The Cut Ups (1966)
By William S. Burroughs
Open Culture: In 1920, Dadaist extraordinaire Tristian Tzara described in his manifesto how to write a poem, Dada-style. It involved cutting up the words from a text, dumping them into a bag and then pulling out the words randomly. “And there you are,” he wrote. “An infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.” Who would have thought that Tzara’s avant-garde methods would be adapted into a successful line of refrigerator magnets? In 1959, William S. Burroughs had just published his notorious non-linear masterpiece Naked Lunch (heard him read it here) when he came across the “cut-up” methods of British artist Brion Gysin, which were influenced by Tzara. Soon the author started using cut-up techniques explicitly in his own work, particularly in his The Nova Trilogy. Unlike Tzara, who believed that cut-ups would reveal the utter absurdity of the world, Burroughs argued that language was a means of control that locked us into traditional ways of thinking. The cut-up was one way of blunting that control with new, unexpected juxtapositions. Excited by the possibilities of the cut-up, he experimented with it in a number of different…
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