Dead Fingers Talk

S Burroughs William

Description

First published in 1963 and representing Burroughs's literary breakthrough in the UK, Dead Fingers Talk is, in the words of Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, "a prophetic work of haunting power," a unique experiment in writing that has for too long been overlooked. Combining new material with rearranged selections from Naked Lunch and his cut-up novels The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, the book is a fascinating precursor to remix and mash-up forms in art and music, which owe much to Burroughs's influence.This newly restored edition of Dead Fingers Talk, based on the novel's archival manuscripts, will delight all Burroughs fans and lovers of experimental literature, and offer a new insight into the artistic process of one of the most original and influential writers of the twentieth century

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714550268
• Langue: English

Extrait

Dead Fingers Talk
The Restored Text
Dead Fingers Talk
The Restored Text
William S. Burroughs
Edited and with an Introduction by Oliver Harris
CALDER PUBLICATIONS
an imprint of
ALMA BOOKS LTD
3 Castle Yard
Richmond
Surrey TW10 6TF
United Kingdom
www.calderpublications.com
Dead Fingers Talk first published in 1963 by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd
This edition first published by Calder Publications in 2020
Text © William S. Burroughs, 1963, 2020
Introduction and Notes © Oliver Harris, 2020
Cover design by William S. Burroughs and Ian Sommerville ©
John Calder (Publishers) Ltd and Alma Books Ltd, 1963, 2020
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN : 978-0-7145-5001-5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Introduction
Dead Fingers Talk
the heat closing in
in a strange bed
no good no bueno
cut city
to quiet the marks
science pure science
the meat handler
but this is interesting
it’s the great work
that’s the way i like to see them
the parties of interzone
save proof through the night
expense account
i urge distraction
the black fruit
all members are worst a century
place of burial
survivor survivor
paco, Joselito, Henrique
combat troops in the area
the board books
dead fingers talk
operation rewrite
the subliminal kid
let them see us
these our actors
Notes
Acknowledgements
Introduction
DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, OR DO THEY?
“NOT QUITE THE WORST OF BURROUGHS”
A prophetic work of haunting power and a unique landmark in cultural history, Dead Fingers Talk is nevertheless a book gone missing in the William Burroughs oeuvre. For half a century, it has been the phantom of a text, existing more as a title flickering in and out of footnotes than as a work that anybody actually read. To date, the only people who’ve seen any value in it are the rare-book collectors who esteem the original jacket design (“the coolest first-edition hardcover”) and a short-lived 1970s British punk band that borrowed the catchy title for reasons just as superficial (“We liked the sound of it… a cool name”). 1 By ignoring Dead Fingers Talk completely, the consensus of the critics is that there’s simply nothing to say for or about it, 2 and has been ever since the reviewers made a damning case against the book on its publication in November 1963, when even the least hostile review asked the question, “Why read Dead Fingers Talk ?” 3 So this cold-case review has to begin by contesting the seemingly cut-and-dried verdict that these fingers don’t talk.
The book is so little known that it can’t even be called misunderstood, for the simple reason that it was only ever published in Great Britain and went out of print decades ago. After appearing in 1963 as a hardback from Burroughs’ British publisher, John Calder, it was reissued in paperback editions in the late ’60s and mid-’70s, which is perhaps more a testament to the cynicism of commercial publishers than to any faith in the book’s intrinsic worth. For by then, its one and apparently only claim to existence had been and gone. Less a work in its own right than an expedience, Dead Fingers Talk was the merely pragmatic means to other more important ends, having been commissioned by Calder to smooth the way to publish Naked Lunch without the censorship battle then facing the book in the United States. To that end, Dead Fingers Talk comprised selections from Naked Lunch , Burroughs’ two cut-up novels, The Soft Machine (1961) and The Ticket That Exploded (1962) , all three titles published by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in Paris and available only in France. Exactly one year after Burroughs made his British debut with Dead Fingers Talk , the real thing – Calder’s Naked Lunch – duly appeared in November 1964. 4 Grove Press published new, heavily revised and expanded editions of The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded soon after, replacing the Olympia texts used in Dead Fingers Talk , and with them went any reason why this teaser trailer for out-of-date products should remain in print.
It therefore seemed the most commercially compromised and least original text possible from a writer whose experimental originality mitigated work that in the 1960s shocked moral sensibilities. Ironically, one of the only things said in the book’s favour at the time was that it redacted the original texts, so that Dead Fingers Talk “might have been called Not Quite the Worst of Burroughs. ” 5 For the Times Literary Supplement it was a “rehash”, and, mixing his derisive metaphors, the author of its November 1963 review (infamously titled “UGH…”) mocked it as a “slightly more hygienic bucketful” and a “house-trained version” of its three source texts. 6 The Guardian dismissed it as a “mish-mash”, and forty years later the same newspaper summed up the prevailing wisdom by describing it as Burroughs’ “drug-fuelled trilogy”, from which “the author had excised some of the more objectionable passages.” 7
Worse still, according to Calder the redactions had been a collaborative effort, resulting in what he referred to as “our carefully selected volume of extracts”. 8 In a hilarious preview for Books and Bookmen in March 1963, Calder was dubbed a “creep” who had “seduced” Burroughs into Dead Fingers Talk , turning the hip Beat writer into a “square” who had “capitulated” by letting the publisher assemble “those bits he thought the delicate English might be allowed to read”. 9 Compromised, sanitized, cynically cut , the book could only be much less than the sum of its parts. Nowadays, nobody wants fat-free slices of a vegan Naked Lunch : if you’re going to read Burroughs, you want the whole bloodsoaked tamale. And if you’re going to discuss The Soft Machine or The Ticket That Exploded , why bother with bits and pieces of the old texts when you can analyse the real things in full?
On its original jacket blurb, Dead Fingers Talk was spun with sales talk that anticipated and shamelessly defied all the objections to come: “ Dead Fingers Talk is not a book of selections but a new novel constructed out of these three earlier books together with some new material.” The rebuttal at the beginning (“not a book of selections”) and the claim at the end (“with some new material”) were both dropped three years later for the 1966 Tandem paperback, as if admitting the jig was up, and so simply let stand the brazen contradiction of “a new novel constructed out of his earlier writings”. Was any of it “new”? Opinions range wildly, from “one quarter new material” to none at all. 10 The stock phrase that comes up again and again is “some new material”, a usefully vague expression that comes precisely from the original jacket blurb.
Inside the front cover of my own first edition, bought in the early 1980s, there’s a comment which was not meant as a compliment, written in ink by my younger self (one entirely ignorant about the collectability of clean first editions): “Greatest Hits.” So, unless this is just more shameless sales talk, why should I waste my time editing, and why should anyone bother to read this new restored edition of Dead Fingers Talk ?
“AN EXPERIMENT”
The case for the defence logically begins with the question of how much in Dead Fingers Talk is new. To trace the text back to its sources word by word turns out to be time-consuming work of painstaking scholarship, which is why it’s not been attempted before, a sign of the unsuspected complexity behind the easy label “book of selections”. But the search for new material that would make it possible to speak of Dead Fingers Talk without really talking about this or that part of Naked Lunch , The Soft Machine or The Ticket That Exploded means looking in the wrong place and missing what is hidden in plain sight. If you already know the original texts, there’s no value in reading an anthology of selections from the oeuvre of any other writer – whether three novels by Margaret Atwood or Émile Zola – but Burroughs’ oeuvre isn’t like any other writer’s. In conventional terms of originality, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded are all far superior works to Dead Fingers Talk , but so what? It’s original in a different way; we just need to learn how to see it. To discover what’s new about Dead Fingers Talk takes us deep into the uncanny textual logic of the work itself, so let’s first consider the more straightforward ground for defending the book: the case for recovering the bigger picture of its lost historical context.
As a book published in Britain in the 1960s, it might seem that Dead Fingers Talk had a narrowly local history – that in cultural terms its back story is a backwater. But the view in retrospect forgets that Burroughs had been an expatriate since 1949 and would not return to the United States until 1974, and so fails to reckon with how essential his European reception was at a time he lived and worked in London and Paris (and sometimes Tangier). Simply in terms of geography, in the 1960s this put him closer to his European publishers, Calder and Girodias, than to Barney Rosset of Grove Press in New York. The true picture of how enormously fertile that decade was for Burroughs is also much clearer now, thanks to the booty of experimental cut-up work that’s become available in the 21st century. The result has been to overturn the narrative of literary history that said Burroughs had cut himself up into a blind alley in Europe from which he only just escaped in the mid-1970s, once safely back home in the States.
Dead Fingers T