The Soft Machine. William S. Burroughs
accompany “Back Seat” in April 1960 was a short, early version of a much-circulated and often-quoted text, an expanded version of which appeared in The Third Mind: “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin.” When it was first published under this title later that year in Sidewalk magazine, Burroughs described it as an “explanation” that was “inseparable” from the Soft Machine material published alongside it (entitled “Have You Seen Slotless City?”)10 The note began by tracing the method’s origins in avant-garde history: “Tzara at a Dada Meeting in the 1920s proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat” (ROW, 22). Burroughs used the resonant final phrasing again when telling Paul Bowles in January 1961 of his “sequel to Naked Lunch entitled The Soft Machine. Cutting and permutating the book writes itself out of a hat” (65). By this time he had been working solidly for eighteen months and was still struggling to cut his manuscripts into shape—“I have so much material here it appalls me to see it” (57), he had despaired in late 1960—so his talk of pulling a book out of a hat was, like Tzara’s original act, a stunt rather than a description of creative process. It wasn’t only his enemies who would throw Burroughs’ words back at him (as hostile and uncomprehending reviewers did, deriding his work as a lazy gimmick): Kerouac dismissed cut-up methods as “an old Dada trick” and Gregory Corso, in a post-script to his own contribution in Minutes to Go, rejected cut-ups as, precisely, old hat: “Tzara did it all before.”11
Burroughs was guilty of promoting cut-ups too simplistically—the message of his early polemics was always: “Method is simple”—but this was precisely because of his evangelical zeal to promote them as widely as possible. It wasn’t a Dada prank, and while The Soft Machine shares more than a similar title with modernist experiments like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Stein didn’t believe her creative techniques were also revolutionary tools for her readers to use. In absolute contrast, Burroughs’ “note on method” ended by declaring: “The old word lines keep thee in old world slots. Cut the word lines.” Burroughs therefore tried to distinguish his new work from high modernists and the historical avant-garde both aesthetically—“important to avoid old surreal look,” he wrote to Paul Carroll in January 1961 regarding the use of typeface12—and, above all, politically. It was in this context that he coined the term “soft machine” in late summer 1960.
“THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE BATTLE
INSTRUCTIONS”
In his 1960 version of “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin,” Burroughs played the role of guide to his own work by mapping it in four ways: one context was art-historical (referring again to “Tristan Tzara at a Surrealist Rally in the 1920s”), another was that of contemporary science (naming the mathematician John von Neumann, whose “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior introduced the cut up principle of random action into military and game strategy”), and a third was entirely open-ended (“Applications are literally unlimited”). The final context was a sharp negative: “The method was grounded on The Freudian Couch.” For Burroughs, opposition to cut-up methods was inseparable from their creative potential and subversive political importance, and identifying enemies was as necessary as trying to convince sceptics or recruit allies in what he saw as not a literary endeavour at all, but essentially a war. And when he picked up the Stanley knife from Gysin in October 1959, he stabbed it first into Sigmund Freud.
In part, the attack on Freud reflected Gysin’s own agenda, his dispute with what he referred to in Minutes to Go as “the Art Wing of the Freudian Conspiracy calling itself Surrealism,” and in part it was personal.13 Burroughs had had two decades’ experience of psychoanalysts, but when Gysin introduced him simultaneously to cut-ups and Scientology he immediately made a connection between them as mechanistic methods that promised fast and radical results, ways to cut himself out of the past and to cut the past out of him. The fingerprints of L. Ron Hubbard, pulp science fiction writer as well as cult prophet, are all over the Cut-Up project: from its manifesto Minutes to Go, where he is quoted and effectively named as a fifth collaborator, to the Nova conspiracy scenario and the therapeutic techniques using tape recorders advocated in the trilogy, although only odd references (e.g., “words engraved on my back tape”) appear in The Soft Machine.
As quickly as Burroughs decided that the cure was as simple as cutting up words on tape or on paper, he identified the plot against it. In writings from late 1959 onwards, he blasted psychoanalysis as “one of the vilest conspiracies of all time,” aimed at spreading mental illness, serving power elites, and actively blocking cut-up methods.14 In the screaming block capitals typical of 1960 typescripts, he declared that “THE PRACTITIONERS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY ARE SHAMELESS OR STUPID MACHINE SENT LIARS AND FRAUDS”: “BURN THEIR STUPID BOOKS. CUT HERR DOCTOR FRAUD INTO A MILLION PIECES. SEE IT FOR THE COMMUNIST SENT LIE IT IS […] THE SOFT MACHINE IS YOUR ILLNESS CUT THE MACHINE WORD LINES AND YOU WILL BE CURED.”15 The 1961 Soft Machine included one brief but telling reference to “fraud Freud and Einstein,” although this was dropped from later editions and little else would remain in his published work to indicate Burroughs’ deplorable subscription to the International Jewish-Communist conspiracy.16 Critics have preferred to turn a blind eye to it, but the anti-Semitism in his work at this time and an equally ugly misogyny were encouraged by Gysin, and represented the dark side of Burroughs’ self-declared megalomania, his missionary conviction of having discovered the secret weapon to combat a conspiracy of conspiracies. The Burroughs of unchecked paranoia was no “Friendly Prophet.”
It was in this context that Burroughs asked “WHO SERVES THE SOFT MACHINE?” and across dozens of texts identified a hydra-headed enemy comprising women (“FIRST THEY INVADED AND TOOK OVER WOMEN OF THE WORLD”), scientists (“PREACHING DEATH AND REALITY”), newspaper magnates (“MR LUCE BEAVERBROOK HEARST TIME SMASH YOUR MACHINE”), bankers and industrialists (“ROTHSCHILD ROCKEFELLER”), and computer technology (“THE HANDLING OF MILLIONS OF LIFE SCRIPTS IN SYMBOL FORM IS DONE NOW BY ELECTRIC COMPUTERS”). Burroughs’ megalomania placed him and the Cut-Up project center-stage in a global conspiracy, and in these texts he not only addressed his enemies directly but imagined the replies they would make to “WILLY THE RAT FROM MISSOURI” who had “CALLED THE LAW” on them.
As well as identifying language itself as the enemy—“THE SOFT MACHINE GOT IN BY THE WORD”—Burroughs specifically attacked the word and image media empire of Henry Luce. He addressed Luce and fantasized his reply (“STAND ASIDE BURROUGHS OF SPACE AND LISTEN TO THE LORD OF TIME”), while backdating the connection between Luce’s magazines and cut-up methods: “When Tzara first pulled words out of a hat the conspiracy of Life Time Fortune to monopolize Life Time and Fortune would have been smashed before it started.”17 The logic of conspiracy may seem simpleminded and run in reverse—a monopoly of news media developed because Freudians used Surrealism to stop the work of a Dadaist poet—but Burroughs was just taking the titles of Luce’s magazines at their word: they did indeed aim to copyright “Life” “Time” and “Fortune,” most literally in Luce’s championing of a permanent “American Century”—a world of American values that would run on American time, to the end of time. Fulfilling the thesis implied by chance in the very first cut-ups—when Gysin had accidentally chopped up Life magazine adverts with news items from the Herald Tribune—Burroughs’ trilogy evolved in direct opposition to Luce’s trilogy. What’s surprising is that, having identified Luce’s “Time Machine” with the “Soft Machine,” he made nothing of the connection in The Soft Machine itself, and instead made it central to Nova Express.
Beyond naming names and identifying monopolistic professions or institutions, Burroughs was attacking the false appearance of the world we think we know, and so ultimately he defined “THIS SOFT INSECT MACHINE AS THE IMMUTABLE REALITY OF THE UNIVERSE.”