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The Ticket That Exploded. William S. Burroughs
Читать онлайн.Название The Ticket That Exploded
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780802197207
Автор произведения William S. Burroughs
Жанр Контркультура
Серия Burroughs, William S.
Издательство Ingram
The verbal-visual relationship was especially important for The Ticket, and as soon as he had finished writing the final section in mid-August 1962, Burroughs mailed the 3-page typescript to Brion Gysin and invited him to complete the text as a physical object: “I would like to end it with a page of calligraphs to follow after the last lines—‘Silence to say good bye’—Could you do like some terminal writing and send along so i can finish the novel like that?”26 For all his notorious shortcomings as a businessman, Girodias always let Burroughs define the artwork for his Olympia titles, and he agreed that Gysin’s art “would be the best ending” for The Ticket—although at this point the title was still not fixed (ROW, 112). Indeed, Burroughs seems to have dropped “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair” and taken up “Word Falling—Photo Falling” before, in late September 1962, for the very first time he refers to it as The Ticket That Exploded.27 That same month he submitted a 132-page typescript and the book was launched in the English Bookshop at the start of December. Shortly after, Burroughs left Paris and the famous Beat Hotel—which on and off for three years had been Cut-Up Headquarters—closed down. It was the end of an era, but the end of only the first of two Tickets.
“A COMMENTARY AND EXTENSION”
When Burroughs informed Paul Bowles that The Ticket was about to be published, he mused: “Perhaps I have said what I had to say—Hope so at any rate.”28 Despite the air of optimism and finality, just two months later the seeds of a new edition were already being planted. In January 1963 he asked Alan Ansen for his opinion while making clear his own: “I am not altogether satisfied with it.”29 This was how Burroughs reacted to every version of his cut-up books, and for the same reason: there was always a kernel of contradiction between his methods and book publication. Even before Naked Lunch was finished in 1959, Burroughs had come to “wonder if any writing now has much raison d’être,” and the impact of Gysin’s painting and calligraphy led him further to query the codex form.30 His subsequent experiments with drawing, scrapbooks, tape recorders, film, photography and photomontage fed into his writing but also confirmed the limitations of texts. At least the little magazines of the 1960s mimeograph revolution allowed variety in typography and layout—such as newspaper-style three-column pieces—while the rougher aesthetic of some magazines well represented the provisional, process-based nature of his mass of short experimental work. In contrast, the book was an old technology that depended on publishing houses with limited formal options and fixed procedures for copyediting and printing. Burroughs was bound to be dissatisfied.
In his January 1963 letter to Ansen, Burroughs explained that the need for revision had come to him when assembling Dead Fingers Talk: “While doing this job of selecting and rearranging I became so dissatisfied with The Soft Machine that I have completely rewritten it.”31 Two years later, he confirmed that The Ticket would be next for Operation Rewrite: “It’s not a book I’m satisfied with in its present form. If it’s published in the United States, I would have to rewrite it.”32 Burroughs made no move to revise The Ticket until summer 1966, when Richard Seaver at Grove Press reminded him that they would need to publish any new version “by early 1967 in order to keep the copyright.”33 As a determining factor in revising the book, this was a nice irony, given The Ticket’s recycling of cultural materials and therefore assault on concepts of originality and ownership. The timing for Burroughs was difficult, however, and in mid-October he appealed to Seaver for patience on delivering the manuscript. In a decade of being constantly on the move, living out of suitcases between London, Paris, New York and Tangier, this was the first time he struggled to meet a deadline. Although Burroughs demonstrated a remarkably consistent responsibility toward his publishers, he also did not want to be rushed by Grove on The Ticket; he surely hadn’t forgotten his intense frustration over their editing of The Soft Machine a year earlier, when Seaver (not unreasonably) had called a halt to his making revisions. Equally, the economic realities of his writing career were not his strong suit. “I hope that you feel as I do,” he wrote on October 26, 1966, the day after finally mailing the manuscript, “that it is now a much more readable and saleable book.”34 The fact that the print run of the revised Ticket, published in June 1967, was barely half that of the revised Soft Machine, published by Grove in March 1966, suggests they knew it was not going to be a bestseller.
There are four main areas of difference between the Olympia edition of 1962 and the Grove revised version of 1967: without altering the sequence of material in any way, Burroughs made cuts, additions, changes to presentation and to the ending of the text. First, he made some forty-three separate cuts—many as small as a single phrase—so that in total the revised edition lost just over 400 words of the Olympia text. Why these particular cuts were made is not at all clear, and in several cases the loss is certainly meaningful, so they have been restored for this new edition. Second, there was the addition of new material written over the previous three years, parts of which had appeared in little magazines in 1964 and 1965. There were nineteen separate insertions, ranging in length from ten to 4,500 words, so that, including “the invisible generation” appendix, in total the 1967 edition was 50 percent longer than the original (rising from just over 40,000 to 60,000 words). The addition of “the invisible generation” reflected Burroughs’ sense that his tape recorder experiments were being enthusiastically taken up, and yet his pitch of the essay to Seaver was tentative—“If the book is not yet set up, this piece could be used to advantage as an appendix”—and the editor probably didn’t realize that a quarter of the 3,500-word article had already been added to The Ticket.35
Burroughs’ plan to make the new book more “readable” did not, therefore, entail deleting cut-up material to any meaningful extent, and indeed a fifth of what he added was also cut-up, so that the overall change was modest: just over half the 1962 text consists of cut-up, just under half of the 1967 text, although the impossibility of defining what is and isn’t “cut-up” (or “fold-in”) makes more precise calculations meaningless. Of the book’s twenty sections, only the first (“see the action, B.J.?”) was entirely added for the 1967 edition, eleven sections remained exactly the same, and eight were expanded. Of those eight, the first and last sections of the original book (“winds of time” and “silence to say good bye”) were expanded by far the most, so that the impact of Burroughs’ revisions was heavily concentrated on the beginning and ending. Although they include some of the funniest passages in the book, the additions he made to the final section created a structural problem, since The Ticket was already long enough and it was surely a mistake to introduce so much new material so late on. Burroughs needed novel-length books in order for his methods to produce uncanny flashes of déjà vu in the reading experience—a unique and beautifully disorientating sensation—but there was a point of diminishing returns and in The Ticket he probably reached it.
All Burroughs’ cuts and insertions are documented in the Notes section, which also gives details of editorial changes involving about a hundred minor corrections and includes significant selections from the major archival variants. The aim is not only to show exactly how Burroughs updated The Ticket and to carry out some necessary restorations but to make visible