DEMONOLOGY
565
presence of one of those threatening forces of the Human Virus who
work to take over human consciousness. They can be defeated by
silence. Well and good. But Burroughs did not make this clear to us
through the fragmented impressionism of his cut-up surrealism. Bur–
roughs is once again projecting a vision of a world
in
danger of
being taken over by some unnamed "demonic" agents who are op–
posed to life in its complex human form. The miasma of surrealism
and cut-ups contains, after all, a definite line of allegory. Out of the
"language of silence" comes an uttered meaning. Apart from the
frivolous distraction of cut-ups, Mr. Burroughs, we are reading you
loud and clear!
Finally, a glance at
Nova Express
which contains, as far as I can
see, all Burroughs' newest techniques which do not, however, com–
pletely obliterate the cosmic drama which has been adumbrated in
all his previous work.
In
many ways the world of the book is like
the world of
Na'ked Lunch
except for the more positive appearance
of a force attempting to counter the "virus" which is reducing all
spontaneous human life to a meaningless blob. The Nova Mob is
made up of various criminals much like the liquefying, devouring,
assimilating beasts of his earlier work. But there are also the Nova
Police who are moving in on the criminals in order to arrest them.
Good enough, one might think. Except that the police themselves,
once they are called in to rectify the dangerous situation created by
the criminals, are by no means reliable in their activities. Burroughs
has made this point very clear: "You've got a bad situation 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....
For nova police, read technology, if you wish." Once again, notice,
he intends to communicate a definite allegory. This is borne out by
the amount of direct statement which occurs in the book. Clearly
Burroughs wants to say things which cannot be communicated
through cut-ups.
He starts the book with a warning letter from, in effect, him–
self-Inspector
J.
Lee, Nova Police. Again a summons to resist the
poisonous manipulating powers that are abroad in the world.
It
contains most of the statements made in the long letter to Ginsberg
quoted earlier, with some extensions. For instance: "I call you all.
