Ferran Destemple's Asemic Erasure of William S. Burroughs’
The Soft Machine
By De Villo Sloan
Spanish writer and artist Ferran Destemple sent me altered pages from William Burroughs’ The Soft Machine as a submission to Asemic Front.
Ferran wrote, “In relation to the pages I sent you, I need to tell you that it is one of my works about Burroughs’ texts. In this case I erased parts of the text to convert or transform it into an asemic one.” Thus he states his intention to create an asemic parasite inside the textual host: A viral metaphor I would like to imagine both Burroughs and Destemple could appreciate.
I like Destemple's concept and his choice of erasure. The pages work for me as engaging visual poetry. Extending the William S. Burroughs cut-up experiment into the realm of asemics is, I believe, a project of great interest and importance.
Burroughs, Gysin and Norse believed the cut-up could strip away Maya and reveal cosmic truths, fitting for their era. Ferran Destemple takes us even further into the book’s inner functions.
The Soft Machine is a text where conventional linear narrative and linguistic conventions are already disrupted in order to reveal the machinations, codes and deep structures ordinarily hidden from the reader’s consciousness. By moving the text further into the realm of the unintelligible, even greater depths are revealed.
Some asemicists aligned with specific theories might question if Ferran’s work is truly asemic. Erasure can raise a process question when there is an original, underlying text that can be reconstructed. In this case I contend Destemple uses deconstructive asemics to hone Burroughs’ text into asemics. I am compelled to table a discussion of erasure as a viable generator of asemics and accept Ferran’s work as the brilliant, conceptual asemic text it is.
De
Villo Sloan
September
21, 2018
Elbridge,
New York
(revised
August 7, 2024)
-sSs-
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