THE SOFT MACHINE (Mass Market Paperback)

'The Soft Machine' is the first of Burroughs 'cut-up' trilogy, the others being 'The Ticket That Exploded' and 'Nova Express'. While anyone with a passing knowledge of Burroughs believes that the cut-up was used to create 'The Naked Lunch', in reality the first novel to fully utilise this technique was 'The Soft Machine'.

The 'cut-up' was a method by which different and disparate pieces of text could be combined with each other to produce a third, new text. This was done more or less at random. Invented by Burroughs' long-time friend and inspiration Brion Gysin, after an accident with a Stanley Knife and a pile of old New York Herald Tribunes on a late September afternoon in 1959, the 'cut-up' was a strategy that seemed to fit Burroughs already fragmented style of writing and suspicion of narrative...

What the cut-up allowed Burroughs to do was similar to what the advent of the modern sampler allowed musicians to do; it allowed him to pull together completely unrelated information and process it into a new and potentially revealing form. 'The Soft Machine' in this case becomes a book length word collage. Burroughs himsef dreamed of producing a machine to manufacture cut-ups completely without human intervention, a way of completely escaping from the cult of the writer, a way of mechanically producing writing with out any idea of inspiration or genius.

When reading this edition of 'The Soft Machine', an 'easier to read' revision of the original published version, it feels like looking at 'The Naked Lunch' through a kaleidoscope, tiny fragments of text reflected in on themselves, repeating in new configurations, recognisable fragments shifting against each other producing new images. Although not traditionally satisfying, 'The Soft Machine' when read with knowledge of its construction, becomes an immensely evocative kind of prose poem, amazingly poignant images swimming up through pages of seemingly random word salad, like tiny flashes of lucidity rising above the surface of a narcotic haze. Quite simply, 'The Soft Machine' is like TS Eliot's 'The Wasteland' written by a junky explorer of inner space rather than a stuffy, elitist academic, both sharing great cumulative emotional effect coming from odd juxtaposition.

It is hard to say what 'The Soft Machine' is about, but it contains all of Burroughs major preoccupations: drugs, control in all its forms, immortality, sex, attacks on hypocrisy and complacency, disorder. Burroughs intended it to be as uncompromising as possible, a psychic wake up call, a destruction of all existing ideas of literature, a journey to a new way of seeing...

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It is clear that this book is more fragmented and confusing in its build-up than Naked Lunch. Speaking of clear plot and story is meaningless and far from the point Burroughs is trying to make. Burroughs sees life as random and fragmented, confusing and perhaps meaningless.

These are the points which one can extract from the novel but at the same time, it is also extremely funny and interesting. Do not expect a normal novel when reading, but enjoy the short episodes which are described. Burroughs' humour might be dark but it is present everywhere in his novels.

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