Cut-ups
A cut-up takes a text that already exist and rearranges the words in a different order. The effect of this literary method is to fracture the original meaning of the text somewhat, and point to a new one. The new meaning is related to the old one, but often moves into a non-literal or surreal dimension. I first encountered cut-ups in William Burroughs’ writing, in books like The Wild Boys. To give a proper example of his cut-up style, I would have to quote a fair amount of text, and it would be too much for fair practice. In addition to The Wild Boys, I would point interested readers to the trilogy that includes Cities of The Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. Of course there is his most famous book, Naked Lunch, which I’m sure a lot of folks have read. I’m curious to hear Burroughs’ effect on other people here. He can be polarizing.
Burroughs did write straight-narrative very well; well, not straight, ha-ha, but Queer. Queer is one of my favorite books of his, even as it is an outlier from the rest of his oeuvre. It’s a good place to start if you haven’t read Burroughs, because it’s relatively short, and hits some of his key themes. There are no cut-ups in Queer – just sharp, devastating prose. Burroughs’ vernacular is all his own – it’s something indelibly American, but it’s drier and sparer than his Beat cohorts Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The Beats always seemed to me essentially latter-day Romantics, and you could think of Burroughs as a Beat-Brahms counterfoil to Kerouac’s more Wagnerian trumpeting. Burroughs, even when he is disturbingly direct in his descriptions of sex and heroin use, is not really a straight-up libertine in the same way as Kerouac was. He’s verklempt all the way through, reckoning with his own carnality, aware of his predicament. That’s the vibe in Queer.
My friend Joe at Merrywood “music camp” as we called it, in Lenox, MA., introduced me to Naked Lunch when I was 13 and he was 14, along with Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn/Tropic of Cancer, and Anaïs Nin’s erotica. All of these books shocked and excited me in their sexually transgressive nature, at the time when my own sexuality was under formation, and in their candid, ecstatic affirmation of a libertine ethos more generally. I was on board right away.
