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