Addiction: an agent of control | The Soft Machine (Burroughs, William S.)

"Smash The Control Machine!"-K9 the pilot | The Soft Machine (Burroughs, William S.) | William S. Burroughs

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	• The Soft Machine (Burroughs, William S.) William S. Burroughs Grove Press, 1994 - 184 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A book that redefines 'multi-interpretable'

"The Soft Machine"... the second excerpt from Burroughs' 1000 page manuscript of garbled chaos, written in Tangiers during a big, several year long heroin binge.

The origins of this writing are clear in the text... Burroughs' obsession with 'junk' is extreme, as is his fixation on orgiastic sex and sexually deviant practices. At least 50% of the book could be considered erotica if it weren't so intermingled with imagery of death and deformation that any aphrodisiac effect is squashed like a bug. This book is unparalleled in its obsessive obscenity, but there are visuals and concepts here that could not come from a sane mind, ideas that easily transcend into the realm of genius.

There is no plot, and unlike the preceding "Naked Lunch", the chapters can't even really be thought of as short stories. The incoherency factor is scaled up to the next level with the increased use of the "cut-up method". It is not a novel.

I think Burroughs was onto something with this idea, but that it makes "Soft Machine" a work that in the end is often little more than a nigh-random word salad, wherein any meaning taken really comes from the reader's mind. It will forever be a literary oddity, and many will find it absolutely impossible to read. Just as many will likely be turned away by its absolute depravity.

But there is something original and real in this book. Something beyond the normal world.

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Addiction: an agent of control

The Soft Machine is Burroughs's definitive work of cut-up and experimental writing. Most of the elements of the book are taken from the same period of writing that produced his first success Naked Lunch and are in many ways a natural continuation of that work. Many familiar characters pop up in The Soft Machine and many of the same themes of homosexuality, drug addiction, death, murder and corruption appear throughout. That being said, The Soft Machine is in many ways different from Naked Lunch. The most apparent is the total abandonment of any semblance to a coherent storyline. I will call this the cut-up style in the macro approach. There is a micro side of it as well. In almost every sentence Burroughs applies the technique to combine words and phrases that at first glance have no apparent connection or meaning together. The result is an interesting, if a bit tiring form of literary art.

I started reading this book directly after I finished Naked Lunch and was a bit let down by it at first. I was looking for something that had a bit more meaning taken as a whole and The Soft Machine just isn't that kind of book. It was only after I realized this that I began to appreciate it for what it was: a conscious attempt to create a new literary form and actively use words to illustrate the patterns of society and life that we are too familiar and dependent upon. Addiction is a dominant theme in Burroughs's work and it normally manifests itself in the form of dope, but I think he uses his unique style to illuminate the other pervasive forms of addiction that he saw saturating society. Addiction is essentially concerned with control, the control of a substance over the actions and choices of an individual. For Burroughs a mode of though or way of life could be just as easily substituted for a substance as long as it met the conditions of addiction.

The Soft Machine is an essential work and in many ways definitive in Burroughs assault against all the agents of control in our societies. Through a destruction of past literary forms and the resulting reconstruction into something utterly different he hoped to show not a solution to the problems confronting us, but rather to show us all how widespread and engrained the current system is.

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"Smash The Control Machine!"-K9 the pilot

This is possibly my favorite, I remember a lot about it. Just as if not more so on the lines of Wild Boys, except those boys are replaced renegade military types who go haywire and destroy the civilized control towers and such with the ubiquitous words "Calling partisans of all nations-Shift linquals, vibrate tourists-Word falling, photo falling-break through in grey room!" Wonderful. Mostly stream-of-conciousness, including the immensely garbled and mind blowing (atleast to me) chapter "Trak!Trak!Trak!" (either that or Trek)...he just keeps going and going, but not like the Energizer Bunny becuase that peice of fluffy pink machinery is a commercialized 'soft machine' and Burroughs is its arch enemy. Wouldn't it just be marvelous if the 2 duked it out on some adulterated Japanese animation like Cowboy Bebob? Err. BREAK THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE...OF LITERATURE AND LUNACY!

Other particularly memorable scenes that stuck in my internal synapses include a chapter where a news reporter infiltrates backward Mayan codices (where a hollogram image of an old master controls the migrant workers) and penetrates the machine and punches the hollogram in the gut and screams out freedom and aw, it was beautiful. Also feast your eyes on voodoo doctors taking advantage of their drug induced patients, boys in the forgotten hills, traveling shifty, where am I going with this? Whatever, just read it, boys and girls.

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In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.

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