Trilogy
The trilogy of experimental novels is composed of The Soft Machine (1961, revised 1966 and 1968), The Ticket That Exploded (1962, revised 1967) and Nova Express (1964). Like Naked Lunch , The Soft Machine derived in part from The Word Hoard , a number of manuscripts Burroughs wrote mainly in Tangier, between 1954 and 1958.
All three novels use the cut-up technique that Burroughs invented in cooperation with painter and poet Brion Gysin and computer programmer Ian Sommerville. Commenting on the trilogy in an interview, Burroughs said that he was "attempting to create a new mythology for the space age". [1]
In 2014, restored editions of the three novels were published, edited by Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris. The new editions made a number of changes to the texts and included notes and previously unpublished materials that showed the complexity of the books' manuscript histories and the precision with which Burroughs used his methods.
Style
The Trilogy is viewed by critics as being one of Burroughs's most radical experimentations with narrative form. All three novels are crafted using the cut-up method, in which existing texts are cut into various pieces and put back together in random order. The technique was combined with images of Gysin's painting and sounds from Somerville's tape recorders. [2]
Due to the cut-up method's random approach to text, Burroughs repeatedly defended his writing style against critics, explaining that the cut-up method created possibilities for mixing text written by himself and other writers and helped deemphasize the traditional role of text. As a result, the novels that make up the trilogy are even more sporadic in plot and structure than Naked Lunch. Burroughs spoke of the trilogy as a "sequel", and "mathematical extension" of the themes and techniques of Naked Lunch. [3]
The Soft Machine is the first book in the trilogy, and is a compilation of descriptive and interchangeable scenes, which delve further into the sexual and biological issues previously explored in Naked Lunch. Critic Mac Tonnies described the main themes in the novel as including "time travel, media bombardment, and out-of-body travel." [4]
In The Ticket that Exploded, Burroughs deals with tape recorders (an allegory Burroughs links to the destruction of control systems), cybernetic pleasure farms, and homosexual erotic exploitations on the planet Venus. [4] Burroughs bypasses linear structure, pattern, and narrative in the novel (i.e., a clear beginning, middle, and end), instead deconstructing traditional organization and composition.
Nova Express follows Inspector Lee as he tracks down members of the Nova Mob. It is considered by critics as being one of the best books in the trilogy due to its graphic descriptions and fragmented cyber world. [4]
The Nova Trilogy (as well as a passage in the book on the cut-up technique named Minutes to Go) feature the character Hassan-i Sabbah and his final words Nothing is true—everything is permitted. Burroughs was introduced to Hassan through Betty Bouthoul, who had written an extensive book on the assassins titled The Master of the Assassins (French title Le grand maître des Assassins). [5] [6] The full story of Burroughs' interest in Hassan Sabbah was told in the 2023 book, Two Assassins, by Oliver Harris and Farid Ghadami. [7]
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William S. Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art".
Naked Lunch is a 1959 novel by American writer William S. Burroughs. The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes, intended by Burroughs to be read in any order. The novel follows the junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone.
Naked Lunch is a 1991 surrealist science fiction drama film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. It is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs's 1959 novel of the same name, and an international co-production of Canada, Britain, and Japan.
Nova Express is a 1964 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. It was written using the 'fold-in' method, a version of the cut-up method, developed by Burroughs with Brion Gysin, of enfolding snippets of different texts into the novel. It is part of The Nova Trilogy, or "Cut-Up Trilogy,' together with The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. Burroughs considered the trilogy a "sequel" or "mathematical" continuation of Naked Lunch.
The Soft Machine is a 1961 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. It was originally composed using the cut-up technique partly from manuscripts belonging to The Word Hoard. It is the first part of The Nova Trilogy.
Hasan-i Sabbah, also known as Hasan I of Alamut, was a religious and military leader, founder of the Nizari Ismai'li sect widely known as the Hashshashin or the Order of Assassins, as well as the Nizari Ismaili state, ruling from 1090 to 1124 AD.
Cities of the Red Night is a 1981 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. His first full-length novel since The Wild Boys (1971), it is part of his final trilogy of novels, known as The Red Night Trilogy, followed by The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987). The plot involves a group of radical pirates who seek the freedom to live under the articles set out by Captain James Misson. In near present day, a parallel story follows a detective searching for a lost boy, abducted for use in a sexual ritual. The cities of the title mimic and parody real places, and Burroughs makes references to the United States, Mexico, and Morocco.
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century.
The Ticket That Exploded is a 1962 novel by American author William S. Burroughs, published by Olympia Press and later by Grove Press in 1967. Together with The Soft Machine and Nova Express it is part of a trilogy, referred to as The Nova Trilogy, created using the cut-up technique, although for this book Burroughs used a variant called 'the fold-in' method. The novel is an anarchic tale concerning mind control by psychic, electronic, sexual, pharmaceutical, subliminal, and other means. Passages from the other two books and even from this book show up in rearranged form and are often repeated. This work is significant for fans of Burroughs, in that it describes his idea of language as a virus and his philosophy of the cut-up technique. It also features the cut-up technique being used by characters within the story. The Ticket That Exploded lays the groundwork for Burroughs' ideas of social revolution through technology, which he would later detail in his book-length essay The Electronic Revolution.
Antony Balch was an English film director and distributor, best known for his screen collaborations with Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs in the 1960s and for the 1970s horror film, Horror Hospital.
Dead Fingers Talk, first published in 1963, was the fifth novel published by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs. The book was originally published by John Calder in association with Olympia Press.
The Word Hoard was a large body of text produced by author William S. Burroughs between roughly 1954 and 1958.
Alamut is a novel by Vladimir Bartol, first published in 1938 in Slovenian, dealing with the story of Hassan-i Sabbah and the Hashshashin, and named after their Alamut fortress. The maxim of the novel is "Nothing is an absolute reality; all is permitted". This book was one of the inspirations for the video game series Assassin's Creed.
Ali's Smile: Naked Scientology is a collection of essays and a short story by American Beat writer William S. Burroughs (1914–1997). First published in 1971 as the short story "Ali's Smile", the book eventually contained a group of previously published newspaper articles as well, all of which address Scientology. Burroughs had been interested in Scientology throughout the 1960s, believing that its methods might help combat a controlling society. He joined the Church of Scientology later in the decade. However, he became disenchanted with the authoritarian nature of the organization. In 1970 Burroughs had published a "considered statement" on Scientology's methods because he felt they were significant enough to warrant commentary. These pieces were later gathered together into Ali's Smile: Naked Scientology, which religious studies scholar Hugh B. Urban describes as a "nonscholarly popular exposé of Scientology". Burroughs's texts argue that while some of Scientology's therapies are worthwhile, the dogmatic nature of the group and its secrecy are harmful.
The Third Mind is a book by Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs and artist/poet/novelist Brion Gysin. First published in a French-language edition in 1977, it was published in English in 1978. It contains numerous short fiction pieces as well as poetry by Gysin, and an interview with Burroughs. Some chapters had previously been published, in slightly different form, in various literary journals between 1960 and 1973.
Oliver C. G. Harris is a British academic and Professor of American Literature at Keele University. He is the author and editor of seventeen books, including a dozen editions of works by William S. Burroughs: Letters, 1945–1959 (1993), Junky: the definitive text of Junk (2003), The Yage Letters Redux (2006), Queer (2010), The Cut-Up Trilogy, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded (2014), Blade Runner: A Movie (2019), Minutes to Go Redux (2020), The Exterminator Redux (2020), BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS (2020) and Dead Fingers Talk (2020). In 2022, he published two short books of essays, A Burroughs Triptych and Making Naked Lunch and in 2023 a collaborative hybrid of criticism and memoir, Two Assassins: William Burroughs/Hassan Sabbah. He is President of the European Beat Studies Network.
This is a bibliography of the works of William S. Burroughs.
Call Me Burroughs is a spoken word album by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, which was released on LP by The English Bookshop, Paris, in June 1965, and then issued in the United States by ESP-Disk, New York, in 1966. Rhino Word Beat reissued the album on Compact Disc in 1995, the company's first ever reissue.
