all, Véronique Lane, for working with me from start to finish, being by my side in the archival vaults, sharing ideas, reading every word I wrote, and for living with the Centipede People and the Crab Boys for the last two years.
For the great archival assistance they have provided, I also want to thank John Bennett of the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Ohio State University, Columbus; Rob Spindler of the Archives and Special Collections at Arizona State University, Tempe; Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and his staff; the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries; Cath Tierney of Green Library, Stanford University; Elspeth Healey, Special Collections Librarian at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, Universtiy of Kansas, Lawrence; and Michael Ryan and all his staff at the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Research Institute for the Humanities at Keele University. Thanks finally to Jeff Posternak of the Wylie Agency, a great guy to have on your side, and to Peter Blackstock at Grove Press.
Introduction
SOLA ESPERANZA DEL MUNDO
“THIS BAD PLACE, MEESTER”
One of The Soft Machine’s recurrent characters is The Guide, modeled after the local young hustlers who picked William Burroughs up as he explored the jungles of South America in the early 1950s, and any reader entering the book’s alien territory would take the advice of a guide: “This bad place Meester. You crazy or something walk around alone?” The Soft Machine is not only a bad place, it’s an impossible one that mutates before your very eyes: “This bad place you write, Meester. You win something like jelly fish.” In this uniquely queer textual zone styles and genres switch in mid-sentence and incompatible realities mix in a single phrase. “Rubbed Moscow up me with a corkscrew motion of his limestones”? “orgasm crackled with electric afternoon”? “Zero eaten by crab”? Is this science fiction or avant-garde poetry? Drug literature or homosexual pornography? Political satire? All, and yet none of the above, because no labels stick and it doesn’t matter how often you read the text, it will seem new every time. As Joan Didion said, to imagine you can put The Soft Machine down when the phone rings and find your place a few minutes later “is sheer bravura.”1
Not knowing where we are or where we’re going is the disorientating and yet desired experience, so anyone looking for a guide to reading The Soft Machine had better follow the perverse example set by Burroughs himself back in 1953, when solicited by a smiling Colombian street boy: “He looked like the most inefficient guide in the Upper Amazon but I said, ‘Yes.’”2 An efficient guide would only have taken Burroughs where he already knew to go, so following his desire by falling for a hustler was the right choice for someone committed to the difficult path of discovering the unknown. You crazy or something read The Soft Machine alone? Yes, indeed; but that’s the best way to do it because what you find there will be your business. Since the text itself resists mapping, all this Introduction can promise, therefore, is a map of where we are right now, offering for the first time the material history of a book about which so much has remained untold—even the origins of its title, a suitably paradoxical phrase that begins with an utterly misleading definite article, since the book in your hand is not The but A Soft Machine.
“I WISH TO MAKE MYSELF AS CLEAR
AS POSSIBLE”
The Soft Machine is usually described as the first novel in the Cut-Up Trilogy—a straightforward enough place to begin, and yet more false than true. For in the 1960s Burroughs published no less than three entirely distinct versions, so that there is quite literally a trilogy of just Soft Machines and to talk about the book always demands specifying which book. Produced by three different publishers in three different countries, the three editions hold three different positions in three different trilogies, marking a beginning, middle, and end: the first edition of The Soft Machine published in June 1961 by the Olympia Press in Paris—never reprinted, a collector’s item nowadays—was indeed the first book, preceding The Ticket That Exploded in 1962 and Nova Express in 1964; the revised second edition of The Soft Machine published in March 1966 by Grove Press in New York—the only text most readers know—can be placed second, since it followed Nova Express in 1964 and came before Grove’s revised edition of The Ticket That Exploded in 1967; and the third edition of The Soft Machine published in July 1968 by John Calder in London—kept in print in the UK—was the final version of any title and so claims third place. Preposterously, there have been enough Soft Machines for a trilogy of trilogies, and the textual history of Burroughs’ book has been almost as baffling as anything between its covers. Clearing a path through that bibliographical jungle is one aim of this new, fourth edition.
Like most remakes or sequels, as Burroughs produced new editions of the title it could be said he ended up losing the plot, and that despite the brilliance of some of its new material, the second edition is structurally a mess, the third even more so. While that’s true, it again misses the point. The original Soft Machine was the most extreme of all Burroughs’ cut-up books, the most uncompromising, but his revisions over time were not merely a series of compromises or mistakes since the “original” was itself a messy hybrid of materials, impossible to read in any conventional sense. There was therefore no plot to lose, only experiments to try again, and again. Equally, while the history of publication is confusing, it’s the mere tip of a huge archival iceberg that reveals both the messiness and the great care in Burroughs’ working practices. Instinctively as much as ideologically, contradiction was part of his method: when Burroughs cut up his writing he introduced the magical chance factor, an experimental random element, and his writing desk resembled a Ouija board in a science lab; whereas when he edited the results, he could be as rigorous as the most traditional nineteenth-century novelist.
But while they’re always called “cut-up novels,” the term tells us very little: how much is “cut-up” and how much is a “novel”? How does The Soft Machine differ from Nova Express or The Ticket That Exploded? How do the three editions of The Soft Machine differ from each other, when were the changes made, and why did Burroughs make them? To answer the first questions and clear up some of the myths about the last one, a precise history is difficult but necessary and long overdue. As well as narrating The Soft Machine’s perplexing story, this introduction explains why an archival manuscript from 1962 with a unique place in that history has been used to make further restorations and revisions for this fourth edition. More precise details of texts and manuscripts are given in the Notes section, supplemented by appendices that include material from the first and third editions as a gesture towards the multiple textual identities of Burroughs’ Soft Machines.
As for the book’s title—an oxymoron which evokes the Pop Art “soft sculptures” of Claes Oldenburg and that directly inspired a series of other Soft Machines, from the 1960s psychedelic rock band to a 1980s analysis of “cybernetic fiction” and a 21st century study of nanotechnology—the received wisdom is that “the soft machine is the human body.”3 In other words, the phrase sums up Burroughs’ urgent warning against genetic and cultural determinism, his bleak vision that we’re automata manipulated by inner and outer forces, from sexual desires to media brainwashing. The received wisdom comes from Burroughs himself but is misleading nonetheless. Significantly, he offered this definition at the very last possible opportunity, in an Appendix added to the third edition of The Soft Machine: the two previous editions not only lacked a definition, astonishingly they never used the phrase “soft machine” except in their titles. But Burroughs didn’t come up with a meaning just for the 1968 edition; even before choosing it as the title for his book, he had already made the term central to the political scenario of his trilogy’s Nova Conspiracy. Burroughs withheld any clear meaning and, as the manuscript draft of his Appendix to the third edition reveals, in the end he defined the term out of sheer
