The Soft Machine

1973 Ballantine Books paperback edition.
Author	William S. Burroughs
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Nova Trilogy
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Olympia Press
Released	1961
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
ISBN	NA
Followed by	The Ticket That Exploded

For the rock band named after this book, see Soft Machine

The Soft Machine is the title of a novel by William S. Burroughs, first published in 1961 and was Burroughs' first novel after the groundbreaking publication of Naked Lunch. It was originally composed using the cut-up and fold-in techniques from manuscripts belonging to The Word Hoard. It is part of The Nova Trilogy. Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 369 × 600 pixel Image in higher resolution (421 × 684 pixel, file size: 80 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) 1973 edition, copyright Ballantine Books. ... Ballantine Books, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine, is a major book publisher and is currently owned by Random House. ... William Seward Burroughs II (1914 – August 2, 1997), more commonly known as William S. Burroughs, was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended, generally fictional narrative, typically in prose. ... Olympia Press was a Paris based publisher, best known for the first print of Nabokov s Lolita; this led to copyright issues, since Nabokov was not satisfied with the publisher and the reputation it had, since besides some serious literature, it published mostly erotic novels. ... See also: 1960 in literature, other events of 1961, 1962 in literature, list of years in literature. ... A hardcover (or hardback or hardbound) book is bound with rigid protective covers (typically of cardboard covered with cloth or heavy paper) and a stitched spine. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ... The Ticket That Exploded is a novel by William S. Burroughs published in 1962. ... The Soft Machine were a pioneering British psychedelic, progressive rock and jazz band from Canterbury, Kent, England, named after the book The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. ... A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended, generally fictional narrative, typically in prose. ... William Seward Burroughs II (1914 – August 2, 1997), more commonly known as William S. Burroughs, was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer. ... 1961 (MCMLXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1961 calendar). ... Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs. ... The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique or genre in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text. ... The Word Hoard also known as the trunk manuscripts was a large body of text (circa 1000 typewriter pages) produced by author William S. Burroughs between roughly 1953 and 1958. ... The Nova Trilogy, The Nova Epic or The Cut-up Trilogy is a name commonly given by critics to a series of three experimental prose novels by William S. Burroughs. ...

Title and structure

The title The Soft Machine is a name for the human body, and the main theme of the book (as explicitly written in an appendix) concerns how control mechanisms invade the body. Human anatomy or anthropotomy is a special field within anatomy. ...

The book is written in a style close to that of Naked Lunch utilizing the cut-up method to an even greater degree.

It is further quite easy to identify passages borrowed and cut in from the work of two other authors: The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot and The Tempest by William Shakespeare.^{[citation needed]} T. S. Eliot (by E. O. Hoppe, 1919) The Waste Land (1922), sometimes mistakenly written as The Wasteland, is a highly influential 433-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. ... Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...

After the main material follow three appendices, the first explaining the title (as mentioned above) and two accounts of Burroughs' own drug abuse and treatment using apomorphine. Here Burroughs clearly states that he considers drug abuse a metabolic disease and writes about how he finally escaped it. Apomorphine is a type of dopaminergic agonist, a morphine derivative. ... A metabolic disease is a disease caused by malfunction in the human total metabolism. ...

Plot summary

The main plot (which is intermingled with other plots) appears in linear prose in chapter VII, The Mayan Caper. This chapter, which can even be read as a short story on its own, portrays a secret agent (presumably the same Bill Lee who appeared in Naked Lunch) who has the ability to change bodies or metamorphose his own body using "U.T." (undifferentiated tissue). As such an agent he makes a time travel machine and takes on a gang of Mayan priests who use the Mayan calendar to control the minds of slave labourers used for planting maize. The calendar images are written in books and placed on a magnetic tape and transmitted as sounds to control the slaves. The agent manages to infiltrate the slaves and replace the magnetic tape with a totally different message: "burn the books, kill the priests" which cause the downfall of their regime. The techniques used for changing bodies involves several chemical, biological and sexual magic-like practices and many things can go wrong. Time travel is a concept that has long fascinated humanity—whether it is Merlin experiencing time backwards, or religious traditions like Mohammeds trip to Jerusalem and ascent to heaven, returning before a glass knocked over had spilt its contents. ... 74. ... The Maya calendar is actually a system of distinct calendars and almanacs used by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and by some modern Maya communities in highland Guatemala. ... Corn redirects here. ...

Characters

The characters of The Soft Machine fall into three categories:

• Characters from the previous novel Naked Lunch: Dr Benway, Clem Snide, Sailor, Bill Gains and Kiki.
• Characters associated with the Nova mythology:
  • The Nova Mob: Mr Bradley Mr Martin, Johnny Yen, Sammy The Butcher, Green Tony, Izzy the Push
  • The Nova Police: Inspector Lee, Hassan i Sabbah, agent K9, The Subliminal Kid, Technical Tilly
• Characters recycled from the work of other authors:
  • Jimmy Sheffields from the novel Fury by Henry Kuttner
  • Salt Chunk Mary from the novel You Can't Win by Jack Black
  • Danny Deaver from poem with the same title by Rudyard Kipling
  • Billy Budd and Captain Verre comes from the short-story Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs. ... The Nova Trilogy, The Nova Epic or The Cut-up Trilogy is a name commonly given by critics to a series of three experimental prose novels by William S. Burroughs. ... Henry Kuttner (April 7, 1915 - February 4, 1958) was a science fiction author born in Los Angeles, California. ... Jack Black was a late 19th century hobo, living out the dying age of the Wild West. ... This article is about the British author. ... Billy Budd is a short novel finished around 1891 by Herman Melville. ... Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, essayist and poet. ...

Editions

The Soft Machine has been printed in no fewer than three different editions, each time revised by the author.

1. The first edition was printed by Olympia Press in Paris, 1961 as number 88 in the Traveller Companion Series and featured 182 pages arranged in 50 chapters of about 8 pages each. This edition was color coded into four different chunks and very fragmentaric.
2. The second edition was printed by Grove Press in the United States, 1966. In this edition, Burroughs removed 82 pages and inserted 82 new pages, and the remaining 100 pages had been rearranged and restructured using further cut-ups. Much of the added material was linear, narrative prose, which is arguably a lot easier to read than the very disorganized first edition. Many chapters were renamed and rearranged in this edition, and the color code from the first edition was removed.
3. The third edition was printed by John Calder in Great Britain, 1968. This time most chapter titles were intact from the second edition, but will begin at more natural places in the text, whereas the second edition could place them in the middle of a sentence. The chapter 1920ies War Movies has been renamed The Streets of Chance. 20 pages of new material had been added, plus circa 8 pages from the first edition which had previously been removed in the second edition. About 5 pages of material which was present in both the first and second edition was removed. This edition also included an "Appendix" and "Afterword".

Burroughs himself was very displeased with the first edition and this was the main reason for rewriting it so thoroughly: in 1961 he wrote to his friend Allen Ginsberg that he rewrote it extensively while he was working on Dead Fingers Talk, mostly because he was displeased with bad cut-ups and introduced linear material to replace it. In a letter to John Calder he claims that he intended the appendix to be published in Playboy Magazine as a promotional device for the book.^{[citation needed]} Olympia Press was a Paris based publisher, best known for the first print of Nabokov s Lolita; this led to copyright issues, since Nabokov was not satisfied with the publisher and the reputation it had, since besides some serious literature, it published mostly erotic novels. ... City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Tossed by the waves, she does not sink) Paris Eiffel tower as seen from the esplanade du Trocadéro. ... 1961 (MCMLXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1961 calendar). ... Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. ... 1966 (MCMLXVI) was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1966 calendar). ... The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique or genre in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... 1968 (MCMLXVIII) was a leap year starting on Monday. ... Appendix can mean: Appendix (see Book design), part of the content of some books vermiform appendix, a human internal organ, physically part of the digestive system but which function is a matter of controversy See also Look up appendix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... 1961 (MCMLXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1961 calendar). ... Irwin Allen Ginsberg (IPA: ) (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat poet. ... 1963 British hardcover edition. ... Playboy is an adult entertainment magazine, or pornography magazine, founded in 1953 by Hugh Hefner, which has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc. ...

Footnotes