It's Freeform Cut-up Exercise of Readings in Unintelligible Cut-up Format?

In 1959 Burroughs use words like "shit", "ass" and "fuck" dozens of times in his most famous book called Naked Lunch. It inspired a headline in the Chicago Daily News titled "Filthy Writing on the Midway." The article influenced the University of Chicago to eventually suppress the journal which was publishing excerpts from Naked Lunch. (Morgan 296) This indirectly caused interest in the book and it was published in full but labelled as obscene. This book acted as a fulcrum for a whole group of concepts which were about to swing into literature and popular culture within a decade. The cut-up is one of the more radical ideas which stemmed from a lifestyle which condoned drugs and non-rational excess. It allowed writing to move into the same space as abstract painting. For the authors it was a mystical experience, not simply a technique or cutting paper apart.

Qui sont les Voleurs

"Thus to be a warrior a man has to be, first of all, and rightfully so, keenly aware of his own death. But to be concerned with death would force any one of us to focus on the self and that would be debilitating. So the next thing one needs to be a warrior is detachment. The idea of imminent death, instead of becoming an obsession, becomes an indifference¹. Don Juan (Castaneda 150)

What the truly illusive Don Juan said about the warrior applies to the Burroughesque writer. Burroughs insisted that any writer who could not accept the word "death", the meaning of DEATH is not a true writer. With death also comes responsibility. Responsibility for characters and what happens to them. (Burroughs, Adding 48-49) These two points separate shitty writing from the real thing. Even the American courts agree. Naked Lunch was labelled as obscene a few times between 1958 and 1966. De Grazia, the lawyer for Burroughs' publisher, arranged for Naked Lunch to go on trial for obscenity instead of a single book seller who was arrested. (Morgan 343) This turned out to be good judgement because the trial made it to the Supreme Court after losing locally. Degrazia's doctrine was this: writing with literary value is not obscene. (Morgan 344) This doctrine has changed the way we look at literature and other art. It has even crossed over into Canada as a way of judging controversial literary material. Finally it was decided in the U.S. Supreme Court that his book did not meet certain criteria for obscenity despite hundreds of "naughty words" and ideas. The actual rules applied to test for obscenity in Naked Lunch:

1. The dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex.
2. The material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters.
3. The material is utterly without redeeming social value.

Rules one and two applied but not the third rule. There was some social value in the book. (Morgan 346-47) But there was much more to Burroughs' writing other than some social value. It introduced randomness to mainstream writing; the cut-up.

How to Cut-up & Fold-in

The cut-up was not new when Brion Gysin and Burroughs used it in their writing. Tristan Tzara was expelled from the Surrealists after he made a poem from words pulled from scraps of paper in a hat. (Morgan 300) There were others who used similar techniques but Gysin and Burroughs were the first to use it to write stories and novels. They developed it much farther than a simple exercise with connections the psychic and magical universe.

1. The fold-in: take a page of any writing and cut it into four equal pieces. Place the bottom-right piece on the top-left and vice-versa. Read left to right as if it was one piece of paper.
2. The Cut-up: cut phrases and sentences from a page of text. Mix thoroughly. Piece together at hazard, so to speak since there are no coincidences. Read as one complete text.
3. Both methods can be used together or separately, two or more different texts can be used together.

What? Because of new kick ... autonomous? I don't really INSPIRATION - what INSPIRITATION - what be autonomous? What literature can help INSPIRATION?

The cut-up, fold-in or any form of scrambling these and other words destroys their ownership and any conscious intent from the "writer". No doubt, this is almost a parallel to the drug use which Paul Bowles, a writer living in Tangier during the 1950s, remembers. Burroughs was submerged in chaos.

"The litter on his desk and under it, on the floor, was chaotic, but it consisted only of pages of Naked Lunch, at which he was constantly working. When he read aloud from it, at random (any sheet of paper he happened to grab would do) he laughed a good deal, as well he might, since it is very funny, but from reading he would suddenly (the paper still in hand) go into a bitter conversational attack upon whatever aspect of life had prompted the passage he had just read."(Burroughs, File 16)

In 1959 the book was accepted for publishing. Sinclair Beiles and Brion Gysin helped with the editing of the manuscript. Sections were sent to the printer in random order. This became the order of the book with minor revisions. (Morgan 313) Burroughs having little memory of writing Naked Lunch and not numbering pages contributed in a large way to the random, cut-up nature of the book. (Burroughs, Naked 8) This is exactly how great discoveries are made: by accident -�or Burroughs would believe in an event of meaningful synchronicity. In a letter to Ted Berrigan: "Many of my best characters have cut in from cut-ups. Also lines of straight narrative arise from cut-ups." (Morgan 403)

He wasn't simply cutting and pasting as critics advertise. The original cut-ups used by Burroughs was almost unconscious. He and Brion Gysin among others as they tried to put the Naked Lunch manuscript together. Pieces lay all around the world "from Texas to Tangier," said Gysin, and he hinted there might have been more of the manuscript in some Tangier bar or with some old junky. Pages of the manuscript were not numbered and seemingly missing parts were plugged up from new material. "It's all material, just material. There is nothing sacred about words." (Gysin 3-4) The same day Burroughs was being interviewed by the Life reporters Gysin made an accidental cut-up. He used the strips from newspapers in random order- strips which were shredded when he was cutting a mat. Burroughs saw the potential for using cut-ups right away. (Morgan 321)

Randomness is not a modernist idea. This is an idea from people who wanted to destroy the agents of control. Postmodern, 1950s American non-suburban - imagine a different enemy. Burroughs called the word a virus, something which infects us and duplicates itself. Certain words have strong effects on us. These are either seen as holy or obscene. Other words can change our consciousness like a chant or song. By cutting these words up Burroughs believed that he could become free from their effects. (Burroughs, Adding 47-51) He created an anarchy in the ego of the writer. Once reincarnation takes place the ego dies, like in the cut-up the ego is dissolved back into the ether of the word source. Who told poets they were supposta pull cut-up whore-half of the other. . . Any book or newsprint. . . plumbing. Let me introduce to you William S. Burroughs writer of many books and essays, original thinker and experimenter with life. "Words don't have brands on them the way cattle do" said Burroughs as he sipped his martini. Beckett scoffed as Burroughs went on, "Shakespeare, Rimbaud, newspapers, magazines, conversations, letters..." He rambled on in his slow drawn out way: "I've used them all." (Morgan 323)

This caused a lot of trouble with other writers and at a writers' conference when he first spoke to the mainstream about his writing. Norman Mailer, a writer at the 1962 conference in Edinburgh, thought of cut-ups as an easy way out, a way of not taking responsibility for your words. It was hard to accept this a real experiment and as something which could really give the writer new ideas. (Morgan 339) But he saw the value of Naked Lunch in his testimony given in the book's 1966 Supreme Court trial. What made taking word from any source morally possible for Burroughs is that he believed he was not acting as a writer but a transcriber of what was already written. Other writers were too caught up in their own ego to be able to write with a clear mind, to see what was already there. For him, it was no trouble if the words he wrote weren't his, since no words belonged to any writer, just like colours don't belong to painters.

They are merely pieces, independent and free. "Writers work with words and voices just as painters work with colors." Burroughs gets his material from everywhere, movies or newspapers. (Burroughs, Adding 19) Brion Gysin agreed with Burroughs; they needed to update writing, bring it into the postmodern time they were in by using the same techniques which were used by painters. "You can't call me the author of these images come trooping out of the colours, now can you?" (Gysin 10) Somehow words were still seen as holy and not free to be used however one wanted.

The main drawback Burroughs and Gysin faced was that words were naturally linear, that is one word follows the preceding one. Painting can happen all at once or in almost any order, since we can see the whole canvas at once. With enough desire to push writing into a new meaning, linearity became another one of those misconceptions about words, at least for the creators of the cut-up. Once a cut-up is made is has to be put to good use. The cut-up of paragraphs and sentences let the brain see a new solution to a problem with a new combination to the order of words.

Writers like Norman Mailer believe that clear and original thinking comes from the writer's mind, talent, from the ego. Burroughs cut-ups were radical in the way they by-passed the ego in making meaning. Burroughs stressed that he didn't see his technique as a final product, though. He used it like any other technique a writer might use, like brainstorming.

What Makes Burroughs' Writing Meaningful Years Later?

Burroughs' writing has been successful for two main reasons. He wrote about the truth he saw and he was entertaining about it. Tragedy and comedy go together well and Burroughs used this to his advantage. In the 1970s while he was living in New York, his secretary, James Grauerholz capitalized on the perforamtive possibilities of his work. "People expected a mysterious, rather awesome figure, and you didn't want to give them a toothless Dracula." His readings became performances as opposed to lectures. (Morgan 478)

Allen Ginsberg saw himself and the writers who surrounded him in the 1940s and 50s as the true inheritors of modern writing. He wanted to make a path far from "faculty tea prose" and "their bloodless, gutless, overintellectual approach." (Morgan)286 Burroughs was one of those writers. While writing Burroughs developed his own kind of meditation where he let his worst fantasies come out instead of trying to ignore them. Allen Ginsberg agreed that even horrible fantasies were valid and needed to be accepted. This would in a sense defuse their power over the fantasizer. Burroughs got stuck on a memory of his childhood nurse and couldn't get past it out of fear. (Morgan 282) But these were the kind of concepts which made up his writing at the time. It was direct in this sense, honest, uncensored. This made the book hard to read for many people.

Naked Lunch was turned down at first but an excerpt was accepted by the Black Mountain Review thanks to Allen Ginsberg and another piece of it appeared in in the Chicago Review in 1958. The University of Chicago fell into controversy because of four-letter words in "Naked Lunch." All six members of the review resigned after they were accused of corruption and the Chicago Review shutdown. All the material was published in a journal called Big Table, which only lasted five issues. But Naked Lunch became known throughout the literary community. (Morgan 296-98)

Today it is still talked about, rarely read from start to finish and has attained a sort of cult status. There is even a film based on the novel . Lawrence Russell, who reviewed the film Naked Lunch, believes "Burroughs was his own experiment. While others used rats, he used himself, although on occasion others - such as his wife - became part of the experiment." (Russell) This is a sensationalistic attempt at critique of Burroughs lifestyle through his novel Naked Lunch and the loosely biographical dramatic feature film by David Cronenberg but barely related to the book by the same name.

The film is a fairly honest look at Burroughs' life in the period when he wrote Naked Lunch beneath the dressings of fiction. The characters names are changed and their exact relationships are fictionalized with a few of Burroughs' most famous characters thrown in like Dr. Benway. Tom Frost in the film resembles the real-life writer from Tangiers, Paul Bowles. The whole film takes place in the USA while Bill Lee (Burroughs character) is conscious and in Interzone when he is hallucinating. Cronenberg uses metaphor and special effects to effectively censor parts of the story which are too obscene to show on screen. (Russell) Dr. Benway is quite evil in the film but he isn't the absolutely corrupt control freak he is in Burroughs' novel. Most of the sexual scenes are missing due to their graphic nature.

"What happened to Steely Dan I ?"
"He was torn in two by a bull dike. Most terrific vaginal grip I ever experienced. She could cave in a lead pipe. It was one of her parlour tricks."
"And Steely Dan II ?"
"Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Baboonsasshole."(Burroughs, Naked 48)

What people think of the man?

Even when Burroughs was an old man, in the 1970s people were afraid of him. Victor Bockris, a friend of his, remembers people being afraid to ask Burroughs to sign their book and instead would ask him. (Bockris xiii) Burroughs was always on the outside. Somehow people were afraid of him since he was a teenager. He was criticized by Philip O'Connor even years after his writing became accepted by the literary community. He believed that much of the avante-garde writing of the 1950s and 60s was done by "ideologcally conservative authors," like James Joyce, Beckett and Burroughs. (Morgan 450-51)

Burroughs was from a bourgeois family and he was submersed into the lower classes as an adult when he met Gregory Corso. Before he only read about junkies and thieves. O'Connor generally criticized modern writing and in this case Burroughs' for be petty and self-absorbed, since Burroughs was supported by the bourgeois he was criticizing. He held onto his old-fashioned values underneath the twist and blur of his personality. Regardless, he rejected the bourgeois life he was born into so he could try to find something more meaningful. Not everyone is able to make the search and because of his money he possibly lived a lot longer than he would have without the financial support of his family.

Advice to Young People

Burroughs was upset when he began to teach at City College in NYC that his students were barely paying attention.

"Be a plumber instead" he felt like shouting, and have your fucking king-size refrigerators full of venison sausages, chilled aquavit and Malvern spring water.... Or be a doctor for chrissakes - once you make the big time as the best asshole doctor that can be got, you won't have to worry that next year there'll be a shortage of assholes." (Burroughs, Adding 28) and (Morgan 472-73)

"Take a walk around the block. Come back and write down precisely what happened with particular attention to what you were thinking when you noticed a street sign, a passing car or stranger or whatever caught your attention. You will observe what you were thinking just before you saw the sign relates to the sign.... Everything is talking to you.... At this point some students become paranoid. I tell them that of course they are getting messages. Your surroundings are your surroundings. Of course they relate to you. (Burroughs, Adding 103-104)

"No control machine so far devised can operate without words, and any control machine which attempts to do so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control. (Burroughs, Adding 117)

Women and Children?

Burroughs has an unfashionable loud mouth. He has a problem with women but it is not a categorical hatred like the legend goes. His so called hatred was not aimed at women only. It went toward people around him, policies, language, even words which he called a virus. There are better words to describe a man who cuts his own finger off to prove a point; unbalanced, crazy etc. He did have many woman friends and respected women writers as well, like Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag. (Bockris 42)

It is popular to discount someone because of an isolated judgement of someone's personality despite their positive influences toward other fields. When Burroughs was in Tangier in 1965... people began to hate him. Chanting outside of his apartment. Fifty veiled women wearing white watched him open his hand above them and they stopped suddenly and left. "They obviously know, he thought, that I am not a friend of women. (Morgan 402) This kind of story only adds to his persona of simply hating women. Burroughs' personal life was a failure, or at least tragic starting with the accidental shooting of his second wife, Joan and ending with the death of his son Billy. Billy had a liver transplant after ruining his liver at only age twenty-nine and died in 1981. (Morgan 500-02)

The Birth of Naked Lunch

In 1954 Burroughs moved to Tangier when he was forty years old. This was partly because he could not stay anyplace else he had lived before. His parents didn't want him living in Palm Beach, where they lived at that time. He has legal problems in New Orleans, Mexico City and New York. (Morgan 225) Tangier was known as an "International Zone" because it was governed by France and Spain. It was a city where almost anyone could become a citizen, as long as you had a passport. Smuggling was common and accepted. (Morgan 237) This was the kind of place Burroughs could be himself. Here, he began to imagine writing a book, novel length, which includes his sardonic vaudvillian routines like the talking asshole. It would be set in "Interzone," which is based on Tangier, and he didn't worry about making it publishable.

The title came from Jack Kerouac from a letter where he mentioned "Naked Lunch," - a place where everything is revealed, where you see what is in front of you clearly. (Morgan 253) This book was the beginning of his new form, totally different than Junky and Queer. During the writing of his novel he tried quitting opiates a few times without much success. By 1956 he was a complete mess and tried to get help from Dr. Dent in London, England. He treated him with apomorphine which slowly replace regular morphine over a period of days. (Morgan 257-8) This cure helped him for a few years.

Alan Ansen came to Tangier to help Burroughs put his "Naked Lunch" manuscript in order. It took two months to assemble and retype the manuscript which was about 200 pages long. It was a collection of notes, dreams, and fantasies from the previous three years. (Morgan 265) In 1957 Burroughs went to Copenhagen to visit an old friend, Kells. He became inspired; his main theme of control addicts and their victims was formed. (Morgan 269) Miss McCarthy noted three exciting new novels at a 1962 International Writer's Conference in Edinbrugh, among them was "Naked Lunch" which reminded her of "jet travel." (Times)

Life Magazine Cuts the Beats Apart

"[The beats] are against work and they are often ill fed, ill clothed and ill-housed by preference. The Negro, it is true, is a hero of the beat (as are the junkie and the jazz musician) ?" reads an article in Life Magazine in 1959. Burroughs is described as "a pale, cadaverous and bespectacled being who has devoted most of his adult life to a lonely pursuit of drugs and debauchery." His trips around the world are mocked and the overtones of 1950s American ethnocentrism permeate the article like mould from a time capsule. As a finale to the article and to capitulate who's ideas became forgotten is the praise of Lawrence Ferlinghetti who is the founder of City Lights Pocket Bookshop. His poem liked by the "Life Magazine" writer goes like this:

He was a kind of carpenter
from a square type place like Galilee
Who said the cat who really laid it on us all was his Dad
They stretch him on this tree to cool....
He just hang there in his tree, looking really petered out
and real cool....
And real dead....

The rest of the beat writers are called amateurs "who have deluded themselves." Reading this forty-five years later I almost want to laugh at how obviously biased this article is but I'm sure it was meant quite seriously as an insult. Its more like a lecture from Dad than critique of the beats, which only shows how misunderstood and resented they were. Burroughs writing style is "made more startling by the fact that he has found the will to write at all."

The rest of the article questions the value of any questions aimed at the convenience of modern (1950s) America which makes is quite hard to take seriously after seeing the survival of the beats and the demise of 1950s values. (Life) The Burroughs family was upset by the article but they mostly worried about their own reputation and wanted to make sure their son would not return to the United States. (Morgan)

Why I Wrote This

Besides taking a course called Directed Readings and needing to get a final grade... I agree with Burroughs about transcribing from some mystical place. I take photographs and most of my images are really "samples" or cut-ups of life. It's someone's face, building, street which I use in my photos. Someone even built the camera I'm using. I am only the transcriber of images, or more like a mirror-aimer. So I've been interested in Burroughs for many years and I thought it was about time to make some conclusions about him, read more about his life, his surroundings. For this Ted Morgan's biography was excellent. I inadvertently read the whole book despite the 650 pages it contains. This journal/essay/commentary on the biography and how it relates to other sources has helped me come to some conclusions and will also hopefully prove to you what I have read. You can try to cut up some text of your own choosing using the Cut-Up Machine. Visit The Cutup Machine using Safari on the Mac or most PC browsers.

Selected Bibliography