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Introduction

“THE FUTURE LEAKS OUT”

“THIS IS A BURNING PLANET”

Nova Express begins with a chapter called “Last Words” in a messianic voice warning of End Times. It is a stunning overture to a terminal scenario that after fifty years has lost none of its ferocity. “Newsweek says I am basically an old fashioned fire and brimstone preacher,” Burroughs noted on the day the book was published; “The Reverend Lee rides again” (ROW, 170).1 Nova Express is actually a mixing deck of many voices—cutting from a hardboiled detective drawl to the comic rhythms of a picaresque villain, and from the convulsive beauty of a Surrealist poet to a tempo as hard and electrical as the clicking of a Geiger counter—but Burroughs would have been pleased to sound like a sulphurous Old Testament authority. For Nova Express is nothing if not an analysis of and tribute to the apocalyptic power of The Word.

Marshall McLuhan, whose own classic Understanding Media appeared the same year, got both the medium—“an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative”—and the eschatological message: “It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction,” he concluded his own review for The Nation in December 1964; “It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home.”2 Nova Express appeared at the height of the Cold War and the Space Race, when Armageddon was rarely out of the news or off the screens. 1964 had opened with the release of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and would climax the week Nova Express was published with a U.S. presidential election over which mushroom clouds had hung, Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Daisy Girl” TV advert linking the prospect of a Barry Goldwater victory with the countdown to nuclear annihilation. In short: “This is a burning planet—Any minute now the whole fucking shit house goes up.”

Nova Express begins with the blistering Last Words of the mysterious Hassan i Sabbah because time is running out: the book is not just a call-to-arms against those who brought us Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mentioned several times, but a manifesto for global resistance against the 1 percent who run our planet like an alien colony. The book predicts what cataclysms are being “summoned up by an IBM machine and a handful of virus crystals” and describes what dystopian futures are being made on a “soft calculating machine geared to find more and more punch cards.” The mainframe in Dr. Strangelove was an IBM, but the corporation that bore the Burroughs family name, a major rival to IBM in those days, had already featured in such disaster B-movies as The Night the World Exploded (1957), in which a Burroughs B205 calculates the exact time of the planet’s destruction. In the month Nova Express appeared, November 1964, the Burroughs Corporation supplied NASA with a B5500, an upgrade of the model that had inaugurated “third generation” computer systems; the room-sized solid state machines using transistors and mylar tape magnetic drums that were the first truly self-governing “mechanical brains.” Updating his 1952 novel Queer, which references “thinking machines,” as well as “the electronic brain” that goes berserk in Naked Lunch, Burroughs uses the “sound of thinking metal” as one of the voices of Nova Express. In 1968 Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey made the HAL 9000 the sinister star of his sequel to Dr. Strangelove, and the following year the Burroughs computer helped launch the Saturn rockets that put a man on the moon. Using technology no more advanced than a pair of scissors, Nova Express was a launch vehicle in William Burroughs’ own Space Program, his rival mission to invent a “Mythology for the Space Age.”

Along with the other volumes of his Cut-Up Trilogy—The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded—Nova Express is a Time Machine, and it’s about time we caught up. But despite the wide reach of Burroughs’ image across popular culture—or maybe because of it—very little is known about the trilogy. How much of these “cut-up novels” are “cut-up”? What order should they be read in, and how exactly should we read them? Why is there so little sex in Nova Express compared to the other books, and what does its title mean? Since most of what is known about the trilogy turns out to be wrong, anyone who thinks Nova Express was the last one and the simplest of the three will need to think again.

“I BRING NOT PEACE BUT PIECES”

Nova Express fires the reader into a textual outer space that escapes linear time through montage methods applied at both a structural and syntactical level. As an assault on what Burroughs calls the “Reality Film,” the method resembles an accelerated form of cinematic editing, as we’re invited to recognize: “Time and place shift in speed-up movie.” Repeated across the book, the rapid-fire fragments of text induce a recurrent sense of déjà vu that is deeply disorientating, as is the uncanny sense that Burroughs may have borrowed techniques from one medium to update another but that he is also predicting the media of the future. When “The Subliminal Kid” takes over jukeboxes of the world and cuts in the music with the movies, he precisely replicates the sampling of a digital cultural environment. Likewise, the action of Nova Express is modeled on old-fashioned penny arcade pinball machines, “jolting clicking tilting,” and yet simulates a console for fantasy video games in codex form: “K9 was in combat with the alien mind screen.” With a pun on “canine” that evokes the “human dogs” now in a state of global revolt against their alien masters, “Pilot K9” or “Agent K9” is a technical upgrade of the 1930s comic strip hero in Secret Agent X-9 scripted by Dashiell Hammett, but today the K9 tag is also immediately recognizable as a science fiction gaming identity.

Traveling in time isn’t a theme in Nova Express; it’s the aim of the form. This is why it’s hard to say what is or isn’t a “reference,” since the text’s viral signifiers find their signifieds not only in the past but in the future. Faced with cut-up passages, the reader can only learn to wait for the “original” words, at which point they take on meaning by discovering new referents. However, since the process happens in both directions at once and the permutations are incalculable, and since the reader’s point of intersection with the text changes on every reading, new combinations always keep appearing. As well as being wide-open and open-ended, Burroughs’ writing is future-oriented, which is why science fiction was the ideal genre for his cut-up methods.

It wasn’t mimesis and it wasn’t magic: “I am a chemist not a prophet,” says a technical sergeant for The Lazarus Pharmaceutical Company, speaking for Burroughs. The chemistry is a mix of the cryptic, the haunting, and the intertextually impossible: “Good night sweet ladies”? Is that Shakespeare, or T.S. Eliot quoting Shakespeare? “Migrants of ape in gasoline crack of history”? What? Does it really say “Lens googles stuttering light flak”? And Uranian Willy “heard the twittering supersonic threats through antennae embedded in his translucent skull”? Google and Twitter? Does “No bueno” come from Naked Lunch or The Soft Machine or both? Sometimes a word clicks, a bell rings and the future leaks out (and “his face lights up like a pinball machine,” to borrow from Naked Lunch), but the reader’s flippers can’t keep up with the pell-mell rush of verbal steel balls.

Narrative episodes drive the text on while cut-up passages “flow out on ticker tape,” and yet Burroughs left most of his material on the cutting-room floor. This is the first revelation about Nova Express: just how much more there was of it—including collages of literary quotations (Shakespeare, Eliot, Rimbaud, and Joyce in particular) and of newspaper reports about Polaris missiles, the Mariner II Venus probe, A-bomb tests, and high-tech terms: “videosonic—Inertial guidance units—Voice integrators—Direct view control systems—inter valometer computers,” and on and on.3 Burroughs kept only fragments, and it’s fascinating to discover in the archival sources that the single word “capsule” in one passage belonged to John Glenn, who piloted his Mercury spacecraft into orbit in 1962 and was feted on his return with one of the largest ever ticker tape parades. A “founding text of the information culture” informed by probability theory and first wave cybernetics,4 Nova Express uses “extremely small particles” of data to experiment with noise and redundancy, to see how much can be left out of the message, and also to show how to get from vacuum tubes to nanotech microchips: “It’s the microfilm principle—smaller and smaller.” Burroughs juxtaposes the subatomic with the astronomical, referencing white dwarf stars and the Crab Nebula while citing the astronomer Robert Kraft. When K9 says “the human nervous system defines the physics I have constructed,” we’re invited to see that the book combines extremes of scale to construct its own kind of textual physics.

Nominated for a Nebula Award in 1965, Nova Express inspired 1980s cyberpunk writing such as William Gibson’s, but it has cut up literary history by continuing to remain more radical than the science fiction it made possible.5 The book’s stream of literary fragments, sampled narratives, shifts in point of view, clips from B-movies and subliminal single frames of current events uncannily maps the digital environment of the Internet that has made Google-eyed cultural DJs of us all. The “futuristic” form of Nova Express, which builds on the hybrid geographies of “Interzone” in Naked Lunch, doesn’t appear antiquated because it’s not clean and pure like most 1960s visions of the future, but mixed and dirty. In cinematic terms, it’s closer to the tech-noir world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), which it influenced, than to Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, although it also has something in common with one of Kubrick’s sources: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, released six months after Nova Express and featuring the gravel-voiced Alpha 60 computer. Significantly, Alphaville’s secret agent Lemmie Caution drives a Ford Galaxie but wears a private eye’s trench and fedora, and while the film may be set in a dystopian “Zone” it is shot entirely in the night-time streets of Paris in a bleak monochrome, to insist that the future is not in the future; it’s already here.

Looking back half a century, Nova Express appears both of its times and uncannily prophetic, not just aesthetically, but politically. A Book of Revelations, in it Burroughs plays the role of Willy the Rat, a defector from the American ruling class determined to “call the law” on its true criminality. For Burroughs, revealing “how ugly the Ugly American can be” started at home: alternative drafts of “The Last Words of Hassan i Sabbah” openly invoked his “proud American name” (“Proud of what exactly?”), while one of its earliest versions addressed both sides of his family in accusatory block capitals: “MR ADDING MACHINE BURROUGHS MR ZERO BURROUGHS MR VIRUS BURROUGHS LEE THE PRESS AGENT.”6 His paternal and maternal heritage tied Burroughs to pioneering capitalists not only in business and military computing (the Burroughs Adding Machine) but also in public relations (Uncle “Poison” Ivy Lee, son of the “Reverend Lee” and press agent for Rockefeller and Standard Oil). Burroughs put his privileged haute-bourgeois, classical education to good use by turning it back on itself. He was thinking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the title of his book’s penultimate section, “Melted Into Air,” but Nova Express is born of the insight Karl Marx had into the world market (“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”), updated to include the role of the media to aggravate conflicts and sell back what it steals from us. It wasn’t prophecy to Burroughs, it was just straight reportage: “Yep its all there in Nova Express,” he observed of mid-1960s America, “word for stupid ugly word” (ROW, 191).

This is the way Nova Express begins, by reversing the duplicitous use of word and image that defines the role of the PR agent and the Mad Man: ratting out the Cold War national security state (“Top Secret—­Classified—For The Board”), blowing the whistle on toxic consumer capitalism (“For God’s sake don’t let that Coca-Cola thing out”), and exposing global ecological disaster (“Not The Green Deal—Don’t show them that”). Reviewing Nova Express, McLuhan had declared, “We live science fiction.” Now, we live Nova Express: replace Lazarus Pharmaceuticals by Monsanto, with its genetically modified “terminal seeds”; swap the monopolistic magazine empire of Time, Life, and Fortune (referenced several times) by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation or the Walt Disney Company; and for Death Dwarfs (“manipulated by remote control”) read hunter-killer combat drones over Asia. Nova Express is not a book from the past: it addresses our present-time disaster, our still burning planet.

However, history is no more simply a “content” of Nova Express than it is a “context” for it. In part, this is because Burroughs mixed up levels of reality as deliberately as he mixed his genres, to make ontologically preposterous hybrids: “Not The Cancer Deal with The Venusians.” Lines that didn’t make the final cut included: “President Kennedy virtually admitted that at least two known Venusian molluscs were sitting on his cabinet,” and “Ben Gurion denied yesterday that any connection exists between what he termed ‘the Jewish people’ and the crab powers of Minraud.”7 This is one reason the book has not dated and become domesticated as either “historical” or “allegorical”: the big picture is always bigger and weirder than any particular history. “The death dwarfs are weapons of the nova mob,” Burroughs explained in an interview with the Paris Review, two months after his book came out, “which in turn is calling the shots in the cold war.”8 Presidents Kennedy and Johnson are accordingly named in Nova Express, but they are not even bit-part players in the galactic conflict led by “Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin.” As Inspector Lee insists, “history is fiction,” a confidence trickster’s “Big Store” operation, involving elaborate sets and a cast of millions. Once they are seen for what they are, however, all the false fronts of the received cultural texts, all the media myths, political theater, and advertising spin can be rewritten, chaotically scrambled, and subjected to ridicule until they lose their power to create solid “reality” and dictate the future. Nova Express is not “about” history; it treats history as paper and cuts it up.

If Burroughs’ “Last Words” are not “too late,” there is “One hope left in the universe: Plan D”: “Plan D called for Total Exposure.” The title of the book’s second section, “Prisoners, Come Out,” confirms that Burroughs updates the philosophy lesson of the cave in Plato’s Republic, and at times readers surely feel like reacting in the same way to the man who says we’re all chained in darkness and everything we know and love is an illusion. “Don’t listen to Hassan i Sabbah”? Enforced liberation from our temporal existence is more than we bargained for, but it’s what Burroughs is offering. In a 1961 typescript he identifies his writing as a war machine for time travel out of time itself: “This is war between those of us who want out and those who want to keep us all locked in time. The cut ups are not for artistic purposes. The cut ups are a weapon a sword. I bring not peace but pieces.”9

“KUNST UND WISSENSCHAFT”

Before it was published in book form, Burroughs recorded a longer, utterly compelling performance of “Last Words,” and I still recall the cold chill of discovering one of the original tapes in a room of the Special Collections Department at Kansas University one winter evening in Lawrence, November 1984. I was immediately mesmerized in my headphones, and have remained so ever since. Three decades later, anyone with access to the Internet can listen to “Last Words” anytime, and follow it by not just more audio tracks from the book but by watching Burroughs perform in Towers Open Fire, the 1963 short based on passages from Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded directed by Antony Balch. Here his voice, intoning a curse over images of film canisters, is perfectly described as “icily malignant and metallic.”10 Burroughs plays a dozen different roles—from secret agent in black gloves and a fedora hat to gun-toting guerrilla fighter in combat fatigues and a gas mask—and the fact that his gun fires Ping-Pong balls and was bought from Hamleys toy shop in London does nothing to undermine the force of the film or the conviction that Burroughs was anything other than deadly serious.

Our easy digital access to Burroughs’ 1960s audiotape recordings and film performances has a double significance for how to read Nova Express in the twenty-first century. First, it confirms that his book cannot be confined to the category of the “literary” or its scenario contained within the fiction. In Nova Express, it is not the writer who acts out multiple roles in an imaginary war to save the planet. On the contrary: “One of our agents is posing as a writer.” What Burroughs was doing was much more than self-dramatization and may have been paranoid self-delusion, but it is categorically not postmodern literary self-reflexivity: “We all thought we were interplanetary agents involved in a deadly struggle,” he mused in his final novel, The Western Lands (1988), before insisting; “The danger and the fear were real enough.”11 Burroughs’ absolute immersion in the cut-up project, his evangelical promotion and daily living of it, had a dark side—­unleashing for a while an ugly megalomania, misogyny, and anti-Semitism—but it is integral to the power of his texts and our experience of them.

The availability of Burroughs’ work in multiple media also establishes that Nova Express does not belong to the field of “experimental literature,” in the usual sense of formally innovative writing. Up until the publication of Naked Lunch in summer 1959, it was still possible to think of Burroughs as “a writer”; not so from that point on. Progressively developing his “third mind” with Brion Gysin, the painter who shared the original cut-up method with him in Paris in October 1959, Burroughs no longer “wrote” but carried out a series of ritualistic activities and empirical operations in one medium or another, from one technology to another. When Gregory Corso asked what “department” he worked for in a 1961 interview, Burroughs replied, “Kunst und Wissenschaft,”12 and the Foreword Note to Nova Express accordingly frames the book in terms of both the arts and sciences. It’s revealing that Nova Express not only refers to Gysin’s paintings and Dreamachine (“flicker cylinders and projectors”) but cross-references them with experimental equipment such as Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator and the sensory isolation tanks built by John Lilly, correlating aesthetic and scientific means and ends.

Nova Express is not so much “experimental writing” as a device for conducting experiments on the reader: learning to “read” cut-ups means not only experiencing textual time travel but living in a new medium, maybe to mutate and grow “purple fungoid gills” like the amphibious Fish People. Taking quite literally the scientific meaning of “experiment” and the military sense of “avant-garde,” and pushing both to the limits, Burroughs’ cut-up project was a decade-long commitment to research and development across a broad range of techniques and technologies in which he collaborated directly with Antony Balch (on films), Ian Sommerville (on audiotapes and photomontages) and Brion Gysin (on the “third mind,” a concept and practice of collaboration in itself). The results—in writing, film, tape, photography and collage—were weapons in a war and as much by-products of a process as artistic objects in themselves.

The last decade has begun to catch up with Burroughs, and has seen not only a mass of new scholarly and critical work but the opening up of the enormous archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the curating of major artwork exhibitions around the world, the publication of catalogs, the release of films, tapes, letters, and the online digitization of some of the hundreds of texts he contributed to the little magazines of the 1960s mimeograph revolution. The result has been a complete transformation in the Burroughs oeuvre, putting center-stage his cut-up work in media beyond the book form. In 2004 it was still possible to argue that the easy commercial availability of The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, as well as the critical attention paid to them, had misrepresented the cut-up project and perpetuated Burroughs’ reductive reception as a novelist: as marketed books, the Cut-Up Trilogy might even be seen as an extraordinary exception to the cut-up project, I myself argued.13 With so much more of the larger project available, now is the time to make the counter­argument, and for a new generation to discover the trilogy and to see where it always belonged: not separate from but integrally connected to the full range of Burroughs’ unique experiments with word and image.

This is the context for revising the three texts by drawing on archival resources of breathtaking richness, to establish for the first time their manuscript and publishing histories. It is also time to rethink such terms as cut-up novel and cut-up trilogy. New readers need new scholarship, the state of which has barely advanced since the 1980s, when the first serious but materially flawed academic studies appeared. Drawing on several thousand pages of archival ­materials—from first drafts and variant typescripts to final long galleys—the notes in this edition aim to reveal the unrecognized complexity of Nova Express: they are organized section-by-section because every part has its own untold backstory. The notes therefore aim to make possible new lines of research and reading, and in what follows I offer one such reading, focused on the story that lies behind the book’s title. But first, in order to piece together the writing of Nova Express we have to unpick the received wisdom about it, starting from the apparent truism that it was the third novel of the Cut-Up Trilogy.

“THE SOFT TICKET”

The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express 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. Running the books together, however, and taking as read the term “Cut-Up Trilogy” (or its thematic alternative, “The Nova Trilogy”), has separated them from their larger context—the many related short texts, photo-collages, scrapbooks, films and tapes that Burroughs made in parallel—and downplayed the important differences between the books (including the almost total lack of sexual material in Nova Express). To some, confusion about the trilogy seems not so much inevitable as intentional, on the basis that the cut-up project attacked stable identities and linear chronology.

A certain confusion was indeed inherent in the method, since cutting up texts on the scale of Burroughs’ project—involving literally thousands of pages of source material, many of which were cut, retyped and cut over and over again—was a process incompatible with achieving a satisfactorily finished product, a definitive text. Burroughs didn’t think that Nova Express was “in any sense a wholly successful book,” but he said the same of The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, and for the same reasons.14 The cut-up method worked well with short texts for little mimeo magazines because the texts were immediate, rough and ephemeral, like the publications themselves: was Burroughs “satisfied” with “Where Flesh Circulates” in Floating Bear No. 24 (1962)? The question wasn’t relevant. In contrast, the commercially published novel had a fixed form that took time to produce and would last forever. To call Nova Express a “cut-up novel” is both inaccurate (it wasn’t a novel that was then cut up), and imprecise (how much of it is “cut-up” and how much a “novel”?), but Burroughs himself couldn’t avoid calling the book a “novel.” It was a contradiction in terms, which is one reason he ended up producing revised editions, so that over a seven-year period the “trilogy” materialized itself as no fewer than six 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). And as we’ll see, that “one” edition of Nova Express gives an entirely misleading impression of simplicity.

In the 1966 edition of The Soft Machine, Burroughs made a joke out of the resulting confusion (and of his books’ lack of commercial success), referring to being paid for the film rights of “a novel I hadn’t written called The Soft Ticket” and to selling “the Danish rights on my novel Expense Account.” But it’s not so funny for anyone genuinely interested in the trilogy and how its parts relate one to another. What is “the trilogy” when the editions published in the 1960s make possible no fewer than six different permutations and when there’s a trilogy alone of Soft Machines?

Ironically, “the trilogy” has by default always maintained a single order: first The Soft Machine, then The Ticket That Exploded, finally Nova Express. The sequence keeps faith with the chronology of the first publications of each title: The Soft Machine in 1961 (by Olympia Press in Paris); The Ticket That Exploded in 1962 (again, Olympia in Paris); and Nova Express in 1964 (by Grove Press in New York). The Olympia editions were never published in the United States and went out of print, however, and the available versions are not only different books but have an entirely different chronological order: in Grove editions, the last title, Nova Express, was the earliest edition (dating from 1964), while the revised middle title, The Ticket That Exploded, became the last edition (published in 1967), and the revised first title, The Soft Machine, became the middle volume (published in 1966). Confused? Sketching the development of Burroughs’ trilogy over time and relating the books to his work in other media, critics have invariably muddled up the editions and got the history back-to-front. Far from being contra-indicated, an historical approach is long overdue.

The books’ reception in the United States and Europe were mirror opposites of each other, since American readers only started the trilogy in 1964 with Nova Express, by which time The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded had been out in Europe for two years. But this is to simplify, since British readers also had a cut-up trilogy-in-one, in the shape of Dead Fingers Talk (1963), which was made from revised selections of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket. In 1968 John Calder also brought out the much-revised British edition of The Soft Machine, so that the trilogy’s first title had now become its final text, and then to cap it all, in 1980 Grove unwisely brought out in one volume a “trilogy” comprising The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Wild Boys.

In light of this confusion’s masterpiece, it’s less surprising that the history of Nova Express, the one “unrevised” edition, turns out to be more complicated than assumed. Constructing the history of its composition clarifies its position within Burroughs’ oeuvre, but the initial clues to its status as part of a trilogy are given in the opening pages of the text itself.

One way that Nova Express distinguishes itself from the rest of the trilogy is by naming other books by Burroughs, and in its second section it refers to Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine twice—in surprising terms: “The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are.” Burroughs identifies Nova Express as the third of three books, but this is a trilogy beginning with Naked Lunch and excluding The Ticket—an omission that turns out to be crucial for understanding the “trilogy.”15

Contrary to the history of publication—in which Nova Express appeared in November 1964, almost two years after The Ticket—Burroughs had in fact written almost all of Nova Express, including this passage, months before he even began The Ticket. Had it not been for delays at Grove Press and the speed with which Burroughs wrote The Ticket That Exploded for Olympia, Nova Express would have followed The Soft Machine, so that The Ticket would have been the third book of the trilogy. As much a composite text as the others, Nova Express was written and rewritten over a three-year period and, time-traveling back and forth within the trilogy’s history, it would be entirely plausible to place it first, second, and third in different trilogies of composition and publication. Perhaps the most meaningful paradox is that Burroughs began Nova Express as a sequel to The Soft Machine and completed it as a sequel to The Ticket That Exploded. Burroughs’ own view was certainly paradoxical: hearing in 1963 that Grove Press had been offered contracts for The Soft Machine and The Ticket, he wrote confirming to Barney Rosset that Grove was “the only American publisher for this work but I certainly think Nova Express should be published first as a measure of logical sequence.”16 The logic is hard to see, but Burroughs wrote Nova Express hoping that Grove would publish it before Naked Lunch, as a way to strengthen their case against censorship, which is why for this book he cut down the sex.

Finally, it’s astonishing to realize that throughout the 1960s Burroughs never once refers to “the cut-up trilogy” in any correspondence, manuscripts or interviews. In fact his only use of the term “trilogy” in this period, in a typescript from early 1962, alludes to the trilogy surprisingly given in Nova Express: “My present work is Novia Express [sic]—reference is to an exploding star or planet it could happen here—This is the last book of a trilogy—Naked Lunch The Soft Machine—The work I am writing now should make it clearer to the reader exactly what I was doing in The Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine.”17 What’s clear is that “the trilogy” is not what we thought it was, and that our readings need to be based on a more accurate history of the writing and rewriting of texts that are both multiple and composite.

“A REWRITE JOB”

In August 1961 Burroughs was living in Tangier at the Villa Muniria, where he had written most of Naked Lunch five years before. After completing The Soft Machine, that April he had made a false start on a novel called The Ugly Spirit, which was intended to be a “joint operation for Painter and Writer,” and spent the summer drawing, painting, making photo-collages and listening to static on transistor radios. At the end of July, Timothy Leary came to visit, bearing hallucinogenic drugs. Leary would later write in vivid detail about that psychedelic summer in Tangier with Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ian Sommerville, and Alan Ansen. As well as describing “When the Celestial Messenger Comes Wearing a Fedora,” Leary reported Burroughs’ decision to write a new kind of cut-up novel, one that would be less “difficult” than The Soft Machine.18 It was in this context that in August Burroughs announced to Brion Gysin: “I am writing a straight action novel that can be read by any twelve year old entitled The Novia Express” (ROW, 83). A week later, still apparently serious that his new work was suitable for teenage boys, he clarified that this was a “science fiction adventure story.”19 Burroughs would drop one word and then change the spelling of another so that the title has its own trilogy of forms—The Novia Express, Novia Express, Nova Express—but, for reasons I will return to, it’s significant that he began with a definite title in mind. Having decided the title, identified the genre, and made a start with what became the “Uranian Willy” section—which in places does read like a space invader video game—in mid-August Burroughs left Tangier for a three-month trip to the United States.

Leary had invited Burroughs to Massachusetts to research psilocybin mushrooms, and although the trip turned out very badly, it was important for Nova Express at this early stage in its writing. The impact shows in the text’s categorical warning about ­hallucinogens—revising Burroughs’ earlier enthusiasm and running against the grain of 1960s counterculture—in favor of promoting nonchemical means of consciousness expansion, which implicitly included his own writing. As he had told Leary at the start of the year, “I have achieved pure cut-up highs” (ROW, 64). Based in Brooklyn and with little to do but write—“No pot no sex no money” (91)—from September to November 1961 Burroughs concentrated on the book, leaving New York for the Beat Hotel in Paris as soon as he received an advance from Grove.

At the start and end of December 1961, Burroughs sent early chapters to Barney Rosset at Grove Press. More surprisingly, he also mailed them to Henry Wenning, a manuscript dealer in Connecticut. The fact that Burroughs was now selling typescripts of a work-in-progress made Nova Express a symbolic landmark in his career. This was not a financially lucrative deal, but the sale separated Nova Express both from Burroughs’ previous novels and from the many short texts he sent to “no-paying far-out experimental magazines” (ROW, 59). The sales helped sustain Burroughs through times when he needed to pawn the tools of his trade: his typewriter, camera, and tape recorder.

From December 1961 to the end of February 1962, writing first in Paris and then London, Burroughs mailed Rosset more material at least four times, and then on March 30, mailed the first complete manuscript—only to admit three days later that it was “not in as good order as I would like,” enclosing more corrections, suggestions and material.20 Since there’s no more “plot” progression than there is “character” development, any structure would have been provisional because multiple permutations were possible. Burroughs’ constant shifts in location were also connected, practically as well as figuratively, to the material he produced and the difficulties he had finding the right order for it. The international geography of Nova Express’ writing history is as revealing as its chronology: as Burroughs explained to Wenning, “my methods of work and constant change of residence traveling with one suitcase makes for difficulty assembling complete typescripts.”21 Barney Rosset encouraged Burroughs to send sections as he wrote them, and several times Burroughs had to ask Rosset to send copies back, having either lost or lost track of what he had written. At least by selling his manuscripts Burroughs preserved them, because his working methods and need to keep moving ensured the casual destruction of much of it.

During the next six months Burroughs started and finished The Ticket That Exploded for Olympia Press, assembled Dead Fingers Talk for John Calder and began revising The Soft Machine—but nothing happened on Nova Express. The last two projects suggest he had an agenda in mind when asking Rosset at the start of October 1962 whether Grove had “a definite publication date for Nova Express” (he had changed the spelling of the title the previous month): “That was a rush job and I am not satisfied with the arrangement of material and some of the sections could do with a rewrite job.”22 Contrary to appearances, Nova Express was not the one unrevised volume in the Cut-Up Trilogy, and in the third week of October Burroughs mailed Rosset a “revised and rearranged manuscript” (ROW, 115). He added a new chapter in March 1963 and submitted a new ending (which was never used) that October, when the typesetting was done, and then over a year later effectively revised Nova Express a second time, so extensive was the work Burroughs did on the galleys in July 1964, now back in Tangier where he had started the book three years earlier.

The three major stages of Nova Express’ compositional history—the March and October 1962 manuscripts and the July 1964 revised ­galleys—generated a trilogy of alternative forms and resulted in a composite final text. Piecing together the March 1962 manuscript from incomplete archival copies, it was clearly similar in content to the published text, lacking for certain only three sections (“Pry Yourself Loose And Listen,” “Chinese Laundry,” and “Inflexible Authority”) and including three others that Burroughs later cut. However, the order was completely different and another eight sections differed significantly. The first ten chapters (often titled in block capitals in his first draft) began with “THE NOVIA EXPRESS” (later retitled “Uranian Willy”) and ended with “A DISTANT THANK YOU.” Other chapters followed in late December and mid-February, and a good deal more of the text was written in the six weeks leading up to his submission of the first complete manuscript on March 30, 1962. This was an especially significant period because Burroughs was now no longer cutting up his material, which is one reason he produced so much so quickly. As he announced on February 20, “I do not use scissors any more” (ROW, 99).

In his Foreword Note to Nova Express Burroughs acknowledged that he had used an “extension of Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I 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 The term nova may refer to a nuclear explosion in white dwarf stars, but Burroughs was well enough versed in astronomy as well as in Latin to know this was an abbreviation of stella nova (“new star”), and that nova also designates what is new or news: it was in this double sense that he originally titled his novel The Novia Express.

A year before making these two collages, in spring 1964 as he waited to receive the Nova Express galleys, Burroughs had been building filing systems modeled on newspaper archives: “Your reporter selects a clipping from the file labelled Daily Express, Saturday, April 25, 1964 (London).”30 In July, as he corrected the galleys, he physically framed his book in terms of newspapers by inserting the same phrase to give a new final line to both the first and last sections of the text: “September 17, 1899 over New York.”31 Burroughs became obsessed with this date, using it in many texts, but its significance lies in its provenance in a newspaper. In February 1964 he wrote Gysin of his discovery: “The New York Times for September 17, 1899 came through a few days ago. I saw at once that the message was not of content but format. Newspapers are cut up by format […] This is the secret of their power to mould thought feeling and subsequent events” (ROW, 139). Restating what he had already made explicit in Nova Express in terms of “Juxtaposition Formulae” (“Our technicians learn to read newspapers and magazines for juxtaposition statements rather than alleged content”), Burroughs was inspired to produce his own newspaper format pieces using three columns, and during 1964 and 1965 he made many such texts. Although these have always been seen as entirely separate from his book-length cut-up work, the ending of Nova Express insists otherwise: “Well that’s about the closest way I know to tell you and papers rustling across city desks . . . fresh southerly winds a long time ago.” Those “city desks” of newspaper offices parallel the sección de sucesos in his Nova Express collage and were a clear reflection of Burroughs’ vision in February 1964: “Why not write a novel as if you were sitting at the city desk?” (ROW, 143). And those “fresh southerly winds” would be associated with newspapers in the archives Burroughs later assembled for sale; Folio 108, which he titled “Fresh Southerly Winds Stir Papers On The City Desk,” gathers together a dozen mid-1960s newspaper-format publications, from “The Daily Tape Worm” to one called “The Nova Express.”32

Burroughs may not have had in mind his late-1950s character “Fats” Terminal, who “edits a newspaper known as the Underground Express,”33 but Nova Express was definitely “underground.” Not quite, perhaps, like the underground press of little magazines to which Burroughs contributed—since a publishing house like Grove was “alternative” but still commercial, not aligned with the self-publishing networks that sprang up in the 1960s. Rather, it was underground in its aim to serve a resistance movement against an occupying power, its cut-up methods intended to sabotage an essentially fascist above­ground world. Nova Express is “about” the Nova Mob, but from the start Burroughs saw it as opposed to and directed against what in 1960 he called “the Beaverbrook Mob,” referring to the Anglo-Canadian owner of the Daily Express, and fascist sympathizer, Lord Beaverbrook.34 In fact, Beaverbrook was one of a trio of press barons in Burroughs’ sights, alongside Henry Luce (Time, Life, Fortune) and William Randolph Hearst (from the San Francisco Examiner to New York’s Daily Mirror). Many early drafts of what became “Last Words,” were addressed directly to all three: “PAY IT ALL PAY IT ALL PAY IT ALL BACK. PLAY IT ALL PLAY IT ALL PLAY IT ALL BACK. RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW FOR ALL TO SEE. MR LUCE BEAVERBROOK HURST TIME SMASH YOUR MACHINE.”35 Dating from as early as May 1960, this and other “Last Words” drafts were written over a year before Burroughs began work on Nova Express, but he never used any such material for The Soft Machine and would make relatively few references to the press in The Ticket That Exploded. However, he saw Nova Express in terms of newspapers from first to last.

The most striking instance of how early and how emphatically Burroughs associated the book’s original title with newspapers appears in a long canceled passage from the section “Too Far Down The Road.” Probably composed in late 1961, the typescript repeats the phrase “To readers of The Daily Express” twice in order to frame a reference to “The Novia Express,” and also cites the title of one of Luce’s magazines (“Looking through Time”). Readers of “The Novia Express” would have got the point, and this material stayed in until the galley stage in July 1964. Burroughs didn’t simply cut it, however: he transferred it from one medium to another, in April 1965 recording “Are You Tracking Me,” a sonic experiment that includes the key phrase “To readers of The Daily Express.”

In August 1961 the first chapter heading of the manuscript in its earliest draft had carried the original title of the book as a whole, “THE NOVIA EXPRESS.” Here, the “one hope left in the universe” is to “wise up the marks”: “Show them the rigged wheel of Life-Time-Fortune. Storm The Reality Studio.” The book therefore opened with not only the clearest possible assault on the fraudulent “reality” projected by Luce’s newsmagazine empire; in the context of references to Life, Time, and Fortune, the section and book title “The Novia Express” also identified Burroughs’ text as alternative reportage, “news” of a different reality. But it’s significant that the book uses words cut from newspapers quite recognizably in just three specific sections (“Extremely Small Particles,” “There’s A Lot Ended,” “Are These Experiments Necessary?”), and that these are all introduced by dates: from “Dec. 17, 1961—Past Time” to “March 17, 1962, Present Time Of Knowledge.” Attacking the temporality and referentiality standardized by Time magazine, Nova Express mainly uses cut-up news items that were of passing, topical interest in December 1961 and March 1962 (crime reports, celebrity events), and renders them deliberately obscure. For Burroughs, “Present Time” was not determined by public events or the official historical record but was a point of personal intersection, and from many pages of cut-up newspaper source material he chose to keep few fragments of “historical” significance for use in Nova Express.

Burroughs’ attitudes toward history, news, and time are suggested by the revisions he didn’t make for the revised manuscript he submitted in October 1962, even though the historical context could scarcely have been more urgent or more resonant. Two days before he mailed his manuscript, Kennedy was addressing Khrushchev on television at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were upgrading the alert status for nuclear war to DEFCON 2, its highest-ever condition of readiness. Cut up with tittle-tattle about film stars and murder stories, Burroughs’ typescript for “There’s A Lot Ended,” written in March 1962, had included prophetic “rumors about Castro,” but that October he neither restored the line nor updated his manuscript, even though the eyes of the world were on Cuba and the world seemed on the brink of nova.

Burroughs’ attack on Time was also a personal counter­attack, most directly in response to its review of the Grove Press Naked Lunch, which was so offensive he sued the magazine, winning token damages of £5 in November 1963. The Time review had also attacked the then-unpublished Nova Express, which it described as coming “daringly close to utter babble, according to reports.”36 Burroughs cut up the text from Time (and the libel case documents) and recycled the phrase “utter babble” in two magazine-format publications printed in 1965, his own version of Time and APO-33, in the spirit of what goes around comes around. Or as he put it in Towers Open Fire, intoning the words over canisters of reality film: “Curse go back.”

Of the trinity of media magnates attacked in early drafts of “Last Words,” by far the most significant was Henry Luce. Nova Express was Burroughs’ central weapon against the monopolistic power of Luce’s own “trilogy” of Time, Life, and Fortune, titles that not only named but in effect copyrighted Time, Life, and Fortune. Luce’s name appears in dozens of typescripts dating from 1960, several addressed directly to him, demanding he dismantle his “Time Machine.”37 Burroughs’ public counterattack had started in 1960 with Minutes to Go, a manifesto that both addressed potential allies in the cut-up project and identified its primary enemy through an “OPEN LETTER TO LIFE MAGAZINE.” This cut-up of Life’s mocking feature article on the Beats from November 1959 returned the mockery with interest, in the vein of the comic cuts in The Drunken Newscaster tapes Burroughs loved. But the text also announced the future direction of a project that had begun just the month before, when Gysin sliced through newspapers and Life magazine advertisements while cutting a mount for a drawing in the Beat Hotel. It identified cut-up methods as a strategy of media détournement, as the Paris-based Situationsists called it. From here, it was a short step to The Third Mind and Electronic Revolution and The Revised Boy Scout Manual, handbooks to inspire future generations of media guerrillas, culture jammers, computer hackers, and pop-up subversives.

In the society of the spectacle, Burroughs understood that “the real battle” is over the production of reality itself: of what counts as real in the first place.38 Given the balance of power in his rivalry with Time, Life, and Fortune, cut-up methods were necessarily terroristic, waging asymmetrical warfare against a global media empire seeking to maintain what Luce had envisioned as a permanent American Century. In that context, Nova Express brilliantly dramatizes how cybernetic feedback could coincide with imperial blowback by reversing the function of Time magazine. For once the news is understood as not reporting the past but projecting the future, Burroughs reasoned that to physically reorder the news is to scramble the reality it produces, until “Insane orders and counter orders issue from berserk Time Machine”: “I said The Chief of Police skinned alive in Baghdad not Washington D.C.” The funniest as well as the most politically ferocious of Burroughs’ Cut-Up Trilogy, Nova Express includes within itself a sense of how ridiculous it was to oppose a media trilogy that in 1965 had a weekly circulation of more than ten million with a book whose print run was ten thousand: “Sure, sure, but you see now why we had to laugh till we pissed watching those dumb rubes playing around with photomontage—Like charging a regiment of tanks with a defective slingshot.” Or like fighting the Nova Mob with a pair of scissors and a Ping-Pong machine gun. Was it just self-delusion to declare that “a box camera and a tape recorder can cut lines laid down by Hollywood and life time fortune”?39

Burroughs started Nova Express as an “action novel that can be read by any twelve year old,” and constructed it both with deadly seriousness and in the adventurous spirit of “Johnny The Space Boy who built a space ship in his barn” (ROW, 112)—in other words, against a backdrop of apocalyptic darkness and overwhelming odds, in the doomed but undefeated spirit of eternal hope.

“COMPLETE INTENTIONS FALLING”

The relation between Nova Express and newspapers draws attention to a basic distinction for Burroughs between the book form and his newspaper experiments: his little magazine and small pamphlet texts in newspaper format were typically quick, rough, and unrevised productions where he deliberately let stand numerous typos and cancellations as signs of his process of composition. In absolute contrast, Burroughs fully expected his book manuscripts to be professionally typeset and copyedited. He addressed Grove Press in pragmatic terms of publishing norms and editorial corrections: “As regards your enquiries,” he wrote Richard Seaver in early October 1963, just as Nova Express was about to be typeset, “most of the irregularities you speak of are typing errors to be corrected in the manner you suggest,” adding, a couple of weeks later: “As a matter of general orientation, both spelling and punctuation should be normalized and consistent.”40 The agreement between author and publisher was clear and establishes an equally clear context for this new edition of Nova Express.

Contrary to media myths, Burroughs did not put his material together haphazardly any more than he wrote it crazed on drugs. Chance operations served particular creative functions that varied over time, but even the early “raw” cut-ups in Minutes to Go were carefully edited, representing ways to escape the control of language, not abdicate it. “If my writing seems at times ungrammatical,” Burroughs explained to his bemused parents in November 1959, as he started to work with cut-up methods, “it is not due to carelessness or accident” (ROW, 7). He was equally insistent about the methods themselves, often repeating that the results “must be edited and rearranged as in any other method of composition” (105). The archival evidence confirms the radical creative role he allowed chance in the process of cutting or folding texts and transcribing the results, and he always retained mistakes and typos across his many rough drafts; but the evidence also confirms the rigorous approach he took to the correction of final drafts.41

Equally, there is no evidence at all that Burroughs accepted as felicitous the kind of contingencies that would usually be called a “corruption,” and, far from embracing the unwanted interventions of copyeditors and typesetters, Burroughs did what he could to restore his original intentions. Burroughs chose his collaborators, just as he chose the material he cut up and the results he retained. That’s why he called on Ian Sommerville, to add a more rigorous hand in proofing the galleys. My own approach to editing Nova Express has kept faith with this logic. Apart from giving the opening sections of each chapter their own titles, the roughly one hundred changes for this edition mainly correct typos or restore Burroughs’ punctuation (including his occasional use of double colons) and are conventionally based (i.e., supported by multiple manuscript witnesses). The notes detail key changes, comment on apparent errors and twilight zone cases and introduce the richest possible selection of archival material to reveal revisions over time and the intricacy of Burroughs’ working methods. While relatively minor, the textual alterations categorically reject the alternative: to fix and fetishize the 1964 Grove edition. Nova Express has no final form any more than it allows a definitive reading, since the paradoxical result of its mechanical creative procedures is an organic textuality, a living text that changes on every reading. The poetic complexity of Nova Express will always exceed our grasp and yet invite us back, because simply to read and re-read it is the only way to do justice to Burroughs’ book, to this textual war machine and homemade spaceship built for time travel, to the radioactive fervor of Reverend Lee’s last words.

Oliver Harris

May 2, 2013

1. Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Ecco, 2012), 170. After, abbreviated to ROW.

2. Marshall McLuhan, “Notes on Burroughs,” The Nation (December 28, 1964), 517–19.

3. Undated typescript, probably 1963 (William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, 37.2). After, abbreviated to Berg. Mariner II is cited in Berg 11.28; Polaris in Berg 36.11; Atom bomb fallout in Berg 12.17.

4. See Dennis Redmond’s essay <http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/PP2.html>

5. The “condensed” novels of J.G. Ballard would be an obvious exception, but the British writer always insisted Burroughs was an inspiration, not an influence.

6. Typescript, dated May 20, 1960 (Berg 49.1).

7. Undated typescript (Berg 10.11).

8. Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1996, edited by Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e): 2000), 80.

9. Autograph, dated 1961 (Berg 62.9).

10. Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London: Verso, 2002), 31.

11. Burroughs, The Western Lands (New York: Viking, 1987), 252.

12. Burroughs Live, 42.

13. See “Cutting Up Politics,” in Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (London: Pluto, 2004), edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh, 175–200.

14. Burroughs, The Job (New York: Penguin, 1989), 27.

15. One explanation for the presence of Naked Lunch might be that Burroughs made his Cut-Up Trilogy from the leftovers of his thousand-page “Word Hoard”; but so far as Nova Express is concerned, there’s little truth in this often-repeated claim.

16. Burroughs to Rosset, May 24, 1963 (Grove Press Records, Special Collections, Syracuse University.) After, abbreviated to Syracuse.

17. Undated 2-page typescript (Berg 9.16).

18. Timothy Leary, High Priest (New York: Ronin, 1995), 225.

19. Burroughs to Gysin, August 18, 1961 (Berg 85.5).

20. Burroughs to Rosset, April 2, 1962 (Syracuse).

21. Burroughs to Wenning, September 23, 1961 (William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, SPEC.CMS.85, 1.1).

22. Burroughs to Rosset, October 2, 1962 (Syracuse).

23. Ginsberg to Kerouac, September 9, 1962, in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Da Capo, 2008), 270.

24. Burroughs also made three contributions to the German magazine Rhinozeros and contributed parts of Nova Express to The Second Coming in 1962 and Ira Cohen’s Gnaoua in 1964.

25. Burroughs to Seaver, July 21, 1964 (Berg 75.1).

26. In rough terms, a quarter of the material in chapters 1 to 4 is cut-up, compared with half of the material in chapters 5 to 7. Almost half the book’s sections combine cut-up and non-cut-up writing, and of the rest half have just one or the other.

27. Burroughs to Seaver, October 24, 1963 (Syracuse).

28. Burroughs to Seaver, July 21, 1964 and October 25, 1964 (Berg 75.1).

29. At this time, Burroughs made another collage that placed an adapted copy of the front cover of a November 30, 1962 copy of Time magazine in between his two Nova Express collages. A photograph of this collage is reproduced in The Art of William S. Burroughs: Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs, edited by Collin Fallows (Nürnberg: moderne Kunst, 2013), 61. According to Barry Miles, it was created at the Hotel Chelsea, New York, in April 1965, and Burroughs used a Spanish language newspaper brought with him from Tangier (e-mail correspondence April 30, 2013). As well as influencing numerous musicians, including an album of the same title by John Zorn (2011), and inspiring Andre Perkowski’s cine­matic homage (2010), Nova Express gave its title to a newspaper in Alan Moore’s 1986 comic-book series, Watchman.

30. Burroughs, “Tangier,” Esquire 62.3 (September 1964).

31. In October 1963 Burroughs asked Seaver for two copies of the New York Times front page. The exact repetition of the line is crucial, although this feature has often been lost in translation, as in the French edition translated by Mary Beach and Claude Pélieu (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1970). This has “au-dessus de New York, le 17 septembre 1899” the first time but “17 septembre 1899, au-dessus de New York” the second time (9, 189). Unaccountably, the edition also translates the final date “21 July, 1964” as “21 janvier 1964.”

32. Folio 108 in the original catalog became Box 38 in the Berg Collection archive.

33. Burroughs, “Word,” in Interzone (New York: Viking, 1989), 184. Fats Terminal does appear in the “Gave Proof Through the Night” section, on a jukebox playing The Star-Spangled Banner.

34. Burroughs to Gysin, August 30, 1960 (Berg 86.8).

35. Undated typescript, probably late 1960 (Berg 48.22).

36. “King of the YADS,” Time (November 30, 1962), 96-97.

37. “Mr Henry Luce, Do you know what the machine is up to?” begins one typescript (Berg 7.38). A diatribe addressed to Mr ­Bradly Mr Martin in The Ticket That Exploded is clearly a reworking of similar material, but the only time Luce is actually named in the trilogy occurs in the 1968 edition of The Soft Machine when a character “goes into his Luce act” (106).

38. Burroughs Live, 150.

39. Draft typescript for The Ticket That Exploded (Berg 20.39). See also “The Inferential Kid,” The Burroughs File (San Francisco: City Lights, 1984), 128.

40. Burroughs to Seaver, October 10, 1963 and October 24, 1963 (Syracuse).

41. Burroughs’ clearest statement on the subject is quoted in Miles’ Introduction to Le métro blanc (Paris: Seuil, 1976), a collection of cut-up texts translated into French: “As you know my methods of writing do not allow me to correct rough copies and first drafts [. . .] It is only when I obtain the final form that I correct errors” (12; my translation).