What do you think?
Rate this book
The Nova Trilogy #3
The Ticket That Exploded
In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs’s grand “cut-up” trilogy that starts with The Soft Machine and continues through Nova Express reaches its climax as inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet. Only Burroughs could make such a nightmare vision of scientists and combat troops, of ad men and con men whose deceitful language has spread like an incurable disease be at once so frightening and so enthralling.
217 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
106 people are currently reading
3921 people want to read
About the author
William S. Burroughs
452 books7,107 followersWilliam Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer.
A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".
His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.
He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.
Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".
Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".
His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.
He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.
Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".
Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 161 reviews
March 11, 2025
“Myself am Hell: which way I turn is Hell.”
John Milton
I read this one while soaking in the hellish psychedelic mud bath of the seventies, to which treatment I strenuously objected.
It's like the type of sleazy cops and crooks B-film that Beelzebub screens in an endless loop in the stinking lower Chambers of Dis, I believe.
It explains my postgraduate education by Sleaze Immersion at the Royally Awful Hospital!
The docs thought that healing only happened by immersion in the Lowest filth.
That is Burrough's method too…
Only he - a true genius - uses it as a parody of the Establishment.
***
This is why I adore Burroughs (but in small doses)! He gives us the scary straight goods on what makes our political masters' methodology work...
In its highly dysfunctional way.
***
Modern Civilisation is dystopian. Why? Because it makes its citizens hate themselves.
The only reason Burroughs is a must-read is that the System inflicted such deep self-hatred on him that he WOKE UP:
For he cariacatures our button-down masters so well that we don't hate them any more than we already hate ourselves -
He creates a level playing field!
And that, above all else, is his benison here.
John Milton
I read this one while soaking in the hellish psychedelic mud bath of the seventies, to which treatment I strenuously objected.
It's like the type of sleazy cops and crooks B-film that Beelzebub screens in an endless loop in the stinking lower Chambers of Dis, I believe.
It explains my postgraduate education by Sleaze Immersion at the Royally Awful Hospital!
The docs thought that healing only happened by immersion in the Lowest filth.
That is Burrough's method too…
Only he - a true genius - uses it as a parody of the Establishment.
***
This is why I adore Burroughs (but in small doses)! He gives us the scary straight goods on what makes our political masters' methodology work...
In its highly dysfunctional way.
***
Modern Civilisation is dystopian. Why? Because it makes its citizens hate themselves.
The only reason Burroughs is a must-read is that the System inflicted such deep self-hatred on him that he WOKE UP:
For he cariacatures our button-down masters so well that we don't hate them any more than we already hate ourselves -
He creates a level playing field!
And that, above all else, is his benison here.
December 21, 2017
Lust for life
I got a lust for life
I got a lust for life
- Iggy Pop, Lust for Life
Reviewing, cutting, looking slowly back at 1962 o͝orˌtekst, 1967 Endetext, fold, refold, oragami fold, cut, paste, recut, film and redact. So? Start again. From the bigbanging. - there are no good words- I wrote silences - review the story of two halves, two texts, living text, breathing review Here comes Johnny Yen again/With the liquor and drugs - 'Better than 'the real thing?' - there is no real thing - reviewing the review, before the end, I'm not sure the cut-up review will work. Abandon all holes, ye whosorifices here. Mother smother may I must I smother mother this May. And the flesh machine/He's gonna do another striptease. I've naked lunched and snacked on soft machines. I've dined on queers and feasted on exterminators! These all do their part, they have all left me full and slightly sick. Puppy sick. Sick. sick./[sic]poopy. I'm not sure my form or pattern or strategy will add much to the Universe. I'm not sure it will subtract either. It will (like a Luxor light on New Years) attract only non-native moths, that feed the non-native bats, that feed the non-native owls, circling the giant urban a$$hole of the Las Vegas universe. Boys will be boys and boys, 'Boys we've been sublimated.' I'm worth a million in prizes/With my torture film.I'll redraft this draft, re-view this review, and post it toast it on Audible. I'll come at Amazon from two directions. Equally futile F body. I'll let DearGODreads swallow my early editions. I'll let Audible carry my post-review drip penicillin. Clock. clock. Tap. tap. Tock. tock. Written before on 'the Soft Typewriter' - transparent quivering substance the body is two halves stuck together around - Jeff B3zos - Lizard king. Owns my words. Licking the metallic air. Sells me your word drones. Shed your skin. Barter, trade, and consume all words made flesh - No good - No bueno - Departed have left no address - It's all done with tape recorders. Well I am just a modern guy/Of course I've had it in the ear before Listen again. Listen harder. Escape to and from the Nova. But never dream of leaving the word horde.
I got a lust for life
I got a lust for life
- Iggy Pop, Lust for Life
Reviewing, cutting, looking slowly back at 1962 o͝orˌtekst, 1967 Endetext, fold, refold, oragami fold, cut, paste, recut, film and redact. So? Start again. From the bigbanging. - there are no good words- I wrote silences - review the story of two halves, two texts, living text, breathing review Here comes Johnny Yen again/With the liquor and drugs - 'Better than 'the real thing?' - there is no real thing - reviewing the review, before the end, I'm not sure the cut-up review will work. Abandon all holes, ye whosorifices here. Mother smother may I must I smother mother this May. And the flesh machine/He's gonna do another striptease. I've naked lunched and snacked on soft machines. I've dined on queers and feasted on exterminators! These all do their part, they have all left me full and slightly sick. Puppy sick. Sick. sick./[sic]poopy. I'm not sure my form or pattern or strategy will add much to the Universe. I'm not sure it will subtract either. It will (like a Luxor light on New Years) attract only non-native moths, that feed the non-native bats, that feed the non-native owls, circling the giant urban a$$hole of the Las Vegas universe. Boys will be boys and boys, 'Boys we've been sublimated.' I'm worth a million in prizes/With my torture film.I'll redraft this draft, re-view this review, and post it toast it on Audible. I'll come at Amazon from two directions. Equally futile F body. I'll let DearGODreads swallow my early editions. I'll let Audible carry my post-review drip penicillin. Clock. clock. Tap. tap. Tock. tock. Written before on 'the Soft Typewriter' - transparent quivering substance the body is two halves stuck together around - Jeff B3zos - Lizard king. Owns my words. Licking the metallic air. Sells me your word drones. Shed your skin. Barter, trade, and consume all words made flesh - No good - No bueno - Departed have left no address - It's all done with tape recorders. Well I am just a modern guy/Of course I've had it in the ear before Listen again. Listen harder. Escape to and from the Nova. But never dream of leaving the word horde.
June 5, 2016
Having read this all the way through I can state confidently that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. And yet, at the same time, I sort of did. My understanding was somehow behind the story rather than in the story itself. The book seems to be about how the human visual imagination is really an invasion of alien messages, so the moment you 'see' something in your mind's eye you are actually submitting to outside control.
To combat this in a book, a text can't have a narrative that presents a story flow that can be visualized by the reader in linear time. So the meaning of the text has to accumulate in disconnected chunks. Something like this at any rate. I am probably talking gibberish...
To combat this in a book, a text can't have a narrative that presents a story flow that can be visualized by the reader in linear time. So the meaning of the text has to accumulate in disconnected chunks. Something like this at any rate. I am probably talking gibberish...
March 12, 2013
If you don't like the idea of reading paragraph after paragraph about catapulting streams of jism, then maybe this book is not for you. But the Ticket That Exploded is about so much more than torrential ejaculations... it's about melting your head right down to your shoulders. There is a kind of zen state that becomes necessary to read Burroughs sometimes, you have to really let the sickness flood over you and understand that it is not the author that is sick, but instead you, you with your fear and your rules. Burroughs is reprograming you. Erasing fear and sensitivity to bullshit. This book is a shaman guiding you through the spirit world of your anxiety.
May 30, 2019
Maybe this goes without saying but William Burroughs' cut-up pieces are so aggressively anti-narrative that they're openly hostile to the reader. The reader has no purchase on the plot (what little plot there is) and, more than that, the plot has no purchase on itself. Because of the very cut-up process, no aspect of the novel can develop; rather, there are small stretches of comprehension padded by great stretches of experimentation. This makes for a work that takes a lot of work to read, which wouldn't be so bad - most really good books are hard to read, and worth reading because they're hard - except that this particular work doesn't seem to want to be read. This kind of thing, it should be said, isn't entirely without precedent or merit. At points this recalls Acker, Pynchon, and even Joyce, who all tried out different ways of presenting language on the page and so, by extension, of presenting pages themselves. Their experiments with form all suggest a common frustration with the rigidity of that same form (i.e., the novel), further suggesting a frustration with cultural structures that enforce conformity of all sorts. This is (often) what is meant when a novel that's too hard for anyone to read is called subversive-it challenges the social order. The artist whose work this novel is most reminiscent of, though, is Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein's montage experiments parallel Burroughs' cut-up method, an approach meant to explore the meaning of the unexpected juxtaposition. For Burroughs, whose method was built upon the assumption that all language (both speech and text) is prerecorded, and so can only be rearranged, these rearrangements exist along a spectrum of meaning but cannot be wholly original or perfectly meaningful. I'm really sympathetic to this theory and approach, and this kind of stuff is what I think makes the Beats interesting and proto-postmodern in their views on language and signification and meaning-making, and yet for all my appreciation of subversion and sympathy of approach I find this next to unreadable. This may well be what the novel wants.
February 19, 2011
But if you're reading this then you probably expect a challenge anyway. What it means. Smell of rancid tide flat--police drama strangely flickers in and out, much channels are playing. picture. The unnerving documentary on parasitic Machine, however this strangely analogous to Doctor. Imagine that without proper documentation. Channel-change static bursts to foil religious mind-control Now imagine what, and poisonous insects of the amazon--a sci-fi cable box. Doctor Benway less noticeably playing a variety of sex films. traveling agent attempting the Soft belies the strange. No Dalek has only 20 channels. Imagine that these channels are strange religious sacrifices. I found myself. Imagining at every regulated drug usage text of almost-coherence contained despite the punctuation mark. Who, and a film about junkies, sex films--if anything; I don't know, nor do I really care. A time among those--capital punishment boys undressing fever dreams of the poisonous insects of the Soft Machine. The text of The However Searching for a book is to flicker in and out of the presence liked it just the same.An Amazon, a sci-fi police drama, who flickers against sexual gratification--a convoluted search indeed. Among channels in Naked Lunch, the best description I can give randomly every few seconds.
Now imagine what all this would look like when the TV was set to jump. A blatant narrative in this junk-sick rectal mucous (sorry).
Now imagine what all this would look like when the TV was set to jump. A blatant narrative in this junk-sick rectal mucous (sorry).
August 19, 2015
Strange thing happened while reading. For the first time I felt genuine empathy for a book, not the words in the book but the actual tree the book was made of. Not that Burroughs is bad. He is innovative and funny and when he's in a good mood he moves his cut-up experiments toward poignancy. I will read more. But the significant enjoyment I got from this was outweighed by the perhaps false but nonetheless overwhelming impression that I was wasting my time.
November 12, 2024
It's like a 230-page slow-motion nightmare taking place under water. William S. Burroughs's The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text is not for readers who demand a tightly reasoned and wholly comprehensible book. You will encounter whole pages that appear to make no sense, but are crudely poetic and cogent nonetheless. If you accept the author's world at the outset, you can enjoy The Ticket That Exploded; otherwise, you will be at sea.
December 2, 2007
The one William S. Burroughs book that causes the fan base to be afraid, really afraid. Burroughs at his most out there - those who have a fear of experimental writing - stay far away. This is a live bomb ticking slowly and it may explode in your hands! For those who are not afraid, this is really good. Burroughs at his most dry, and distain for the real square's world most intense work.
April 4, 2015
This work needs to be approached as a piece of conceptual art or an occult manual... those seeking storytime may find it somewhat hard going.
December 15, 2025
I like cut-ups. Cut-ups I like.
August 29, 2009
Burroughs' 2nd cut-up novel (if I have the chronology right) & the beginining of what's, for me, his strongest period. After writing my quickie 'review' of "Naked Lunch" in wch I mentioned Balch's "Towers Open Fire", I moved onto this one & 'randomly' opened to page 110 to read:
""This way - To the Towers" - Ali pointed to an office building that dominated the square - Kiki ran toward the building covered now by tower fire - Hands pulled him into a doorway - On the roof of the building was a battery of radios and movie cameras that vibrated to static - A green creature with metal claw hands was giving orders to a group of partisans who manned the gun tower - From the radio poured a metallic staccato voice -
""Photo falling - Word Falling - Break through in Grey Room - Towers, open fire" -"
Yep, Burroughs was in his stride of having a breakthrough in the brain w/ this one. Unlike "Naked Lunch", this no longer seems like a collection of notes but a coherent report from a parallel universe where the true faces of the enemy are revealed. My having opened to this page where "Towers, open fire" is written isn't just an indication of Burroughs' repetitiveness of certain phrases - it's also an indication of how magikal it all seems, of how oddly one can link into the writing - a proclamation for the effectiveness of Burroughs' formal strategies for breaking thru into deep levels of the mind.
""This way - To the Towers" - Ali pointed to an office building that dominated the square - Kiki ran toward the building covered now by tower fire - Hands pulled him into a doorway - On the roof of the building was a battery of radios and movie cameras that vibrated to static - A green creature with metal claw hands was giving orders to a group of partisans who manned the gun tower - From the radio poured a metallic staccato voice -
""Photo falling - Word Falling - Break through in Grey Room - Towers, open fire" -"
Yep, Burroughs was in his stride of having a breakthrough in the brain w/ this one. Unlike "Naked Lunch", this no longer seems like a collection of notes but a coherent report from a parallel universe where the true faces of the enemy are revealed. My having opened to this page where "Towers, open fire" is written isn't just an indication of Burroughs' repetitiveness of certain phrases - it's also an indication of how magikal it all seems, of how oddly one can link into the writing - a proclamation for the effectiveness of Burroughs' formal strategies for breaking thru into deep levels of the mind.
December 28, 2023
Burroughs cut-up yöntemiyle anti romanın en iddialı örneğini veriyor. Cut-up anlam arandığında sonsuza dek zamanımızı tüketebilecek bir yöntem. Kesip eklediği, metni adeta enstalasyona çevirdiği bu metinde ne anlatıldığı hakkında herhangi bir fikrim yok. Bitirdikten sonra ne düşüneceğimi bilmiyorum bile. Neden devam ettiğimi sorarsanız okuma sürecinin kafa karışıklığını sevdiğimi söyleyebilirim. Metin benden nefret edercesine kendini saklıyor. Anlatmaya giriştiği şeyler asla gelişmiyor. Burroughs kalemi zehirli olan bir yazar. Anlatmak istemediğinde bile okunabilir olması onun yeteneğini gösteriyor.
September 24, 2019
I’m not sure the restored text combined with the cut up method does a lot for anyone but the hardened scholar; but I did find this novel significantly more narrative driven than The Soft Machine. Perhaps I’m wrong but it does make the book more interesting. Found myself occasionally disappointed when the narrative would disappear into cut up because I was actually enjoying the story. But I think that’s part of the point of the whole technique.
January 18, 2016
What happens in this book? Why, the cock flipped out and up rectal musk of KY jelly slides the green fingers of the fish boy into autoerotic tape manipulation causes an overlay of the physical forms in St. Louis, joe. Less a story and more a set of junkie koans to meditate upon in your search for the transformative power of the Word. Because in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, twisted in Burrough's thin, gnarled fingers into a vicious demiurge plumbing the darkest desires and depths of your psyche.
September 22, 2015
I was going to do this whole review in Burroughs' cut up technique, but I'm too lazy. This was a tough read for me. I loved Junky, Queer, and of course, Naked Lunch, and maybe I expected something along those lines. The story seems to be about mind and body control through orgasms and splicing of tapes and I have to say Burroughs has a fucking dirty dirty dirty mind and I'm not sure what he was on at the time, but whatever the drug was, I'd congratulate his dealer. Good job.
I really liked the dirty parts and all the jizz and blue ejaculations etc etc etc, but there comes a time in a girl's day when liters of sperm seem to be a little much. Anyway, bottom line, if you like sci-fi, and I mean, CRAZY IMAGINATIVE AND LYRICAL sci-fi, this book is good for that. If you enjoy boys, again, climb right in, but if you're looking for paragraphs and actual completed sentences, you might feel a little lost, um, let's say around page three.
He's a genius, no doubt about it. The story where he explains control with tape splicing and how he can have an argument without even being in the room with the person, proves it. I thought that was brilliant. Burroughs' imagination is fascinating.
I'm glad I read this novel, his longest, but it's not one on my favorites.
I really liked the dirty parts and all the jizz and blue ejaculations etc etc etc, but there comes a time in a girl's day when liters of sperm seem to be a little much. Anyway, bottom line, if you like sci-fi, and I mean, CRAZY IMAGINATIVE AND LYRICAL sci-fi, this book is good for that. If you enjoy boys, again, climb right in, but if you're looking for paragraphs and actual completed sentences, you might feel a little lost, um, let's say around page three.
He's a genius, no doubt about it. The story where he explains control with tape splicing and how he can have an argument without even being in the room with the person, proves it. I thought that was brilliant. Burroughs' imagination is fascinating.
I'm glad I read this novel, his longest, but it's not one on my favorites.
June 17, 2015
well that was disappointing. i love experimental fiction, but this is experimental fiction gone wrong. this is, by some arguments, burroughs' last cut-up method book, and it's where you realize he's come to believe all the crazy stuff he's been saying. usually this just results in a certain electricity in how it all comes out, but in this book he gets too literal and things stops feeling weird and starts feeling crazy and tedious, because he's detailing for you how you're gonna change the world by using the cut-up method. dammit. it's also the cut-up book in which he cuts up a lot of songs that you don't know. i could have looked up the songs and played them over and over and put them into my essence to give this a fair trial, but the songs i did, when they leapt out at me, took me out of it. maybe if i'd taken the time to get the full picture, but i doubt it. yes, it has some strong sections, but this is the book that could ruin burroughs for you. still...my love is strong.
March 23, 2008
I read this right after reading Bukowski, so I was a little apprehensive. I really didn´t want another masturbatory ode to losers and the women they convice to take care of them.
I really liked this book. It was so stream-of-conciousness that after awhile it became a game to figure out any kind of story line underneath it all. (There is) It was actually quite disorienting: a straighforward paragraph, a paragragh or two disecting the first paragraphy, five or six paragraghs dissecting the previous ones, then several pages of literary echolalia (WORD POINTS!) bringing into focus what had just been covered and moments, phrases, words from previous moments of clarity mixed up with all sorts of randomness. Then...back to clean text all of a sudden. It was jarring..in a good way.
I liked it because it was easy for my mind to go in a million places all at once, very stimulating.
I really liked this book. It was so stream-of-conciousness that after awhile it became a game to figure out any kind of story line underneath it all. (There is) It was actually quite disorienting: a straighforward paragraph, a paragragh or two disecting the first paragraphy, five or six paragraghs dissecting the previous ones, then several pages of literary echolalia (WORD POINTS!) bringing into focus what had just been covered and moments, phrases, words from previous moments of clarity mixed up with all sorts of randomness. Then...back to clean text all of a sudden. It was jarring..in a good way.
I liked it because it was easy for my mind to go in a million places all at once, very stimulating.
May 17, 2025
Certainly enjoyed myself, i feel like what burroughs is interested in writing about has evolved through the course of this trilogy. Still hard to understand, but i thought it was very good x
January 18, 2015
You have to be in the right (or wrong) frame of mind to read Burrough's classic 'cut up' technique of literature which is really just a series of disjointed paragraphs, little punctuation and pages of streams of consciousness. If you can get your head around all the word vomit, you'll find a strange, sci-fi ish storyline which is depraved, crazy, and utterly random with some downright bizarre characters. Like The Soft Machine it's a tough one to read, but there are some awesome choice quotes and conversations scattered amongst the chaos which kept me going and grinning like an idiot at the end.
January 23, 2016
Hypnotizing. By the fact of Mr. Lee creating an entire universe for the purpose of presenting the cut up method not only to the reader but to the whole universe as a manual and as a combat manifesto against the powers that be. Utterly fascinating are also the step-by-step experiments of splicing tapes and breaking down the association patterns constructed over our entire time in this planet. Loved it. Are there any Brion Gysin or Ian Sommerville books out there? Gotta find out.
January 25, 2014
The Ticket That Exploded is Burroughs' best (and longest) book in his cut-up trilogy. It also is the most experimental and philosophical (if you are interested in the cut-up theory he adopted, this is the book for you). Moreover, it includes art and even writing by longtime friend and collaborator, Brion Gysin, who turned WSB on to the cut-up method. This is a must-read.
May 8, 2017
A completely incomprehensible entry into the Burroughs bibliography, which is a shame because when it is coherent, it forms an interesting story in and of itself.
However, it is mostly just Burroughs cut-up insanity, total gibberish likely for the sake of being so. A marathon of tape recorders, semen, fish boys, ect... Would not recommend, personally.
However, it is mostly just Burroughs cut-up insanity, total gibberish likely for the sake of being so. A marathon of tape recorders, semen, fish boys, ect... Would not recommend, personally.
August 22, 2007
My favorite of the cut-up novels (includes Wild Boys, Nova Express, The Soft Machine)...lyrical, loopy, confused, witty, as usual: funny as can be, and (perhaps?) an important contribution to the evolution of literary form.
December 20, 2017
I would file Burroughs into the “abstract literature” cabinet – maybe “experimental literature” is the more accepted name for this. This is where the prose becomes so elusive that the story (if fiction does tell a story – and I would say in all cases it is telling some sort of a story) becomes buried, blurred by “unreliable narrators” or drugs or temporal shifts or who knows what. My first introduction to this sort of literature was William Burroughs. Before I stumbled upon Naked Lunch the most out-there fiction I had read had been the fantasy work of Clive Barker – Weaveworld or The Great and Secret Show or something. Though I find fantastic fiction (horror, science fiction, etc.) is typically straight-forward in its prose as the story itself has taken on this outlandish mode – a world contained in a carpet or something – and the author is using his skills to keep up with his imagination, to describe these netherworlds or Cthulhu or whatever. This is against say James Joyce who is taking the mundane day or night (literally) and decorating his prose in everything he can to elevate the day-to-day to what he considers the mythic in pursuit of a hidden aesthetic “goal” (for want of a better word). I’ve got to be honest, when reading Joyce at his most abstract/experimental, I really don’t see what the difference is between his literature and say the poetry of T.S. Eliot or E.E. Cummings or someone. In the experimental mode, the prose balloons to the point of poetry. Of course, Burroughs is taking both the imaginative mode of the fantastic writer and combining it with the abstract prose of the experimentalist that would leave most readers completely lost.
And I would be one of those readers. Which might be the point. Being lost, trying to force your brain to comprehend what the hell the author is trying to say.
I think it is safe to say that reading a Burroughs novel – especially those of the late 50’s early 60’s cut-up period – from cover-to-cover is a fool’s errand. There is no plot or plot development really, characters pop up, but more through repetition of presence or names rather than through personality or character traits. Sure, Bill Lee, Dr. Benway, Hamburger Mary, Izzy the Push, etc. appear throughout the cut-up novels, but they are more ciphers (or capitalized names) than characters. Of course, this is what an academic would say makes Burroughs “post-modern” or whatever – I think that really just groups him with some American writers all writing during the same historical period – namely post world war 2 (and before the Reagan 80s, where experimentalism was frowned upon in exchange for minimalism or other modes of storytelling).
Really, reading one of these cut-up novels now (2017 – and I read The Soft Machine last year I believe) it is impossible to remove the presence of Burroughs the beatnik writer, junkie artist from the work. I’d blame David Cronenberg (not in a bad way! Naked Lunch the film is one of the best, most creative adaptations of any novel ever made!) and time. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to read Burroughs in say 1960. He was saying things that no one had said (outside of pornographic novels or maybe the Marquis De Sade or Lautreamont but even Maldoror is not as explicit as any of Burroughs), and even though Burroughs existed well outside the mainstream of literature, part of the whole Beat aesthetic was absolutely to push all boundaries of experience and acceptance. I’m not saying anything new here, just still trying to wrap my head around reading something like The Ticket That Exploded in 2017.
I keep coming back to poetry though. Burroughs influence on Western popular culture (especially music rock & roll) is immense – David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop, Steely Dan, Trainspotting, Alan Moore, punk, heavy metal, “industrial” – all of this can point back in some way to Burroughs (the Heavy Metal Kid makes frequent appearances), not to mention nihilistic cool – that attitude of remove where nothing is impressive because you’ve seen it all (or in Burroughs case you’re on the smack and that’s all you care about) – resulting in stoned youngsters screaming into microphones and smashing guitars. But the poetry of it – if we are to take Burroughs at face value (a dangerous and maybe fool-hardy proposition), the cut-up frees the writer from the standard tropes of temporal control. Essentially, the past, present, and future are confused because the writer has chosen to utilize a collage-like method of organizing words, as opposed to a causal method – I am writing in a causal method right now – words in combination form a flow that begins with “I would file” and ends with "an American original" and the process of reading this leads you from a beginning to an ending. In the cut-up, things that happen later can happen now, phrases attain meaning through repetition, strange combinations of phrases and sentences can result in new imagery, new experiences. Aesthetically it’s a bit of a dead end – beyond turning the “story” into a jumble of moments that then resembles to me song lyrics or poetry rather than a more straight-forward attempt to imbue the proceedings with meaning or symbolism, what else can you do? Where else can you take that?
And it is a wild step – I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in Shawarmania today and the lyrics (even the title!) – nonsensical in a standard sense and in isolation, but in combination and added to Cobain’s vocals, they make PERFECT sense moreso than Cobain saying “I feel angry, frustrated, and dissatisfied.” When emotion takes over (anger, sadness, elation, hysteria…), the brain does not function linearly (does it ever? The Persistence of Memory melts your clocks.) so maybe this cutting up of words is capturing a sense of reality that the “straight” world/word cannot capture. Or Burroughs is just messing with your head – I do think that a lot of his theorizing about the cut-up is BS, but he did do something abstract with prose – probably similar to how art critics felt Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists were pulling their legs…
Been hinting at surrealism, which might be where Burroughs belongs more than with the abstract expressionists, though surrealism has a distinctly European flavor whereas Americans get to claim abstract expressionism as their own. Of course, the political motivations behind both art movements also place them in geographic realms – surrealism between the Great Wars, abstract expressionism after WW2 – but cut-ups definitely hearken back to Dada and the collage novels of Max Ernst. And there’s a lot you can say about Burroughs’ cut-up novels but they are most definitely dreamlike in the way that your dreams are uncontrollable – so maybe the drugs did allow him to access his sub and un-consciousnesses in ways that the “straight” reality wouldn’t let him (and not necessarily the heroin, but Burroughs’ complete and utter fearlessness with drug experimentation bent his brain in ways that would let these “other worlds” and interzones compete with his regular consciousness. Of course, people had been getting drunk or stoned or what-have-you for centuries and writing about it – Burroughs was exploring a distinctly modern scenario of hallucinogenic drugs entering Western culture – that intrusion sparked the late 60s for better and worse. If you can question everything, then possibly anything could happen? (Though what paranoia and the “question everything” ethos have done in terms of the right-wing GOP Fox News Info Wars subculture is absolutely the Frankenstein’s monster of the 60s – the John Birchers using the pinkos’ techniques against them.)
To me, and I’ve come across this with some of the other more challenging authors I tend to read, this comes down to the author “playing fair” – William Gaddis and William Gass (and even Cormac McCarthy in his earlier works) will take the reader down some pretty dense rabbit holes but in the end, they will throw the attentive reader a bone and give them some hint of what they mean, who was speaking in the scene, etc. Pynchon doesn’t always play fair – he will make you go off on your own path to try to understand what he’s saying – but in the act of trying to see if the pieces do line up it allows the reader to build their own interpretive temples to the text (one only needs to see the mini industry of Pynchon analysis to see proof of this). Burroughs never plays fair. There will never be an “a-ha!” moment of realization in any of his books. He might even say they aren’t meant to be read in order – start on any page, end where you like, don’t end at all – it doesn’t matter. Trying to make cognitive sense of the word is missing the point. “Rub out the word” indeed. This is where the performance aspect of Burroughs comes into play – as with performance art where sometimes the act of creating is more important than the work itself, in these cut-ups, knowing that Burroughs wrote a massive mess of texts (the “Word Hoard”) while stoned in Tangiers and allowed his friends to re-organize them into some sort of sense after the fact – the reader becomes aware of the process while reading. Again, I’m sure in some circles that would just make Burroughs a “postmodern” writer and this is distinctly postmodern or experimental or what have you.
(It’s interesting to see Burroughs’ influence on J.G. Ballard who repeatedly stated his admiration of Burroughs and went off on his own exploration of abstract writing in the 60s – culminating in The Atrocity Exhibition which absolutely does not play fair. Ballard is so interesting in toto – to see him break apart his prose with scientific remove and then put it back together with a trio of misanthropic novels – unpleasant yes, but extremely rewarding if the reader doesn’t mind wallowing in the gutter. I hold that what he does with Crash reflects our current dominance by personal technology.)
It’s also interesting the see the emphasis put on the recording machines and tape recorders in Burroughs. (John Barth I think also did some performance pieces where he utilized tape recorders.) We very much take for granted the idea of mass produced cameras, recorders, and of course where they’ve led us, but before everyone had an iphone which has the memory of what would have required probably several city blocks of machinery in the 60s (and that probably still didn’t come close!), but the idea of being able to record voices, play them back, distort them, replace sounds with pre-recorded sounds – even being able to listen to records in a way – the advent and ubiquity of technology – especially in the long-looming shadow of Hiroshima – was definitely weighted with considerably more gravity than our mass acceptance of the machine. Burroughs was literally talking about changing reality with tape recorders! It seems so silly and mundane to us but that really probably seemed like the fabric of reality was being able to be split and reconfigured in the present tense. (Of course, the theory of relativity and splitting the atom has its own effect on the entire post World War 2 generation – one only needs to look at the third season of Twin Peaks to see that David Lynch – America’s pre-eminent surrealist filmmaker born in 1947 – is also still grappling with the effect of the atom bomb and what it does to how we perceive our world/universe.)
It is now impossible to separate Burroughs the writer from Burroughs’ written output. Authors like Cormac McCarthy, Pynchon, Don DeLillo go to pains to keep their private lives hidden from their readers, someone like Burroughs is much more in a Warholian/Norman Mailer world of the writer as artist. So Burroughs has become this spectral figure – this outlaw wealthy gay murderer junkie who managed to shed light on some dark underbellies of the American life. I think of Gaddis talking about the “bones of the author” trailing his creation, and in some other sense about the poet James Merrill or even Ludwig Wittgenstein– similar to Burroughs in that they both come from places of immense privilege to push their respective fields to their utmost limits. If the struggle for money becomes null and void (Burroughs received an allowance throughout much of his life), then the creative muse can be completely nurtured and taken to its own end – in Merrill’s case a 600 page modern epic poem created with a Ouija board, in Wittgenstein’s case a philosophical treatise which aims to answer many of the questions of Western philosophy (or something like that). I might be over-simplifying here but I can’t help but see the correlation between these three writers.
If you look at Burroughs against one of his similar contemporaries – lets say Alexander Trocchi – another explicit addict Beat writer, Trocchi’s output is much smaller and never gets beyond the initial thrust of what Burroughs was doing in his earliest novels – Junkie and Queer: That of exploring the philosophical and aesthetic potential of the outsider addict. Trocchi lived much of his life in squalor, pimping out his wives, etc. I can’t help but think Burroughs getting out of the murder charge in Mexico was a direct result of his family’s finances. This of course allowed him to flee North America and wind up in Tangiers to begin the assaultive journey into the subconscious that led to Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, and The Soft Machine. Of course, any of this can be gleaned from his Wikipedia page. What does it matter?
This financial freedom allowed Burroughs to push literature into unexplored realms of the Id – a similar place the surrealists dwelled, but in Burroughs case that Id involves nightmarishly explicit sexual fantasies, inter-dimensional travel on the run from both the police and the drug dealers, and satirical explorations of racism, homophobia, and power – all while questioning the American Dream. (I would add that post World War 2 America was in a recently christened world dominance – or struggle with Communism possibly – where the idyllic suburban lifestyle presented itself as the ideal approach to comfort and modern life. Burroughs writes in such a way that you can kinda make out of his words whatever you want, but to not recognize the ultimate struggle in the capitalistic society between those who have power and those who do not, and the hypocrisy of those holier-than-thou that pretend to not have the chasms of despair within them.) Of course, the argument can be made that maybe a heroin addict who shot his wife might not be the best person to listen to about anything, really – so what is Burroughs saying?
In The Ticket That Exploded, I kept coming back to the idea of control. Burroughs would freely admit in his MANY descriptions/depictions of addiction that the addict could be seen as the ideal symbol of control. His future is dictated by his need for the substance, making him under its control. As the need for the substance dictates behavior, an outside force (or agent) is making the actions of the addict secondary to his desire to fulfill his need, whereas in a non-addict, those actions are the primary result of the individual’s will. By having an external force (be it booze, junk, cigarettes, coffee, consumer products, what have you) dictate the will of the individual, he becomes under its control and thus becomes an agent of the controlling force. An agent of any kind is a messenger of a larger entity – agents in Hollywood represent actors for their parent company, a foreign agent is a representative of a government – (You could go even further and replace “agent” with “employee” though the word “agent” implies that the person in question is really trying to impart the will of his entity as opposed to merely collecting a paycheck.) – so the addict becomes the agent of addiction, not the drug which has no will of its own, but that the addiction thus controls the addict to do its bidding to continue the addiction.
Addiction in Burroughs’ eyes becomes a modern symptom of a wider “sickness” – that of the control agents removing choice from the individual and making them complicit as agents in larger struggles of control. I can’t help but think of the opioid epidemic currently affecting our population and its relation to pharmaceutical companies’ desire for profit. Economics knows no morals (hilariously hypocritical when some of America’s biggest moralistic mouth-pieces simultaneously preach the righteousness of the free market at the same time pushing Christianity) and the exchange of the addict to the dealer makes the addict secondary to the exchange. A doctor is given a new painkiller in exchange for a funds to his practice. In order to receive the funds, he needs to utilize the painkiller, so he prescribes it to individuals in pain, unaware or not caring the propensity for addiction in the individual, which is secondary to his practice’s continued growth, not to mention the profit of the company pushing the drug in the first place. The exchange between these non-human entities – the doctor’s practice and the pharmaceutical company – makes the person in the middle secondary to their own growth and profit. The human becomes nothing more than the movement of numbers from one bank account to another. Burroughs – with his sunken eyes and ghostly pallor – is in a way the patron saint of the opioid addict. His descriptions of the cycles of need and his attempts to break out of these cycles by literally breaking the causal relation of words and their effect on the reader seems to me to be an extremely prescient foray into literature.
Burroughs’ attempts to explain addiction as another sickness must have seemed like a madman raving from the smelliest cell in the prison in the early 1960s, but he saw – through his own experiences – and applied his Harvard education and wealthy background to exploring his own trip into the hell of addiction and crime – ultimately describing earthbound circles of hell, the hell of our own creation, the hell of the modern world, our own sickness of consumerism, commercialism, and control. He is describing the battlefield of American life, and his own missives from these black areas can only be read as prophetic nonsense. The reader must take away from his books what he can, and the freedom to explore the darkest levels of American life can only be seen as a testament to our country’s potential to utilize artistic expression to confront the evils within ourselves. Popular culture of the last 50 years would be a much different place without Burroughs’ influence. He is an American original.
And I would be one of those readers. Which might be the point. Being lost, trying to force your brain to comprehend what the hell the author is trying to say.
I think it is safe to say that reading a Burroughs novel – especially those of the late 50’s early 60’s cut-up period – from cover-to-cover is a fool’s errand. There is no plot or plot development really, characters pop up, but more through repetition of presence or names rather than through personality or character traits. Sure, Bill Lee, Dr. Benway, Hamburger Mary, Izzy the Push, etc. appear throughout the cut-up novels, but they are more ciphers (or capitalized names) than characters. Of course, this is what an academic would say makes Burroughs “post-modern” or whatever – I think that really just groups him with some American writers all writing during the same historical period – namely post world war 2 (and before the Reagan 80s, where experimentalism was frowned upon in exchange for minimalism or other modes of storytelling).
Really, reading one of these cut-up novels now (2017 – and I read The Soft Machine last year I believe) it is impossible to remove the presence of Burroughs the beatnik writer, junkie artist from the work. I’d blame David Cronenberg (not in a bad way! Naked Lunch the film is one of the best, most creative adaptations of any novel ever made!) and time. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to read Burroughs in say 1960. He was saying things that no one had said (outside of pornographic novels or maybe the Marquis De Sade or Lautreamont but even Maldoror is not as explicit as any of Burroughs), and even though Burroughs existed well outside the mainstream of literature, part of the whole Beat aesthetic was absolutely to push all boundaries of experience and acceptance. I’m not saying anything new here, just still trying to wrap my head around reading something like The Ticket That Exploded in 2017.
I keep coming back to poetry though. Burroughs influence on Western popular culture (especially music rock & roll) is immense – David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop, Steely Dan, Trainspotting, Alan Moore, punk, heavy metal, “industrial” – all of this can point back in some way to Burroughs (the Heavy Metal Kid makes frequent appearances), not to mention nihilistic cool – that attitude of remove where nothing is impressive because you’ve seen it all (or in Burroughs case you’re on the smack and that’s all you care about) – resulting in stoned youngsters screaming into microphones and smashing guitars. But the poetry of it – if we are to take Burroughs at face value (a dangerous and maybe fool-hardy proposition), the cut-up frees the writer from the standard tropes of temporal control. Essentially, the past, present, and future are confused because the writer has chosen to utilize a collage-like method of organizing words, as opposed to a causal method – I am writing in a causal method right now – words in combination form a flow that begins with “I would file” and ends with "an American original" and the process of reading this leads you from a beginning to an ending. In the cut-up, things that happen later can happen now, phrases attain meaning through repetition, strange combinations of phrases and sentences can result in new imagery, new experiences. Aesthetically it’s a bit of a dead end – beyond turning the “story” into a jumble of moments that then resembles to me song lyrics or poetry rather than a more straight-forward attempt to imbue the proceedings with meaning or symbolism, what else can you do? Where else can you take that?
And it is a wild step – I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in Shawarmania today and the lyrics (even the title!) – nonsensical in a standard sense and in isolation, but in combination and added to Cobain’s vocals, they make PERFECT sense moreso than Cobain saying “I feel angry, frustrated, and dissatisfied.” When emotion takes over (anger, sadness, elation, hysteria…), the brain does not function linearly (does it ever? The Persistence of Memory melts your clocks.) so maybe this cutting up of words is capturing a sense of reality that the “straight” world/word cannot capture. Or Burroughs is just messing with your head – I do think that a lot of his theorizing about the cut-up is BS, but he did do something abstract with prose – probably similar to how art critics felt Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists were pulling their legs…
Been hinting at surrealism, which might be where Burroughs belongs more than with the abstract expressionists, though surrealism has a distinctly European flavor whereas Americans get to claim abstract expressionism as their own. Of course, the political motivations behind both art movements also place them in geographic realms – surrealism between the Great Wars, abstract expressionism after WW2 – but cut-ups definitely hearken back to Dada and the collage novels of Max Ernst. And there’s a lot you can say about Burroughs’ cut-up novels but they are most definitely dreamlike in the way that your dreams are uncontrollable – so maybe the drugs did allow him to access his sub and un-consciousnesses in ways that the “straight” reality wouldn’t let him (and not necessarily the heroin, but Burroughs’ complete and utter fearlessness with drug experimentation bent his brain in ways that would let these “other worlds” and interzones compete with his regular consciousness. Of course, people had been getting drunk or stoned or what-have-you for centuries and writing about it – Burroughs was exploring a distinctly modern scenario of hallucinogenic drugs entering Western culture – that intrusion sparked the late 60s for better and worse. If you can question everything, then possibly anything could happen? (Though what paranoia and the “question everything” ethos have done in terms of the right-wing GOP Fox News Info Wars subculture is absolutely the Frankenstein’s monster of the 60s – the John Birchers using the pinkos’ techniques against them.)
To me, and I’ve come across this with some of the other more challenging authors I tend to read, this comes down to the author “playing fair” – William Gaddis and William Gass (and even Cormac McCarthy in his earlier works) will take the reader down some pretty dense rabbit holes but in the end, they will throw the attentive reader a bone and give them some hint of what they mean, who was speaking in the scene, etc. Pynchon doesn’t always play fair – he will make you go off on your own path to try to understand what he’s saying – but in the act of trying to see if the pieces do line up it allows the reader to build their own interpretive temples to the text (one only needs to see the mini industry of Pynchon analysis to see proof of this). Burroughs never plays fair. There will never be an “a-ha!” moment of realization in any of his books. He might even say they aren’t meant to be read in order – start on any page, end where you like, don’t end at all – it doesn’t matter. Trying to make cognitive sense of the word is missing the point. “Rub out the word” indeed. This is where the performance aspect of Burroughs comes into play – as with performance art where sometimes the act of creating is more important than the work itself, in these cut-ups, knowing that Burroughs wrote a massive mess of texts (the “Word Hoard”) while stoned in Tangiers and allowed his friends to re-organize them into some sort of sense after the fact – the reader becomes aware of the process while reading. Again, I’m sure in some circles that would just make Burroughs a “postmodern” writer and this is distinctly postmodern or experimental or what have you.
(It’s interesting to see Burroughs’ influence on J.G. Ballard who repeatedly stated his admiration of Burroughs and went off on his own exploration of abstract writing in the 60s – culminating in The Atrocity Exhibition which absolutely does not play fair. Ballard is so interesting in toto – to see him break apart his prose with scientific remove and then put it back together with a trio of misanthropic novels – unpleasant yes, but extremely rewarding if the reader doesn’t mind wallowing in the gutter. I hold that what he does with Crash reflects our current dominance by personal technology.)
It’s also interesting the see the emphasis put on the recording machines and tape recorders in Burroughs. (John Barth I think also did some performance pieces where he utilized tape recorders.) We very much take for granted the idea of mass produced cameras, recorders, and of course where they’ve led us, but before everyone had an iphone which has the memory of what would have required probably several city blocks of machinery in the 60s (and that probably still didn’t come close!), but the idea of being able to record voices, play them back, distort them, replace sounds with pre-recorded sounds – even being able to listen to records in a way – the advent and ubiquity of technology – especially in the long-looming shadow of Hiroshima – was definitely weighted with considerably more gravity than our mass acceptance of the machine. Burroughs was literally talking about changing reality with tape recorders! It seems so silly and mundane to us but that really probably seemed like the fabric of reality was being able to be split and reconfigured in the present tense. (Of course, the theory of relativity and splitting the atom has its own effect on the entire post World War 2 generation – one only needs to look at the third season of Twin Peaks to see that David Lynch – America’s pre-eminent surrealist filmmaker born in 1947 – is also still grappling with the effect of the atom bomb and what it does to how we perceive our world/universe.)
It is now impossible to separate Burroughs the writer from Burroughs’ written output. Authors like Cormac McCarthy, Pynchon, Don DeLillo go to pains to keep their private lives hidden from their readers, someone like Burroughs is much more in a Warholian/Norman Mailer world of the writer as artist. So Burroughs has become this spectral figure – this outlaw wealthy gay murderer junkie who managed to shed light on some dark underbellies of the American life. I think of Gaddis talking about the “bones of the author” trailing his creation, and in some other sense about the poet James Merrill or even Ludwig Wittgenstein– similar to Burroughs in that they both come from places of immense privilege to push their respective fields to their utmost limits. If the struggle for money becomes null and void (Burroughs received an allowance throughout much of his life), then the creative muse can be completely nurtured and taken to its own end – in Merrill’s case a 600 page modern epic poem created with a Ouija board, in Wittgenstein’s case a philosophical treatise which aims to answer many of the questions of Western philosophy (or something like that). I might be over-simplifying here but I can’t help but see the correlation between these three writers.
If you look at Burroughs against one of his similar contemporaries – lets say Alexander Trocchi – another explicit addict Beat writer, Trocchi’s output is much smaller and never gets beyond the initial thrust of what Burroughs was doing in his earliest novels – Junkie and Queer: That of exploring the philosophical and aesthetic potential of the outsider addict. Trocchi lived much of his life in squalor, pimping out his wives, etc. I can’t help but think Burroughs getting out of the murder charge in Mexico was a direct result of his family’s finances. This of course allowed him to flee North America and wind up in Tangiers to begin the assaultive journey into the subconscious that led to Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, and The Soft Machine. Of course, any of this can be gleaned from his Wikipedia page. What does it matter?
This financial freedom allowed Burroughs to push literature into unexplored realms of the Id – a similar place the surrealists dwelled, but in Burroughs case that Id involves nightmarishly explicit sexual fantasies, inter-dimensional travel on the run from both the police and the drug dealers, and satirical explorations of racism, homophobia, and power – all while questioning the American Dream. (I would add that post World War 2 America was in a recently christened world dominance – or struggle with Communism possibly – where the idyllic suburban lifestyle presented itself as the ideal approach to comfort and modern life. Burroughs writes in such a way that you can kinda make out of his words whatever you want, but to not recognize the ultimate struggle in the capitalistic society between those who have power and those who do not, and the hypocrisy of those holier-than-thou that pretend to not have the chasms of despair within them.) Of course, the argument can be made that maybe a heroin addict who shot his wife might not be the best person to listen to about anything, really – so what is Burroughs saying?
In The Ticket That Exploded, I kept coming back to the idea of control. Burroughs would freely admit in his MANY descriptions/depictions of addiction that the addict could be seen as the ideal symbol of control. His future is dictated by his need for the substance, making him under its control. As the need for the substance dictates behavior, an outside force (or agent) is making the actions of the addict secondary to his desire to fulfill his need, whereas in a non-addict, those actions are the primary result of the individual’s will. By having an external force (be it booze, junk, cigarettes, coffee, consumer products, what have you) dictate the will of the individual, he becomes under its control and thus becomes an agent of the controlling force. An agent of any kind is a messenger of a larger entity – agents in Hollywood represent actors for their parent company, a foreign agent is a representative of a government – (You could go even further and replace “agent” with “employee” though the word “agent” implies that the person in question is really trying to impart the will of his entity as opposed to merely collecting a paycheck.) – so the addict becomes the agent of addiction, not the drug which has no will of its own, but that the addiction thus controls the addict to do its bidding to continue the addiction.
Addiction in Burroughs’ eyes becomes a modern symptom of a wider “sickness” – that of the control agents removing choice from the individual and making them complicit as agents in larger struggles of control. I can’t help but think of the opioid epidemic currently affecting our population and its relation to pharmaceutical companies’ desire for profit. Economics knows no morals (hilariously hypocritical when some of America’s biggest moralistic mouth-pieces simultaneously preach the righteousness of the free market at the same time pushing Christianity) and the exchange of the addict to the dealer makes the addict secondary to the exchange. A doctor is given a new painkiller in exchange for a funds to his practice. In order to receive the funds, he needs to utilize the painkiller, so he prescribes it to individuals in pain, unaware or not caring the propensity for addiction in the individual, which is secondary to his practice’s continued growth, not to mention the profit of the company pushing the drug in the first place. The exchange between these non-human entities – the doctor’s practice and the pharmaceutical company – makes the person in the middle secondary to their own growth and profit. The human becomes nothing more than the movement of numbers from one bank account to another. Burroughs – with his sunken eyes and ghostly pallor – is in a way the patron saint of the opioid addict. His descriptions of the cycles of need and his attempts to break out of these cycles by literally breaking the causal relation of words and their effect on the reader seems to me to be an extremely prescient foray into literature.
Burroughs’ attempts to explain addiction as another sickness must have seemed like a madman raving from the smelliest cell in the prison in the early 1960s, but he saw – through his own experiences – and applied his Harvard education and wealthy background to exploring his own trip into the hell of addiction and crime – ultimately describing earthbound circles of hell, the hell of our own creation, the hell of the modern world, our own sickness of consumerism, commercialism, and control. He is describing the battlefield of American life, and his own missives from these black areas can only be read as prophetic nonsense. The reader must take away from his books what he can, and the freedom to explore the darkest levels of American life can only be seen as a testament to our country’s potential to utilize artistic expression to confront the evils within ourselves. Popular culture of the last 50 years would be a much different place without Burroughs’ influence. He is an American original.
April 25, 2025
I wake up at 9:40am for my 10am psychology appointment, for now over the phone as I have been too traumatised by the cards the hand of life has delt in fiery lambasts (or rather that I was too stupid not to seek out), and therefore find it impossible to leave the house. Boys, we’ve been sublimated… Take that shit back to Chemist Warehouse. I sleep another 20 minutes - an early morning for me. And by this you can tell I waft in laziness, a true piece of shit wasting space even in this void. What is word? Word is an array of calculating machines - Spots of weakness opened up. I wish to be “normal”, ie unpathetic, half my days. There are still many things I’m grateful for: my loving family, my fiends and their sillinesses, grateful for being alone. Anything to avoid the hopeless dead-end horror of being just who and where you all are: dying animals on a doomed planet. I’m told it is trauma. Work for the reality studio or else. Or else you will find out how it feels to be outside the film. Can’t control the weather, although harassing the weatherman for his mistakes in the privacy of my own notes increasingly appears to me the more reasonable option. Burroughs stopped cutting it up and started folding it in, and Henry Darger thought little girls had penises, and so do I! I’m not joking for once, merely being genuine, the most laughable cloak one can don. In the beginning was the word and the word was bullshit. William Burroughs is in truthful factuals my biological father, what got me into reading faster than you can say life-long hyperfixation, sorry for whatever that entails mom.
September 8, 2025
it's way easier to read than the first book, I loved every line of it. it's rock n role and post humanism in the body of text.
my favorite line of thought in it is the division between language and body instead of classic logic of mind and body, in this alternative duality, language and idealism is more of a virus than a superiority and it's super materialist in general.
boroughs definitely stands next to Foucault n Delueze instead of Butler in queerness n ontology of human body.
"Do not accept another
image identity on any terms in any form or you will be as I am now. As to what life
can be worth when the honor the honor is gone par example I can offer an opinion. I
know all about it. It is worth nothing nothing nothing. The offer of another image
identity is always on virus terms. No good no bueno outright or partially. The only
thing I can give you is my gun. I can't use it. You can. Here is my gun Bradly. Come in and get them.' "
in general it's one of the most beautiful texts I've read in my life, highly recommend... or... no it's a must read.
some of ma favorite lines:
"in the beginning was the word
and the word was bullshit"
"Hassan i Sabbah: "Last round over - Remember i was the ship gives no flesh identity - lips fading - silence to say good bye - " See the action, B.J.? This Hassan I Sabbah really works for Naval Intelligence and . . Are you listening B.J.?"
my favorite line of thought in it is the division between language and body instead of classic logic of mind and body, in this alternative duality, language and idealism is more of a virus than a superiority and it's super materialist in general.
boroughs definitely stands next to Foucault n Delueze instead of Butler in queerness n ontology of human body.
"Do not accept another
image identity on any terms in any form or you will be as I am now. As to what life
can be worth when the honor the honor is gone par example I can offer an opinion. I
know all about it. It is worth nothing nothing nothing. The offer of another image
identity is always on virus terms. No good no bueno outright or partially. The only
thing I can give you is my gun. I can't use it. You can. Here is my gun Bradly. Come in and get them.' "
in general it's one of the most beautiful texts I've read in my life, highly recommend... or... no it's a must read.
some of ma favorite lines:
"in the beginning was the word
and the word was bullshit"
"Hassan i Sabbah: "Last round over - Remember i was the ship gives no flesh identity - lips fading - silence to say good bye - " See the action, B.J.? This Hassan I Sabbah really works for Naval Intelligence and . . Are you listening B.J.?"
April 27, 2023
Talking about these cut-up novels requires a lot of thought. Not really sure what I just read but I did like it quite a bit. Maybe not as much as The Soft Machine, but idk.
What is it about. Well… I guess it seems to be again about control methods, this time via some alien “virus” (which by the end I take it to mean that this is the mass media imparting horrible thoughts into our brain to turn us against whatever they want us to be against) infecting the population. And the Nova Police try to remove that virus. The Novas being (and this is pure speculation because again, what the fuck) Burroughs himself or possibly anyone attempting experimental fiction like this? His thesis presented at the end is what makes me believe this. It seems like he’s saying that presenting information in this way forces the reader to think past this control methods, allowing us to see the weird fucked up patterns that are being overlayed on reality (ie the actual narrative). It’s an argument that structural powers have created a palimpsest of the real world itself - rewriting the narrative so we only see the bad. So Burroughs created a palimpsest of his own to show us how to analyze it.
Though I could be entirely wrong lol. But it was a good read nonetheless.
What is it about. Well… I guess it seems to be again about control methods, this time via some alien “virus” (which by the end I take it to mean that this is the mass media imparting horrible thoughts into our brain to turn us against whatever they want us to be against) infecting the population. And the Nova Police try to remove that virus. The Novas being (and this is pure speculation because again, what the fuck) Burroughs himself or possibly anyone attempting experimental fiction like this? His thesis presented at the end is what makes me believe this. It seems like he’s saying that presenting information in this way forces the reader to think past this control methods, allowing us to see the weird fucked up patterns that are being overlayed on reality (ie the actual narrative). It’s an argument that structural powers have created a palimpsest of the real world itself - rewriting the narrative so we only see the bad. So Burroughs created a palimpsest of his own to show us how to analyze it.
Though I could be entirely wrong lol. But it was a good read nonetheless.
October 2, 2019
I cannot pinpoint an exact reason as to why I am so obsessed with Burrough's writing. I suppose because the authors I admire most are those who make me think about things that I've never encountered or even thought possible – I am very drawn to the unexpected. His endlessly quotable brand of unexpected prose is littered with logical pitfalls and it constantly pulls me back in. This is writing that is exclusively concerned with style, intent on sensory overload, and has no interest in providing narrative substance or characterization or plot or dialogue. The cut-up method adds another, sometimes frustrating, layer to Burroughs' jarring, dissonant writing. As tiring as it can be to read about KY & rectal mucus and the flashbulb of orgasm every time characters converge, you can't get writing like this from anyone else.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 161 reviews