The Ticket That Exploded. William S. Burroughs
be over. His first novel, Junky, describes Burroughs on drugs, but the writing of Queer shows him hooked by desire, which makes it more essential to the oeuvre that followed. Indeed, despite the gulf between early autobiographical novella and radical experimental text, Queer predicts The Ticket at a precise formal level. It does so by embedding the menacing song in passages of recurrent images and phrases, including the sound of humming, which create uncanny effects of déjà vu. This eerily repetitious textuality becomes the very hallmark of Burroughs’ writing from Queer onward, and it’s no coincidence that for the 1967 edition of The Ticket Burroughs created a new opening section that recycled the narrative of Queer.
The narrative Burroughs added to The Ticket replayed the “possession” of Lee by Allerton and is crucial because it retrospectively grounds the cut-up text in Burroughs’ experience of traumatic desire. The link confirms that his research into the virus of language was less “experimental writing” than scientific self-experimentation. The reduction of “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair” in Queer to “the fair” in The Ticket cuts up the song’s refrain to separate Johnny from the fair, as if surgically removing a tumor of lovesickness. Since late 1959, when his discovery of cut-up methods coincided with a dramatic break from psychoanalysis and his adoption of Scientology techniques for erasing traumas, Burroughs’ logic had been that our consciousness and sense of reality are verbally programmed from without, so reversing the mechanistic process should lead to deconditioning: “Get it out of your head and into the machines.” Making trauma into a text, the cut-up method was one such machine and the tape recorder its obvious technological extension. But on the evidence of The Ticket, the actual results were mixed or, as Alan Ansen suggested, quite paradoxical: “Are not cut-up and fold-in the music of obsession, fragments that evoke rather than destroy?”13
On the one hand, the text achieves its own self-ruination and the result is page after page of mechanically atomized prose: a “disastrous success,” to borrow Burroughs’ own ironic warning. More interestingly, the text that explodes gives rise to “tentative beings,” “flicker ghosts,” and cybernetic aliens that spin “free of human coordinates” to reveal hybrid creatures with bodies “of a hard green substance like flexible jade—back brain and spine burned with blue sparks as messages crackled in and out.” Applying a similarly post-human aesthetic to music lyrics, The Ticket produces monstrous human-machine composites out of the charming “Daisy Bell” (“love skin on a bicycle built for two,” “i’m half crazy all for the love of color circuits”). Burroughs was writing this in 1962, the same year that a physicist at Bell Labs synthesized the very same song on the vocoder of an IBM 704 to demonstrate the first singing computer. When HAL sings “Daisy Bell” while being disconnected in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (released in 1968, a year after the revised Ticket), the pathos of the dying machine seems to mock our belief in human subjectivity, memory and emotion. For as capitalist technology makes our machines smarter and softer, so we come to appear more stupid and automated. Individual identity is reduced to the effects of a mechanical device, repeating like the roll of music in a player piano or vinyl going round on a turntable—as Burroughs suggests in a mid-1960s text courtesy of lyrics from Irving Berlin’s “The Song Is Ended”: “but the melody lingers on . . . but the melody lingers on . . . but the melody lingers on . . .”14
On the other hand, a ghost remains in the Burroughs machine, a poetic lyricism and a humanity that is all the more deeply felt and mourned for being so surprising: “sad shadow whistles cross a distant sky . . . adiós marks this long ago address . . .” The Ticket succeeds above all in such elegiac gestures of farewell, its paradoxically memorable enactments of forgetting, especially in the last pages: “I lost him long ago . . . dying there . . . light went out . . . my film ends.” With a shocking pathos worthy of this flawed but fascinating book, when Burroughs died in August 1997, Patti Smith attended the funeral at Bellefontaine cemetery in St. Louis and did a graveside rendition of . . . “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair.”
This valedictory quality is particularly fitting because, contrary to the standard history, The Ticket That Exploded was not the middle volume of Burroughs’ Cut-Up Trilogy, following The Soft Machine and preceding Nova Express; it was the final one.
THE TICKET MACHINE
The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded have been grouped together for fifty years. This is partly because they are so unlike anything else and partly because the identity of each book is blurred by Burroughs’ recycling of material across and between them. And yet, although the term is impossible to avoid, “the Cut-Up Trilogy” was always a misnomer. This is because Burroughs never planned to write a series of three books and didn’t himself use the term, and because calling them “the trilogy” has the effect of domesticating these wildly experimental texts and glossing over the differences between them. But equally, it’s because over a seven-year period this “trilogy” materialized itself as no fewer than six quite different books: three versions of The Soft Machine (1961, 1966, 1968); two of The Ticket That Exploded (1962, 1967); and one of Nova Express (1964). Given the publication dates, it’s possible to generate half a dozen sequences that would form “trilogies.” Burroughs made a joke out of the resulting confusion, referring in the 1966 edition of The Soft Machine to “a novel I hadn’t written called The Soft Ticket,” and the gag itself could be permutated from The Nova Machine to The Express That Exploded. The consequences for interpretation have been serious, however, since critics need to map the development of his work using a beginning, middle and end to “the trilogy,” and, lacking the chronology or muddling up the editions, misread the texts accordingly.
In practice, this multiplicity has been conveniently concealed by being reduced to simply “the trilogy” in a single order: first The Soft Machine, then The Ticket That Exploded, finally Nova Express. Since this order follows the sequence of first publications of each title, it appears logical, but it’s false at both a material and philosophical level: materially, because the differences between editions of the same title are significant; and philosophically, because “the trilogy” represents exactly the false essentializing linguistic usage against which Burroughs deployed cut-up methods in the first place—put most succinctly in his attack on the definite article in Nova Express: “Alien Word ‘the.’ ‘The’ word of Alien Enemy imprisons ‘thee’ in Time.” Burroughs’ revisions of “the trilogy” over time were contingent and materially motivated, arising from a tension between his creative methods and the nature of book publication, but they certainly served the philosophical goal of scrambling traditional notions of fixed identity and linear chronology.
The standard sequence is also misleading in entirely practical terms of available editions. In June 1961 Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in Paris published The Soft Machine, followed eighteen months later by The Ticket That Exploded. Like the original Olympia edition of Naked Lunch, which appeared in July 1959,15 these were physically small softback books wrapped in distinctive olive green papers and artwork dust jackets (with designs by Burroughs himself, then Gysin, and finally Sommerville). In addition to having a very special look and feel as physical objects, the Olympia trilogy has become eminently collectible, and the two cut-up volumes are especially rare because, after the initial print run of 5,000, they were never republished. For almost all their history as titles, therefore, the available editions of both The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded have not been the original books but the later revised versions—each of which were published after Nova Express, the supposedly final title of the trilogy. Leaving aside the Calder 1968 British edition of The Soft Machine, the Grove Press Ticket was therefore the final text of “the trilogy,” since it appeared after both the Grove Nova Express (1964) and Soft Machine (1966). But this deals only with histories of publication, whereas the most revealing history affecting how we read The Ticket That Exploded is that of composition.
Since The Ticket was first published in 1962 and Nova Express in 1964, the general assumption has always been that Burroughs wrote The Ticket long before Nova Express, but this is not the case. Following the appearance of The Soft Machine in summer 1961, Burroughs began work on Nova Express that August,