The Cutup in the
work of William S. Burroughs
“Life is a
Cutup”-William S. Burroughs
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Burroughs was introduced to the cutup technique by Brion
Gysin (a painter) whilst they were staying in the Beat Hotel in Paris in
1959.The cutup technique is somewhat similar to montage techniques used in
painting and structural film editing popularized by Eisenstein. “Burroughs
immediately saw the similarity to the juxtaposition technique he had used in
Naked Lunch (Grove Press 1959) and began extensive experimentation with text, often
in collaboration with other writers”.[1]
The cutup is essentially a mechanical method of
juxtaposition in which Burroughs literally cuts up passages of prose by himself
and other writers and then pastes them back together at random. Burroughs often
supplemented this literary version of the collage technique by transcribing
taped cutups(several tapes spliced into each other),film cutups(montage) and
mixed media experiments(results of combining tapes with television, movies, or
actual events.[2] The
fruition of these experiments can most clearly be seen in two avant-garde films
with which he collaborated with Gysin and director Anthony Balch entitled
“Towers Open Fire”(1963) and “The Cutups”(1963).
Cutup Theory
As Burroughs experimented with the Cutup technique he began
to develop a theory of the Cutup and incorporated this into his pseudoscience
of addiction. “Along with drugs, sex and power as examples of man’s addictive
nature, Burroughs added an analysis of control over human beings exercised by
language (“The Word”), time and space (i.e man’s physical existence and mental
constructs he uses to survive and adapt).”[3]
“In Burroughs cutup theory drugs, sex and power control the
body, but “word and image locks” control the mind, that is “lock” us into
conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking and speaking that determine our
interactions with environment and society. The cutup is a way of exposing word
and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness
that occurs in both the writer and reader of the text”[4]
For Burroughs as an artist, the cutup is an impersonal
method of inspiration, invention and an arrangement that redefines the work of
art as a process that occurs in collaboration with others and is not the sole
property of artists. Thus Burroughs cutup texts are comparable to similar
contemporary experiments in other arts, such as action painting, happenings and
aleatory music. His theory of the cutup also parallels avant-garde literary
theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction.[5]
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