{"id":72649,"date":"2024-01-12T11:05:49","date_gmt":"2024-01-12T16:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=72649"},"modified":"2025-01-15T16:46:23","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T21:46:23","slug":"burroughs-gysin-tzara-tracing-the-cut-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2024\/01\/12\/burroughs-gysin-tzara-tracing-the-cut-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Burroughs, Gysin & Tzara: tracing the cut-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Burroughs, Gysin & Tzara: tracing the cut-up<\/h3>\n
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William Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin. Minutes to Go. Paris: Two Cities, 1960.<\/p><\/div>\n

“Tzara did it all before.” –Gregory Corso, Minutes To Go<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps the most influential and widespread ‘technique’ or method in contemporary art and culture has been the cut-up. The use of assemblage and collage in sculpture and cubism, its growing use in literary works from Mallarm\u00e9, DADA, Cinema, to William Burroughs, and its steady integration in contemporary music, techno and digital culture.<\/p>\n

“The Word is a Virus,” said William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), author of Naked Lunch<\/a><\/em>, which was perhaps the first novel to use the cut-up method to such a shocking degree. Burroughs was a student of Egyptian and Mayan image-based writing systems and saw he power of the word as avisual tool. He used cut-ups throughout his career including his last major work, the Red Night<\/em> trilogy, with its multiple themes of Egyptian myth, ESP, space aliens, systems of control, an apocalyptic virus, alternative histories with jarring flashbacks, and forays into the afterlife. Burroughs’s darkly humorous routines, and his old Naked Lunch<\/em> sidekick Dr. Benway<\/a> make return engagements in his writings. The trilogy consists of: Cities of the Red Night<\/em>, The Place of Dead Roads<\/em>, and The Western Lands<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Cities of the Red Night<\/a><\/em> introduces virus B-23, a virus that mutates after a meteor strike<\/a> in Siberia, destroying 800 square miles of forest and causing the ‘Red Night syndrome’: a souped-up radioactive virus that increases sexual desire (among other side effects) and that eventually eliminates humankind.<\/p>\n

It is the human virus. After many thousands of years of more of less benign coexistence, it is now once again on the verge of malignant mutation.” \u2014Wm. S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Inspired by Norman Mailer’s hypnotic bestseller Ancient Evenings<\/a><\/em>, Burroughs invokes Egyptian deities throughout the final trilogy volume: The Western Lands<\/a><\/em>\u2014a title named after the Egyptian land of the dead.<\/p>\n

Burroughs’s use of cut-ups from Naked Lunch<\/em> to his word-virus trilogy, were admittedly lifted from his life-long co-conspirator Brion Gysin (1916-1986): novelist, visual artist, and inventor of the Dream Machine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the early 1970s, Burroughs and Gysin collaborated on The Third Mind<\/em>, a manifesto of cut-up techniques. A 2010 exhibition, Byron Gysin: Dream Machine<\/a>, showed the history of their collaborations at the New Museum. In this short interview<\/a> with Laura Hoptman, the exhibition’s curator, she explains the Burroughs\/Gysin experiments and their lifelong relationship.<\/p>\n