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.
