Unbelievable part 23: The Soft Machine
29 May 2020
Although the Covid-19 pandemic played a significant part in halting my progress on my research on Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, in all honesty so too did reading William Burroughs's 'cut-up' novel The Soft Machine (1961). My brain already delicate from a healing psychiatric injury couldn't much hack it. To be fair, though, if anyone in their right mind can hack it, I suspect they're either lying to look smart, or broken in a different way. Perhaps you need to be on the same amount of heroin when reading it as Burroughs was on when writing it to get much of a story or any meaning out of it. As a side note, my copy of the book includes his essay 'A Treatment That Cancels Addiction' and it helped make his work a little more accessible for me, even if I still struggle to pinpoint details relevant to my studies.
The Soft Machine is referenced in the Treasures guidebook in the description of the first in-gallery work, the Calendar Stone. The literary reference setting a tone just before this was the passage from The Tempest creating an air of illusion, sorcery, manipulation, misinformation and misdirection. With The Soft Machine we have time travel fiction, and what is archaeology but a doorway to imagining what a buried object's life had been before it became lost? The novel also evokes subjects around the body, human anatomy and human nature. This stone (made of cast bronze), is almost stamped with the Hirst brand - in its centre is a half-face/half-skull motif so prevalent across his anatomical works and also calling to mind his diamond-encrusted platinum casts of his archaeological purchases, namely For the Love of God (2007).
From what I can discern, The Soft Machine (the title referring to the corporeal body) has within its fragmented pages a narrative detailing a time travel caper to free slaves whose lives are controlled by Mayan priests through a calendar stone that regulates the agricultural year. How the traveller goes from the novel's present day to Mexico in the late-Mayan period involves violent death, sacrifice and bodily transference. As I understand it, for the traveller to reach his destination, his body must die and he takes over or transforms into the body of a teenage pre-colonial Mayan boy. In both bodies many violent homoerotic experiences are had before the objective is complete.
Such overt sexuality is not, and perhaps could not, be imaged in Treasures, however there is much allusion to more heterogeneous (sexual/potential) violence towards women of all classes and slaves of all genders. I suppose the violent consumption of bodies in Cronos Devouring His Children is relevant too. Certainly the sense of time and the duration of life as evoked by Kronos is worth probing further.
There was a period when I could write quite eruditely about philosophical approaches to understanding different types of time and the nuances in language this requires, mostly when I was devouring a lot of Deleuze, Bergson and Foucault during my postgraduate studies. Having done it so vigorously in my formal education, I now want to consider it all more freely. I do still at times return to Mulvey's Death 24x A Second, though. Her application of Pearce's theories of time to readings of viewers' interactions with film are interesting to me and I think are relevant to my readings of sculpture, if only for sculpture's broad similarities with paused/stilled moving images.
The Soft Machine draws notions of cinematic time and deity time together, if only superficially, in the title of chapter 6: 'The Case of the Celluloid Kali'. The narration of this chapter seems to be dominated by a character called Johnny Yen whose genitals change sex back and forth several times as he/she relays a string of experiences, mainly as a private eye, to an audience (don't quote me on the accuracy of this description). The chapter title seems to bear significance by the chapter's end in which viewings of snuff films of executions during the 'Abyssinian War' (likely referring to the Italo-Ethiopian War in the 1930s) are held. The text describes how the boys in the film are lined up and must watch the hangings in turn. In the film the experience of being hanged causes ejaculation and arousal and ejaculation in the viewers both in the film and of the film (all male). In thinking about cinematic time and ways it can be stretched and compressed, the following passage describing the screening is useful (p. 48):
What I want to draw from all this just now is a consideration of narrative voice. The tone of fiction writing across all genres and styles that come to mind is often as if the action is real, whether told from an omniscient third person or if it is a first-person account. Even when the narrator is unreliable, the voice tends to come from a perspective of telling a story they perceive or believe to be true.
An example that comes to mind is from Sherlock Holmes short stories, as reading them aloud has been one of our household's lockdown activities. Most of the stories are remembered written accounts of cases by Watson. In the stories' diegeses we understand the details to be true, but we know it's a fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle. Occasional stories draw attention to the potential unreliability of Watson as narrator when the narration is given over to Holmes and the delivery, tone and attention to detail change.
Therein lies a reflexive instance of the nature of fiction writing. As faux documentary, Treasures joins a category of fiction comprising works by surrealists and satirists that more overtly signposts its artifice, with the caveat that you must approach viewing it with a sceptical eye. When I began this research, lies around Brexit seemed to be the biggest battle, at least in my little corner of the world, faced by critical thinkers. At the time of writing, this has been swallowed whole by even bigger and potentially more dangerous lies, conspiracies and mismanagement in the face of a deadly viral pandemic. I feel resolved to keep going with my study demonstrating how the plausible and the true can clash and investigating the differences between ways that well-placed lies can show truths while wilful ignorance and lying for self-preservation inflict damage. Overcoming the waves of futility is prettyHerculeKalian, though.
If you enjoy my posts, please consider supporting me via liberapay.com/peablair. Thank you!
*there are mentions of sexual violence/violent sex in this post*
Although the Covid-19 pandemic played a significant part in halting my progress on my research on Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, in all honesty so too did reading William Burroughs's 'cut-up' novel The Soft Machine (1961). My brain already delicate from a healing psychiatric injury couldn't much hack it. To be fair, though, if anyone in their right mind can hack it, I suspect they're either lying to look smart, or broken in a different way. Perhaps you need to be on the same amount of heroin when reading it as Burroughs was on when writing it to get much of a story or any meaning out of it. As a side note, my copy of the book includes his essay 'A Treatment That Cancels Addiction' and it helped make his work a little more accessible for me, even if I still struggle to pinpoint details relevant to my studies.
The Soft Machine is referenced in the Treasures guidebook in the description of the first in-gallery work, the Calendar Stone. The literary reference setting a tone just before this was the passage from The Tempest creating an air of illusion, sorcery, manipulation, misinformation and misdirection. With The Soft Machine we have time travel fiction, and what is archaeology but a doorway to imagining what a buried object's life had been before it became lost? The novel also evokes subjects around the body, human anatomy and human nature. This stone (made of cast bronze), is almost stamped with the Hirst brand - in its centre is a half-face/half-skull motif so prevalent across his anatomical works and also calling to mind his diamond-encrusted platinum casts of his archaeological purchases, namely For the Love of God (2007).
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| Calendar Stone (Damien Hirst, 2017) Image url: https://www.artapartofculture.net/new/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/damien-hirst-calendar-stone.jpg |
From what I can discern, The Soft Machine (the title referring to the corporeal body) has within its fragmented pages a narrative detailing a time travel caper to free slaves whose lives are controlled by Mayan priests through a calendar stone that regulates the agricultural year. How the traveller goes from the novel's present day to Mexico in the late-Mayan period involves violent death, sacrifice and bodily transference. As I understand it, for the traveller to reach his destination, his body must die and he takes over or transforms into the body of a teenage pre-colonial Mayan boy. In both bodies many violent homoerotic experiences are had before the objective is complete.
Such overt sexuality is not, and perhaps could not, be imaged in Treasures, however there is much allusion to more heterogeneous (sexual/potential) violence towards women of all classes and slaves of all genders. I suppose the violent consumption of bodies in Cronos Devouring His Children is relevant too. Certainly the sense of time and the duration of life as evoked by Kronos is worth probing further.
There was a period when I could write quite eruditely about philosophical approaches to understanding different types of time and the nuances in language this requires, mostly when I was devouring a lot of Deleuze, Bergson and Foucault during my postgraduate studies. Having done it so vigorously in my formal education, I now want to consider it all more freely. I do still at times return to Mulvey's Death 24x A Second, though. Her application of Pearce's theories of time to readings of viewers' interactions with film are interesting to me and I think are relevant to my readings of sculpture, if only for sculpture's broad similarities with paused/stilled moving images.
The Soft Machine draws notions of cinematic time and deity time together, if only superficially, in the title of chapter 6: 'The Case of the Celluloid Kali'. The narration of this chapter seems to be dominated by a character called Johnny Yen whose genitals change sex back and forth several times as he/she relays a string of experiences, mainly as a private eye, to an audience (don't quote me on the accuracy of this description). The chapter title seems to bear significance by the chapter's end in which viewings of snuff films of executions during the 'Abyssinian War' (likely referring to the Italo-Ethiopian War in the 1930s) are held. The text describes how the boys in the film are lined up and must watch the hangings in turn. In the film the experience of being hanged causes ejaculation and arousal and ejaculation in the viewers both in the film and of the film (all male). In thinking about cinematic time and ways it can be stretched and compressed, the following passage describing the screening is useful (p. 48):
'Then they run the movie in slow motion slower and slower and you are coming slower and slower until it took an hour and then two hours and finally all the boys are standing there like statues getting their rocks off geologic'The narrator then speeds up the projection (pp. 48-9):
'so the hanged boys are coming like machine guns - Half the guests explode straightaway from altered pressure chunks of limestone whistling through the air. The others are flopping around on the floor like beeched idiots and the Countess [the host] gasps out "Carbon dioxide for the love of Kali!"'Notably, Kali is a goddess who punishes men for their ill-actions in war. After the gassing of the viewers, I really don't understand what is said in the closing paragraph, but there are some tentative ideas going on here that link to my earlier thoughts on sculptural time needing further development.
What I want to draw from all this just now is a consideration of narrative voice. The tone of fiction writing across all genres and styles that come to mind is often as if the action is real, whether told from an omniscient third person or if it is a first-person account. Even when the narrator is unreliable, the voice tends to come from a perspective of telling a story they perceive or believe to be true.
An example that comes to mind is from Sherlock Holmes short stories, as reading them aloud has been one of our household's lockdown activities. Most of the stories are remembered written accounts of cases by Watson. In the stories' diegeses we understand the details to be true, but we know it's a fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle. Occasional stories draw attention to the potential unreliability of Watson as narrator when the narration is given over to Holmes and the delivery, tone and attention to detail change.
Therein lies a reflexive instance of the nature of fiction writing. As faux documentary, Treasures joins a category of fiction comprising works by surrealists and satirists that more overtly signposts its artifice, with the caveat that you must approach viewing it with a sceptical eye. When I began this research, lies around Brexit seemed to be the biggest battle, at least in my little corner of the world, faced by critical thinkers. At the time of writing, this has been swallowed whole by even bigger and potentially more dangerous lies, conspiracies and mismanagement in the face of a deadly viral pandemic. I feel resolved to keep going with my study demonstrating how the plausible and the true can clash and investigating the differences between ways that well-placed lies can show truths while wilful ignorance and lying for self-preservation inflict damage. Overcoming the waves of futility is pretty
If you enjoy my posts, please consider supporting me via liberapay.com/peablair. Thank you!
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