Chapter Four—
"I Hassan i Sabbah Rub Out the Word Forever ":
The Dialectic of Treason and the Abolition of the Law in the Nova Trilogy

After Naked Lunch, the Nova trilogy, composed of the novels The Soft Machine (SM, 1961, revised 1966), The Ticket That Exploded (TE, 1962, revised 1966 and 1967), and Nova Express (NE, 1964), is the most famous of Burroughs's literary projects. It is also the subset of his work that is most difficult to read, by virtue of its often aleatory syntax, and for that reason alone the trilogy has been both an obstacle to academic assessments of Burroughs and a perennial favorite among nonacademic, "bohemian" readers. For many critics, Burroughs's use of the cut-up technique in the trilogy was proof a priori that his writing could no longer be interrogated for objective meaning or structure (if it ever could have been), but had to be treated like Rorschach inkblot tests of the reader's associative patterns. That is, his use of cut-ups meant that Burroughs could no longer be treated as an author, that his writings were no longer his but belonged entirely to his readers. Other readers refused to grant cut-ups even that much merit, and claimed that the procedure eliminated the possibility of aesthetic value. Even Burroughs's friends sometimes came to this kind of hostile conclusion. In 1960, Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles, and Brion Gysin published a first slim volume of cut-up texts entitled Minutes to Go . On the last page of Minutes to Go, Gregory Corso repudiated the cut-up experiments on the preceding pages as "uninspired machine-poetry":

I join this venture unwillingly and willingly. Unwillingly because the poetry I have written was from the soul and not from the dictionary; willingly because if it can be destroyed or bettered by the 'cut-up' method, then it is poetry I

care not for, and should be cut up. Word poetry is for everyman, but soul poetry—alas, is not widely distributed. (63)

Corso's pious lament over having his "soul poetry" "destroyed," like his elitist claim to a poetic inspiration beyond the reach of "everyman," is paradigmatic of the many negative responses to Burroughs's experiments, but Corso's denunciation also reveals the stakes of Burroughs's enterprise.

Readers who call the cut-ups simply destructive are irresponsible, however, and their reactions often stem from misunderstanding of the technique, coupled with a refusal to learn how to read cut-up texts (and, often, a refusal to look at the texts at all). Once its fundamental strategies are understood, the Nova trilogy is no more difficult to read than Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons or Joyce's Finnegans Wake, two "unreadable" works which have experienced popular and scholarly revivals of interest in recent years. Like the pun that serves as the basis of Finnegans Wake, the basic cut-up technique is very simple: one takes at least one printed text, physically cuts it up into fragments, and reassembles the fragments in random order. There are several variables which can be manipulated to produce cut-up texts of varying degrees of randomness. If one cuts out wide or long sections of text, more of the original syntax remains intact and disjunctions occur less frequently. The quadrant method of cutting up, in which one cuts a single sheet of paper into four equal parts and reorders the parts, preserves perhaps the most of the original sense. If one cuts the text into very small sections, the disjunctions will occur more often and the syntax will be commensurately less normal; indeed, one can even cut individual words apart and recombine them to form new words. One can also cut two or more texts together, which can produce jarring juxtapositions if the texts deal with disparate subjects. If what the reader seeks is artistry or poetry in the traditional sense—the subjective imposition of an order onto raw material—she will find it here, in the selection of original texts and in the choice and arrangement of the cut-ups that are generated.

Burroughs credits his awakening to the cut-up method to his friend Brion Gysin, an expatriate American painter and writer whom Burroughs met in Tangier and with whom he later lived in Paris and London. Gysin himself attributes the discovery of cut-ups to the Zurich dadaist Tristan Tzara, who composed instant poems by pulling words at random out of a hat.^[1] Burroughs claims that "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 film montage and

multiple exposure ("Cut-Up Method," 29). Even these comparisons are insufficient to explain the radicality of cut-ups, however. The cut-ups do not reproduce the artificially structured "stream of consciousness" of Joyce or Virginia Woolf, or even the carefully constructed textual "montage" of the "Camera Eye" sequences in John Dos Passos's U.S.A., let alone the elaborate dialectical montages of Eisenstein; these techniques are methods of control whereby the artist imposes his or her will on resistant symbolic material. As Burroughs insists, "You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors," in other words by cutting up the text ("Cut-Up Method," 29). The experimenter can use his or her own words, or any other words by any other writer: "Poets have no words 'of their very own.' Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody. 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?" ("Cut-Up Method," 34).

Burroughs claims for the cut-ups an almost mystical power of prophecy: "If you cut into the present, the future leaks out."^[2] The words contain, in themselves, all the possible permutations into which they can enter, so the experimenter can discover the future by cutting up the syntax and recombining the words to reveal their possibilities.^[3] Burroughs also insists that cutting up a text that is explicitly dedicated to a certain goal will reveal the hidden motives of the text and its author, a thesis that he tests repeatedly on mass media texts, which appear often in the trilogy. The validity of his claim of prophecy is beyond the scope of this study, but the claim that cutting up reveals motivations and intentions hidden in ideological texts has some basis. In the chapter of Nova Express entitled "Chinese Laundry," Burroughs cuts up an article opposing the "maintenance" of addicts (a British program whereby addicts were supplied with cheap heroin to prevent them from committing crimes to support their habits) by former Assistant U.S. Attorney General Malcolm Monroe, called "Fighting Drug Addiction: The 'Clinic Plan,'" published in the magazine Western World in October 1959.^[4] The text that emerges from Burroughs's cut-up operations dramatizes the dilemma of the trilogy: the police forces that combat criminals depend on those same criminals for their own continued existence.

Now you are asking me whether I want to perpetuate a narcotics problem and I say: "Protect the disease. Must be made criminal protecting society from the disease."

The problem scheduled in the United States the use of jail, former narcotics plan, addiction and crime for many years—Broad front "Care" of welfare

agencies—Narcotics which antedate the use of drugs—The fact is noteworthy—48 stages—prisoner was delayed—has been separated—was required—

Addiction in some form is the basis—must be wholly addicts—Any voluntary capacity subversion of The Will Capital And Treasury Bank—Infection dedicated to traffic in exchange narcotics demonstrated a Typhoid Mary who will spread narcotics problem to the United Kingdom—Finally in view of the cure—cure of the social problem and as such dangerous to society—

Maintaining addict cancers to our profit—pernicious personal contact—Market increase—Release the Prosecutor to try any holes— (NE 51)

This cut-up, which succinctly states the central conflict of the Nova trilogy, also reveals that the antidrug rhetoric of the fifties and sixties served merely to cover up the real intention of the government agencies assigned to tackle the problem: to "Protect the disease" of addiction that was the source or "basis" of their existence, to maintain the "addict cancers" from which they drew their "profit." Any real "cure of the social problem" would actually be "dangerous to society." This was the situation that Burroughs had already recognized in the addict-agents of Junky and Naked Lunch: the reversible symmetry of roles, cop and criminal, imposed by formal relations of legality that Foucault would analyze ten years later in Discipline and Punish . Perhaps this anticipation of Foucault's influential critical insight is evidence of the cut-ups' real power of prophecy.

In revealing the constitutive contradiction of the Law (the term is capitalized to remind us that it refers to a concept rather than a particular law), the cut-up method challenges the hegemony of that Law and offers a method for abolishing it. In a passage of The Ticket That Exploded that alludes back to the introduction to Naked Lunch, Burroughs again cites Wittgenstein, followed by Marx and Engels: "Wittgenstein said: 'No proposition can contain itself as an argument' = The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe is the prerecording itself which is to say any recording that contains a random factor" (TE 166). The constraints of Law constitute a virtual prerecording, a determining influence that the past has on the present, locking the future into dull repetition, but such a determinism can be circumvented by means of cut-ups. On the next page, another parody of the Communist Manifesto appears, advocating the revolutionary valence of affordable recording technology in the form of Phillips' portable Carry Corder: "Carry Corders of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your pre-recordings" (TE 167). This challenge that cut-ups make to the Law—not only to copyright law but to the abstract form of the Law that defines society and its component agents—constitutes the theoretical labor

of Burroughs's trilogy, and it grants the reader access to the explicit level of narrative in the trilogy as well.

The Nova trilogy is largely a hybrid of two hoary popular genres, the science fiction novel and the detective story—a combination that became Burroughs's standard means of organizing his narrative material. As we have seen, Deleuze views philosophy also as a hybrid form combining the detective novel and science fiction.

By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where . . . they operate in relation to "dramas" and by means of a certain "cruelty.". . . . Following Samuel Butler, we discover Erewhon, signifying at once the originary "nowhere" and the displaced, disguised, modified and always-recreated "here-and-now.". . . . We believe in a world in which individuations are impersonal, and singularities pre-individual: the splendor of the pronoun "one." Whence the science-fiction aspect, which necessarily derives from this Erewhon . (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition xx–xxi)

This passage accurately describes Burroughs's trilogy, in which the question "And who are you?" (asked earlier of anyone who claimed to have "Your very own words, indeed!") takes on a profoundly impersonal, antisubjectivist perspective. The "local situation" under scrutiny is the living environment of this planet, seen from the perspective of alien powers of exploitation and control as well as from the viewpoint of Law; the primary "concept" used to "resolve" this "local situation" will be that of the Law.

As we should expect from the compositional techniques used to construct it, the narrative constituted by the trilogy is discontinuous, both within each individual novel and from each novel to the next in the series. Passages of linear narrative last for several pages at most, either preceding or succeeding a passage that cuts up the contents of that particular linear narrative; such doubled passages are organized in a rather broad thematic pattern within the larger chapter-like units of each novel. Many passages, both of cut-ups and of linear narrative, are repeated throughout all three novels and act like refrains or choruses to unify, to some small extent, the fractured story. In light of these, and of Burroughs's own comments on the trilogy, it is possible to discern the broad outlines of an organization arising spontaneously from the material, without the conscious predetermination a modern artist would impose.

The first novel, The Soft Machine, is "concerned with just description of the factors involved and the scene [of the conflict], which corresponds somewhat with the planet Venus[. . . . ]And also in Soft Machine there's [. . .]a good deal of narrative material that's concerned with reincarnation. This is the concept of the street of chance, not sure of what kind of reincarnation you're going to have" (Burroughs, "Interview with Allen Ginsberg"). This reincarnation material draws upon the hanged man's orgasm, from Naked Lunch, as a means of transmigration of identity and hence of immortality. The second volume, The Ticket That Exploded, continues the description of the "set" and provides an allusive, indirect, and cut-up account of the conflicts therein, while the third novel, Nova Express, "is more directly concerned with the struggle" in detail and with its theoretical foundations and material ramifications. Indeed, Burroughs suggests that "Nova Express would probably have the clearest [statement]" of thematic summation.^[5] My strategy in approaching the trilogy will therefore be retrospective: after broadly sketching the development of the first two volumes of the trilogy, I will explicate the conflict and its possible solutions through a close examination of Nova Express, and then move backward to examine the specifics of the earlier novels.

As Jennie Skerl notes, The Soft Machine is concerned with exposing the "social control of mankind throughout human history by the manipulation of bodily needs" (Skerl 52). Indeed, the very title refers to "the human body under constant siege from a vast hungry host of parasites[. . . . ]what Freud calls the 'id' is a parasitic invasion of the hypothalamus [and] What Freud calls the 'superego' is probably a parasitic occupation of the mid brain where the 'rightness' centres may be located."^[6] The routines that make up The Soft Machine are set in widely disparate historical periods, though they all take place in a setting that Burroughs describes as the planet Venus (science fiction "writers have equated it with something like South America," an area Burroughs knows well).^[7] There is no clear development from routine to routine, but rather a sort of random juxtaposition of chapters, as if the narrative had "come unstuck in time," as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five . The first chapter/routine, "Dead on Arrival," apparently opens in the sordid present of Naked Lunch but progresses backward through American history, while the final routine, "Cross the Wounded Galaxies," acts as a negative "creation myth" in Skerl's words, describing the dawn of language as the result of a devastating plague: "In the pass the muttering sickness leaped into our throats, coughing and spitting in the silver

morning[ . . . ]sick apes spitting blood laugh. sound bubbling in throats torn with the talk sickness[. . . . ]We waded into the warm mud-water. hair and ape flesh off in screaming strips. stood naked human bodies covered with phosphorescent green jelly[. . . . ]When we came out of the mud we had names" (SM 177-78). The "coughing and spitting" alludes to Burroughs's recurrent archetypal junky, who is always "coughing and spitting in the junk-sick morning" through Naked Lunch and the later works. This Paleolithic plague announces the coming of the "Explosive Bio-Advance Men out of space," revealed in The Ticket That Exploded to be the Nova Mob, who "cross the wounded galaxies" to find new "marks" (the con man's term for his victims, which also suggests the needle tracks or marks by which addicts are identified, as well as the marks on paper that constitute language) that they can subject to their linguistic and bodily control tactics (SM 182). The intervening chapters present paradigms of such control in corporate ("Trak Trak Trak"), cultural/religious ("The Mayan Caper"), and gender ("Gongs of Violence") terms.

The basic premise of Burroughs's trilogy does not receive explicit exposition until the second volume, The Ticket That Exploded . The routine entitled "the nova police" offers a discursive presentation of the antagonisms between the Nova Mob and its marks, and between the Mob and the Nova Police who pursue it, both of which antagonisms have heretofore appeared only in allusive cut-ups. The expositor, in this instance, is "Inspector J. Lee of the nova police" (TE 54), who addresses a press conference called to provide the public with an explanation of the situation. He begins: "i doubt if any of you on this copy planet have ever seen a nova criminal—(they take considerable pains to mask their operations) and i am sure that none of you have ever seen a nova police officer—When disorder on any planet reaches a certain point the regulating instance scans police —otherwise—Sput—Another planet bites the cosmic dust" (TE 54; also NE 49–50). Naturally the Inspector puts his intervention in the best possible light. He and his forces have arrived to save the Earth from disorder and destruction. And who are the instigators of this disorder? Nova criminals, like the Heavy Metal Kid and the Subliminal Kid, led by "Mr and Mrs D also known as 'Mr Bradly Mr Martin' also known as 'the Ugly Spirit'" (TE 55). "The basic nova technique is very simple: Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts—This is done by dumping on the same planet life forms with incompatible conditions of existence[. . . . ] Their conditions of life are basically incompatible in present time form and it is precisely the work of the nova mob to see that they remain in

present time form, to create and aggravate the conflicts that lead to the explosion of a planet, that is to nova" (TE 54–55, also NE 52). Such conflicts, the Inspector claims in Nietzschean fashion, are not moral but biological: "There is of course nothing 'wrong' about any given life form since 'wrong' only has reference to conflicts with other life forms" (TE 55, also NE 52). Both kinds of conflict, however, are subject to the Law: the moral conflict to the reversible dialectic of legality, and the biological conflict to the normative formulae of physical science.

So what can the Nova Police do about these mobsters? "We intend to arrest these criminals and turn them over to the Biological Department for the indicated alterations" (TE 56, also NE 52–53). But arresting Nova criminals is a tricky business:

nova criminals are not three-dimensional organisms—[. . .]but they need three-dimensional human agents to operate—The point at which the criminal controller intersects a three-dimensional human agent is known as 'a coordinate point'—And if there is one thing that carries over from one human host to another it is habit: idiosyncrasies, vices, food preferences—[. . .]a gesture, a special look, that is to say the style of the controller—A chain smoker will always operate through chain smokers, an addict through addicts—Now a single controller can operate through thousands of human agents, but he must have a line of coordinate points—[. . . . ]It is only when we can block the controller out of all coordinate points available to him and flush him out from host cover that we can make a definitive arrest—Otherwise the criminal escapes to other coordinate. (TE 57-58, also NE 54)

These criminals are viruses, "defined as the three-dimensional coordinate point of a controller" (NE 68), which invade the human body and in the process produce language, like the plague that struck the apes at the end of The Soft Machine . Language is both the medium and the effect of their control.

Arrest is not the end; the "indicated alterations" must be ordered and a sentence meted out to the Nova mobsters. This task falls to the "Biological Courts," which administer the biological, and thus the physical, law. The double sense revealed in this use of the word "law"—for both regularities in nature (physical law) and constraints placed on social action (judicial law)—will remain central to Burroughs's critique of dogmatic authority. Lee admits that the Courts are in "a deplorable condition at this time": "No sooner set up than immediately corrupted so that they convene every day in a different location like floating dice games, constantly swept away by stampeding life forms all idiotically glorifying their stupid ways of life—most of them quite unworkable of course" (TE

56, also NE 53). The Earth case does not go to trial until near the end of Nova Express, where many of these points are reiterated; the trial will therefore be discussed below. In any event, once the trial is finished, the Nova Police intend to vacate the scene. Lee also admits that he is "quite well aware that no one on any planet likes to see a police officer so let me emphasize in passing that the nova police have no intention of remaining after their work is done—That is, when the danger of nova is removed from this planet we will move on to other assignments—We do our work and go—" (TE 54, also NE 50). Unlike other law-enforcement agencies, the Nova Police claim to disappear when they are no longer needed, rather than stay around and manufacture work for themselves, the way terrestrial law-enforcement agencies do—recall the cut-up anti-drug article. As his name and intentions indicate and as he later admits openly, Inspector Lee is Burroughs's double: "The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go[. . . . ]With your help we can occupy the Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly—(Signed) INSPECTOR J. LEE, NOVA POLICE" (NE 14).

All this technical exposition, complete with answers to audience questions, obscures the most important point in Lee's presentation: who or what is the "regulating instance" that sends for the police in the first place? Lee insists that the Nova "blockade" has been "broken by partisan activity[ . . . ]that cut the control lines of word and image laid down by the nova mob" (TE 56), and he cites details of partisan recruitment to distract his audience from the crucial point, which is revealed in a parenthesis: the leader of the partisans is actually one of the Nova Mobsters, Willy the Rat, who has "informed on his associates" (TE 55). This betrayal has been announced much earlier, in the "Uranian Willy" chapter of The Soft Machine, when "Uranian Willy the Heavy Metal Kid, also known as Willy the Rat[ . . . ]wised up the marks" (SM 155).^[8] Just before the beginning of the "nova police" routine, however, at the end of "operation rewrite," the unnamed narrator claims that the conflicts managed by the Nova Mob can be "written out" of the Reality Film script, and that "alternative solutions" to the problem can be found, to which his listeners, the subjugated marks, respond, "'No hassan i sabbah—we want flesh—we want junk—we want power— .'" The marks want to remain under control; the situation has clearly gotten out of hand. The narrator, finally given a name, concludes, "'That did it—Dial

police '" (TE 54). Whether he is called Willy the Rat or Hassan i Sabbah, the traitor (like the Nova Policeman) is clearly the figure of the writer or Rewriter—of Burroughs himself, who "had to call in the nova police to keep all these jokers out of the Rewrite Room" (TE 54), as the contemporary recorded routine "Burroughs Called the Law" makes clear.^[9] Willy's treachery is not actually narrated in detail until the "Chinese Laundry" chapter of Nova Express (56-58), but its effects reverberate throughout the trilogy.

The significance of this treachery for the further development of Burroughs's engagement with the "Telepathic Bureaucracies" and "Time Monopolies" of control (NL 217) cannot be overstated. We have seen Burroughs's incisive analysis and parody of the reversible logic of oppositional social relations, the "dialectic of treason," in both Junky and Naked Lunch . That is, the imperative that founds the police—"Apprehend lawbreakers"—leads them to negotiate "deals" with some lawbreakers in order to capture others and ultimately to manufacture new criminals to keep themselves in business, while the imperative that founds private enterprise—"Produce profit"—leads entrepreneurs to blur and even erase the line between legitimate and illegitimate business ("shady or legitimate the same fuck of a different color," SM 28) in order to maximize their returns. Without this reversibility, capitalist society would come apart. The police compromise themselves by protecting and even supporting criminals who testify, but without the testimony that this support encourages, the police would be unable to make cases against organized criminals and thereby justify their jobs. Criminals suborn cops with bribes in a symmetrical manner by appealing to the entrepreneur's imperative to profit, which underlies even the police imperative to order. And if entrepreneurs did not operate illegitimate businesses, or at least incorporate illegitimate aspects into their legitimate businesses, their profit margins would suffer and they would fail. Thus the environment in which these reversals operate is both necessarily clandestine and socially ubiquitous.

This secrecy is constitutive of the subjective forms that operate in this environment. Organized crime, by its very nature, is secretive and communal, bound together by family ties and blood oaths. As Jean-Paul Sartre argues, to swear such an oath is to promise to carry out certain positive tasks and, more importantly, "To swear is to say, as a common individual: you must kill me if I secede. And this demand has no other aim than to install Terror within myself as a free defence against the fear of the enemy" (Sartre 431). In other words, as Jameson notes, the oath

"must include its own principle of enforcement, and implicitly each member pledges his own death should he in the future break the unity of the group and turn traitor to it. He therefore, in a sense, consents in advance to the Terror" such as the bloodshed that followed in the wake of the French Revolution (Jameson, Marxism and Form 254) and the similar reprisals that the Mob makes against informers. The fear of the enemy (the police) and the Terror of the vengeful Mob are symmetrical for both the undercover cop (who may be bribed) and the treacherous mobster. The investigators of organized crime must double the secrecy and violence of the Mob's oaths in order to infiltrate and expose it; informers and undercover agents must take the secret blood oaths of the Mob and then break them, in the name of a "higher" or prior oath which is, despite Sartre's denial, fundamentally the same as the social contract (Sartre 420).^[10] Like the contract, the oath represents the group's bid for survival, for social permanence in the face of the radical flux of commodified individual desires. By taking an oath, the cop or mobster submits himself voluntarily to the jurisdiction of the Law that constitutes the group.

Likewise, entrepreneurs violate the particular laws constraining their behavior in the name of the most fundamental Law of capitalism, profit at any price. There is no irony in the fact that both mobsters and private entrepreneurs consider themselves simply adventurous businessmen; indeed, this fact is a tautology. The treason that both constitutes and ultimately destroys individual social subjects (who are quickly replaced within the opposed groups so that society can continue to function) is not limited to American market capitalism, however. In fact, the dialectic of treason finds one of its most extreme historical embodiments in the Soviet Union, in Joseph Stalin's show trials of 1936–38, during which apparently faithful Communist Party members were accused of conspiring to overthrow the Soviet government and return Russia to capitalism, were tortured into signing prefabricated confessions, and were executed. The most striking feature of this "Great Purge" is the fact that most of the accused, despite their apparent innocence, pleaded guilty to treason in order to avoid compromising Stalin's regime, in which they continued to believe despite the regime's treatment of them; their denial of historical "truth" in favor of ideological "truth" was not confirmed until 1956, during the international "thaw" of the Khrushchev era, when Burroughs was composing Naked Lunch in Tangier.^[11]

The United States was quick to reproduce this Orwellian tragedy on its own terms; near the end of The Soft Machine Burroughs bids "Ta ta Stalin" (SM 164) shortly before announcing his "stand on the Fifth Amendment"

to avoid "the question of the Senator from Wisconsin: 'Are you or have you ever been a member of the male sex?'" (SM 168). The "Senator from Wisconsin" is Joseph McCarthy, the most visible prosecutor of suspected communists during the Cold War, whose name has since become synonymous with paranoid opportunism. The question "Are you or have you ever been . . . ?" is Burroughs's parodic version of McCarthy's perennial question to accused communists, which actually ended with the words "a member of the Communist Party"; invoking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to answer this question was interpreted as an admission of guilt. Burroughs's version of the question links the apparently "natural" attribute of sex or gender with the apparently "cultural" choice of communist sympathy, and in so doing complicates this fundamental but rarely interrogated binary opposition. He also identifies, as he did in Junky, the metonymic chain that accounts for the equation of social and sexual "deviance" with political subversion in mainstream American ideology. The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, dominated by McCarthy from 1950 to 1954, demonstrated how easy it was to circumvent the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and reproduce the hysterical atmosphere of the Moscow show trials. It has become commonplace to point out that many people accused of communist sympathies during those years were merely liberals and leftists who justified their activities on the basis of what they assumed to be the difference between the U.S. and the Soviet Union: constitutionally guaranteed freedom of thought and expression.^[12] These issues must have had particular resonance for Burroughs at that time, since he was engaged in the legal defense of Naked Lunch against obscenity charges as he composed the early versions of the Nova trilogy.

These historical events demonstrate the extent of the problem that Burroughs identified in the terroristic dialectic of treason, but they provided him with only incidental material for the trilogy. The central symbolic structure of the trilogy is the conflict between organized crime and the police, both bound by oaths and operating everywhere in secret, mediated by the informer through whom all other roles communicate and to whom all those roles can ultimately be reduced.^[13] The question the trilogy must address, then, is whether this dialectic can be evaded and the conflict neutralized without setting the stage for a return of the same old antagonistic positions and the same old conflict. Both the police and the Mob function on the basis of implicit or explicit loyalty oaths, with each side trying to out-commit the other and bring about the betrayal of the enemy by the enemy; since the informer is central to this situation, might

it be possible for an informer to upset the dialectic, perhaps by performing an act of superbetrayal, an act of treason to end all future treason? Could a traitor destroy not only the group he betrays, but also the oath itself, the very condition of the group's existence? In 1957 something like this happened: Joseph Valachi, a highly placed New York Mafioso, testified against his former comrades in the Mob before a Senate committee hearing. The story was carried in all the American media. Mobsters had "ratted" before, but none with Valachi's connections or on his scale; he was not content merely to testify to individual crimes committed by his former colleagues, but went so far as to reveal in detail the very foundation of his former loyalty, the Cosa Nostra blood oath.^[14]

In the face of this spectacular act of treason, some commentators at the time predicted the imminent demise of the Mafia, which to Burroughs would have implied the equally imminent demise of the Mafia's symmetrical reflection, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the police. The logic of the situation would dictate that only a similarly highly placed figure in the Nova Mob could reveal both the general strategy underlying its organization and the specifics of its operation. If the primary means of control is language—the Word—then all writers are, in principle, implicated in the Nova Conspiracy, including Lee (Burroughs's early alter ego) and Burroughs himself. As a junky, Burroughs's physical body is one of the "coordinate points" for the Nova Mobster, who operates "through addicts" (TE 57). Therefore, Burroughs's consciousness is actually that of a Nova Mobster, "Uranian Willy the Heavy Metal Kid" (SM 155), or even Hassan i Sabbah, who is privy to all of the parasitic secrets concealed behind the Nova Mob's mask of benign linguistic symbiosis (TE 54). Thus he can call the Nova Police and "rat" to them with sufficient force, he hopes, to destroy the Mob altogether and put the Police out of business at the same time. He can, perhaps, eliminate the only thing that guarantees the permanence of these repressive social structures: the Law to which the oaths or social contracts submit individual subjects, the Law that allows the structures to reproduce themselves. If he can do this, he can put the flux of individual desires back into rigid social relations, just as the cut-up method puts flux into syntax. But such an act, a transgression to end all transgression, will also expose him to the wrath of the groups he has betrayed: the Nova Mob and, perhaps, the Nova Police as well. In the aftermath of this textual situation, it is perhaps not wholly coincidental that Burroughs was actually declared by L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology to be in "Condition of Treason" following his abandonment of the church in

1968 and his subsequent composition of critical articles "ratting" on its techniques of psychological analysis and control.^[15]

"Willy the Rat" is an obvious nickname for Burroughs, the addict writer who betrays his former criminal companions, but where does "Hassan i Sabbah" (TE 54) come from? The name does not appear at all in The Soft Machine, but from the second routine of The Ticket That Exploded to the end of Nova Express, Hassan i Sabbah is a regular point of reference, generally as a term of comparison that reveals the inauthenticity and Nova Mob-like intentions of various pretenders to leadership of the human marks. Well into The Ticket That Exploded, for example, the narrator denounces the "welchers[ . . . ]who can't cover their bets and never intended to cover—the 'Hassan i Sabbahs' from Cuntville USA backed by yellow assassins who couldn't strangle a hernia—Self-appointed controllers of 'the Rotting Kingdom' strictly from Grade B Hollywood" (TE 137). This sarcastic comparison implies that Hassan i Sabbah is a legitimate leader of the partisans, and that he commands real and deadly assassins. Beyond this and similar scenes that cut through the "media" of control, The Ticket That Exploded offers the reader no further insight into the significance of Hassan i Sabbah; to explore that significance, we must turn to Nova Express .

Nova Express opens, paradoxically, with a chapter written in the imperative entitled "Last Words." At first it is difficult to determine whose last words are being spoken: "Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever—" (NE 11). The "last words" themselves are straightforward: "Listen: I call you all. Show your cards all players. Pay it all pay it all pay it all back . Play it all pay it all play it all back. For all to see" (NE 11). The speaker wants the secret controllers to reveal themselves, to "play back" the tapes, to the people that they control—the marks—and to give those people back what the controllers have stolen. The repetition of the phrases "pay it all" and "play it all" gives the imperative a ritual or incantatory cast. The controllers ask for more time, to which the speaker, alluding to the first volume of cut-ups, replies, "I say to all these words are not premature. These words may be too late. Minutes to go" (NE 12). The controllers invoke secrecy by appealing to their executive privileges and the interests of national security,^[16] which provokes the still unidentified speaker to rage:

Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth? These are the words of liars cowards collaborators traitors. Liars who want time for more lies. Cowards who can not face your "dogs" your "gooks" your "errand boys" your "human animals" with the truth. Collaborators with Insect People with Vegetable People. With any people anywhere who offer you a body forever. To shit forever. For this you have sold out your sons. Sold the ground from unborn feet forever. Traitors to all souls everywhere. You want the name of Hassan i Sabbah on your filth deeds to sell out the unborn? (NE 12)

This passage lays out the real terms of the Nova Mob's parasitic takeover of human life, which it has covered up in various ways but which is revealed in the controllers' derogatory terms for their prey, as well as their attitudes toward these hosts. Thus the passage functions as a critique of the Mob's ideology of benign coexistence and mutual benefit.

Hassan i Sabbah's name, invoked as an ironic legitimation in the last sentence, has popped up at irregular intervals throughout the second novel of the trilogy, but is still not immediately recognizable to most readers. The name is repeated in the next paragraph of "Last Words," which reveals the speaker himself to be Hassan i Sabbah: "What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: 'the word .' Alien word 'the .' 'The' word of Alien Enemy imprisons 'thee ' in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the word forever . If you I cancel all your words forever. And the words of Hassan i Sabbah as also cancel. Cross all your skies see the silent writing of Brion Gysin Hassan i Sabbah" (NE 12). The first lines articulate one of the basic themes of the trilogy: humanity is subjugated not only by "Alien Enemies" but by its "own" language in every possible way. Language, "the word, " imprisons people in material bodies, which are subject to decay and little better than excrement, when they could be flying through the "great skies," free from materiality. Language inter-pellates individuals into a social order that is organized to benefit the controllers, and gives those individuals generic "identities" that are no more individual than the definite article, the paradoxical term that grants specificity to common nouns even though "the" itself is no less generic than the nouns it modifies. "To speak is to lie" (NE 14). "Word and Image write the message that is you on colorless sheets determine all flesh" (NE 30) because in fact "Word is flesh" (NE 71) and image—specifically, film—is the master narrative of human life. The name of Hassan i Sabbah, who is here equated with Brion Gysin (as he is in The Ticket That Exploded ) rather than with Burroughs himself, reappears in the explicit performative that "cancel[s] all your words forever," including the very

"words of Hassan i Sabbah" that perform the "rubbing out" or cancellation. Throughout the rest of the novel, this operation recurs often.

The name "Hassan i Sabbah" is a central point of reference in the Nova trilogy, despite the fact that Hassan i Sabbah rarely appears in any of the books as a character. He functions rather as an author-surrogate, a godlike figure, subject of imperative curses and object of magical invocations, whose incarnations, or avatars, under different names, fill the novels; as such Hassan i Sabbah is unquestionably the central figure in Burroughs's later literary cosmology. Hassan i Sabbah does not appear at all in the early autobiographical novels or in Naked Lunch ; Burroughs's first reference to him occurs in the epigraph to Minutes To Go: "'Not knowing what is and what is not knowing I knew not. ' Hassan Sabbah's 'Razor'." The source of the epigraph is not given, but the term "Razor" alludes to the famous logical principle of the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (or Occam, as Burroughs prefers to spell the name), already mentioned in the introduction to Naked Lunch and equated there with Wittgenstein's claim that "If a proposition is NOT NECESSARY it is MEANINGLESS" (NL xlvi).^[17] Ockham himself wrote it thus: "What can be explained by the assumption of fewer things is vainly explained by the assumption of more things" (Ockham xxi).^[18] This principle is often paraphrased as the scientist's or detective's motto, that the simplest explanation which covers the known facts is probably the correct one. The statement attributed to Hassan i Sabbah in the epigraph is a much stricter version of Ockham's principle. Ockham's Razor presupposes that the relation between the thing to be explained and the things that must be assumed to produce an explanation is self-evident—in other words, that causality and its representation in conceptual language are simple, unproblematic operations not requiring further investigation. Hassan i Sabbah's Razor, on the other hand, does not take those operations for granted, but rather questions the grounds of their self-evidence. Since the speaker does not assume in advance the difference between knowledge and its negation—the difference that is the precondition of all knowing, including the knowledge of the conditions necessary for knowledge—he cannot know anything with assurance and certainty, and therefore cannot determine which explanation is simplest and thus true. Hassan i Sabbah's Razor is Burroughs's version of the hermeneutic circle.

The "Razor" of the epigraph also alludes to the contents of Minutes To Go: the very first published cut-up experiments, including those made by Brion Gysin on the day when he first "sliced through a pile of news-

papers with my Stanley blade . . . picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts."^[19] By extension it alludes to the cut-up contents of the Nova trilogy as well. No doubt it was Gysin, a longtime resident of Tangier and a dedicated student of Arabic and North African culture, who introduced Burroughs to the history of the Muslim holy man Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain and Master of the Assassins, just as he introduced Burroughs to Moroccan music and philosophy.^[20] In the interviews with Terry Wilson published as Here to Go: Planet R -101, for example, Gysin repeats an old (and apocryphal) story about Hassan i Sabbah's childhood friendship with the poet Omar Khayyam (of Rubaiyyat fame) and the statesman Nizâm al-Mulk. According to legend, the three friends vowed to assist one another should any of them achieve success; when Nizâmal-Mulk became vizier to the Sultan of the Saljûq Turks, he arranged a stipend for Omar and a court post for Hassan. Unfortunately, this put Nizûm and Hassan in conflict. Hassan was assigned to provide an account of the revenues of the realm, but "he found when he came to deliver his speech on the exchequer that his manuscripts had been cut in such a way that he didn't at first realize that they had been sliced right down the middle and repasted. . . . All of his material had been cut up by some unknown enemy and his speech from the Woolsack was greeted with howls of laughter and utter disgrace and he was thrown out of the administration. . . . So he was the victim of a cut-up" (Gysin and Wilson 98).^[21] The threefold conjunction in Burroughs's literary practice—collaborations with Gysin, experiments with the cut-up method, and adoption of Hassan i Sabbah as a central symbolic figure—may be why Burroughs equates Gysin with Hassan i Sabbah in the opening section of Nova Express and elsewhere. But this conjunction is only part of the rationale behind Burroughs's figurative use of Hassan i Sabbah.

Hassan i Sabbah is quoted in almost all of Burroughs's major works after Minutes To Go . This first citation, "Hassan Sabbah's 'Razor,'" recurs occasionally in later works (for example, NE 114), but it is soon superseded by another quotation of similarly unspecified origin: "'Nothing Is True—Everything Is Permitted—' Last Words Hassan I Sabbah " (NE 131).^[22] This same citation appears in The Ticket That Exploded, without the attribution, immediately before the "nova police" routine (TE 54). If the "Razor" is (anti-) epistemological and demonstrates the inaccessibility of true knowledge, the "Last Words" are simultaneously (anti-) ontological, in their denial of the existence of truth (which remained at least an abstract possibility in the "Razor"), and ethical, in

their assertion that "Everything Is Permitted." Indeed, Burroughs understands this Dostoyevskian statement to mean that "Everything is permitted because nothing is true"; thus the (anti-) ontological antecedent renders the ethical consequent equally (anti-) ontological. These "Last Words" reveal Hassan i Sabbah's ultimate function in Burroughs's novels: he represents the abolition of traditional, formal ethical Law in the face of an unknowable, because unrepresentable, ontology of difference that generates its own ethics. We still do not know, however, what gives Hassan i Sabbah the power to "rub out the word" of the Law.

Though Burroughs's symbolic use of Hassan i Sabbah may appear wholly personal, in fact it generally remains quite close to the few historical facts that we have concerning the real Muslim leader. Hasan-i Sabbâh, or Hassan i Sabbah as Burroughs prefers to spell it,^[23] was one of the leaders of a dissident Islamic sect called the Ismâ`îlîs, a particularly militant subset of the Shî`a, or Shiites, who claim a special reverence for and descent from 'Alî, the cousin and son-in-law of Mohammed; central to their strain of Muslim faith is the belief that members of this line of descent are the "only legitimate rulers . . . and moreover the only authoritative religious teachers, imâms " (Hodgson 8).^[24] The Shî`a were a minority in the relatively unified Islamic empire the eighth and ninth centuries, and the Ismâ`îlîs were a minority of the Shî`a; the dominant form of Isîlamic practice and government was Sunnism, a pragmatically liberal and consensual synthesis of the many competing interpretations of Islamic tradition. "Sunnism represented a conscious effort to cling to those community symbols which had widest support already, rejecting any conflicting minority emphasis in the name of community solidarity" (Hodgson 6). Among these symbols were the Koran; the hadîth (the record of the Prophet's worldly actions distinct from the divine revelation of the Koran); the shahâda, or statement of witness ("There is no god but All`âh, and Mohammed is His prophet"); and, most importantly for our account of Burroughs, the shî`a, or body of ritual canon law that prescribed and proscribed the daily actions of believers. Since there were many versions of this ritual law, "to improve community solidarity [the Sunnîs] admitted the possibility of a number of alternatively acceptable systems of sharî`a, which the faithful might choose among within broad limits" (Hodgson 6).

Ismailism is an offshoot of Shiism that derives its name from Ismâ`îl, son of a Shî`a imâm and reputed father of a line of imâms to whom the Ismâ`îlîs granted exceptional power.

Among the early Shî`a there seems to have been much speculation concerning . . . the nature of the afterlife, the possibility of divine inspiration, the meaning of ritual prescriptions. There was a tendency, labeled ghuluww, exaggeration by its opponents, to carry these speculations farther than most Muslims felt consistent with religious propriety, giving the imâm and even the ordinary believer too high a spiritual station. . . . The imâm had sometimes been made vaguely divine by the ghuluww teachers; the Ismâ`îlîs [later] tied him to philosophical tradition as the Microcosm par excellence, in whom the metaphysical soul of the universe was personified. He had access to metaphysical reason itself, personified in the inspired Prophet, and could so guarantee a rational interpretation of the Prophet's seemingly arbitrary directives. (Hodgson 9–10)

Thus Ismailism, which posited an incarnate source of absolute transcendent knowledge in the material world, found itself at odds with the liberal and consensual order of Sunnism, which relied on rational debate and communal agreement.

Since the Sunnîs were numerically superior and controlled most of the Islamic governments, the Ismâ`îlîs could only hope to impose their ideas through revolution. In a few places, such as Egypt, they were successful and established enduring dynasties; elsewhere (and after the collapse of the Ismâ`îlî state in Egypt) the reaction to their tactics forced them to dissimulate their beliefs: "the faithful must practice what was called among the Shî`tes taqiyya, concealing their true allegiance from the worldly authorities lest persecution wipe out the faith" (Hodgson 12). This dissimulation found a rationale in the Shiite doctrine of zâhir and bâtin, which corresponds in many ways to the Platonic distinction between appearance and essence. "The imâm was [the] ultimate source of the inward and universal sense underlying the outward, evident sense of Koran or hadîth. The outer formulas set forth in these scriptures were called the zâhir; the hidden meaning of them, which the imâm revealed, was called the bâtin " (Hodgson 10). For many Ismâ`îlîs, this doctrine implied at least the impermanence and at most the irrelevance of the laws of the sharî`a which were seen as a form of zâhir —for the enlightened believer who had gained transcendental insight into the bâtin revealed by the imâm .^[25]

Hassan i Sabbah enters the historical stage at this point, during the decline of the Egyptian Ismâ`îlî state. A convert to Ismailism, he studied in an Egypt in which governmental authority, while symbolically vested in an imâm, was actually held by a military dictator. Thereafter he established his headquarters at Alamût, or Alamout, a fortress built atop a virtually inaccessible mountain on the southern shore of the Caspian

Sea, in what is now the Gilan province of northern Iran; from this fortress he takes his honorific title "the Old Man of the Mountain."^[26] There, according to history as well as legend, he acquired a second honorific, "Master of the Assassins," as the leader and trainer of a legion of killers, the fidâ'îs, whose infamy spread throughout the Islamic world and Christendom during the Crusades; it is primarily in the capacity of teacher of subversive assassins that Hassan i Sabbah enters Burroughs's later works. Indeed, the very word "assassin" comes from the Arabic hashîshiyyûn, meaning "user of hashish," which was popularly though probably erroneously applied to the followers of Hassan i Sabbah (Hodgson 134–37). Legends reported by Marco Polo have it that Hassan i Sabbah's castle at Alamout contained a beautiful garden; when young men visited him, he served them a drugged banquet and, while they slept, had them carried into this garden where they awakened to find themselves surrounded by pliant boys and women, fine wine, and food. After a short time in the garden, the men were again drugged and returned to Hassan i Sabbah's dining room, where they were told upon waking that they had been granted a foretaste of the afterlife that awaited them if they agreed to do the Old Man's bidding.

These aspects of the Alamout legend appear in many places in Burroughs's trilogy and later works. The castle of Alamout itself is mentioned in The Ticket That Exploded ("Great wind voices of Alamout it's you?"—TE 119), and it is described paradoxically in Nova Express as the "cold windy bodiless rock" of immortality and transcendence that Hassan i Sabbah offers instead of the dangerously seductive delights of the flesh and the word (NE 13). Those who accept Hassan i Sabbah's offer become his assassins after exhaustive training; many passages in the trilogy (as well as in the subsequent Mayfair "Academy" essay series and parts of The Job ) describe the intellectual and physical education of partisan "cadet" assassins in the "color writing of Hassan i Sabbah" (NE 83–84, 136–42). The legendary garden appears in many guises in the trilogy, but most often as a version of the deadly "Garden of Delights" described in "winds of time," the second routine of The Ticket That Exploded: "a vast tingling numbness surrounded by ovens of white-hot metal lattice[. . . . ]Outside the oven funnels is a ruined area of sex booths[. . . ]orgasm addicts stacked in rubbish heaps like muttering burlap[. . . . ]The Garden of Delights.. GOD" (TE 8). Burroughs has apparently placed these two aspects of the legend—the eager assassins and their promised reward—in opposition to one another, or perhaps he simply demands that "partisans" be willing to imagine a disembodied

Garden of Delights, offered by Hassan i Sabbah, to combat the carnal Garden of the Nova Mobsters. In any case, the "winds of time" routine parallels the "Last Words" routine that opens Nova Express in offering the partisans a choice between the terminal pleasures of the flesh and the bodiless immortality of Hassan i Sabbah.

Several important aspects of the trilogy that Burroughs associates with Hassan i Sabbah have no apparent grounding in this part of the historical record, however. In particular, there seems to be no historical rationale for Burroughs's attribution of the destruction of language or the oft-repeated quotation "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" to Hassan i Sabbah. This fact suggests that Burroughs's Master of Assassins may be a composite of several figures, especially since he is not the only figure in Ismâ`îlî history who has a direct bearing on Burroughs's work in the Nova trilogy and later works. It is possible, of course, that Burroughs merely extended, according to his own figurative intentions, the few historical facts he had learned about the Old Man from Gysin and elsewhere. But further historical study of Ismailism offers a very compelling rationale, not only for these apparently unfounded attributions to Hassan i Sabbah, but also for Burroughs's overall task in the Nova trilogy: the end of the reversible dialectic of treason and the abolition of the Law.

Though Hassan i Sabbah was the leader of the fidâ'î assassins and an important theologian in his own right, he never claimed to be the divine imâm; he was, rather, the hujja, or "witness," the still-hidden imâm 's interpreter and representative. Hassan i Sabbah, who had no male children, was succeeded by one of his lieutenants, whose grandson, Hasan II, was apparently named for the first Old Man.^[27] Hasan II was therefore neither a direct descendant of 'Ali nor a grandson of the Old Man, a point that his father, the Old Man's successor, made clear: even though he was to lead the Ismâ`îlîs, Hasan II was not the imâm . Two and a half years after Hasan II claimed the Ismâ`îlî leadership upon the death of his father, however, he did proclaim himself Caliph, or divinely appointed ruler. This was not all: during the holy month of Ramadan in 1164—perhaps to the sound of the "flutes of Ramadan" that accompany many pivotal scenes in Burroughs's Nova trilogy (SM 13, NE 30, 32.)—Hasan II also proclaimed the arrival of the Qiyâma, the "Great Resurrection" of the dead that corresponds in Islam to the Apocalypse in Christianity,^[28] and simultaneously declared himself to be the Qâ'im, or Judge of the Resurrection.^[29] What Hasan II proclaimed, in effect, was the end of historical time and of the material world.

The most important practical effect of this proclamation was the abolition of the sharî'a, the ritual or canon law, as part of the now-superseded taqiyya, or dissimulation of the faith. The sharî`a constrains the behavior of the believer constantly and in many ways; it consists of the rules of behavior, both private and social, outlined in the Koran itself,<sup>[30]</sup> as well as the aforementioned hadîth, or collection of the Prophet's mundane actions, and the authoritative interpretations of these rules and actions given by the historical imâms . For the liberal Sunnî majority, the sharî`a acted as a crucial social glue to bind divergent versions of Islam into a more or less cohesive society, but for the extremist Ismâ`îlîs, the law was merely a temporary expedient, an external form, or zâhir, to be imposed while the believer's internal revelation, or bâtin, was lacking and to be abandoned once that revelation matured. When one achieved revelation, one could no longer transgress because all of one's actions would be divine by definition; therefore, the law ceased to apply, and in fact any action became the only measure of itself.

The abolition of the Law begins, for the Ismâ`îlîs, as a necessary trans-gression of it. In principle if not in practice, this abolition does not end there. When Hasan II declared the arrival of the Qiyâma, he declared that this arrival required that the Ismâ`îlîs consciously and willfully break the sharî`a by breaking the ritual fast they undertook during Ramadan. Indeed, as Qâ'im, Hasan II insisted that those believers who refused to break the law be given the punishment formerly reserved for lawbreakers (Hodgson 158). This period seems to have been rather brief, however—"a minor episode, which would run its course," as Burroughs would later claim of his own interpretation of the Qiyâma, or Apocalypse.<sup>[31]</sup> Hasan II was soon assassinated, presumably by Ismâ`îlîss who refused to accept the radical transformation of daily life that the Qiyâma entailed. But his revolution was carried on by his son, Muhammad II, who extended the claims of Hasan II, declared his father to have been the imâm as well as the Qâ'im, and announced that he himself therefore was the imâm also. Muhammad II ruled for forty-four years, during which time the doctrine of Qiyâma formed the basis of everyday life for the Ismâ`îlîss of Alamout.

Fundamental to Hasan's idea of resurrection was the interpretive doctrine of zâhir and bâtin, as it was reinterpreted at Alamout. As Henry Corbin argues, Islam is similar to Judaism and Christianity in that each is "ahl al-kitãb, a people in possession of a sacred Book, a people whose religion is founded on a Book that 'came down from Heaven'" and which contains "the law of life within this world and [the] guide beyond it." Therefore, for Muslims as for Jews and Christians, "The first and last

task is to understand the true meaning of this Book" (Corbin 1). These religions thus share a basically interpretive or hermeneutic orientation toward the world, which, in Christianity, has been superseded by a ty-pological or historical (apocalyptic) orientation as a result of the hegemony of the institutionalized Church over interpretation. No such institution or hegemony exists in Islam, where each believer must interpret for him- or herself the inner meaning of the Koran (and of other sacred texts like the hadîth ), which is hidden by the literal word. Because

the conditions of mankind are always changing . . . the sharî`at, or the Divine law revealed to mankind, must change. Thus, if the prophet leaves to them a book, its language must be allegorical, and its teachings must be expressed in similes. Only these are intelligible to the primitive people; they cannot understand anything beyond the outward meaning of things, zâhir, because they are in their intellectual development similar to brutes. . . . But those who are capable of understanding the inner meaning (bâtin ), and themselves seek for knowledge of the real (haqiqat ), living not only by their lower instincts, but also by reason and thought,—these can perceive the meaning of those instructions and commandments. . . . Therefore the letter, zâhir, of the religious teaching (sharî`at ), which is concerned with the world as it appears to us, must be continually changing, while the inner meaning of it, the bâtin, which is the revelation of the eternal laws (haqâ'iq ), is concerned with the world of reality; and since the latter is the same as the world of Divinity, it is unchangeable.^[32]

Each individual must rise through the hierarchy of appearance to essence, through the word to its meaning, without the dogmatic guidance of a priest. The Muslim has the imâm, of course, but the imâm is, according to Hasan II and Muhammad II, the divine reality itself and does not stoop personally to enlighten the masses.

This is where Burroughs's quest to "rub out the word" finds its most compelling formulation: Hasan II "proclaimed 'a day when one does not know by signs, and doctrines, and indications,' but 'he who particularizes the self of the Essence with his own self, particularizes all signs and indications'; and therefore 'deeds and words and indices come to an end'; for whoever would 'reach [Essence or truth] through names and through its distorted and twisted attributes is veiled [from the truth]" (Hodgson 155, citing the Haft Bâb-i Abî Ishâq ). The zâhir/bâtin dualism seems to be identical to the signifier/signified dualism, so in declaring an end to the domination of the zâhir, or material world, Hasan II and his successor proclaimed the end of language's illusion.

The imâms appear to have fallen into the fallacy of essential meaning that has plagued the West since Plato and that has been so thor-

oughly criticized in recent years. They have rubbed out the signifier or word, yet they still conceive the "unchangeable" meaning itself in linguistic—that is, in negative and dualistic—terms as a signified. Despite his agreement with this preliminary action, Burroughs ultimately rejects the dualism (in the form of both linguistic dialectics and sexual difference) that remains determinant in the Alamout account. Indeed, for Burroughs the two forms of dualism mask a single antihuman conspiracy: the Nova Mob's bid to take over the Earth by intensifying binary conflicts. The leader of the Mob, Mr Bradly Mr Martin, is himself a doubled character and may also be an autoparasitic double star that consumes itself (NE 69). We have already discussed briefly the routine in The Ticket That Exploded entitled "operation rewrite," in which Hassan i Sabbah suggests that the Nova Mob can be written out of the script for the Reality Film; when his subordinates insists that they "want flesh [. . . ]junk [. . . and] power, " he calls the Nova Police. At the beginning of that routine, however, the Nova problem is defined primarily in terms of language. "The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of an 'Other Half' a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally[. . . . ]Man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk . That organism is the word."^[33] The Word is the parasite that doubles the human host, that imprisons the subject in body, time, and shit. The parasitic Word presents itself as part of the organism, when in fact it preys on the organism vampirically. Worse, the Word has split the human host along sexual lines and given rise to the dualism of gender: "The human organism is literally consisting of two halves from the beginning word and all human sex is this unsanitary arrangement whereby two entities attempt to occupy the same three-dimensional coordinate points giving rise to the sordid latrine brawls which have characterized a planet based on 'the Word,' that is, on separate flesh engaged in endless sexual conflict—[. . . . ]It will be readily understandable that a program of systematic frustration was necessary in order to sell this crock of sewage as Immortality, the Garden of Delights and love —" (TE 52). The dualism of the Word, unlike sexual dualism, is also the method Burroughs uses to overcome the Word itself; he is still a writer, and "rub out the word" is still a linguistic imperative. But this simple opposition must be complicated, as must the simple dualist model of the Qiyâma.

Some contemporary Islamic historians, such as Jorunn J. Buckley and Christian Jambet, dispute the dualist or dialectical interpretation of the Qiyâma in favor of a tripartite model of Ismâ`îlîs ontology, which resembles Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics more than Ferdinand de Saussure's binary sermiology. These nondualist interpretations provide a rationale for the Alamout project that is more in line with Burroughs's own critique of dualism. The passage cited above from the Kalâm-i Pir actually contains three terms, of which we have discussed only two, zâhir and bâtin . Buckley claims that there is a third term, beyond the zâhir, the signifier, and the bâtin, the signified: haqîqa, or reality itself, of which the bâtin is merely the conceptual image or "revelation" (Buckley 146–47). To be fair, Hodgson himself supports this tripartite reading in his table of corresponding levels of reality, faith, and social status, even though he actually presents a dualist reading in his argument. People are divided into three categories in Ismailism (Hodgson 173):

`âmm (common people)

khâss (elite)

akhâss-i khâss (super-elite)

This division functions on the basis of three categories of relation to Divinity:

tadâdd (opponents)

tarattub (order)

wahda (union)

All non-lsmâ`îlîs, be they Sunnîs, Christians, or barbarians, are "opponents"; the relatively unenlightened common Ismâ`îlîss represent the "order" of Ismâ`îlî society, while the advanced students of Koranic and imâm -derived wisdom experience "union" with the imâm . Only the people of order and the people of union are resurrected. Each of these categories has its own distinct relation to the divine good:

sharî`a (ritual law)

tarîqa (the way)

qiyâma (resurrection)

Ritual law serves the opponents, just as "the spiritual way" of Ismailism serves the common Ismâ`îlîs. The total abolition of the Law is reserved

for the super-elite, the people of union. Each category exists on and has access to a different level of reality:

shakl (form)

ma`nî (meaning)

haqîqa (reality)

Opponents see and indeed are themselves only the outer form, while simple Ismâ`îlîs participate in the inner meaning, and the super-elite alone contemplate in themselves essential reality. These categories, according to Muhammad II ave always functioned implicitly in the Islamic world, but the Qiyâma institutes a new set:

`adm (nonexistence)

juz'î (partial)

kullî (total) (Hodgson 173)

Thus, with the arrival of the Great Resurrection, the non-Ismâ`îlîs opponents have ceased to exist and can be ignored, while the common Ismâ`îlîss have only a partial existence; only the super-elite exist fully in the Divine realm. For them, the dialectic of signification implicit in the zâhir/bâtin opposition has ceased to exist also (Hodgson 173).

Yet this tripartite scheme, so reminiscent of Plato's class-based hierarchy of ignorance, belief, and knowledge,^[34] implies that class divisions continued to exist during the Qlyâma, which does not actually appear to have been the case. Most of the common Ismâ`îlîss supported both Hasan II and Muhammad II, and the earlier hierarchy of believers faded. Hodgson notes that "one gathers from the lack of any practical notice of the hierarchical rankings . . . that in the fortress society they were ceasing to be ordered in the old formal way, or else that such rankings were ceasing to play a great role." This is because "Under the new dispensation . . . with the whole population at least potentially on a common level in the presence of the imâm-qâ'im, there was no further room for such rankings at all" (Hodgson 158). Thus the tripartite ontology apparently tended to reduce class division and antagonism, rather than increase it as we might imagine.

The reason for this reduction may be that, by definition, only one member of Ismâ`îlîs society is a member of the super-elite, like the

philosopher-king in Plato's imaginary state: the imâm himself. But the imâm is unlike the philosopher-king because he is the Microcosm "in whom the metaphysical soul of the universe was personified" (Hodgson 10), while the philosopher-king can only contemplate the metaphysical plane of Being. Such personification was extended to its full implications in the Qiyâma, when, with the abolition of the material universe along with the external Law, the imâm became the sum total of existence, outside of whom there was nothing. Corbin specifies that "the return to the World beyond—the world of spiritual entities—is the transition to a state of existence in which everything takes the form of human reality, since it is the human being alone who possesses speech, the logos " (Corbin 98). The law only had meaning as the path toward the imâm, so now that he has come, "The whole sharî`a is [rendered] meaningless, not truly existent, except insofar as, in the spiritual resurrection, a changed perspective upon the things it speaks of shows them as foreshadowing the personal office of holy figures," of whom the most important is the imâm (Hodgson 169). It is as the personification of the universe that the imâm Muhammad II, like his father Hasan II, can claim the power to annihilate the material zâhir world, and in so doing eliminate the addictive subjectivities of his followers: "by focusing their attention on [the imâm ], they could be made to forget themselves, and be led to the divine hidden within him" (Hodgson 165). The imâm is reality itself, prior to all allegorical signification (zâhir/bâtin ), and, as the highest "form of human reality" in possession of the Logos, he is also master of that signification.^[35] Since the Qâ'im, or divine Judge, is subordinate to the imâm, the imâm can abolish his own activity of judgment as well. This is precisely the paradoxical power that Burroughs attributes to Hassan i Sabbah, the power to "rub out the word forever, " to "cancel" even his own words (NE 12), to eliminate the dialectic of signification and its attendant binarisms (of gender, criminality, class) that pass from the traitorous Nova Mobster through his coordinate point, the junky writer.

Such power can, according to this model, eliminate the Law as well, or it can fall back into the dialectics it has exceeded; such was the case at Alamout, where the apocalyptic reforms of Hasan II and Muhammad II were reversed by the latter's successor, Hasan III. "The sharî`a was reestablished in the Ismâ`îlîs dominions after forty-seven years' abeyance, and the younger generation had to learn at least to seem able to fulfill the ritual duties of Sunnî Muslims" (Hodgson 217). No attempt was made to revive the Shiite sharî`a of the earlier Ismâ`îlîss; by now law was

Law, "an outward imposition in any case—taqiyya, in the sense in which Hasan II had eliminated it at the Qiyâma" (Hodgson 218). Without the paradox of vigilant forgetting of the Law, the community falls back into the dialectic of Law and the transgression of it that only strengthens that Law further. St. Paul recognized this logic when he insisted on the fundamental position of the Law: Law creates the possibility of sin, which in turn creates the opportunity for redemption and return to the province of the Law. Burroughs recognizes the danger of this logic as well and will dedicate the rest of his career to the analysis and testing of its limits, beginning with the residual effects of linguistic representation that survive the aleatory processes of the cut-up method. Yet this danger of the Law's return should not blind us—as it often blinds those of a more Hegelian bent—to the possibility of its elimination, a possibility whose realization Burroughs presents not as inevitable but as contingent upon the efforts of those who desire it. "This is a Manichean conflict. The outcome is in doubt" (Burroughs, Adding Machine 83). This contingent and paradoxical power to proclaim the end of words, scribble the end of writing, and sentence the Law to oblivion, is the power that Burroughs names, appropriately, "Hassan i Sabbah."

The power that allows "Willy the Rat" Burroughs, as coordinate point for the treasonous Mobster Hassan i Sabbah, to "wise up the marks" and reveal the machinations of the Mob is the same power that may put the Nova "heat" out of business. The Nova Police, Inspector Lee claims, is different from every other police force in human history, because it does not reproduce itself, does not remain in existence once its work is done: "we do our work and go," as Inspector Lee said in The Ticket That Exploded . It is not clear that it does so by the end of the trilogy, and Burroughs remarked in an interview published shortly after the completion of the trilogy that even after the partisans' "Break through in Grey Room," the Nova Police remain an ambivalent force: at the climax of the trilogy,

the underground and also the nova police have made a break-through past the guards and gotten into the darkroom where the films are processed, where they're in a position to expose negatives and prevent events from occurring. They're like police anywhere. All right, you've got a bad situation here in which the nova mob is about to blow up the planet. So the Heavy Metal Kid calls in the nova police. Once you get them in there, by God, they begin acting like any police. They're always an ambivalent agency . . . In other words,

once you get them on the scene they really start nosing around. Once the law starts asking questions, there's no end to it.^[36]

Yet the ideal of a police force that would be less ambivalent, that would really "do [its] work and go," remains important for Burroughs's work from this point forward, and it is theorized at many points in the trilogy.

If the Nova Police can really be put out of business along with their opponents—which is by no means certain—it is because they are not so much dialectically and linguistically constructed social subjects, which must constantly recreate the conditions of their own existence, as they are biochemical agents, which react to a limited set of conditions and disappear once those conditions vanish.

The difference between this department and the parasitic excrescence that often travels under the name 'Police' can be expressed in metabolic terms: The distinction between morphine and apomorphine[. . . .]The Nova Police can be compared to apomorphine, a regulating instance that need not continue and has no intention of continuing after its work is done[. . . . ]Now look at the parasitic police of morphine. First they create a narcotic problem then they say that a permanent narcotics police is now necessary to deal with the problem of addiction. (NE 50–51)

The police force itself is a kind of second-order addiction, or metaaddiction, that feeds on the simple, first-order addictions of junkies, homosexuals, dissidents, and criminals; if these criminals vanish, the police must create more in order to justify their own survival. They must insist upon the linguistic identities of their opponents in order to maintain their own identities; thus they are called the "Logos Police" (NE 146), who work for "Ideology Headquarters" (NE 81). Unlike the standard, specular police, who must prosecute "society's disapproval of the addict" (TE 216), "all concepts of revenge or moral indignation must be excised from a biologic police agent" (NE 80) like the Nova Police. They act like apomorphine, the nonaddictive cure for morphine addiction that Burroughs used and then promoted for many years. In the trilogy its value is even greater, because it eliminates the basis of addiction: the word and the image. "Apomorphine is no word no image—It is of course misleading to speak of a silence virus or an apomorphine virus since apomorphine is antivirus" (NE 47). Nevertheless, the narrative later recounts the use of the "Silence Virus " to cause a "Silence Sickness, " which destroys "citizens who had been composed entirely of word" (NE 77).

Before we can judge the veracity of Inspector Lee's claim about the Nova Police—if indeed we ever can—we must endure the trial of the

Nova Mob in the Biologic Courts. This trial constitutes one of the longest and most coherently focused passages in the entire trilogy; it begins near the end of the "Gave Proof Through the Night" routine (a version of "Twilight's Last Gleamings," an oft-repeated early piece composed with the help of Burroughs's childhood friend Kells Elvins) and continues to the end of "This Horrible Case" (written in collaboration with Ian Sommerville). Our traitor hero, the Heavy Metal Kid, has "brought suit against practically everybody in the Biologic Courts" (NE 111), so at the first hearing the judge, like the Ismâ`îlîs Qâ'im "many light years away from possibility of corruption," orders "biologic mediation": "the mediating life forms must simultaneously lay aside all defenses and all weapons[. . . ]and all connection with retrospective controllers under space conditions merge into a single being which may or may not be successful" (NE 112). Immediately the "Man at The Typewriter[. . . ]presents the Writ: [. . . ]I have canceled your permissos through Time-Money-Junk of the earth[. . . . ]All your junk out in apomorphine—All your time and money out in word dust drifting smoke streets." The "Gods of Time-Money-Junk" attempt escape, shouting "You called the Fuzz—you lousy fink," but are caught by the partisans and brought to the Court (NE 114).

"This Horrible Case" narrates the actual progress of the Nova case, offering the reader an explanation of how the double "biologic law," of descriptive physical regularity and prescriptive social constraint, functions. The Court "enables any life form in need of legal advice to contact an accredited biologic counselor trained in the intricacies and apparent contradictions of biologic law." The precedent that will be invoked in the Nova Mob trial is the "Oxygen Impasse," a "classic case presented to first year students":

Life Form A [which] arrives on alien planet[. . . ]breathes "oxygen"—There is no 'oxygen' in the atmosphere of alien planet but by invading and occupying Life Form B native to alien planet they can convert the "oxygen" they need from the blood stream of Life Form B—The Occupying Life Form A directs all the behavior and energies of Life Form B into channels calculated to elicit the highest yield of oxygen—Health and interest of the host is disregarded[. . . . ]For many years Life Form A remains invisible to Life Form B[. . . . ]However an emergency[. . . ]has arisen—Life Form B sees Life Form A[. . . ]and brings action in the Biologic Court alleging unspeakable indignities,[. . . ]demanding summary removal of alien parasite[.] (NE 117–18)

Life Form A responds to the accusation by claiming its "absolute need" of food, in the form of Life Form B. This general case corresponds ade-

quately to the Nova Mob case, if we substitute "Nova Mob" for "Life Form A" and "human marks" for "Life Form B." The precedent is a "basic statement in the algebra of absolute need—'Oxygen' interchangeable factor representing primary biologic need of a given life form" (NE 118).

The precedent does not function in the Biologic Courts quite as it would in an earthly court. Instead of acting as a general concept, the range of which determines the decision to be reached in the case, the precedent case serves as material for cut-ups: "From this statement the students prepare briefs—sift cut and rearrange so they can view the case from varied angles and mediums" (NE 118). Instead of imposing a general similarity on the singular case at hand, the precedent allows the lawyers to reveal and extend differentiation by means of the cut-up method. This procedure allows the student defense counselor to "anticipate questions of the Biologic Prosecutor," the most important of which is the following: "Was not the purpose of [Life Form A's] expedition to find 'oxygen' and extract it at any price?" (NE 120). The counselors "must be writers" because "the function of a counselor is to create facts that will tend to open biologic potentials for his client. One of the great early counselors was Franz Kafka and his briefs are still standard" (NE 120). Therefore the counselor cuts passages from Kafka's The Trial into a brief on the specific case in order to generate a useful set of new facts and to introduce new potential relations that will allow the client to evade the biologic law. The resulting brief shows how difficult the case will be: its three pages offer only "one phrase[. . . ]on which a defense can be constructed—'They sometimes mutate to breathe here'—That is if a successful mutation of Life Form A can be called in as witness" (NE 125). If Life Form A, the Nova Mob, can mutate into a nonparasitic form, the defense can avoid the suicidal argument of "absolute biologic need" (suicidal because all biologic need, as Inspector Lee implied, is merely relative to the life form involved [TE 55, NE 52]) and thus evade the constraints imposed by the biologic law.

The Nova Mob case never receives a definitive ruling at any point in the trilogy, however. In the final section of Nova Express, "Pay Color," one of the partisans (the "Subliminal Kid") demands that the "Boards Syndicates Governments of the earth Pay —Pay back the Color you stole—": the red of flags and Coca-Cola signs, stolen from penises, blood, and the sun; the blue of police uniforms stolen from sea, sky, and human eyes; and the green of money, stolen from flowers and rivers (NE 131). In the face of this challenge, and perhaps also in the face of the

legal "biologic mediation" that may turn against them, the Mob decides to "pay off the marks" and avoid any penalties (NE 132). This out-of-court settlement may be why no clear ruling is ever handed down. A more provocative reason would be that no ruling can come down because the Law itself has been abolished in Uranian Willy the Heavy Metal Kid's treason, because the Mob has been undone and, with the same stroke, the Police have been put out of business, leaving nothing over which the Biologic Courts can claim jurisdiction. The reversible symmetry on which the Law was premised and which the Law has constantly reproduced has perhaps been eliminated. The absurd "moral" implications of physical or biologic "law," ridiculed by Nietzsche a century ago, can finally be laid to rest, too.^[37] This conclusion, unfortunately, must remain a tantalizing hypothesis in the face of the ultimate indeterminacy of the trilogy.

The abolition of the Law has one further conceptually necessary consequence that is important for our understanding of Burroughs's efforts in the Nova trilogy, whether or not such an abolition actually takes place therein: the end of time. Ismâ`îlîs gnostic thought is not as rigidly teleological as Christianity, with its single endpoint to history. The Shiite predecessors of Hasan II articulated instead a cyclic idea of temporality that Henry Corbin has named "hierohistory," or "metahistory," to signify the centrality of archetypal recurrences (similar to Biblical typology or Christology) in the revelation of its meaning (Corbin 61–68, 86–90). Hodgson describes the concept in these terms:

The Sunnî position was based on a lively sense of the decisive importance of certain historical events—the revelation to Mohammed, and the triumph of Islâm; it emphasized the consensus of the community which derived from them by a continuing historical tie. The Ismâ`îlîs philosophers required a sense of history and of human nature in direct contrast to this. To support the utter sovereignty of each imâm, historical continuity of development must be replaced by a sense of historical repetition. History became a matter of types: each generation reproduced the recurrent archetypes, so that each moment was complete within itself. (Hodgson 19)

History was seen not as a developmental process but as a rigidly determined succession of abstract and eternal structures; no future was conceivable that was not conditioned by this determinism.

This concept corresponds precisely to Burroughs's theory of historical time as flat repetition without the possibility of novelty, according to which "the image past molds your future imposing repetition as the past accumulates and all actions are prerecorded and doped out and there is

no life left in the present sucked dry by a walking corpse muttering through empty courtyards under film skies of Marrakesh" (TE 189).^[38] As he implies throughout the trilogy, "history is fiction" (NE 13), the two-dimensional film set that serves as a backdrop for the "old army game from here to eternity" narrated in countless routines throughout Burroughs's body of work. There is only one possible escape from this confining determinist vision of history: "It is time to forget. To forget time. Is it? I was it will be it is? No. It was and it will be if you stand still for it. The point where the past touches the future is right where you are sitting now on your dead time ass hatching virus negatives into present time into the picture reality of a picture planet. Get off your ass, boys" (TE 196). The tenses of the Word and the self-similarity of the Image lock human history into the tedious repetition of past time, because "time is getting dressed and undressed eating sleeping not the actions but the words .. What we say about what we do. Would there be any time if we didn't say anything?" (TE 114) Like Nietzsche, Burroughs insist that the only escape from repetitive time is the abolition, through forgetting rather than transgression, of the Word that binds us to time. This is what Hasan II and Muhammad II hoped to achieve in making the Qiyima the situation of daily life at Alamout, and what Burroughs similarly hopes to achieve by invoking the power of "Hassan i Sabbah who wised up the marks to space" (NE 72) in order to "rub out the word forever " (NE 12). This abolition of historical time, which will accompany the abolition of the Law of the Word, will lead us "'All out of time and into space. Come out of the time-word "the" forever. Come out of the body-word "thee" forever. There is nothing to fear. There is no thing in space. There is no word to fear. There is no word in space'" (SM 162).

Nova Express ends with Burroughs's advice on how to achieve the silence that is necessary to end the dualistic conflict between parasitic Word and human host, between the dead past that holds the present and future in a vampiric death-grip and the possibility of a revolution that will eliminate all the rules: "When you answer the machine you provide it with more recordings to be played back to your 'enemies' keep the whole nova machine running—The Chinese character for 'enemy' means to be similar to or to answer—Don't answer the machine—Shut it off—" (NE 153). The machine cannot forget, since it has the repetition of memory inscribed in every one of its parts, but it can be "shut off" by sabotage. Specifically, one must give the machine scrambled, cut-up recordings of its own memory/control words and let it fall into a self-destructive feedback loop. The Nova trilogy itself is nothing but such a cut-up recording, a Trojan

Horse aimed at the control machine of language that is most effective, paradoxically, when it makes the least syntactic sense. Hence Burroughs's enigmatic farewell to the reader, the "last words" of the trilogy, can only allude, indirectly, to the task he has tried to execute: "Well that's about the closest way I know to tell you and papers rustling across city desks . . . fresh southerly winds a long time ago" (NE 155). To tell us any other way would be to give the machine fresh answers for it to play back, fresh energy for its dialectics, which, like the Crab Guards of the Biologic Courts, "can not be attacked directly since they are directly charged by attack" (NE 76).

Paradoxically, this expository conclusion to Nova Express does not actually represent the conclusion of the Nova conflict that drives the trilogy; that (anti-) narrative conclusion occurs instead, as Burroughs notes, at the end of the second volume, The Ticket That Exploded, in a routine called "silence to say goodbye" (TE 183–202, which "winds it up" through an enactment of "the action of the Nova or of the explosion itself[. . . ]dissolving everything into a vibrating, soundless hum" (Burroughs, "Interview with Allen Ginsberg"). Therefore we will now have to move backward through the trilogy. The general conclusion, the success of the partisan uprising, is announced twenty pages before "silence to say goodbye": "Control machine is disconnected—Word fell out of here through the glass and metal streets—God of Panic pipes blue notes through dying peoples—The law is dust—The wired structure of reality went up in slow-motion flashes—" (TE 155). The "wired structure of reality" that has been destroyed is the structure of the Reality Film. In a contemporary interview Burroughs points out that "Implicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is actually a movie. It's a film—what I call a biologic film."^[39] This concept of the Image that accompanies and assists the Word is central to all of Burroughs's other formulations of the problem of ideology and reality, history and the body. "To conceal the bankruptcy of the reality studio it is essential that no one should be in a position to set up another reality set. The reality film has now become an instrument and weapon of monopoly. The full weight of the film is directed against anyone who calls the film in question with particular attention to writers and artists" (TE 151). The linear determinism and subliminal constructedness of the Reality Film has infiltrated all aspects of human life "until there is no way to distinguish film from flesh and the flesh melts" (TE 69) away into the film. At certain points in the trilogy, however, it becomes clear that "The film bank is empty" (TE 151) and control

has been broken, following the partisans' "Break through in Grey Room" (TE 104; NE 37, 62).

The routine "silence to say goodbye" opens lyrically as "our actors bid you a long last goodbye"; the routine consists of elegiac cut-ups of other routines from the trilogy interspersed with brief narratives of cutups being performed by writers, engineers, soldiers, and others. The marks that drew the Nova Mob, having been "wised up" by Willy the Rat, are nowhere to be seen: "'Marks?—What Marks?'—Identity fades in empty space—last intervention" (TE 183). Willy the Rat's treason echoes through the routine; so does the denunciation of static time: "It is time to forget. To forget time" (TE 196). The final uncut passage serves as another negative creation myth like the one that concluded The Soft Machine, but this time it is the creation myth for a new, Wordless world:

In the beginning was the word and the word was bullshit. The beginning words came out on the con clawing for traction—Yes sir, boys, its hard to stop that old writing arm—more of a habit than using—Been writing these RXs five hundred thousand years and sure hate to pack you boys in with a burning down word habit—But I am of course guided by my medical ethics and the uh intervention of the Board of Health—no more—no más —My writing arm is paralyzed—ash blown from an empty sleeve—do our work and go— (TE 198)

The voice that speaks here is a composite of all the characters of the trilogy, from the apparently repentant Nova Mobster to the self-promoting Nova Police inspector to the Burroughs-surrogate writer; all, of course, are voices that pass necessarily through the telepathic writer on their way from the unknown place from whence they came to their unimaginable final destination.

The last pages of "silence to say goodbye" offer the farewells of each of the trilogy's major recurrent characters. Mr Bradly Mr Martin offers the penultimate farewell to conclude the "faded story of absent world just as silver film took it—" (TE 201). He laments: "sure you dream up Billy who bound word for it.. in the beginning there was no Iam..[. . . ] no Iam there..no one..silences..[. . . ] Iam the stale Billy..I lived your life a long time ago..sad shadow whistles cross a distant sky..adiós marks this long ago address..didn't exist you understand.." (TE 202). Mr Bradly Mr Martin is also Billy, an alternate version or variation of Burroughs himself, the writer "who bound word for" the trilogy; like him, all subjects are just minor variations on the repetitive structure of "Iam," the self-definition of God.^[40] Indeed, the reader is told at the other "end" of the trilogy, "You are yourself 'Mr Bradly Mr Martin'" (NE 154). Billy is the "boy I was

who never would be now..a speck of white that seemed to catch all the light left on a dying star..and suddenly I lost him..my film ends..I lost him long ago..dying there..light went out..my film ends" (TE 202). As Mr Bradly Mr Martin's film ends, so ends the Reality Film, at least until the next screening. Hassan i Sabbah, appropriately, has the last word here, as he does so often throughout the trilogy: "Last round over—Remember I was the ship gives no flesh identity—lips fading—silence to say goodbye." As he declares this, silence descends over the world, ending abruptly the continuous chatter of the inevitable swindlers and con men who try to convince themselves that "This Hassan I Sabbah really works for Naval Intelligence and .. Are you listening B. J.?" (TE 202). Hopefully, we have taken the multiplied narrator's advice to "disinterest yourself in my words[. . . . ] Disinterest yourself in anybody's words" (TE 198), and so no one is listening. That silence, that disinterest, would signify victory for the partisans under Hassan i Sabbah. As proof of this victory, the last page of The Ticket That Exploded contains no print, but instead Gysin's calligraphic permutations of the routine's title, which quickly decompose into the free lines of some forever illegible script (TE 203).

This final passage is as melancholy and elegiac as the final passage of Nova Express is sober and descriptive (or at least as sober and descriptive as cut-ups get), but why would Burroughs want to conclude the trilogy in two distinct places? What purpose could thus be served? Burroughs has never offered an explanation for this paradox, but an account of sorts follows from the fundamental insights of the cut-up method. If the point of the cut-ups is to break the rigid and linear historio-logical determinism of syntax to allow the future to leak out, as Burroughs claims, then it would be inconsistent to reinscribe that linear logic at a higher level by subordinating the cut-ups' rupture to traditional narrative structure—in other words, to arrange the trilogy itself in linear order. The structure of the entire trilogy must be cut up in order to break the deterministic logic of repetitive time. Deleuze has offered a provocative explanation for this sort of operation, which he claims is constitutive of all eruptions of novelty into the static world of repetitive time. His explanation, presented (appropriately enough) shortly after Burroughs completed his revisions of the Nova trilogy, involves three distinct syntheses of time. The first synthesis of time is the passive synthesis of the living present, which contracts all of the past and the future and allows time to pass unidirectionally; the past and the future belong to this pregnant present, "the past in so far as the preceding instants are retained in the contraction[,] the future because its expectation is anticipated in this same contraction" (Deleuze, Difference and Rep -

etition 70–71). The past and future are merely dimensions or modalities of this pregnant present that is constantly divided against itself. The second synthesis is the active synthesis of the pure past in memory that represents the old past and the current representation of that past: "The present and former presents are not, therefore, like two successive instants on the line of time; rather, the present one necessarily contains an extra dimension in which it represents the former and also represents itself" (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 80). In this synthesis, the pure past is the a priori, the general element that founds representation and that coexists with every current present as its constitutive and normative myth. In static, determined time, only the first two syntheses operate, and the future is locked into simple repetition of the past. The third and final synthesis, however, is the static synthesis of the pure and empty form of time, which displaces the relation between the others to create a differential repetition, the future (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 88–89).^[41] The third synthesis comes between the other two, breaking their fundamental symmetry and allowing the living present a chance to affirm a difference into the new future.

Deleuze's temporal logic may appear abstract, but we can translate it easily back into Burroughs's language of cut-ups: in affirming chance, which he calls the "spontaneity" which "You cannot will " (Burroughs, "Cut-Up Method," 29), Burroughs can "cut into the present" so that "the future leaks out."^[42] The future, the escape from static repetition in history, always exists as a virtual or potential time within each static moment, a potential time that can be brought into reality by an act of subjectless affirmation, just as the cut-up permutation of words can reveal all the alternatives hidden by the linear arrangement of syntax. This is the most compelling measure of success of the Nova trilogy and of the cut-up method in general: they bring the future into the present and in so doing break—if only for a moment, in a certain place, and for a small group of readers—the habits, language, and history that bind its readers to a self-destructive past. This is the performative, rather than constative, effect the Nova trilogy had on its author and continues to have on its readers. As Burroughs will write many years later, "I have blown a hole in time with a firecracker. Let others step through" (C 332).

The success of the cut-up method can also be measured by its influence: in the course of the sixties, many writers and artists in many countries experimented with variations on it, and some discovered preferred

versions of their own. The Fall of America (1965–71), perhaps Allen Ginsberg's most significant (though not his best-known) achievement as a poet, would not have taken the form it has, had he not followed Burroughs's lead in abandoning stream of consciousness in favor of the collage of multiple sources. Tom Phillips' "treated Victorian novel," A Humument, was born when he "read an interview with William Burroughs and, as a result, played with the 'cut-up' technique," and decided to "push these devices into more ambitious service."^[43] Many less well known writers and artists adopted variants of the cut-up as well. By the late sixties, Burroughs reached a double impasse, however. At the formal level, the critical force of the cut-up method began to dissipate, as it was taken up and applied too rigidly by less talented writers, especially in Europe, who revealed its limits by discovering the formal and stylistic indifference to which the procedure often led. At the level of social critique, the progressive incorporation into the order of production of the antagonistic subject positions from which the critique was articulated led to abstraction and opened the door to the kind of postmodernization that dominates the few current critical discussions of Burroughs's work. Nevertheless, the Nova trilogy also marks the beginning of Burroughs's critique of the temporality of social control as the accelerating dialectic of capital, based initially on his analysis of the Mayan calendar and caste system.^[44] This particular critique reaches its mature form several years later, after the countercultural break, in Ah Pook Is Here and "The Limits of Control": the acceleration of subjective time and the concomitant collapse of space forms "an exact parallel here with inflation, since money buys time." More explicitly, he insists that money is shit, not for psychoanalytic reasons, but because "It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity. . . . The more the machine eats the less remains. So your money buys always less. This process is now escalating geometrically" (Burroughs and Odier 73–74). Burroughs here approaches the crisis of the law of value—which Antonio Negri analyzed so astutely^[45] —from the point of view of capitalist control, in order to demonstrate the self-destructive tendency of its dialectical motion (though he doesn't "mean to suggest that control automatically defeats itself, nor that protest is therefore unnecessary": Burroughs, Adding Machine 120). But in the Nova trilogy he examines it primarily from the positions of subjects and collectivities subjected to control; Deleuze has observed that "'Control' is the name proposed by Burroughs to characterize the new monster, and Foucault sees it fast approaching" (Deleuze, Negotiations 178).

Although the Beat Generation with which Burroughs was identified was being incorporated into academic and publishing institutions by the late sixties, it served not as an imitable model but as a "rhizomatic" relay (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 22) for the social movements that followed: the student-led antiwar and ecology movements grew into mass movements that cut across traditional national and class lines, as the new subjectivities—formed in resistance to capital's response to the labor unions, the civil rights movement, the Beats, and others—recognized their collective nature. Burroughs took to the streets to follow these developments, covering the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago for Esquire magazine^[46] and calling for "more riots and more violence" from the students (Burroughs and Odier 81). The experience of mass activity, coupled with the non-dualistic interpretation of writing he had conceived in the course of the Nova trilogy, led Burroughs out of the reflexive impasse of the cut-ups; The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, published in 1969, signaled his recognition of and commitment to the new forms of subjectivity revealed by the massification of the student movements, as well as his return to the narrative scene or routine as his basic compositional unit. This experience also led him to alter his basic metaphors, from organized crime and the secret agent, too easily trapped in the formal dialectic of treason, to the revolutionary group, committed to the transformation of society by means of the total elimination (rather than the dialectical maintenance) of its opponents.^[47] In a sense, then, The Wild Boys represents the most important turning point in Burroughs's career, and we will now examine it.