''The Soft Machine'' is a 1961
novel
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ...
by American author
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major Postmodern literature, postmodern author who influen ...
. It was originally composed using the
cut-up technique partly from manuscripts belonging to ''
The Word Hoard''. It is the first part of ''
The Nova Trilogy
''The Nova Trilogy'' or ''The Cut-up Trilogy'' is a name commonly given by critics to a series of three experimental novels by William S. Burroughs.
Volumes
* '' The Soft Machine''
* '' The Ticket That Exploded''
* '' Nova Express''
Trilogy
Th ...
''.
Title and structure
The title ''The Soft Machine'' is a name for the
human body
The human body is the entire structure of a Human, human being. It is composed of many different types of Cell (biology), cells that together create Tissue (biology), tissues and subsequently Organ (biology), organs and then Organ system, org ...
, and the main theme of the book (as explicitly written in an appendix added to the 1968, British edition) concerns how control mechanisms invade the body.
The book is written in a style close to that of ''
Naked Lunch
''Naked Lunch'' (first published as ''The Naked Lunch'') is a 1959 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. The novel does not follow a clear linear plot, but is instead structured as a series of non-chronological "routines". Many of thes ...
'', employing third-person singular indirect recall, though now using the cut-up method.
After the main material follow three appendices in the British edition, 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.
Plot summary
The main plot appears in linear prose in chapter VII, ''The Mayan Caper''. This chapter portrays a secret agent 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
Time travel is the hypothetical activity of traveling into the past or future. Time travel is a concept in philosophy and fiction, particularly science fiction. In fiction, time travel is typically achieved through the use of a device known a ...
machine and takes on a gang of
Mayan priests who use the
Mayan calendar
The Maya calendar is a system of calendars used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and in many modern communities in the Guatemalan highlands, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico.
The essentials of the Maya calendar are based upon a system which had ...
to control the minds of slave laborers used for planting
maize
Maize (; ''Zea mays''), also known as corn in North American English, is a tall stout grass that produces cereal grain. It was domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from wild teosinte. Native American ...
. The calendar images are written in books, 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 causes the downfall of their regime.
Characters
The characters of the ''Soft Machine'' fall into three categories:
* Characters from the previous novels ''Junkie'', ''Queer'' and ''Naked Lunch'': ''Dr Benway'', ''Clem Snide'', ''Sailor'', ''Bill Gains'', ''Kiki'', and ''Carl Peterson''.
* Characters associated with the Nova Trilogy:
** The Nova Mob: ''Mr Bradly Mr Martin'', ''Sammy the Butcher, Green Tony, Izzy the Push, Willy the Rat/Uranian Willy, agent K9?''
** The Nova Police: ''Inspector J. Lee''
** Alien races: The Venusians/Green Boys (''Johnny Yen, Contessa di Vile''), The Uranians/Blue heavy metal boys.
*Characters recycled from the work of other authors:
** ''Jimmy Sheffields'' from the novel ''Fury'' by
Henry Kuttner
Henry Kuttner (April 7, 1915 – February 3, 1958) was an American author of science fiction, fantasy fiction, fantasy and horror fiction, horror.
Early life
Henry Kuttner was born in Los Angeles, California in 1915. Kuttner (1829–1903) and ...
** ''Salt Chunk Mary'' from the novel ''You Can't Win'' by
Jack Black
Thomas Jacob "Jack" Black (born August 28, 1969) is an American actor, comedian, and musician. He is known for roles in family and comedy films, in addition to his voice work in animated films. His awards include a Children's and Family Emmy ...
** ''Danny Deaver'' from poem with the same title by
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British Raj, British India, which inspired much ...
** ''Billy Budd'' and ''Captain Verre'' from the short-story ''
Billy Budd
''Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative)'', also known as ''Billy Budd, Foretopman'', is a novella by American writer Herman Melville, left unfinished at his death in 1891. Acclaimed by critics as a masterpiece when a hastily transcribed vers ...
'' by
Herman Melville
Herman Melville (Name change, born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance (literature), American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works ar ...
Editions
''The Soft Machine'' has been printed in four different editions, the first three revised by the author, the last by Burroughs scholar
Oliver Harris.
# The first edition was printed by
Olympia Press
Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane. It published a mix of erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, and is ...
in Paris, in 1961, as number 88 in the Traveller Companion Series. It featured 182 pages arranged in 50 chapters of about 8 pages each. This edition was colour-coded into four different Units, and it was heavily fragmented. This edition is rare and the text is not widely available.
# The second edition was printed by
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United S ...
in the United States, in 1966. In this edition, Burroughs removed 82 pages and inserted 82 new pages, and the remaining 100 pages were rearranged and restructured using further
cut-ups. Much of the added material was linear, narrative prose, which is arguably easier to read than the disorganized first edition. Many chapters were renamed and rearranged in this edition, and the colour code from the first edition was removed.
# The third edition was printed by
John Calder in Great Britain, 1968. This time most chapter titles were intact from the second edition, but they began at more natural places in the text, whereas the second edition could place them in the middle of a sentence. The chapter ''1920s War Movies'' was renamed ''The Streets of Chance''. Twenty pages of new material had been added, plus about eight pages from the first edition which had been removed in the second edition. About five pages of material which was present in both the first and second edition was removed. This edition also included an "
Appendix" and "Afterword".
# The fourth 'Restored' edition was printed by Grove Press in the United States in 2014. Drawing on the discovery of a manuscript of ''The Soft Machine'' that was to have been published by Olympia Press in 1963, this edition restores a short cancelled chapter ('Male Image Back In'), restores the 1961 edition's heavy use of capital letters, and has some different chapter breaks. The edition also includes an introduction, extensive notes and appendices.
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
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of th ...
that he rewrote it extensively while he was working on ''
Dead Fingers Talk'', mostly because he was displeased with the balance of cut-up and more linear material. However, his revised editions included much new cut-up material as well as more conventional prose.
Obscenity controversy
The novel was subject to an obscenity trial in Turkey in 2011.
Sel Yayıncılık and the novel's Turkish translator faced obscenity charges after the release of the book, due to alleged "incompliance with moral norms" and “hurting people’s moral feelings.” Sel Yayıncılık and the books’ translators face three more years of uncertainty after the judge pronounced that the trial would be postponed until 2015, due to the implementation of new legislation. Meanwhile, the judge warned that if either of the publishing houses or the translators were foolish enough to publish further ‘obscene’ works, these cases would be added to the charge sheet.
Legacy
The term "
heavy metal" was first used in this novel, introducing the character “Uranian Willy The Heavy Metal Kid" (Burroughs continued using the term in subsequent novels). Although that character had no relation with that genre of rock music, the rock critic
Lester Bangs
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs (December 14, 1948 – April 30, 1982) was an American music journalist and critic. He wrote for ''Creem'' and ''Rolling Stone'' magazines and was also a performing musician. The music critic Jim DeRogatis called ...
did cite Burroughs in his ''Creem Magazine'' articles in which he is generally believed to have originated the term ‘heavy metal’ as applied to a rock music form.
English jazz rock band
Soft Machine
Soft Machine are an English Rock music, rock band from Canterbury, Kent. The band were formed in 1966 by Mike Ratledge, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Daevid Allen and Larry Nowlin. Soft Machine were central in the Canterbury scene; they became o ...
, from Canterbury, named themselves after the book, when they formed in mid-1966.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Soft Machine, The
1961 American novels
Novels by William S. Burroughs
Obscenity controversies in literature
Olympia Press books