The Ticket That Exploded. William S. Burroughs
THE
TICKET
THAT
EXPLODED
Other Works by William S. Burroughs Published by Grove Press
Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk”
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
The Soft Machine: The Restored Text
Nova Express: The Restored Text
The Adding Machine: Selected Essays
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead
Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader
Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs
THE
TICKET
THAT
EXPLODED
The Restored Text
William S. Burroughs
Edited and with an Introduction by
Oliver Harris
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 1962, 1964, 1967 by William S. Burroughs
Introduction Copyright © 2014 by Oliver Harris
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Second revised edition published by Grove Press in 2014.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2209-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9720-7
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
Contents
Acknowledgments
It is a privilege to edit works by William Burroughs, and a pleasure to thank James Grauerholz for making it possible and for all the support he has given. It is also a pleasure to thank the following for their expert help: Jed Birmingham for assistance with little magazines; Keith Seward for razor-sharp feedback; and above all, Véronique Lane, for working with me from start to finish, being by my side in the archival vaults, sharing ideas, reading every word I wrote, and for living with the Fish Boys and the Vegetable People for two years.
For the great archival assistance they have provided, I also want to thank John Bennett of the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Ohio State University, Columbus; Rob Spindler of the Archives and Special Collections at Arizona State University, Tempe; Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and his staff; and Michael Ryan and all his staff at the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Research Institute for the Humanities at Keele University. Thanks finally to Jeff Posternak of the Wylie Agency, a great guy to have on your side, and to Peter Blackstock at Grove Press.
Introduction
“A SERIES OF OBLIQUE REFERENCES”
“OF COURSE, I’VE HAD IT IN THE EAR BEFORE”
A million people who’ve never heard of William Burroughs, let alone made it as far as the “operation rewrite” section of The Ticket That Exploded, can sing lines from the book. That’s because Burroughs’ book is where Iggy Pop found the raw materials of “Lust for Life”—it’s where Johnny Yen comes from along with those hypnotizing chickens and the flesh gimmick, the striptease and the torture film. The name is a typically Burroughsian composite, idiomatically mixing sex and drugs—a “Johnny” being both a condom and what goes inside; “to yen” meaning to yearn for it—which is why Johnny Yen comes again and is gonna do another striptease, and another. The repetitious lyrics recycle The Ticket to make Johnny a singing telegram for the endless bad kicks and insatiable lusts of consumer capitalism. Since Burroughs’ words have an indelible originality it’s no coincidence they’ve inspired an A to Z of musicians, writers and artists from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa, but the art of recycling words was also the method of “operation rewrite,” Burroughs’ mission to kick the habit of language itself by cutting it up.
An outrageous hybrid of pulp science fiction, obscene experimental poetry and manifesto for revolution, The Ticket was part of Burroughs’ 1960s Cut-Up Trilogy, along with The Soft Machine and Nova Express. A lazy mythology has either damned or praised the books as crazy word collages thrown together at random, with the result that little is known about them—from the meaning of their titles to how they were written or how they’re supposed to be read—and their novelty remains simply shocking. The difficulty is that the urgency of Burroughs’ message goes together with the radicalism of his method, and The Ticket calls itself “a novel presented in a series of oblique references” because that’s the only way to get it: obliquely. In which case, before giving the backstory to its creation and clarifying how this new edition revises the text and its position in the trilogy, it makes sense to start with the musical history of a minor character—or in Burroughs’ own words, “with one average, stupid, representative case: Johnny Yen.”
Traces of The Ticket return in the lyrics of “Lust for Life” not just because Burroughs’ cultural influence has reached far and wide but more precisely because the book has produced a reception made in its own image. The Ticket is by far the most musically-minded of all Burroughs’ books, referencing the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and mixing fantasies of drum-playing Sex Musicians with a World Music sound-track that ranges from Moroccan flutes to the call of Irish bagpipes. Whole pages consist of nothing but song titles and sampled lyrics, collages of nursery rhymes and jazz standards, torch songs and blues ballads, cowboy tunes, Negro spirituals and Tin Pan Alley sentimental melodies. Iggy Pop knew this when he and David Bowie worked together on “Lust for Life” in West Berlin in 1977, so there’s nothing coincidental about Burroughs’ most musical cut-up book itself being cut up for the lyrics of a song: this was a case of “operation rewrite” in action.
Pop and Bowie probably knew the heavily revised 1967 edition of The Ticket, but had they seen the 1962 original they would have read the jacket blurb describing