I: Introduction
The Soft Machine is a 1961 novel by William S Burroughs. It originally came from manuscripts from The Word Hoard, a large body of text (roughly 1,000 typewritten pages) produced between about 1954 and 1958, and used as the basis also for Naked Lunch and the Interzone collection, as well as some of Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. TSM is the first part of The Nova Trilogy.
An experimental novel, TSM uses the cut-up technique, an aleatory narrative that involves taking a written or typewritten text, cutting it up into pieces, and rearranging them to create a new text. The concept started with Dadaists like Tristan Tzara in the 1920s, yet writers like Burroughs in the 1950s popularized it.
Two things from Burroughs’s novel were later applied to music: its title, which became the name of a late 1960s/1970s psychedelic/jazz-fusion band from the Canterbury scene (check out an analysis I did of their third album here); and the expression “heavy metal,” used by Burroughs originally to describe a heavy, “metallic” kind of drug addiction.
I am basing this analysis on the second edition of TSM, with which most readers are familiar. Here is a link to it, and here is a link to Burroughs reciting “Uranian Willy,” which is a different version from the text I’ll be using.
II: General Remarks
As I did with my analysis of the Naked Lunch novel, I’ll only be looking at select parts of TSM, since the cut-up technique has created a chaotic incoherence that would make an analysis of everything virtually impossible, at best turning a blog article into a book. I’ll be looking at those parts that do read as a linear narrative (or approximately so), such as ‘The Mayan Caper,” among others.
Because of the cut-up technique’s causing of the story to jump back and forth instead of being linear, it would perhaps be best to read TSM more like an extended prose poem than as a novel, appreciating each piece of imagery for what it is, instead of trying mentally to put all the pieces back in order, a frustrating process that would negate Burroughs’s purpose in cutting up the text anyway.
His reason for cutting up the text and rearranging it was not some kind of avant-garde self-indulgence for its own sake. He was trying to subvert the reader’s sense of perceiving the linearity of language as a manipulative or coercive power. As with so much of Burroughs’s writing (as I observed in my analysis of NL–link above), he was preoccupied with systems of power and control, as manifested in religion, the government, drug addiction, and sexual indulgence as an attempt to escape from such control.
Burroughs may have written about drug abuse a lot, but he by no means glorified it. He knew the pain of addiction and the need to be freed of it, so notions of drug abuse are a major theme in his writing as an aspect of power structures’ way of trying to control us, as we see in NL and TSM. For Burroughs, the human body is a “soft machine,” a weak, vulnerable thing under siege by parasites, drug addiction, and totalitarian control.
One of those forms of totalitarian control is the linear use of language, so the purpose of the cut-up technique is to liberate us from the linguistic aspect of that control. One aspect of TSM is a tendency to go back and forth in time, as if in a time machine (indeed, it’s been observed that Burroughs’s title for the novel is a variation on HG Wells‘s Time Machine), so the cut-up technique can be seen as representing that moving back and forth in time, instead of experiencing it in the normal, linear way.
The idea that the cut-up technique can be a metaphor for time travel is suggested in “The Mayan Caper,” in the third paragraph of that chapter, where the narrator speaks of taking yesterday’s and today’s newspapers and rearranging their pictures to make a montage: as he does this, he’s literally moving back in time to yesterday.
Though it’s the first novel of The Nova Trilogy, TSM is also widely regarded as a sequel to and extension of NL, since both novels are taken from The Word Hoard, as mentioned above, and so TSM continues NL‘s habit of explicitly describing drug abuse and homosexual sex, these being ways of trying to escape the miseries of totalitarian control through the government and religion, yet also paradoxically keeping us in its thrall, as slaves to our own desires.
The political aspect of that control, as depicted in NL, was in the form of political parties that all (except for the sympathetic Factualists, who represented Burroughs’s libertarian socialist individualism) in their own ways stifled the individualism that Burroughs valued. The religious aspect of that control in NL was represented by the Muslim faith (i.e., “Islam Incorporated”); in TSM, it’s represented by the Mayan religion, which leads me to a discussion of…
III: The Mayan Caper
This is not only the one genuinely linear narrative in all of the novel; it’s also central to understanding the meaning behind the cut-up technique as a means of undoing the manipulative and coercive power, as Burroughs saw it, of language, especially as it passes through linear time. One upsets the established order by literally upsetting the word order of syntax and temporal order (i.e., going back in time to the Mayan era).
I already mentioned above how the narrator ‘traveled time’ by rearranging the pictures of the day’s newspaper with those of the newspaper from the day before to make a montage–analogous to the cut-up technique’s rearranging of the order of cut-out sentences on strips of paper. He will also mention how the oppressive Mayan priests will use the Mayan calendar–a record and arrangement of the order of time–to control their slavish, toiling population, who work in the fields doing slash-and-burn agriculture.
After rearranging temporal order with the newspaper pictures, the narrator goes to a film studio and rearranges the order of time by learning “to talk and think backwards on all levels…by running film and sound track backward.” An example of such retrograde motion includes going from satiety to hunger. He will also run a film first at normal speed, then in slow motion…he applies the same method to such physical practices as achieving orgasm, which I assume means either delaying it (what fun!) or reversing it.
He next goes to Mexico City and learns all he can about the Mayan language (which he finds easy to learn) and their culture. The absolute power of the Mayan priests, about two percent of the population, depended on their control of their calendar. As I explained above, control over temporal order and the concepts of language–as expressed, for example, in their calendar–is essential to manipulating and having power over the people–this is why messing up that order is so crucial to liberating the people, as Burroughs saw it.
Slash-and-burn agriculture–what the priests use to keep the population obedient, ever-toiling slaves–is a matter of precise timing, according to the narrator. It must be done at specific times; “a few days’ miscalculation and a year’s crop is lost.” We see once again how temporal order is strictly maintained for the priests to retain power over their people.
Most of the hieroglyphs from the Mayan writings refer to dates on the calendar; the other, undeciphered symbols probably refer to the ceremonial calendar. Yet again, we see how language, mixed with temporal organization, is used to manipulate and control the Mayan people.
After learning of the Mayan language and culture, the narrator has to find a “vessel,” that is, the body of a Mayan boy in whom the narrator is to be transferred–his soul moved into it for the purposes of mixing in unnoticed among the Mayan population after traveling in time back to their era. The two are to do this procedure, an illegal one, with an American doctor who has lost his certificate due to having become addicted to heavy metal [!].
What’s ironic here is how the narrator’s mission–to liberate the Mayan people from their oppressive priests and systems of language and the temporal order of their calendars–is to be facilitated with the help of a doctor also in need of liberation (i.e., the “soft machine” of his body controlled by the hardening, heavy, metallic nature of his drug addiction). Furthermore, the doctor learns, from his examination of the Mayan boy’s naked body, that his body “is riddled with parasites,” which are another major form of control dealt with in TSM. Another paradox of liberation via the aid of the non-liberated.
The narrator “would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites” if the doctor used “the barbarous method used by…[his] colleagues”, so instead he’ll use a different technique for the transfer operation. He’ll operate with molds, keeping the narrator intact in deepfreeze.
Once the transfer operation is done, the narrator goes to find a “broker” who will help him achieve time travel to the Mayan era. The method of traveling time should be of no surprise to those familiar with Burroughs’s writing: it involves nothing other than drinking a drug, made from dried mushrooms and herbs that the broker cooks in a clay pot.
The narrator feels the motion sickness of time travel, he pays the broker his fee, and he finds himself in a jungle. When he comes to a clearing, he sees a number of workers in a field planting corn. He feels “the rushing weight of evil insect control forcing [his] thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds, squeezing [his] spirit into a soft invisible vise”, and he is handed a planting stick from one of the workers. He’s gone from time machine to soft machine, the parasitic insects taking control of his body.
He comes across as “a half-witted young Indian”, which will be useful to him, since he’ll never be suspected by the priests as a threat to their power. He can thus possibly be transferred from field work to rock carving the stellae after a long apprenticeship and the priests have total confidence he’ll show no resistance to their power. He stays, therefore, for months as a field worker and keeps a low profile.
He learns of two horrible punishments for anyone who tries to challenge, or even just thinks of challenging, the priests’ authority: “Death in the Ovens,” and “Death In Centipede“, this latter one involving being strapped to a couch and eaten alive by giant centipedes–executions carried out secretly in rooms under the temple.
In order to mess with the system of controlling the people and thus liberate them, the narrator needs access to a machine the Mayans know how to use, but not how to repair were it to be broken, or how to build a new one were it to be destroyed. Since the machine uses recordings (i.e., on magnetic tape, something not invented until the 1920s), it’s clearly an anachronism that Burroughs, in his surreal imagination, has invented out of poetic licence–this anachronism is also reflective of TSM‘s theme of rearranging the temporal order of things.
To gain access to the machine, the narrator agrees, in all disgust and reluctance, to do a sexual favour for one of the priests–the latter transforming himself into a green crab from the waist up during the sex act. The narrator is able to endure all of this by reassuring himself that he’ll enjoy killing the man when the time comes. So after the narrator’s sexual ordeal, the priest transfers him to janitor work in the temple, where he witnesses executions: bodies torn into insect fragments by the ovens, and centipedes born in the ovens from those fragments. It’s time for him to act.
The narrator uses the drug he got from the doctor to take over the priest’s body, he gets into the room where the codices are kept, and he photographs the books. He dismantles the machine by mixing the order of recordings and images, a change that will be picked up by the machine and fed into it. Recorded agricultural operations–the slash and burn–are shuffled so they’ll occur at the wrong times, losing a year’s crop, and causing famine.
He sends out a new command, essentially: “Smash the control machine–Burn the books–Kill the priests–Kill! Kill! Kill!” And with this, to make a long story short, comes the toppling of the Mayan “regime,” to use the word in, of all sources with an obvious liberal agenda, the Wikipedia article. This leads to my next point.
Now, a bringing of an end to the Mayan tyranny is all fine and good…if such is an accurate representation of what their priestly authority was really like. Yet with an anachronism like their machine and its ‘recordings’ as central to the priests’ power, I’d say such accuracy is rather unlikely, to put it mildly.
Matters get more sinister when we consider how this whole “Mayan caper” (interesting choice of words in itself) has been conceived by, of all people, Americans, and for the purpose of toppling an aboriginal “regime” in what’s today Latin America. Yes, the tankie in me is coming out for commentary again.
Of course, there’s nothing inherently socialist about the Mayan “regime.” Remember also, though, that in the opinion of an anarchist–as Burroughs can reasonably be described to have been–neither were the USSR or the Soviet Bloc, nor have China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, or Laos ever been ‘genuinely socialist.’ Any state is oppressive, whether right-wing, left-wing, or centrist, in the eyes of your average anarchist or ‘left-wing’ communist, especially in the eyes of individualist libertarian socialists like Burroughs…so what difference did it make to him whether or not the Mayan priests were socialists?
The point is that it has been a standard practice of US and Western imperialism to do regime change on any country out there that goes against imperialist interests. The first step of such regime change is to justify it by claimning that those “regimes” are oppressive: exactly what we are meant to understand about the Mayan priests–it’s all propaganda, meant to manufacture consent for said regime change.
The ruling class has always found anarchists useful in agreeing that state socialism isn’t ‘real socialism,’ and is therefore tyrannical. The capitalists can say of the anarchists, “See, even fellow leftists agree that the socialist states are no better than capitalist ones, so we should oppose them!” In helping imprialism crush, for example, the Soviet resistance, through their own propaganda, anarchists give the working class “the unkindest cut.”
IV: Uranian Willy
“Heavy metal,” as Burroughs used the expression, had nothing to do with music, of course. I recall seeing him on TV (back when I was still living in Canada) talking about his use of “heavy metal”; I wish I could find the video of him talking about this on YouTube so I can share it here, but my foggy memory of it will have to serve. He was talking about a “metallic” drug experience.
So Uranian Willy, “the heavy metal kid,” personifies drug addiction at its worst: where it has gone from the organic (vegetable) to the mineral (metallic). Willy thus represents the final stage of addiction, a “heavy metal” addiction to junk, sex, and power.
He may be among the “Nova Mob,” a group of parasitic entities attempting to destroy the Earth by manipulating human thought and flesh through “word and image” machines (rather like that of the Mayans, just discussed above), but also being closely associated with Will Lee (who in turn represents Burroughs), Uranian Willy also wishes to break free of his drug addiction and thus free everyone else from addiction’s thought control. Hence, he is also known as “Willy the Rat,” or “Willy the Fink,” for having turned his back on and snitched on the Nova Mob. “He wised up the marks”–that is, he got them to understand how they’re being manipulated. Recall Burroughs’s dictum from Naked Lunch: “Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.” You can fool others, but you cannot fool yourself.
Willy’s efforts to liberate others (“the marks”) from heavy metal drug addiction is compared, on one level, to a pilot in a fighter plane attacking “the Reality Studio and retak[ing] the universe”–“target[ing] Orgasm Ray Installations.” On another level, Willy’s resistance can be compared–in terms of its somewhat similar language–to the narrator of “The Mayan Caper” and his changed commands in the Mayan machine to “Burn the books–kill the priests–Kill! Kill! Kill!”
“This is war to extermination,” Willy understands of his wish to end his dependency on heavy metal. He must “wise up the marks everywhere,” and get them to understand the dangers of drug addiction and how the powers-that-be use it to control the minds of the masses. To wise them up, he must “show them the rigged wheel,” how the marks are being played by those in power. He must save the “Souls rotten from the Orgasm Drug” of heavy metal.
So in this context, we can see how passages like “Photo falling–Word falling–..Take Studio–Take Board Books…Towers, open fire” are similar to what happens when the narrator in “The Mayan Caper” messes with the Mayan machine and its words and images to overthrow the Mayan regime.
Now, members of the Nova Mob are alarmed at Willy’s having suddenly gone rogue and against them, so they try to get him to stop his attack: “Pilot K9, you are cut off–Back–Back–Back before the whole fucking shithouse goes up–Return to base immediately.”
It seems, however, that the Nova Mob have failed in their attempt to stop Uranian Willy, for “It was impossible to estimate the damage–Board Rooms destroyed–Enemy personnel decimated–…Shift linguals–Cut word lines…Photo failing–Word failing…”
Note how “Shift linguals–Cut word lines…” and “Word failing…” sounds a lot like the cut-up technique’s disruption of the natural flow of language as a way of liberating humanity from systems of control. The Nova Mob is being overthrown just as the Mayan priests were.
V: Gongs of Violence
The sexes are at war, dividing the planet right down the middle. It’s a perfect way for the ruling class, with their systems of power and control, to keep us all from resisting and fighting them: make us all fight each other instead, through idpol. [This battle of the sexes, incidentally, should not be confused with the legitimate and necessary struggle for the equality of the sexes, to allow equal opportunity for women, to end their domestic servitude, and to end their sexual degradation. Such an attainment of equality necessitates solidarity between men and women through the adoption of socialism, not the divisiveness of edgy liberal identity politics.]
The armies on both sides seem to have adopted homosexuality, for one army has “Lesbian colonels in tight green uniforms.” Those on either side are deemed “the Sex Enemy.”
Since there is no true love between the sexes in this world, there are no heterosexual marriages or families, and there’s no natural parenthood. Children, therefore, are just “property,” usually not owned by their biological parents.
Each of these “properties” has a “life script,” which sounds again like the use of a predetermined language for the purposes of control by the ruling class. Those with “a lousy grade B life script” may complain…to their mothers, whether adoptive or biological?…”Fuck my life script will you you cheap downgrade bitch!”
The idea that “time-nappers jerk the time position of a property” sounds like an example of how normal linear time is also used as an instrument of power and control by the ruling class, and so “time-nappers,” who “jerk the time position,” are engaging in acts of resistance against the powers-that-be. “The property can also be jerked forward in time and sold at any age,” which sounds as though those in power also manipulate temporal order to maintain power, through the selling of children.
With vivid descriptions of a cityscape we also have vivid descriptions of fighting and violence there, presumably manifestations or results of the battle of the sexes. “Rioters of all nations storm the city in a landslide of flame-throwers and Molotov cocktails.”
Amidst all of this fighting and surrealist description is the ongoing battle for the souls of the people: on one side, those trying to liberate us from the heavy metal addiction: “We are converting to vegetable state–Emergency measure to counter the heavy metal peril”; and on the other side, there are those trying to keep us all addicted to heavy metal: “we are converting all out to heavy metal. Cabonic plague of the Vegetable People threatens our Heavy Metal State…Do not believe the calumny that our metal fallout will turn the planet into a slag heap.”
“Gongs of violence” on the one hand sounds like explosions ringing out like the banging of gongs, and on the other hand like a pun on ‘gangs of violence,’ a male gang vs a female one in the sex war.
The world of this sex war seems to be a future dystopia, which fits in well with the sense of time travel going on throughout TSM. The destruction of cities is implied in the spelling of a number of them without the first letter of each: Ewyork, Onolulu, Aris, Ome, Oston.”
VI: Cross the Wounded Galaxies
In this final chapter, we seem to have traveled time yet again: this time, to the very beginning of human consciousness. The “muttering sickness” has come to “the ape forms,” or the first primitive man, who are able to speak. Since Burroughs regarded language, and the normal, ordered use of it, to be a form of power and control over humanity, he saw it as a “sickness.”
The sickness was brought to the narrator of this chapter “from white time caves frozen in [his] throat.” The “sick apes spitting blood laugh, sound bubbling in throats torn with the talk sickness.” The primates are learning to speak, which is a kind of forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, so to speak, that is going to lead them all to their collective ruin.
And with language, they now have names. They’ve come out of the mud and are about to enter civilization, and all the irreparable harm it causes, as Burroughs saw it. “The sickness leaped into our body…cold screaming sickness from white time…spitting ape wounds…the talking sickness had names…we had names for each other.”
The “talking sickness” sounds like a rejection of the psychoanalytic “talking cure.” Just as Burroughs didn’t trust language, he didn’t trust the Freudians as people who used therapy as a tool of control. On the other hand, the “ape forms” problematically having names for each other sounds representative of ego formation, which a later Freudian–Jacques Lacan–saw as illusory.
“White time” and “the white worm-thing inside” (this latter being a parasite as yet another instrument of control) seem to represent white supremacy. The “fear-softness in other men” would be the soft machine, or the vulnerable human body in its susceptibility to all the forms of control: time, language, parasites, and heavy metal drug addiction.
“The thing inside [him, that is, “the white worm-sickness in all our bodies”] would always find animals to feed [his] mouth meat.” The parasites inside us that control us always make us kill for food, which includes eating other humans.
There seems to be a jump ahead in time later on in the chapter, for we read of “sewers of the city, crab parasites in [their] genitals.” What was parasitic in prehistory is still parasitic now.
As we have moved from prehistory to the modern world, in Burroughs’s time machine of the rearranged words of his cut-up technique, we encounter a proliferation of the evils begun in the era of the “ape forms”: more parasites and tapeworms, people with names (“Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin”), the authoritarianism of religion (“I am Allah. I made you.”), and shattered windows (“Glass blizzards”), the result of vandalism, or war? There are even Orwellian “Think Police”.
Time travel seems to go into the future again, with presumed astronauts who “cross the wounded galaxies”: Earth seems not to be the only planet infected with parasitical forms of power and control. After all, the “heavy metal boys” are from Uranus, hence “Uranian Willy, the heavy metal kid.”
VII: Conclusion
What TSM is trying to tell us is that the most significant and dangerous forms of manipulation and control that we have to be wary of are not so much those of the government, religion, or even the capitalist class. They are those that we have all internalized: what the parasites and the heavy metal addictions are metaphors for–whatever we allow inside ourselves to have power over and harden the soft machine of the human body.
Infinite Ocean 