The Mayan Caper
The Soft Machine consists of seventeen relatively brief chapters, or routines. (Most are fewer than ten pages: the longest is a little over twenty pages.) Each routine contains both improvisational narrative episodes sim- ilar in style to the satirical fantasies of Naked Lunch and cutup material. The narrative episodes within routines, however, are usually much briefer than those in Naked Lunch. The shorter narrative passages in combination with cutup collage passages make up a highly fragmented work in which the juxtaposition technique dominates the consciousness of the reader. The book must be read slowly and carefully, like a poem, and one must focus on imagery, theme, and associative relationships, rather than on chronological -causal structures.
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"The Mayan Caper" is the single most significant section of The Soft Machine because of its central placement in the text, because it is the longest sustained narrative, and because it gives the most straightforward exposition of how a control system works and how it can be dismantled. The Mayans are presented both as the historical beginning and the epitome of "civilization": a social order in which a few control the many through manipulation of word and image. Literacy only makes the control system more sophisticated. The Mayan priest-ruler class controls the mass of peasants through their calendar, a word-and-image system that orders time, space, and human behavior. The calendar is the basis for the Mayans' agricultural economy, their hierarchical system of classes, and their religion. The priests exert total mind control and thus have total mastery over the peasants' bodies. The power imagery associated with the Mayans is the same as that of the Minraud people in the Nova mythology: religious sacrifice, insects, ants, centipedes, scorpions, crabs, lobsters, claws, white heat, and the city. The first part of the "I Sekuin" routine, which immediately follows "The Mayan Caper," makes the link to Minraud explicit and again emphasizes the importance of the Mayan fantasy as the classic type of all control
"The Mayan Caper" is the single most significant section of The Soft Machine because of its central placement in the text, because it is the longest sustained narrative, and because it gives the most straightforward exposition of how a control system works and how it can be dismantled. The Mayans are presented both as the historical beginning and the epitome of "civilization": a social order in which a few control the many through manipulation of word and image. Literacy only makes the control system more sophisticated. The Mayan priest-ruler class controls the mass of peasants through their calendar, a word-and-image system that orders time, space, and human behavior. The calendar is the basis for the Mayans' agricultural economy, their hierarchical system of classes, and their religion. The priests exert total mind control and thus have total mastery over the peasants' bodies. The power imagery associated with the Mayans is the same as that of the Minraud people in the Nova mythology: religious sacrifice, insects, ants, centipedes, scorpions, crabs, lobsters, claws, white heat, and the city. The first part of the "I Sekuin" routine, which immediately follows "The Mayan Caper," makes the link to Minraud explicit and again emphasizes the importance of the Mayan fantasy as the classic type of all control