The Ticket that Exploded

I’m still having a difficult time fully understanding The Ticket that Exploded as it seems many people are, especially how the cut-up method and tape recorder analogies that Burroughs utilizes specifically apply to his theory of language as a virus. It constantly seems like I’m on the cusp of understanding how different aspects of the book lock together, but that taunting cohesiveness is still out of reach. What I can piece together is largely centralized around control and the use of easily manipulated elements of human nature such as addiction. Ali goes to a hotel in the chapter in a strange bed and sees a sign on the wall entitled “The Nature of Begging” which reads “Need?-Lack Want?-Need Life?-Death”. I think this sign in many ways illustrates a kind of basic blueprint for conditioning, making someone realize that they lack something desirable which leads to their wanting and pursuing that thing, the more urgent it seems or the stronger the illusion of necessity, the more vulnerable and dependent someone is to another. It is a process that leads from step one, knowing that there is a specific thing that you do not have and giving into its seduction, to a final step of being manipulated by another who controls what it is that is desired. The manipulator can be anybody from a drug dealer to an advertiser; it seems Burroughs is saying anything can have an addictive quality if it has this kind of relationship with a person. Addiction is wholly included in the Garden of Delights, or G.O.D. Burroughs describes G.O.D. as “the smell of burning leaves in cobblestone streets a rustle of darkness and wires frayed sounds of a distant city.” This quote implies the conquering of nature and the triumph of man’s creation. The acronym G.O.D. is even more illuminating because in a way it suggests that the hierarchical order of man and God is reversed, that the universal natural impulse of man, from the most secluded tribe to the most advanced civilizations throughout history, is to believe there is a being that is creating and controlling, but God may just be the logical extrapolation of our ego, a deep striving for creation and control but a creation in itself. The stance that Burroughs takes on G.O.D., the amalgamation of human creations and in turn its addictions is that its destruction is a beautiful thing. This is shown in parts of the chapter winds of time in which the Demolition Team blows up the Garden of Delights and descriptions emphasize the beauty of nature overcoming man’s creations, for instance the line, “Behind them in a darkening valley the Garden of Delights is scattered piles of smoldering rubbish…scrub and vine grow through blackened tape recorders where goats graze and lizards bask in the afternoon sun.” Along with the objects and ideas of G.O.D., a charred tape recorder is being overgrown. Here Burroughs is setting up opposition between language and the wholesome aspects of nature. From what I gather he is comparing the human faculty for language to a tape recorder, only a little less reliable. We hear words and ideas with microphone ears, record them with our brains, and spout the information back out as if hitting a play button. Most of the words, concepts and stories we have picked up through hearing, remembering, and retelling occurs much like a tape recorder picks up a sound, records it, and plays it back. Through experimentation with splicing these various tapes, or in a human sense, segments of memory recorded by language, sometimes an original combination or new idea is uncovered. In this way language is a virus and we spread it like a tape recorder redistributes sound, we hear and remember things through language which come from numerous sources (“Thousands of voices muttered out of the darkness, twittering creatures pulling and tugging and dancing on their way…”pg.86) like many tapes spliced together, little of it originates from us individually, a viral swarm of words inhabits the mind. At the end of The Ticket that Exploded Burroughs suggests that people shouldn’t even show up to parties but instead bring a tape recorder which will replace the function of propagating the word virus by playing and recording at intervals. At the heart of much of the manipulation previously mentioned is the basic tool of language, which must itself be manipulated in order to communicate anything in the first place. Several times throughout the book, like in the chapter the black fruit, halves of bodies or brains of characters are described to represent the natural state of a human (without language) and the other portion infected by language, both inhabiting the same body. Usually the part of the being with the word virus is distraught like Lykin who in the black fruit “Found himself choking as unknown bodies tear his insides apart” (pg. 87). Similarly, in the external world Burroughs observes the problem of unknown bodies or differing groups of people tearing the earth and each other apart by trying to control one another but stubbornly refusing to change themselves, they are simply too incompatible. This tension is escalated and manipulated by the Nova Mob who attempts to turn the earth into a super nova by emphasizing those differences until humans bring on planetary self destruction. The cut-up technique used in the book then might be Burroughs’ attempt at a vaccination of the word virus, striving to disarm language and find natural silence before the silence following a kind of super nova occurs first.