The Master Remastered
Digital Fingers Play 5-D Chess — Part 1  

3,849 words

William S. Burroughs
Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text
Edited & with an Introduction by Oliver Harris
Richmond, UK: Calder Publications, 2020 (1st ed., London: Calder, 1963)

“Numbers are repetition and repetition produces events. Dead Finger Talk.”
—William Burroughs [1]

“Is there a better definition of digital culture than the talk of dead fingers?”
—Oliver Harris

William Burroughs, born over a hundred years ago, was a Jazz Age curmudgeon who first came to prominence as the Grey Eminence of the midcentury Beat Generation; came into his own fame in the 60s; then lived, improbably enough for a lifelong heroin addict, almost into the twenty-first century; and rather than residing in the Where Are They Now File seems to become more relevant with each passing year.

For example, this here/now book: Dead Fingers Talk, a … let’s call it, “selection,” for now, compiled or edited or … concocted, let’s say, by Burroughs and, perhaps, his British publisher, John Calder, or … perhaps not. You can see the problems already. Published only in the UK and out of print for decades, it has long been regarded as either the Holy Grail or the red-headed stepchild of the Burroughs oeuvre. Now Oliver Harris, the Magister Ludi of Burroughs Studies, [2] has brought it back to the light, and made a compelling case for it as Burroughs’ first and perhaps greatest, or at least most relevant, masterpiece.

Why read a 60-year-old greatest hits collection[3] likely concocted by the publisher as a promo stunt or by the author as a cash grab, and long-since forgotten except by Burroughs nerds? Harris begins his brief for the defense by examining the historical origins of DFT, or rather, the legends and misunderstandings.

John Calder had had the brilliant idea of inviting the relatively-unknown Burroughs (his major books had only been published in France due to censorship concerns) to a writers’ conference he was organizing in Scotland. Speaking at symposia on censorship and new writing techniques, he proved to be the hit of the event, garnering praise from both Norman Mailer and, oddly, the Catholic novelist Mary McCarthy.[4]

Striking while the press was still hot, Calder signed up Burroughs (his name would appear on the publisher’s list between Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras) but realizing that the public needed to be prepared for an author supposedly harder to read than Joyce or Beckett and far more legally objectionable,[5] he had the cunning plan of first publishing a some sort of anthology as a kind of gentle, relatively painless introduction;[6] “cooling off the marks,” as Burroughs might say.

And here’s where things get a bit sticky, starting with Calder’s own ad copy:

Dead Fingers Talk is not a book of selections but a new novel constructed out of these three earlier books[7] together with some new material.

What on earth does this mean? Is it just “useless sales talk?” The “case for the defence,” Harris suggests, must start with that “usefully vague” phrase, “some new material.” What counts as “new material”? Harris calculates that one half of Dead Fingers Talk (DFT) comes from Naked Lunch (NL), one quarter from the first, unrevised text of The Soft Machine (TSM) and about one fifth from the not-yet-published The Ticket that Exploded (TTE). Conversely, Burroughs used almost two thirds of NL, just under one half of TTE, and nearly one third of TSM. Each chapter of DFT uses material from one, two or all three previous books in various combinations. And so on.

More importantly, what does “new” or “original” mean here, even apart from the questionable value of “originality” itself[8]? We know the difference between a novel by Tito Perdue, say, and a book of selections from his oeuvre. Obviously the three Olympia Press books are “original” in the conventional or legal sense, but DFT is “original in a different way,” an original originality, if you will. Unpacking that unique sense requires us to look into the “uncanny textual logic” of the work—and note the word “uncanny,” it’s not just window dressing.[9]

Let’s go back to Edinburgh, where Burroughs made his splash and signed his contract with Calder.[10] The Edinburgh event was not just a conference about avant-garde writing but an avant-garde conference itself: a “risky festival, open to chance rather than all under control.”[11] As Calder said in the programme:

At the time of writing, we cannot predict even approximately how it will all turn out, but the raw material available is the most lively and stimulating that could be assembled. The conference is an experiment. [Emphases added]

In the same way, Harris calls DFT “an experiment of assembled raw material whose outcome could not be predicted.” In typically perverse Burroughs fashion,[12] the book’s very origin in the aftermath of Burroughs’ success at the conference tainted it as “crassly opportunistic” rather than the utterly original outcome of the sort of aleatory techniques proclaimed at the conference and now demonstrated in the book itself.

***

But what about the question of self-censorship? Although we might bemoan the requirement that an author submit to the whims of public decency – or perhaps not – the fact is that Burroughs was always willing to trim his sails to the prevailing winds; even surprisingly so. He agreed with Calder’s project because he himself knew he had to prepare the public for his more, um, challenging writing. So he applied the blue pencil with gusto: four whole chapters of NL were ignored, effectively occluded from public view, not coincidentally containing most of the famous pornographic scenes,[13] and dozens of small changes or deletions of wording were made.

If the idea was to bowdlerize the text to escape censorship, the choices are sometimes…odd. One interesting choice was to replace “get fucked up the ass” with “molest a child.” Was Burroughs right to think this would make the text less “offensive,” and what does that tell us about the current scene, or at least British society at the time?

It also raises the question—for me, though not for Harris—of whether all the porn was necessary? If not, why was it there in the first place? Consider these reflections on how the Elites transmit their secret stories:

The elites simply understand that the peasants don’t know how to read so they’ll just openly share the story amongst themselves in the elitist publications that ordinary people don’t read.

They are also able to keep the masses away from elite publications by making them obscene to normal sensibilities. Traditionally in the West, this was achieved by promoting gayness and the blacks. See, one of the strange side-effects of higher than average IQ is the development of a kind of “disgust-suppression” ability. Smart people can basically see gross things and have the self-control to act like they’re OK with them. So, surrounding themselves with gross art and gross people became a kind of flex for the big city types and a way to repel ordinary people from their circles. But that whole topic is far more Tom Wolfe territory.

Whether or not the postwar “avant-garde” are part of the Elite’s project,[14] the original Modernists certainly had a similar project, to “purify” the arts by keeping out the bourgeois or hoi polloi, and one way to do that was, paradoxically, to ladle in plenty of smut (which didn’t hurt sales, either). In this, Burroughs would be following in the footsteps of such masters as Joyce and Lawrence.

***

A smaller issue also involves Calder’s role. The Calder Problem is whether this book is a collaboration between Burroughs and Calder, author and publisher, and hence – some might argue – not “really” a Burroughs text. The objection seems overly scrupulous. Burroughs frequently worked with a collaborator: his very first sustained work of fiction, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, was written with Jack Kerouac in 1945, and he frequently worked with Brion Gysin, including The Third Mind, whose very title relates to the importance of collaboration for Burroughs.[15] I suppose in these cases the collaboration is “properly acknowledged” in what librarians will call the “statement of responsibility”—i.e., the authors on the title page.

Even so, unlike authors whose works disappeared into the cut-ups, Calder frequently highlighted his input; both in promotional materials at the time and in his 1980s memoirs, Calder claimed to have had a not indecisive part in the genesis of the book. Of course, the smaller the role Burroughs is thought to have in it, the less the interest of fans and scholars.

Harris provides evidence that Calder mystified or exaggerated his role, deliberately or inadvertently, and that we can safely assume that we are dealing with authentic if not 100% Burroughs here. For example, Calder could not possibly have “already read the three texts” since TTE had not yet been published; and he brags about including material, such as the “County Clerk” and “Talking Asshole,” which isn’t there. Here and elsewhere, we can charitably assume that Calder’s memory is not infallible.

In short, Calder, by accident or intention, exaggerated his actual role, and we can feel free to dial it back until we become comfortable enough to dive into the text itself.

***

So the story so far is that DFT has been dismissed as either a cash-grab based off the publicity from Burroughs’ breakout appearance in Edinburgh or as a no longer relevant attempt to evade censorship, and in any event it’s at best a book of selections intended to offer cleaned-up previews of books we have long since had access to in full text; and besides all that, it’s a collaboration, so not “really” Burroughs.

The objections boil down first to temporality: DFT being outdated, a product of its time; and then to “originality: DFT being a collaborative and self-censored re-hash. Harris turns both of these on their heads: he argues that DFT is perhaps the purest, at least the first major, example of Burroughs’ unique compositional methods; indeed, it is its “original originality” that makes it more timely than ever.

To make his case for the defense, Harris effectively undertakes a word by word – even punctuation mark by mark – examination of the DFT text, comparing it with the source materials in Burroughs’ manuscripts and various editions of the three books, including publisher proofs and his own “restored editions.” Though sometimes his analyses – some fifty pages of endnotes to a two-hundred-page text—go to eye-watering lengths, he succeeds in establishing the mind-boggling amount of re-working that Burroughs applied to this “book of selections,” crafting what can only be fairly called a new work.[16]

But what kind of “work” is this? Harris tops off his work with a brilliant insight:

What was in the early 1960s derided as a “mishmash” and a “rehash,” we now recognize as the literary prototype of mashup and remix.

His book of repetitions spoke of the digitized future through cut-and-paste methods that retrospectively-prophetically made Burroughs a “pre-Internet Remixologist,” to borrow Mark Amerika’s verdict on his cut-up audio experiments.[17]

Harris can literally begin to illustrate his case from the original dust jacket, reappearing in this edition and replacing the sensationalistic, drug-oriented covers of later paperbacks. At first glance, it seems to justify the charge of unoriginality, merely reproducing the dust jackets of the Olympia Press editions of the three main texts. Rather than resorting to the trite response of “don’t judge a book by its cover,” Harris boldly asks us to do just that, stating the case for it as a brilliant example of “the demonstration of the method” that Burroughs had called for in Edinburgh.

The jacket design is a collage of the three earlier covers, each itself a calligraphic collaboration of Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, for books that are themselves more or less collages of text, now reappearing in a new collage. While superficially resembling the concurrent work of Andy Warhol, “this multimedia collaborative jacket design made from previous multimedia collaborative jacket design” represents DFT as the next fractal step:

As a collage of source texts that were collages of source texts, which were often themselves also collages of source texts (e.g., Eliot’s The Waste Land), Dead Fingers Talk took cut-up methods to a higher power.

This is what Gysin meant by claiming that writing was fifty years behind painting and could benefit from adopting some of the techniques of the latter.[18]

But, as Harris points out, not only do we have here a re-purposing of older covers, but something else has been newly added, yet still recalling the past: a ghostly white hand covers the covers, asserting renewed ownership in present time[19] as well as recalling an even older event. For it is the left hand of William S. Burroughs himself, identifiable by the missing first joint of the little finger.[20] Moreover,

[It] denies the “obviously” metaphorical gesture of the cut-up methods, insisting on their literalism as operations on language as a biological form and vice versa: on the body as a text and the text as a body.[21]

If painting had discovered collage fifty (now over a hundred) years ago, and Burroughs’ cut-up technique was treating words on a page as a physical object to be manipulated in present time, the method also pointed to the future, with its obvious analogy to audio tape, and, in the further future, already now, digital files. [22]

 Notes

[1] William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin: The Third Mind (New York: Viking, 1978), p.178. That is to say: “[When] you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event…. Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.” (Daniel Odier, The Job: Interview with William Burroughs (New York: Penguin, 1989 [1970]). For example: “. . . it’s hard to say what is or isn’t a ‘reference,’ since the text’s viral signifiers find their signifieds not only in the past but in the future. Faced with cut-up passages, the reader can only learn to wait for the ‘original’ words, at which point they take on meaning by discovering new referents…. What? Does it really say ‘Lens googles stuttering light flak’? And Uranian Willy ‘heard the twittering supersonic threats through antennae embedded in his translucent skull’? Google and Twitter?” William Burroughs, Nova Express: The Restored Text, ed. Oliver Harris (New York: Grove / London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2013), p. xiv.

[2] Oliver Harris is Professor of American Literature at Keele University, and the editor of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 (1993), Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” (2003), The Yage Letters Redux (2006), Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2008), Queer: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition (2010), The Soft Machine: The Restored Text (2014), Nova Express: The Restored Text (2014), and The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text (2014). In 2019, he introduced a new edition of Blade Runner, (an unproduced film script whose title was sold to Ridley Scott for “a nominal fee,) followed by new editions of four cut-up works: Minutes to Go Redux, The Exterminator Redux, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS and Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text (all 2020). He is presumably not related to Kamala Harris’s non-black grandfather.

[3] Unaware at the time of its value as a work and as a rare book, the young Harris of the 80s scrawled “Greatest Hits” on the flyleaf of his copy.

[4] Mailer’s “the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius” would appear on endless book jackets; Mary McCarthy’s review of The Naked Lunch appeared in the very first issue of the New York Review of Books (February, 1963)

[5] Beckett and Burroughs would not only eventually share Calder as a UK publisher, but initially at least the French pornographic house, Olympia Press. Hard to believe, not only Joyce but even Beckett faced censorship difficulties in the UK, one reason perhaps that the latter eventually took up residence in Paris and wrote mainly in French. Unlike Burroughs, Beckett’s troublesome speech involved less sensationalistic matters than intergalactic buggery and pederasty, instead revolving around the mention of contraception (forbidden in Ireland) and a general contempt for the Irish. Interestingly, the EU is now threatening Ireland with fines etc. for “failing” to implement “hate speech” laws.

[6] The most (mildly) positive of the contemporary reviews called it a collection of “the least offensive” of his writings and suggested titling it Not Quite the Worst of Burroughs.

[7] (The) Naked Lunch (as the title was given in the UK), The Soft Machine and The Ticket that Exploded.

[8] Consider the Traditionalists, as delineated by Mark Sedgwick: “Guénon … also attacked belief in originality…. For Guénon, truth was ancient, not new, and certainly not individual or ‘original’ in the modern sense. Those who value what is new thus miss the value of ancient truth. Emphasis on the originality of individual ideas blocks access to true metaphysical ideas, which are neither original nor the creation or property of any one individual. (p. 106) While, for Coomaraswamy, “the Renaissance was the point where Western art had gone into decline, moving away from its proper function of revealing forms and communicating metaphysics. Instead, what began to matter was the personality of the artist and the alleged originality of the work.” (p240) Burckhardt suggested a compromise: “The general tendency for Traditionalists before Burckhardt had been to dismiss appreciation of originality and genius as a modernist delusion, comparable to mistaken modern passions for progress and individuality. Burckhardt compromised on this, arguing that ‘no work exists that is traditional. . . which does not give sensible expression to a certain creative joy of the soul’. Creativity is back, then, if in a subordinate position. “(p247) See his Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order, by Mark Sedgwick (Pelican, 2023).

[9] Wikipedia defines the Freudian “uncanny” as “the psychological experience of an event or thing that is unsettling in a way that feels oddly familiar, rather than simply mysterious”; the familiar becomes unfamiliar, hence “unheimlich.”

[10] Consider, Chris Kelso, Burroughs & Scotland: Dethroning the Ancients: The Commitment of Exile (Beatdom Books, 2021), which examines Burroughs’ time in Scotland and the influence of the’ cut-up method on modern Scottish literature.

[11] The Scottish poet Edwin Morgan titled his report on it “The Fold-In Conference,” alluding to the newer method Burroughs was starting to use for TTE. “Control” with a capital “C” is a key Burroughs target throughout his work.

[12] “Disastrous success” was Brion Gysin’s terms for the outcome of cut-up experiments: see Brion Gysin: “Cut-ups: A Project for Disastrous Success,” collected in William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin: The Third Mind (New York: Viking, 1978) and my review of Matthew Levi Stevens, The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs (Oxford: Mandrake of Oxford, 2014), here and reprinted in Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson, & Other Populist Gurus (Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020).

[13] These passages included those, which I shall not sully the reader’s eyes by describing here, which Burroughs’ defense at the later obscenity trial in Massachusetts claimed—bizarrely but effectively—were actually “Swiftian satires” directed at capital punishment.

[14] See, of course, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (U.S. title The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters) by Frances Stoner Saunders for documentation of the CIA’s role in promoting “avant garde” art and literature as a weapon against the Soviet Union.

[15] Burroughs held that when two work together, a “third mind” arises. This was one key to understanding the significance of the cut-up technique, which often involved dhe works of others, from Kafka’s Trial to The International Hearld Tribune. Burroughs acknowledged appropriating the idea from popular New Thought writer Napoleon Hill, who in Think and Grow Rich described the Mastermind principle as: “No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.” See Mitch Horowitz, The Power of the Master Mind (New York: G & L Media, 2019).

[16] It surely would have would have delighted an earlier Professor of American Studies, Harold Beaver, who, in his 300-page commentary on Moby Dick, (Moby Dick, or The whale / Herman Melville, edited with an introduction and commentary by Harold Beaver. Published in the Penguin English Library 1972, reprinted in Penguin Classics 1986; now sadly retired) obsessively notes all such deviations among Melville’s manuscripts and various American and English editions, with a special emphasis on sodomy. This chap found his copy in France, appropriately enough: “The book is a log, with about half as many pages of ancillary material as there are of the novel itself, but the weight and space it took in my pannier wasn’t any concern. I pedaled with it for three months; read it in bars and parks, in hostels and campgrounds; even visited the Heidelberg Tun described in Chapter LXXVII. I still consider it an excellent edition. The editor, Harold Beaver, is described as ‘Reader in American Literature at the University of Warwick.’ It appears that he wanted to put everything needed to appreciate M-D in a single paperback package, with a dream-like Turner painting on the cover. For that first ‘committed’ reading, Beaver’s ‘Commentary’ section was my private tutor, greatly increasing my understanding and appreciation of Melville’s labors. There is about one page of notes for every two pages of source text.” I too was similarly impress – reading it as a teenager, a point that will be revisited – and it undoubtedly influenced my own delight in texts that are more footnotes than body.

[17] Like “online” and “log in,” kids reading this should be told that the “cut and paste” function is how we Boomers did editing back in the day.

[18] “Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage.” Brion Gysin, “Cut-Ups Self-Explained,” from: William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, 1978. In “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin”, Burroughs further explains: “The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit— all writing is in fact cut ups.”

[19] A phrase favored by L. Ron Hubbard that Burroughs took up and used long after his association had waned.

[20] Burroughs had bought a pair of chicken shears and cut it off, while “on a Van Gogh kick” – i.e., to somehow impress an uninterested love interest. This resulted in his first encounter with a new form of Control: the psych ward at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, a frequent home for Beat writers.

[21] The root metaphor of Burroughs’ oeuvre is that language, The Word, is a biological parasite, a virus deliberately introduced into the human body millennia ago.

[22] Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘N’ Roll (University of Texas Press 2019) documents Burroughs’ incredible influence on just about every genre of popular (and unpopular) music (despite being himself a “jazz age relic” who listened to 78s on a windup victrola) and is my source for what follows.