The inside critic creates author’s block and stifles adventurous writing, hems it in with secure clichés and overassumeing. Each author has to search out his or her personal solution to get freed from that bitterpuss rationalist who insists on strangling every thought with logical analysis and matchting every concept into an oppressive predetermined scheme or ideology. William S. Burroughs, one of the adventurous writers to emerge from the mid-Twentieth century, well-knownly employed what he known as the cut-up methodology.
Developed by Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin, this literary tackle the collage technique utilized by avant-garde artists like Georges Braque originated with Surrealist Tristan Tzara, who “professionalposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling phrases out of a hat.” The suggestion was so provocative, Burroughs claims in his essay “The Minimize-Up Technique,” that cut-ups had been thereafter “floored… on the Freudian sofa.”
Since Burroughs and Gysin’s literary redeployment of the tactic in 1959, it has proved useful not just for poets and novelists, however for musicwriters like David Bowie and Kurt Cobain. And any frustrated novelist, poet, or musicauthor might use it to shake off the behaviorual thought patterns that cage creativity or choke it off wholely. How so?
Nicely, it’s greatest at this level to defer to the creatority, Burroughs himself, who explains the cut-up technique thus:
The strategy is simple. Right here is one solution to do it. Take a web page. Like this web page. Now reduce down the middle and cross the middle. You have got 4 sections: 1 2 3 4 … one two three 4. Now rearrange the sections placing section 4 with section one and section two with section three. And you’ve got a brand new web page. Someoccasions it says a lot the identical factor. Someoccasions somefactor fairly totally different–(reducing up political speeches is an interesting train)–in any case you’ll discover that it says somefactor and a fewfactor fairly definite. Take any poet or author you fancy. Right heresay, or poems you might have learn over many occasions. The phrases have misplaced implying and life by means of years of repetition. Now take the poem and kind out chooseed passages. Fill a web page with excerpts. Now reduce the web page. You have got a brand new poem. As many poems as you want.
Burroughs provides us “a method” to do it. There could also be infinite others, and it’s as much as you to search out what works. I actually have pushed by means of a creative funk by making montages from scraps of historic poetry and phrases of modern pop, clichés ripped from the pinnacletraces and esoteric quotes from obscure religious texts—pieced together kind of at random, then edited to suit the type of a music, poem, or whatever. Virtual cut-and-paste makes scissors unnecessary, however the physical act might precipitate epiphanies. “Photos shift sense beneath the scissors,” Burroughs writes; then he hints at a synesthesia experience: “scent photos to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic.”
Who is that this methodology for? Eachone, Burroughs asserts. “Cuts ups are for eachone,” simply as Tzara remarked that “poetry is for eachone.” No have to have established some experimalestal artwork world bona fides, and even name oneself an artist in any respect; the tactic is “experimalestal within the sense of being somefactor to do.” Within the brief video on the high, you possibly can hear Burroughs clarify the technique further, including his occult spin on issues by noting that many cut-ups “appear to check with future occasions.” On that account, we might suspend perception.
As Jennie Skerl notes in her essay on Burroughs, cut-up theory “parallels avant-garde literary theory” like Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction. “All writing is the truth is reduce ups,” writes Burroughs, implying not that each one writing is pieced together with scissors and glue, however that it’s all “a collage of phrases learn heard overheard.” This theory ought to liberate us from onerous notions of originality and authenticity, tied to concepts of the creator as a sui generis, all-knowing god and the textual content as an expression of cosmically ordered implying. (Another surrealist writing methodology, the sport of Exquisite Corpse, makes the purpose literal.) All that metaphysical baggage weighs us down. Eachfactor’s been accomplished—each effectively and badly—earlier than, Burroughs writes. Follow his methods and his insistent creative maxim and you maynot make a mistake—“Assume that the worst has happened,” he writes, “and act accordingly.”
Notice: An earlier version of this put up appeared on our web site in 2016.
Related Content:
How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Burroughs’ Minimize-Up Technique
The “Priest” They Referred to as Him: A Darkish Collaboration Between Kurt Cobain & William S. Burroughs
How William S. Burroughs Used the Minimize-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)
What Happens When the Books in William S. Burroughs’ Personal Library Get Artistically Organized — with His Personal “Minimize-Up” Technique
How Jim Jarmusch Will get Creative Concepts from William S. Burroughs’ Minimize-Up Technique and Brian Eno’s Indirect Strategies
Josh Jones is a author and musician primarily based in Durham, NC.
