addressed Grove Press in pragmatic terms of publishing norms and editorial corrections: “As regards your enquiries,” he wrote Richard Seaver in early October 1963, just as Nova Express was about to be typeset, “most of the irregularities you speak of are typing errors to be corrected in the manner you suggest,” adding, a couple of weeks later: “As a matter of general orientation, both spelling and punctuation should be normalized and consistent.”40 The agreement between author and publisher was clear and establishes an equally clear context for this new edition of Nova Express.
Contrary to media myths, Burroughs did not put his material together haphazardly any more than he wrote it crazed on drugs. Chance operations served particular creative functions that varied over time, but even the early “raw” cut-ups in Minutes to Go were carefully edited, representing ways to escape the control of language, not abdicate it. “If my writing seems at times ungrammatical,” Burroughs explained to his bemused parents in November 1959, as he started to work with cut-up methods, “it is not due to carelessness or accident” (ROW, 7). He was equally insistent about the methods themselves, often repeating that the results “must be edited and rearranged as in any other method of composition” (105). The archival evidence confirms the radical creative role he allowed chance in the process of cutting or folding texts and transcribing the results, and he always retained mistakes and typos across his many rough drafts; but the evidence also confirms the rigorous approach he took to the correction of final drafts.41
Equally, there is no evidence at all that Burroughs accepted as felicitous the kind of contingencies that would usually be called a “corruption,” and, far from embracing the unwanted interventions of copyeditors and typesetters, Burroughs did what he could to restore his original intentions. Burroughs chose his collaborators, just as he chose the material he cut up and the results he retained. That’s why he called on Ian Sommerville, to add a more rigorous hand in proofing the galleys. My own approach to editing Nova Express has kept faith with this logic. Apart from giving the opening sections of each chapter their own titles, the roughly one hundred changes for this edition mainly correct typos or restore Burroughs’ punctuation (including his occasional use of double colons) and are conventionally based (i.e., supported by multiple manuscript witnesses). The notes detail key changes, comment on apparent errors and twilight zone cases and introduce the richest possible selection of archival material to reveal revisions over time and the intricacy of Burroughs’ working methods. While relatively minor, the textual alterations categorically reject the alternative: to fix and fetishize the 1964 Grove edition. 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. The poetic complexity of Nova Express will always exceed our grasp and yet invite us back, because simply to read and re-read it is the only way to do justice to Burroughs’ book, to this textual war machine and homemade spaceship built for time travel, to the radioactive fervor of Reverend Lee’s last words.
Oliver Harris
May 2, 2013
1. Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Ecco, 2012), 170. After, abbreviated to ROW.
2. Marshall McLuhan, “Notes on Burroughs,” The Nation (December 28, 1964), 517–19.
3. Undated typescript, probably 1963 (William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, 37.2). After, abbreviated to Berg. Mariner II is cited in Berg 11.28; Polaris in Berg 36.11; Atom bomb fallout in Berg 12.17.
4. See Dennis Redmond’s essay <http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/PP2.html>
5. The “condensed” novels of J.G. Ballard would be an obvious exception, but the British writer always insisted Burroughs was an inspiration, not an influence.
6. Typescript, dated May 20, 1960 (Berg 49.1).
7. Undated typescript (Berg 10.11).
8. Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1996, edited by Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e): 2000), 80.
9. Autograph, dated 1961 (Berg 62.9).
10. Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London: Verso, 2002), 31.
11. Burroughs, The Western Lands (New York: Viking, 1987), 252.
12. Burroughs Live, 42.
13. See “Cutting Up Politics,” in Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (London: Pluto, 2004), edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh, 175–200.
14. Burroughs, The Job (New York: Penguin, 1989), 27.
15. One explanation for the presence of Naked Lunch might be that Burroughs made