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
