Nova Express (5 page)

Burroughs' attitudes toward history,
news, and time are suggested by the revisions he
didn't
make for the revised manuscript he submitted in October 1962, even though the historical context could scarcely have been more urgent or more resonant. Two days before he mailed his manuscript, Kennedy was addressing Khrushchev on television at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were upgrading the alert status for nuclear war to DEFCON 2, its highest-ever condition of readiness. Cut up with tittle-tattle about film stars and murder stories, Burroughs' typescript for “There's A Lot Ended,” written in March 1962, had included prophetic “rumors about Castro,” but that October he neither restored the line nor updated his manuscript, even though the eyes of the world were on Cuba and the world seemed on the brink of nova.

Burroughs' attack on
Time
was also a personal counter­a
ttack, most directly in response to its review of the Grove Press
Naked Lunch
, which was so offensive he sued the magazine, winning token damages of £5 in November 1963. The
Time
review had also attacked the then-unpublished
Nova Express
, which it described as coming “daringly close to utter babble, according to reports.”
36
Burroughs cut up the text from
Time
(and the libel case documents) and recycled the phrase “utter babble” in two magazine-format publications printed in 1965, his own version of
Time
and
APO-33
, in the spirit of what goes around comes around. Or as he put it in
Towers Open Fire
, intoning the words over canisters of reality film: “Curse go back.”

Of the trinity of media magnates attacked in early drafts of “Last Words,” by far the most significant was Henry Luce.
Nova Express
was Burroughs' central weapon against the monopolistic power of Luce's own “trilogy” of
Time, Life,
and
Fortune
, titles that not only named but in effect copyrighted Time, Life, and Fortune. Luce's name appears in dozens of typescripts dating from 1960, several addressed directly to him, demanding he dismantle his “Time Machine.”
37
Burroughs' public counterattack had started in 1960 with
Minutes to Go
, a manifesto that both addressed potential allies in the cut-up project and identified its primary enemy through an “OPEN LETTER TO LIFE MAGAZINE.” This cut-up of
Life
's 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. Typescript, 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 his Cut-Up Trilogy from the leftovers of his thousand-page “Word Hoard”; but so far as
Nova Express
is concerned, there's little truth in this often-repeated claim.

16. Burroughs to Rosset, May 24, 1963 (Grove Press Records, Special Collections, Syracuse University.) After, abbreviated to Syracuse.

17. Undated 2-page typescript (Berg 9.16).

18. Timothy Leary,
High Priest
(New York: Ronin, 1995), 225.

19. Burroughs to Gysin, August 18, 1961 (Berg 85.5).

20. Burroughs to Rosset, April 2, 1962 (Syracuse).

21. Burroughs to Wenning, September 23, 1961 (William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, SPEC.CMS.85, 1.1).

22. Burroughs to Rosset, October 2, 1962 (Syracuse).

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

24. Burroughs also made three contributions to the German magazine
Rhinozeros
and contributed parts of
Nova Express
to
The Second Coming
in 1962 and Ira Cohen's
Gnaoua
in 1964.

25. Burroughs to Seaver, July 21, 1964 (Berg 75.1).

26. In rough terms, a quarter of the material in chapters 1 to 4 is cut-up, compared with half of the material in chapters 5 to 7. Almost half the book's sections combine cut-up and non-cut-up writing, and of the rest half have just one or the other.

27. Burroughs to Seaver, October 24, 1963 (Syracuse).

28. Burroughs to Seaver, July 21, 1964 and October 25, 1964 (Berg 75.1).

29. At this time, Burroughs made another collage that placed an adapted copy of the front cover of a November 30, 1962 copy of
Time
magazine in between his two
Nova Express
collages. A photograph of this collage is reproduced in
The Art of William S. Burroughs: Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs
, edited by Collin Fallows (Nürnberg: moderne Kunst, 2013), 61. According to Barry Miles, it was created at the Hotel Chelsea, New York, in April 1965, and Burroughs used a Spanish language newspaper brought with him from Tangier (e-mail correspondence April 30, 2013). As well as influencing numerous musicians, including an album of the same title by John Zorn (2011), and inspiring Andre Perkowski's cine­matic homage (2010),
Nova Express
gave its title to a newspaper in Alan Moore's 1986 comic-book series,
Watchman
.