What was William S Burroughs’ cut-up method?
Do you remember the lessons at school about writing stories? On a piece of paper, you’d draw a perfect arch. It starts with the introduction, building up to a climax where the action happens and then settles into a conclusion. The narrative moves along in an understandable order, actions make sense, characters develop over time—that’s how it usually goes.
Now take that piece of paper and rip it to shreds. Welcome to William S Burroughs‘ world.
Ripping it to pieces is perhaps the best way to explain the cut-up technique. Burroughs was taking stories, more typical, traditional stories, and then tearing them up into bits and shuffling them all about. And I mean physically. Though sometimes this was more of a mental practice as his brain jumped from idea to idea, it often was a physical act of tearing up his notepads, taking razor blades to finished works and genuinely hacking them into something new, something without any order or a clear beginning, middle and end.
It didn’t begin with Burroughs, although it’s now most closely tied to his name. It started with the Dada crowd, one of the many anti-establishment art movements that popped up, rejecting traditional art forms or traditional ways of handling their art.
Originally, the Dadaists were taking it incredibly literally in performances where artists would take a finished and linear text and physically cut it up. Then, the scraps would be rearranged into something new that was completely without the original clear story. Or, they’d take a page of text and fold it all up, achieving the same thing in the end by taking a traditional piece and mangling it.
Those things led to an early wave of writers who felt they had permission to cast off the need to make things make sense. By the time Burroughs came along, he could already cite a few other inspirations that moved him in the literary world. Alongside the original Dadaists, he’d point out TS Eliot as a key one, especially his meandering poem ‘The Waste Land’.
Burroughs took it further, though. While Elliot’s work still loosely rotated around a theme or jumped more obviously between marked sections, he tore it up even more. That’s partly because he introduced copious amounts of drugs into the mix and was writing with a mind so intoxicated that it wouldn’t have been able to work in a linear structure even if he tried. But with the help of the Beat Generation, he not only turned that into a literary phenomenon with his own novels, but he furthered the theory and awareness on the method by writing The Third Mind, a 1977 collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form, put together alongside Brion Gysin, a multi-media artist who was also fascinated by the rejection of structure.
From there on, it kept growing. The idea of defying traditional storytelling for something more abstract has been found across everything from literature to film to music. In a similar vein to the way that Burroughs’ stories and characters have inspired other artists, his actual methods have influenced the very way that creatives across all media work.
Artists inspired by William S Burroughs’ cut-up method:
- David Bowie: From the early 1970s onwards, the cut-up method would play a part in Bowie’s lyric writing, especially during the Thin White Duke era.
- Thom Yorke and Radiohead: During the making of Kid A, Yorke would put lines into a hat and draw them out at random for lyrics.
- The Beatles: The Fab Four became friends with Burroughs and actually helped him too, as McCartney recalled, “Burroughs and I hung out, and he’d borrowed my reel-to-reel a few times to work on his cut-ups”.
- Kurt Cobain: Cobain was hugely inspired by Burroughs as a young boy, and used to read the writer letters and recordings, trying to impress him with his own cut-up creations.
- Cabaret Voltaire: Stephen Mallinder applied the cut-up method to the actual tapes the band would record on, adopting it into their technical handling of sound.
- Kathy Acker: The writer used the cut-up method for parts of Blood and Guts in High School.
