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William Burroughs (1914-1997), the last humanist?
Department of Literature and Languages of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
December 12th 2014
(Photos by Yuri Zupancic with his permission)
Published at Hyperallergic as
On His 100th Birthday, a Conference Considers William Burroughsʼs Humanist Legacy
http://hyperallergic.com/171506/on-his-100th-birthday-a-conference-considers-william-burroughss-humanist-
legacy/
Burroughs’ 100th birthday poster
With determined indeterminacy, young Mathilde Louette initiated a perplexing (but hip)
four-hour English language centenary celebration of William S. Burroughs’ 100th
birthday for Paris, home to the writer on and off between 1958 and 1966. In her
introduction to the Burroughs' inspired talks, discussions and presentations, Louette
reminded us that it was a Parisian publisher, Maurice Girodias, whose daring publishing
house Olympia Press, first put into print Monsieur Burroughs’ unforgettable non-linear
narrative work, Naked Lunch (sometimes The Naked Lunch); a dreamlike, highly sexual
and drug charged stream of freely associated vignettes that together make for an
impressionistic, if disjointed, masterpiece (one that underwent a court case under U.S.
sodomy laws).
Olympia Press cover of The Naked Lunch (wikipedia)
Didier Girard
To begin the celebration in fascinating fashion, Didier Girard copiously explored
Burroughs work in comparison to automatons (self-operating human-like mechanism)
and two literary outcasts: Jean Genet and Denton Welch. Then Benoît Delaune spoke on
the creative cut-up technique and its implications, reminding the audience that the Beat
writer (as influenced by Brion Gysin – an artist known predominantly for his rediscovery
of the Dada master Tristan Tzara's cut-up technique and for co-inventing the flickering
kinetic optical sculpture “Dreamachine” (1958)) popularized the literary cut-up technique
in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64), named after his 1964 novel Nova Express.
(Do watch Andre Perkowski’s film adaptation of Nova Express).
Burroughs (who died in 1997) employed the cut-up method so as to achieve an anti-
narrative procedure that involved randomly splicing together phrases from various
sources and inserting them into his own text. However Delaune failed to mention that
Burroughs and Gysin worked together in the early 1960s on a publishing project called
The Third Mind that used chance based cut-up method, the basis for an interesting art
show by the same name that was curated by Ugo Rondinone for the Palais de Tokyo in
2007.
Benoît Delaune
In brief, cut-up method consists of cutting up and randomly reassembling various
fragments of something to give them a completely new and unexpected meaning. 1+1=3
(However, I once heard Martin Scorsese speak about how any editing together of two
shots in a film creates a third subjective image effect in the mind of the viewer.) In the
excellent biography of Allen Ginsburg, Celebrate Myself, Ginsburg’s archivist, Bill
Morgan, recounts some of the genesis of Gysin and Burroughs forays into radical Dada
cut-up technique/collaboration based on Ginsburg’s diary entries. (Ginsburg remained
highly skeptical of cutting up for some time, but following his travels in India came to
appreciate the cut-up technique; even while never employing it.) Gysin in the mid-50s
pointed out to Burroughs that collage technique has been a regular tool in painting and art
graphics since half a century. This came as late news to the Beat writers, so it is perhaps
unsurprising that Ginsburg’s first exposure to Burroughs’s use of the cut-up was met with
distain – Ginsburg considered it something along the lines of a parlor trick. (p. 318) Even
more, Ginsburg speculated from NYC that Burroughs had lost his mind through lack of
sex (note: Burroughs lusted after Ginsburg, mostly in vain). As a joke, Ginsburg and
Peter Orlovsky cut up some of their own poems and rearranged them and sent them to
Burroughs with the note “Just having a little fun mother.” (pp. 318 – 319). However,
Burroughs was so dedicated to the random cut-up method that he often defended his use
of the technique. When Ginsburg and Orlovsky arrived in Tangiers in 1961, Burroughs
was working on an even more advanced use of the cut-up; he and Ian Sommerville were
cutting and splicing audiotapes and Burroughs was making collages from newspapers and
photographs while proclaiming that poetry and words were dead. (pp. 331-332)
Burroughs however soon began work on a cut-up novel, the Soft Machine - drawing
material from The Word Hoard. The Word Hoard is a collection of Burroughs’s
manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, and London that all together created the super
mother-load manuscript that served as the basis for much of Burroughs’s cut-up writings:
The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, (together referred to as The
Nova Trilogy or Nova Epic). Even Naked Lunch was taken from sections of The Word
Hoard. There was also produced a text called Dead Fingers Talk in 1963 which contains
excerpts from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded - combined
together to create a new narrative.
Also, via Burroughs’s artistic collaborations with Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the cut-up
technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape
recorders. Some of these recordings can be heard here. Sommerville was regularly
speaking of building electrical cut-up machines.
Jean-Jacques Lebel (left) and Barry Miles
Jean-Jacques Lebel (left) and Barry Miles
Jean-Jacques Lebel (left) and Barry Miles
Following Delaune’s talk, Burroughs’s biographer, Barry Miles and artist/scholar Jean-
Jacques Lebel had a expansive discussion about Burroughs’s time in Paris at the Beat
Hotel (at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur). It was a warm exchange that revealed an interesting
incident that occurred between Marcel Duchamp, Burroughs, Ginsburg and Peter
Orlovsky. At his father’s party, Lebel introduced them (stoned and drunk, respectively) to
Duchamp. Orlovsky decided it would be Dada-apropos to cut Duchamp’s tie off (as
Tristan Tzara reportedly did) and went ahead. Mortified, Ginsburg got down on his knees
and started passionately kissing Duchamp’s knees, while the smacked-out Burroughs
stonely took it all in.
This centenary celebration concluded with the screening of “The Cut-Ups” (1966), an
incredible trance (or flee) inducing film that Burroughs made with Antony Balch. This
was part of an abandoned project called “Guerrilla Conditions,” footage meant as a
documentary on Burroughs filmed throughout 1961-1965. Inspired by Burroughs' and
Gysin's technique of cutting up text and rearranging in random order, Balch had an editor
cut his footage for the documentary into little pieces and he imposed random control over
its reassembly. Included in “The Cut-Ups” are shots of Burroughs acting out dystopian
scenes from Naked Lunch. “The Cut-Ups”, “Ghost at n°9 (Paris)” (1963-72), a
posthumously released short film compiled from reels found at Balch’s office after his
death, “William Buys a Parrott” (1982) and others films can be seen here.
Even if we set aside the uncomfortable fact that in 1951 Burroughs shot and killed Joan
Vollmer, his common-law wife, in a drunken game of "William Tell" at a party above the
American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City, I found it rather a stretch to classify
Burroughs as humanistic, even if the final. In that an avant-garde posthuman artist is one
that works on situated (rather than universal) objectivity - creating meaning in art through
the play between constructions of information patterns and the randomness of the on-off
switches of digital binary systems - (something roughly synonymous with the cyborg
theory of Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto), my take away (especially after seeing
Burroughs again in the context of the random chance operation of the cut-up) veered
wildly from the conferences premise. I more clearly came to see Burroughs as one of the
first visionary posthuman artists. One already investigating issues of control and de-
control that are so relevant to our age of post-Snowden meta-paranoia.
Joseph Nechvatal