Nova Express. William S. Burroughs
call the fold-in method,” a statement that begs many questions: How did the methods differ, in terms of materials used and results obtained? Is it possible to say which parts of Nova Express were cut-up and which folded-in? Should the book be called a “fold-in novel”? Telling Gysin in March 1962 that he was “using more and more cut up method of folding,” Burroughs seems to make “fold-in” a subcategory of “cut-up,” and while this is not the place to develop a taxonomy of forms, it’s obvious that Nova Express contains not one but various types of “cut-up” and “fold-in” texts and that we lack the terms to describe and differentiate them—or even to distinguish them from Burroughs’ “normal” writing: “he writes naturally now like cut up,” Allen Ginsberg observed in September 1962.23
Burroughs’ 170-page October 1962 manuscript, which was used as the typesetting copy, restructured the material to give it the order of the published text. He revised the titles of more than half a dozen sections, cut one, redacted several others and divided the novel into nine chapters, the last of which would be cut only at the galley stage. In his covering letter, Burroughs referred to its internal divisions as both “chapters” and “sections” and as “sections” and “subsections” (ROW, 115). The self-contradiction was typical of Burroughs, and although “section” and “subsection” are more surgically precise, he used “chapter” and “section” more frequently, and I have followed his general if inconsistent practice. In terms of content, the broad direction of manuscript revision was clear: Burroughs redacted cut-up sections and expanded narrative ones. In October 1962 he added two long narratives (“Chinese Laundry” and “Inflexible Authority”), which he suggested to Rosset “would make good advance publicity for the book,” potentially in Evergreen Review. Although the house journal of Grove Press did not take up the suggestion, it had already published two selections from Nova Express, in January and July 1962, and would publish one more in March the following year, while, less strategically, Burroughs contributed other parts to several short-lived little magazines.24 In March 1963, he added another long piece, the 2,000-word “Pry Yourself Loose” section, adding what might be called a nova noir tone of hardboiled vitriol and giving a stronger narrative drive to the book’s opening chapter.
Returning his corrected galleys to Richard Seaver at Grove in July 1964 (a second set had gone, as requested, to Ian Sommerville), Burroughs resumed one last time his familiar refrain: “I found myself dissatisfied with a good deal of the cut up material so the corrected proofs contain considerable deletions and quite a few inserts.”25 These changes were, he insisted, essential to “the integrity and impact of the book.” The ten separate inserts he made on the galleys, typed up and Scotch-taped in, added up to some 1,800 words, all inserted into the second half of the manuscript, which was also where he made all the deletions, using a thick black marker pen. By far the longest insert went into the “One More Chance?” section and significantly expanded the material in Nova Express about Scientology, a key factor that had been there from the start of the cut-up project. Apart from a long, entirely cut-up ninth chapter that Burroughs canceled completely, the cuts and additions he made at the galley stage balanced out in length. It’s revealing that while everything he canceled on the galleys was cut-up material, so was a third of what he added: he hadn’t lost faith in his methods, it was just that the older material now seemed too repetitive (which it was, especially in the ninth chapter). Overall, the revisions didn’t much change the balance of the book, the second half of which has roughly twice as much cut-up material as the first half, although precise percentages are impossible to calculate and becoming progressively unable to tell the difference between what is cut-up and what is not is one of the book’s strangest effects.26
The cut-up text that Burroughs added in 1964 stands out formally through its heavy use of ellipses (. . .), in contrast to his earlier use of the em dash (—). There are 150 ellipses in Nova Express, but just one comes from a pre-1964 typescript. Useful for dating Burroughs’ material, the ellipses of Nova Express also emphasize the larger significance of punctuation. Burroughs not only had an extraordinary ear for speech and idiom and a genius for enigmatic turns-of-phrase but a great sense of rhythm and pace, and he used punctuation to vary the tempo of the reading experience: like a cinematic dissolve, ellipses are usually slow, enigmatic; like a cinematic cut, the em dash is sharp, rapid and urgent. The visual impact of punctuation on the page also makes a clear gesture against the formal limits imposed by mainstream publication. Commenting on the “multiplicity of punctuation” in the new ending he submitted in October 1963, Burroughs had told Seaver: “This is an experiment with format and the use of punctuation which I have carried further in the work I am doing now.”27 On the other hand, the general practice of Grove’s copyeditors was to normalize such distinctive practices as his use of lower case “i” for the first person pronoun and to regularize Burroughs’ inconsistency in using punctuation.
Most important, Burroughs makes punctuation itself operate as a sign system, a language, when the dots and dashes are arranged into lines of “supersonic Morse code” at the end of the section “Will Hollywood Never Learn?” The Morse letters were again a gesture, a pragmatic way to assimilate into book form an equivalent to, for example, his “color alphabet,” a series of experiments with word and image he developed in spring 1961, inspired by a combination of Rimbaud’s poetry and the use of hallucinogens—visually rich experiments which had no commercial possibilities. Visible, rather than audible like phonetic language, the lines of Morse code thus also anticipated the “silent writing of Brion Gysin,” embodied in the calligraphic design that closed The Ticket That Exploded. Although Grove did not use the “sketch by Brion Gysin for a suggested cover” that Burroughs sent Seaver in July 1964, when Nova Express appeared three months later he congratulated his editor on the results: “An excellent job I think as regards cover and typesetting.”28 The question of cover design brings us finally to the book’s title, and the bigger picture that lies behind it.
“CURSE GO BACK”
In spring 1965 Burroughs made an untitled collage for his and Gysin’s “Book of Methods” (later published as The Third Mind) that includes his earlier title for Nova Express constructed as a cut-up of words in two different typefaces: a Gothic “The” followed by “NOVA EXPRESS” in white Sans serif capitals against a black background. The title acts as a caption to the picture above it of a train wreck, while the words “By train” appear prominently nearby. The composition also includes typewritten text by Burroughs in two columns (beginning, “you are reading the future”), a photograph of him making tea, and the Spanish word “Sucesos,” identifying the train crash as an item in the sección de sucesos, the newspaper section dealing with crimes and disasters. In 1966, Jonathan Cape used parts of this collage for the cover of the British edition of Nova Express, omitting the Gothic article “The” and adding pictures of locomotive wheels to emphasize the obvious: Nova Express names the onrushing apocalyptic train crash of history, the railroad of time, “the total disaster now on tracks.”
However, to read the title in this way is to risk missing the point Burroughs was making in both book and collage, and indeed in the cut-up project as a whole: what mattered most was not the apparent referential content but the form, the message in the medium itself. The importance of form is precisely established in the Nova Express collage by the way it is reproduced in The Third Mind, where in miniature it is juxtaposed alongside another Nova Express collage. This collage makes two changes to the book’s title, omitting the article “The” and, after the same white-on-black capitalized “NOVA,” has the word “EXPRESS” in a different typeface. To British readers, the font and spacing of the letters in “EXPRESS” are unmistakable: it is from the masthead of the Daily Express. The other semantic content of the word “express”—referring to not trains but newspapers—is activated formally by the typography of the word and by the broadsheet page layout of the collage.29