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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
To begin with, the biggest change was not actually made by newly added material but by alterations to the original text. In particular, Burroughs revised to lower case many hundreds of upper-case letters, removing capitals from the first person (“I” became “i”) and from words at the start of sentences or in specific phrases (“Nova Police” became “nova police,” “Board Books” became “board books,” and so on). The result is a lack of consistency that at first strikes the reader as a series of errors, then as a challenge to discover a principle, and finally as an indeterminable system that can only be accepted for what it is. Since it’s part of Burroughs’ critique of literary and linguistic conventions, from an editorial point of view the whole concept of error and intentionality is put into question and the only certainty is that it would be a mistake to impose consistency. On the other hand, nor should the past errors of copyeditors, printers, or Burroughs himself be fetishized as if there were a degree zero of editing. It’s not just that “Harly St” should become “Harley St” or “Gothenberg” “Gothenburg,” but that “hassan i sabbah” should be “Hassan i Sabbah” since the name was only put in all lower case when Grove misinterpreted Burroughs’ request to change block capitals from the first edition (including at one point “HASSAN I SABBAH”) into lower-case italics. Burroughs was a poor proofreader but the archival evidence shows he neither passively accepted nor actively embraced mistakes at the editorial stage.
More coherently, Burroughs extended his experimentation with punctuation, which went back to the use of parentheses and ellipses in Naked Lunch. Like Nova Express, but unlike The Soft Machine, the 1962 text of The Ticket had used the em dash ( — ) as radically as one of Burroughs’ major influences, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, had used the ellipsis (. . .). The Olympia edition of The Ticket had just a single three-dot ellipsis but some four thousand em dashes which function, as the French novelist said in the mid-1950s of his own punctuation, like the rail tracks on which the metro of the writing depends. But just as Céline surprisingly made the ellipsis, normally a sign of suggestion and enigma, the electric dynamo of prose that “charges right into the nervous system,” so the surprise of The Ticket is to find the dash used for more than a sense of urgency.37 Burroughs never explicitly theorized punctuation as Céline did, but he was well aware that the material he added in 1967, containing some four hundred two-dot ellipses, a dozen three-dot ellipses, and about a hundred more em dashes, transformed the page. All these dots and dashes make the entire text of The Ticket an encrypted signal, a code or “system,” as one draft typescript puts it, “like Morse with scales of intensity and speed.”38 Because they cannot be spoken aloud or put into words, the em dashes and ellipses are crucial to the physical sensation of the reading experience, but Burroughs’ practice was more than a generalized aesthetic. On the contrary, on close inspection The Ticket shows how subtle and precise his use of a dash was in literary terms. Take the example of the section “combat troops in the area.”
The first half of “combat troops” appeared in the 1962 edition, shown in its use of the em dash some 250 times, an average of every ten words. The second half of the section, added in 1967, has only a single em dash and the main punctuation is the two-dot ellipsis, of which there are more than seventy. The placement of the one em dash—so visibly out of place in a paragraph sprayed with a dozen ellipses—is carefully contrived in lines that refer to the experimental poet e.e. cummings: “his gentle precise fingers on Bill’s shoulder fold sweet etcetera to bed — EE Cummings if my memory serves and what have I my friend to give you? Monkey bones of eddie and bill?” The obvious anomaly is that Burroughs puts the poet’s name in upper case, rather than using the lower-case letters that exemplified cummings’ famously nonstandard orthography. This is the tip-off to three more subtle manipulations. First, there’s the title of cummings’ poem “my sweet old etcetera,” which Burroughs alters by inverting the word order and turning “old” into “fold” to make a self-reflexive pun on his fold-in method. Second, the phrase “eddie and bill” has also been subject to a precise restructuring, since Burroughs has separated the run-together names “eddieandbill” from another cummings poem. Finally, and not by chance, this other poem has an em dash in its very title: “in Just—” Although it’s easily missed, Burroughs has named the second poem just through his use of the dash, and encoded his work in a tradition of typographic poetic experiment.
Such precision at the microscopic level demonstrates an attention to detail for which Burroughs is almost never given credit. It also suggests why it is necessary to edit The Ticket with rigor, and the Notes section provides textual and archival evidence in support of changes made or, in the case of certain apparent errors, not made. However, the text was also determined by more contingent circumstances at the formal level, by chance factors that pose a different challenge to the editor, as they do to the reader and literary critic. Out of all Olympia and Grove Press editions of the trilogy, The Ticket is actually the odd one out in its use of the em dash, for here the dash is printed with a space on either side; a small difference, but one that makes a definite impact on the look of the page and therefore the experience of reading. Since the question of agency is central to the text and the method of its production, we have to ask: was this intentional? The answer is in the typesetting manuscript Burroughs submitted to Olympia Press in September 1962. The first forty-four pages have the spaced em dash, which seems to have invited the typesetters to follow suit. The remaining two thirds of the manuscript, however, uses Burroughs’ standard dash without spacing, and comparison of the two parts establishes that the first third was typed not by Burroughs but for him. On its own, such evidence is inconclusive, but Burroughs’ intentions are confirmed in the Olympia page proofs—the final stage before printing—which include his last-minute addition of a typed insert, a paragraph using more than a dozen of his standard em dashes, without spacing.39 Letting the spaced em dashes stand for the 1967 Grove edition, Burroughs in effect granted the material its own agency, tacitly recognizing that texts are collaborative and that the work has a life of its own independent of the supposed author. The most important collaboration between design and contingency in the production of the two Tickets, and the final major difference between editions, concerns the very end of the text.
“SILENCE TO SAY GOOD-BYE —
In 1962, Burroughs asked Gysin to produce some “terminal writing” in order to solve the problem of ending a book that subverted the linearity of traditional narrative. Gysin’s calligraphy terminates the text physically by permutating in pen the section title—“silence to say good bye”—turning typed words into graphic forms and changing words that can be spoken into silent shapes. By canceling the referential function of the sign, the calligraphic line puts an end to the voice and the illusionism of realist language. In this way Gysin’s terminal writing is a perfect complement to the final section’s invocation of The Tempest: “These our actors bid you a long last good bye.” As the text’s characters line up to bid adieu like performers on a stage, they now appear as just characters—merely