This is the second installment in william s. burroughs’s cut-ups trilogy. Burroughs described the
plot of the book as follows: “The Ticket That Exploded involves the Nova conspiracy to blow up
the earth and then leave it through reincarnation
by projected image onto another planet. The plot
failed, so the title has both meanings.” Stylistically,
the book takes the cut-up method that Burroughs
developed with Brion Gysin in The soft macHine
and extends it by creating collages of image and
sound, a technique that Burroughs developed in
collaboration with Ian Sommerville and British
filmmaker Anthony Balch. The first version of the
book was published by Olympia Press in Paris in
1961. A revised version, meant to be more accessible, incorporated more of the Sommerville/Balch
material and was published by Grove Press in 1966.
The opening chapter recalls Burroughs’s South
American trip and is based in part on his days in
Panama with Bill Garver. By the time Garver returned to Mexico City, Burroughs had decided that
his old friend was self-serving and even “vicious.”
Burroughs introduces the idea of the “reality film”
being directed by behind-the-scenes characters.
The director is B.J., and a screenwriter pitches him
an idea that is based closely on the novel’s reality: A virus has enslaved humanity, and renegades
are trying to break through the control lines. The
screenwriter periodically will break into the novel
to heighten the “pitch.”
Hassan i Sabbah was the head of a group of
assassins who operated out of a mountain castle
in Northern Persia in the 11th and 12th century.
Legend has it that when his assassins successfully
completed a mission, they were treated to rest and
relaxation in the sumptuous and sensuous “Garden of Delights.” Burroughs uses the Garden of
Delights as a metaphor for the many sensual traps
and addictions that entice the unwary traveler on
life’s path. Inspector Lee is involved in a plot to
find a similar group of assassins in 1962, and he
must pass through the garden to experience its
temptations and thus inoculate himself against
the “virus.” The district supervisor gives him his
“orders”—a series of antiorders that require him
to avoid joining any group and also to look for his
orders in a “series of oblique references.” These
take the form of “cut-up” knowledge that is similar
to the cut-up style of the book, as the book itself
points out: “This is a novel presented in a series of
oblique references.” Lee is ordered to investigate
the suicide of the roommate of a man named Genial. He discovers that Genial subliminally influenced his roommate’s death with a series of clever
tape-recorded messages. Burroughs’s knowledge of
such tape effects is attributed to Ian Sommerville
in the opening of the book. The subliminal message is discovered to be just the surface of a larger
plot—“a carefully worked out blueprint for invasion of the planet.” This is in fact the larger plot of
the novel (and of the trilogy as a whole). The deconditioning methods of the “Logos” group (based
on Scientologists) are described but are ultimately
rejected as a means of breaking through the “control” of the invaders.
A separate storyline shows Brad and Iam
(based on Ian Sommerville) on Venus (the home
planet for the invasion) trapped in a semen dairy—
which has human males for cows. Iam arms them
with a camera gun, and they blast their way out.
The plot returns to Inspector Lee’s appointed
meeting with Genial, who cannot speak with Lee
until Lee pays the screenwriter a fee for his dialogue. He finds Genial detained by police over a
passport issue, a scenario very close to Burroughs’s
detainment for similar reasons in Puerto Assis. The
chapter ends as do many in the book—with a cutup re-creation of the preceding events.
Many of the characters in the book are actually the same character. Here Bradly and Lykin are
exploring the green boys’ planet, and this scenario
turns out to be a dream of Ali (later identified as
the God of Street Boys and Hustlers). A second
dream awakens Ali. The characters are constantly
moved forward and backward in time and space.
Ali, for example, “flashes” back on the passport
episode involving “Genial.” In Panama, Ali is fitted
with a pair of gills by a shopkeeper, who points to
the sky: In Burroughs’s cosmology, human beings
must evolve as they once did from fish into lunged
mammals by evolving yet again into a creature that
is capable of space–time travel.
A good part of the “do you love me” chapter
cuts up the trite lyrics of popular love songs. In
1964, Burroughs told Eric Mottram, “I feel that
what we call love is largely a fraud—a mixture of
sentimentality and sex that has been systematically degraded and vulgarized by the virus power.”
Burroughs thus believed that love was a virus and
that the “original engineering flaw” in human
beings was the duality of nature created by the
“word” (which established self-consciousness) and
the dual sexes: “The human organism is literally
consisting of two halves from the beginning word
and all human sex is this unsanitary arrangement
whereby two entities attempt to occupy the same
three-dimensional coordinate points.” This duality
is the source of the planet’s conflicts and wars, and
this flaw has left us open to invasion by intergalactic parasites. “Operation Rewrite” is meant to fix
this flaw in human nature, but there are too many
viruses that are “addicted” to the human condition, and they mightily resist being thrown out of
their hosts. These “Gods” are “vampires.”
The nova police are called in because the “addicts” keep breaking into the Rewrite office. The
basic “nova” techniques are described, the primary
one being to create insoluble problems on a planet
by stocking it with incompatible inhabitants. The
members of the Nova Mob are listed for the first
time. The leader of the Mob is Mr. Bradly/Mr.
Martin, also known as “the Ugly Spirit.” (It is important to note that Burroughs later identified the
“ugly spirit” as the entity that invaded him and
caused him to shoot his wife, making the Nova
Mob a metaphor, at least in part, for Burroughs’s
own addictions and making “nova” the mistakes
and tragedies that stem from these addictions.) In
this myth for the new space age, our planet can
be taken over because of a “blockade” on thought
that was engineered by the Venusians, but partisans from Saturn cut through the word and image
lines (again, a reference to Burroughs’s cut-up
technique in the novel). While the blockade was
in effect, alien parasites invaded human beings
through “coordinate points” that were defined by
the individual’s addictions. Heroin addicts, for example, were invaded by “heavy metal junkies” from
Uranus. The planet is freed by shutting down the
coordinate points, and the “ugly spirit” is dragged
kicking and screaming from Hollywood, Time magazine, and Madison Avenue.
This book is self-referential, meaning that it is
often about the writing of the book itself, and in
one chapter Burroughs demonstrates his own cutup technique, cutting up classic literary texts with
his own texts.
The “substitute flesh” chapter cuts up images.
Both the image and the soundtrack have to be cut
up to free human beings from the control of the reality film. The main subject of the chapter is the
Garden of Delights. The garden has a sex area for
which Bradly is prepared by being photographed,
measured, and then by having his image intercut
with that of thousands of sex partners. The sex area
of the garden is intended to negate the allurements
of sex, for sexual frustration and sentimentality
only feed the viruses living inside us. The chapter
ends with a description of how sensory deprivation
tanks can be used to free us of these parasites as
well. The tank reveals to us the parasite inside as
many participants in tank experiments report feeling a “second” body.
Lykin is a coordinate point that is used by
parasites throughout the galaxy. Bradly’s adventures in the jungle (“in a strange bed”) continue.
He encounters a naked young man with a bow and
a quiver, who observes Bradly’s disheveled appearance and surmises that the “blockade” has been
broken. The young man expects more of Bradly’s
type to arrive. His attitude is not one of “contempt,” but the tone is that of British colonialism.
In the fake journal “all members are worst
a century,” an explorer and his “boy” Johnny encounter a virus that causes sexual delirium. Burroughs wrote several versions of this story that
were based on an account that he heard in South
America of a grasshopper with a sting that acted as
a powerful aphrodisiac: If “you can’t get a woman
right away you will die.”
Dr. Dent’s apomorphine cure for heroin addiction, which Burroughs underwent in London
in 1955, is analyzed in an afterward to the British
edition of The Soft Machine which is entitled “A
Treatment that Cancels Addiction.” Apomorphine
was thus part of Burroughs’s arsenal of methods
that are used to vanquish “control” of any sort.
Here, apomorphine breaks the control lines of
the Venusians, the Mercurians, and the Uranians:
“Good bye parasite invasion with weakness of dual
structure, as the shot of apomorphine exploded
the mold of their claws in vomit.” The fight in the
Control Room is replayed from the point of view
of Burroughs’s Tangier companion Kiki, the street
boy who is aided by Ali (from the liberating planet
of Saturn). Kiki is advised that “retreat” is the better part of valor in some battles with evil forces of
Minraud and that space–time travel allows retreat.
Such “time travel on association lines” leads Burroughs back into his St. Louis boyhood days when
Bill and John build a crystal radio. Bill asks John,
“Is it true if we were ten light years away we could
see ourselves here ten years from now?” The scene
demonstrates this possibility by cutting in moments
from 10 years in the future, which are then played
out in a linear scene. Only afterward does the
reader realize that he/she has been given a glimpse
into the future in the previous pages.
The chapter “vaudeville voices” is in part of
pure “association lines,” as Burroughs calls his literary representation of consciousness. The screenwriter continues his pitch to B.J. and dreams up
a plot where writers “write history as it happens in
present time.” Burroughs believed that writers (as he
said of jack kerouac) could actually write history
into being through the influence of their works.
Bradly’s adventures in “the black fruit” are
continued in “terminal street.” He is walking the
streets of Minraud after the Reality Studio has
burned, and he is introduced to The Elder (later
called The Old Man) who was behind the hoax
on Earth. He tells Bradly that his race will have to
make “alterations” to itself now that the blockade
has been broken. Minraud’s inhabitants live without emotion and include centipedes and scorpions.
These creatures personify deep horror in Burroughs’s work.
In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville catalogs all of
the horrors that are associated with “whiteness” in
a famous chapter entitled “The Whiteness of the
Whale.” The chapter “last round over” is Burroughs’s extension of that idea. Here, whiteness is
heroin, yetis, monopolies, anglo-saxons, and Time/
Life/Fortune, Inc. “Drain off the prop ocean and
leave the White Whale stranded,” he demands.
Now that the control game has been exposed, he
wants restitution from all of the “Mr Martins who
are buying something for nothing.”
The rant turns to ridicule of the failed intergalactic con men: “You had every weapon in three
galaxies you couldn’t roll a paralyzed flop.” The
marks have wised up, and the “collaborators” with
the insect trust will be punished. Still, the “marks”
brought it on themselves by being weak and easily
addicted: “If you have to have it well you’ve had it.”
The two parasites that worked to control us were
“word” and “sex,” and Burroughs asks just what
exactly “word” and “sex” are. Other writers, from
Jacques Derrida (the famous deconstructionist) to
Norman Mailer (in The Prisoner of Sex) would take
up these questions. The con worked for a while
because it was pleasurable, rather like the 19thcentury America to which Burroughs always looks
back nostalgically. Back then, the Reality Film was
never exposed because everyone had a “part” written into it; however, when the roles gave out, the
film existed primarily to silence those who began to
question the Reality Film (writers and artists).
With the con exposed, the controllers rush to
leave the planet like passengers abandoning a sinking ship. One of Burroughs’s favorite metaphors is
that of the ship’s captain abandoning his ship disguised as a woman. The “marks” now see environmental destruction at the hand of monopolies and
“boards” (the “Green Deal”), drug deaths, sexual
obsessions, and subliminal messages all as part of
the con: “technical brains melted the law—control
machine is disconnected by nova police.”
The Fluoroscopic Kid (one of the defectors
from the Nova Mob, along with the Subliminal
Kid) lectures about the invisible “Other Half”
that is parasitically attached to us: “The body is
two halves stuck together like a mold—That is, it
consists of two organisms—See ‘the Other Half’
invisible—(to eyes that haven’t learned to watch).”
He shows the “marks” the Board Books (control
system similar to the Mayan calendar) and challenges them to rewrite them. The Subliminal Kid
disempowers the books by “cutting” them up,
thereby exposing their naked mechanisms of control. Control can also be exposed (and broken) by
simple exercises that are made with the aid of tape
recorders. Ian Sommerville demonstrated to Burroughs the ways in which tape loops and feedback
allowed participants to gain control over their responses to conflicts and arguments: “Get it out of
your head and into the machines.” The recorder
experiments make a basic Burroughs point: Recordings can be just as “real” as reality.
The defectors from the Nova Mob “silence”
Mr. Bradly/Mr. Martin. Silence is the end result
of the eradication of the “word” virus. Inspector Lee has been working throughout the book
in “Rewrite” to cut in on the messages of the
“collaborators”—a metaphor for Burroughs’s role
as writer of the novel.
“Now some words about the image track,” begins the chapter “let them see us.” Just as sound
has been manipulated in the Reality Film, so too
has image been used to control us. Burroughs discusses slow-motion projection techniques, which
he believes create an image more real than flesh
and could be used to hoodwink human sensory
systems. Burroughs had worked extensively in film
experiments by this time, particularly with the filmmaker Anthony Balch.
The characters in the book (if one can refer to
characters in a Burroughs book) make their exit in
Shakespearean fashion in “silence to say good bye”:
“our actors bid you a long last goodbye.” The final
chapter, “the invisible generation,” is a cut-up explanation to wise up the marks.
Rob Johnson