The Cut - Up Method of Brion Gysin

There is nothing new under the sun. Here, William Burroughs—adding machine fortune heir, junkie, killer of his wife, most challenging and complex of the Beat writers—describes a technique itself based on earlier experiments of the surrealists, which in turn had their origins centuries before, in techniques of very literal “cut and paste” editing. It is quite fitting that Burroughs invoked computing pioneer John von Neumann in tracing the uses of the cut-up method, for these techniques have been employed in many aspects of new media, in computer literary practice as well as game theory. That they are not novel should not deter writers from use of these techniques. Although drawing words out of a hat to form a poem may be old hat, it can still be an effective technique for textual production. It can also suggest different techniques which are genuinely new. There have been plenty of “surrealist” poetry generators available on the Web for years. Their invocation of surrealism is misleading. Generating texts directly for readers by means of computerapproximated randomness is not what the Surrealists or Burroughs meant to suggest. Burroughs indicates, rather, that randomness and recombination can be used by an author as an intermediate step in composition. The surrealists were uninterested in tossing dice unless the throw might help to coax something up from the unconsciousness. It is only in juxtaposition with our personal and social ghosts, as Italo Calvino writes, that randomly-retrieved words resonate. Those using the cut-up method should note that it is hardly incompatible with the process of revision. In fact, this very article was substantially revised and expanded by Burroughs between its first appearance in 1961 and its publication in a 1978 book that he and Brion Gysin edited. In the much shorter original article, Burroughs wrote that “The cut-up method was used in Naked Lunch without the author’s full awareness of the method he was using. . . . Subsequently I used the method with awareness scissors in Minutes to Go and The Exterminator.” He encouraged cut-up creators to “Cut paper cut film cut tape” and to employ “Scissors or switch blade as preferred.” Although the claim was made that a book, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed, has been generated by computer alone, few who have studied the text (and the program that purportedly generated it, Racter) believe this claim. Rather, it seems certain that Racter was loaded with special, additional templates to generate a draft, which was then edited into its published shape by a human editor. A similar method was used without dissimulation by Charles O. Hartman, who has written computer programs, had them programmatically mangle texts, and then has gone on to use the texts in creating poems. More recently, free software has been used to generate metrical, rhymed sonnets. These are descendants of the traditional poetic cut-up form, the cento, cross-bred with Burroughs’s cut-up technique and the combinatorial and procedural methods of the Oulipo (◊12). —NM Burroughs’s article was published just before Ted Nelson( ◊11) coined the term “hypertext” in a famous piece which also imagined decomposing and rearranging the traditional hierarchical text.