Authors: William S. Burroughs
Nova Express
NOVA
EXPRESS
Other Works by William S. Burroughs Published by Grove Press
Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk”
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
The Soft Machine: The Restored Text
The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text
The Adding Machine: Selected Essays
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead
Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader
Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs
NOVA EXPRESS
The Restored Text
William S. Burroughs
Edited and with an Introduction by
Oliver Harris
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 1964 by William S. Burroughs
Copyright renewed © 1992 by William S. Burroughs
Copyright © 2013 by the Estate of William S. Burroughs
Introduction copyright © 2013 Oliver Harris
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.
First revised edition published by Grove Press in 2014.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2208-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9722-1
Grove Press
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Acknowledgments
It is a privilege to edit works by William Burroughs, and a pleasure to thank James Grauerholz for making it possible and for all the support he has given. It's also a pleasure to thank the following for their expert help: Jed Birmingham for assistance with little magazines; Barry Miles for his knowledge of Burroughs' artwork; Jeffrey Miller for insights into the finer points of printing; Keith Seward for razor-sharp feedback; and above all, Véronique Lane, for working with me from start to finish, being by my side in the archival vaults, sharing ideas, reading every word I wrote, and living with the Fish Boys and the Vegetable People for two years.
* * *
For the great archival assistance they have provided, I also want to thank: John Bennett of the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Ohio State University, Columbus; Rob Spindler of the Archives and Special Collections at Arizona State University, Tempe; Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and his staff; and Michael Ryan and all his staff at the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Research Institute for the Humanities at Keele University. Thanks finally to Jeff Posternak of the Wylie Agency, a great guy to have on your side, and to Peter Blackstock at Grove Press.
Introduction
“
THE FUTURE LEAKS OU
T
”
“
THIS IS A BURNING PLANE
T
”
Nova Express
begins with a chapter called “Last Words” in a messianic voice warning of End Times.
It is a stunning overture to a terminal scenario that after fifty years has lost none of its ferocity. “
Newsweek
says I am basically an old fashioned fire and brimstone preacher,” Burroughs noted on the day the book was published;
“The Reverend Lee rides again” (
ROW,
170).
1
Nova
Express
is actually a mixing deck of many voicesâcutting from a hardboiled detective drawl to the comic rhythms of a picaresque villain, and from the convulsive beauty of a Surrealist poet to a tempo as hard and electrical as the clicking of a Geiger counterâbut Burroughs would have been pleased to sound like a sulphurous Old Testament authority. For
Nova Express
is nothing if not an analysis of and tribute to the apocalyptic power of The Word.
Marshall McLuhan, whose own classic
Understanding Media
appeared the same year, got both the mediumâ“an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative”âand the eschatological message: “It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction,” he concluded his own review for
The Nation
in December 1964; “It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home.”
2
Nova Express
appeared at the height of the Cold War and the Space Race, when Armageddon was rarely out of the news or off the screens. 1964 had opened with the release of Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
and would climax the week
Nova Express
was published with a U.S. presidential election over which mushroom clouds had hung, Lyndon Johnson's famous “Daisy Girl” TV advert linking the prospect of a Barry Goldwater victory with the countdown to nuclear annihilation. In short: “This is a burning planetâAny minute now the whole fucking shit house goes up.”
Nova Express
begins with the blistering Last Words of the mysterious Hassan i Sabbah because time is running out: the book is not just a call-to-arms against those who brought us Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mentioned several times, but a manifesto for global resistance against the 1 percent who run our planet like an alien colony. The book
predicts what cataclysms are being “summoned up by an IBM machine and a handful of virus crystals” and describes what dystopian futures are being made on a “soft calculating machine geared to find more and more punch cards.” The mainframe in
Dr. Strangelove
was an IBM, but the corporation that bore the Burroughs family name, a major rival to IBM in those days, had already featured in such disaster B-movies as
The Night the World Exploded
(1957), in which a Burroughs B205 calculates the exact time of the planet's destruction. In the month
Nova Express
appeared, November 1964, the Burroughs Corporation supplied NASA with a B5500, an upgrade of the model that had inaugurated “third generation” computer systems; the room-sized solid state machines using transistors and mylar tape magnetic drums that were the first truly self-governing “mechanical brains.” Updating his 1952 novel
Queer
,
which references “thinking machines,” as well as “the electronic brain” that goes berserk in
Naked Lunch
, Burroughs uses the “sound of thinking metal” as one of the voices of
Nova Express.
In 1968 Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey
made the HAL 9000 the sinister star of his sequel to
Dr. Strangelove
, and the following year the Burroughs computer helped launch the Saturn rockets that put a man on the moon. Using technology no more advanced than a pair of scissors
, Nova Express
was a launch vehicle in William Burroughs' own Space Program, his rival mission to invent a “Mythology for the Space Age.”
Along with the other volumes of his Cut-Up Trilogyâ
The Soft Machine
and
The Ticket That Exploded
â
Nova Express
is a Time Machine, and it's about time we caught up. But despite the wide reach of Burroughs' image across popular cultureâor maybe
because
of itâvery little is known about the trilogy. How much of these “cut-up novels” are “cut-up”? What order should they be read in, and
how
exactly should we read them? Why is there so little sex in
Nova Express
compared to the other books, and what does its title mean? Since most of what
is
known about the trilogy turns out to be wrong, anyone who thinks
Nova Express
was the last one and the simplest of the three will need to think again.
“I BRING NOT PEACE BUT PIECES”
Nova Express
fires the reader into a textual outer space that escapes linear time through montage methods applied at both a structural and syntactical level. As an assault on what Burroughs calls the “Reality Film,” the method resembles an accelerated form of cinematic editing, as we're invited to recognize: “Time and place shift in speed-up movie.” Repeated across the book, the rapid-fire fragments of text induce a recurrent sense of déjà vu that is deeply disorientating, as is the uncanny sense that Burroughs may have borrowed techniques from one medium to update another but that he is also predicting
the media of the future. When “The Subliminal Kid” takes over
jukeboxes of the world and cuts in the music with the movies, he precisely replicates the sampling of a digital cultural environment. Likewise, the action of
Nova Express
is modeled on old-fashioned penny arcade pinball machines,
“jolting clicking tilting,” and yet simulates a console for fantasy video games in codex form: “K9 was in combat with the alien mind screen.” With a pun on “canine” that evokes the “human dogs” now in a state of global revolt against their alien masters, “Pilot K9” or “Agent K9” is a technical upgrade of the 1930s comic strip hero in
Secret Agent X-9
scripted by Dashiell Hammett, but today the K9 tag is also immediately recognizable as a science fiction gaming identity.
Traveling in time isn't a theme in
Nova Express
; it's the aim of the form. This is why it's hard to say what is or isn't a “reference,” since the text's viral signifiers find their signifieds not only in the past but in the future. Faced with cut-up passages, the reader can only learn to wait for the “original” words, at which point they take on meaning by discovering new referents. However, since the process happens in both directions at once and the permutations are incalculable, and since the reader's point of intersection with the text changes on every reading, new combinations always keep appearing. As well as being wide-open and open-ended, Burroughs' writing is future-oriented, which is why science fiction was the ideal genre for his cut-up methods.
It wasn't mimesis and it wasn't magic: “I am a chemist not a
prophet,” says a technical sergeant for The Lazarus
Pharmaceutical Company, speaking for Burroughs. The chemistry is a mix of the cryptic, the haunting, and the intertextually impossible: “Good night sweet ladies”? Is that Shakespeare, or T.S. Eliot quoting Shakespeare? “Migrants of ape in gasoline crack of history”? What? Does it really say “Lens googles stuttering light flak”? And Uranian Willy “heard the twittering supersonic threats through antennae embedded in his translucent skull”? Google and Twitter? Does “No bueno” come from
Naked Lunch
or
The Soft Machine
or both? Sometimes a word clicks, a bell rings and the future leaks out (and “his face lights up like a pinball machine,” to borrow from
Naked Lunch
), but the reader's flippers can't keep up with the pell-mell rush of verbal steel balls.
Narrative episodes drive the text on while cut-up passages “flow out on ticker tape,” and yet Burroughs left most of his material on the cutting-room floor. This is the first revelation about
Nova Express
: just how much
more
there was of itâincluding collages of literary quotations (Shakespeare, Eliot, Rimbaud, and Joyce in particular) and of newspaper reports about Polaris missiles, the Mariner II Venus probe, A-bomb tests, and high-tech terms: “videosonicâInertial guidance unitsâVoice integratorsâDirect view control systemsâinter valometer computers,” and on and on.
3
Burroughs kept only fragments, and it's fascinating to discover in the archival sources that the single word “capsule” in one passage belonged to John Glenn, who piloted his Mercury spacecraft into orbit in 1962 and was feted on his return with one of the largest ever ticker tape parades. A “founding text of the information culture” informed by probability theory and first wave cybernetics,
4
Nova Express
uses “extremely small particles” of data to experiment with noise and redundancy, to see how much can be left out of the message, and also to show how to get from vacuum tubes to nanotech microchips:
“It's the microfilm principleâsmaller and smaller.” Burroughs juxtaposes the subatomic with the astronomical, referencing white dwarf stars and the Crab Nebula while citing the astronomer Robert Kraft. When K9 says “the human nervous system defines the physics I have constructed,” we're invited to see that the book combines extremes of scale to construct its own kind of textual physics.
Nominated for a Nebula Award in 1965,
Nova Express
inspired 1980s cyberpunk writing such as William Gibson's, but it has cut up literary history by continuing to remain more radical than the science fiction it made possible.
5
The book's stream of literary fragments, sampled narratives, shifts in point of view, clips from B-movies and subliminal single frames of current events uncannily maps the digital environment of the Internet that has made Google-eyed cultural DJs of us all. The “futuristic” form of
Nova Express
, which builds on the hybrid geographies of “Interzone” in
Naked Lunch
,
doesn't appear antiquated because it's not clean and pure like most 1960s visions of the future, but mixed and dirty. In cinematic terms, it's closer to the tech-noir world of Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner
(1982), which it influenced, than to Kubrick's
Space Odyssey,
although it also has something in common with one of Kubrick's sources: Jean-Luc Godard's
Alphaville,
released six months after
Nova Express
and featuring the gravel-voiced Alpha 60 computer. Significantly,
Alphaville
's secret agent Lemmie Caution drives a Ford Galaxie but wears a private eye's trench and fedora, and while the film may be set in a dystopian “Zone” it is shot entirely in the night-time streets of Paris in a bleak monochrome, to insist that the future is not in the future; it's already here.
Looking back half a century,
Nova Express
appears
both of its times and uncannily prophetic, not just aes
thetically, but politically. A Book of Revelations, in it Burroughs plays the role of Willy the Rat, a defector from the American ruling class determined to “call the law” on its true criminality. For Burroughs, revealing “how ugly the Ugly American can be” started at home: alternative drafts of “The
Last Words of Hassan i Sabbah” openly invoked his “proud American name” (“Proud of what exactly?”), while one of its earliest versions addressed both sides of his family in accusatory block capitals: “MR ADDING MACHINE BURROUGHS MR ZERO BURROUGHS MR VIRUS BURROUGHS LEE THE PRESS AGENT.”
6
His paternal and maternal heritage tied Burroughs to pioneering capitalists not only in business and military computing (the Burroughs Adding Machine) but also in public relations (Uncle “Poison” Ivy Lee, son of the “Reverend Lee” and press agent for Rockefeller and Standard Oil). Burroughs put his privileged haute-bourgeois, classical education to good use by turning it back on itself. He was thinking of Shakespeare's
The Tempest
in the title of his book's penultimate section, “Melted Into Air,” but
Nova Express
is born of the insight Karl Marx had into the world market (“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”), updated to include the role of the media to aggravate conflicts and sell back what it steals from us. It wasn't prophecy to Burroughs, it was just straight reportage: “Yep its all there in
Nova Express
,” he observed of mid-1960s America, “word for stupid ugly word” (
ROW
, 191).
This is the way
Nova Express
begins, by reversing the duplicitous use of word and image that defines the role of the PR agent and the Mad Man: ratting out the Cold War national security state (“Top SecretâÂClassifiedâFor The Board”), blowing the whistle on toxic consumer capitalism (“For God's sake don't let that Coca-Cola thing out”), and exposing global ecological disaster (“Not The Green DealâDon't show them that”). Reviewing
Nova Express
, McLuhan had declared, “We live science fiction.” Now, we live
Nova Express
: replace Lazarus Pharmaceuticals by Monsanto, with its genetically modified “terminal seeds”; swap the monopolistic magazine empire of
Time
,
Life
, and
Fortune
(referenced several times) by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation or the Walt Disney Company; and for Death Dwarfs (“manipulated by remote control”) read hunter-killer combat drones over Asia.
Nova Express
is not a book from the past: it addresses our
present-time disaster, our still burning planet.