BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is the most important new publication by William S. Burroughs not only since the writer’s death in 1997 but quite possibly since The Third Mind made it into print in 1978. Burroughs wrote a number of books in the final decades of his life. His estate, under the leadership of James Grauerholz, has done a terrific job putting out revised editions as well as previously unpublished material including correspondence, journals, and “lost” works. But BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is of a different, higher caliber. The book, never quite finished by Burroughs, brings together typescripts he wrote from May to November 1960. This was a sort of annus mirabilis for Burroughs. In 1960, he was getting a handle on how to use the cut-up technique, discovered by Brion Gysin the previous October. He was learning how to transfer the technique over to tape recorders and he was considering doing the same with a film camera. He was taking mescaline and LSD for the first time. He was experimenting with the flicker phenomenon. These were preoccupations that would inform his work for the next decade, when Burroughs was arguably the riskiest, most relevant writer on the planet. BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS comes to us direct from this period of Burroughs’ greatness and offers a new take on what he was doing — an “uncut kick that opens out instead of narrowing down like junk,” to borrow a phrase from Junkie.

BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is one of a quartet of cut-up publications newly “oliverized” by Oliver Harris. Since working with Burroughs on the first volume of his collected correspondence, Harris has almost singlehandedly created a corpus of Burroughs editions which usually takes a team of scholars and a university press to assemble. Marking the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the cut-up in fall 1959, Harris now adds to the list Dead Fingers Talk, newly released by Alma Books, as well as Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, and BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, all published by Moloko. The books have been rigorously edited, copiously annotated, and furnished with thoughtful introductions that explain their genesis, context, and intent. Dead Fingers Talk is rescued from neglect by Harris’ contention that the book, once “derided as a ‘mishmash’ and a ‘rehash,’ we now recognize as a literary prototype of mashup and remix.” Minutes to Go and The Exterminator, with Burroughs’ assertion that the cut-ups were “virus time bombs,” feel as fresh as ever in the era of Covid-19. But it is BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS that is revelatory.

Many readers will have had a premonition of BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS in “The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah,” known for the recording of Burroughs incanting it in a hypnotically glowering voice. “Last Words” was the text that opened up the whole of BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS for Burroughs. He wrote it in May 1960, describing it as “the testament of Hassan i Sabbah which came to me under mescaline,” and sent a draft to publisher Dave Haselwood. It was too late to include “Last Words” in The Exterminator, which Haselwood was just about to put out under the auspices of his Auerhahn Press. (Burroughs called the finished book “not bad” but Haselwood did a beautiful job designing and printing it, meriting it a place on Jed Birmingham’s list of the top 23 Burroughs collectibles.) Burroughs then included “Last Words” in a second manuscript which he sent to Haselwood on August 30, 1960, with the idea that Auerhahn would publish a follow-up called EXTERMINATOR II or THE INITIATOR. Never one to consider a text finished, Burroughs kept working on the material and added several further chapters. It is that never-published Auerhahn manuscript and the additional chapters which Harris has recovered from various archives to create BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, deriving the title from a phrase that recurs in the material.

In an introduction, Harris describes how he discovered a batch of the texts in the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library. What struck him about the material was not what the texts were about but what they looked like. “What holds [the typescripts] together,” Harris writes, “and gave rise to BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS as a ‘lost manuscript’ in the first place, is chiefly the visible appearance of the text on the page: its wholesale use of BLOCK CAPITALS.” For page after page Burroughs wrote as though the shift key on his typewriter was jammed in the on position. When you first start reading BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, the all caps approach hardly seems worthy of the radical writer. It’s a crude stylistic technique, a beginner move comparable to Burroughs’ unfortunate use of homonyms. (“Meating for “meeting,” “copy write” for “copyright,” “Fraud” for “Freud” — Burroughs doing dad jokes.) The vibe e.e. cummings established using lowercase letters was casual, like people today who text without capitals or punctuation, whereas BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS rants, screams, and harangues. After a while, you realize that what makes the all caps technique effective is precisely that Burroughs pushed it, as he pushed the cut-up technique itself, to an extreme. The style is telegraphic but Harris points out that “a ten-thousand-word cable is a contradiction in terms, overloading the page and making BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS alienating to read.” That’s why it works — excess, audacity, Burroughs steeling himself to take a method to the bitter end.

It is precisely that commitment to the cut-up technique that made Burroughs its lord and master. The dabblers — Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso, Harold Norse — cut up a few texts then filed the technique away as a party trick. Burroughs locked in on it. He developed various procedures for manipulating text (cutting, folding, reading across columns, working in grids, adding visual elements). He extended the cut-up into sound and film. He theorized about it. One of the fantastic things about BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is that you can see Burroughs taking the technique to a new level. The first few months of cut-ups produced ruins, texts that were difficult to read or make sense of. Here’s the beginning of “Everywhere March Your Head” from Minutes to Go.

A rap of
sound
A.

turns
Urns back O
Our lots con
the   time to you

change
no mat
desires
Arrival of////

What counted in this early cut-up was the bold gesture, the assertion that something interesting happened when you chopped up a poem by Rimbaud. Now look at what happens when “Everywhere March Your Head” mutates in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS.

YES I AM TALKING TO YOU “MR BRADLY VIRUS ADDING MACHINE MORE ME MARTIN.” YOU ANAL NARCISSISTIC BASTARD HAVE STOCKED A PLANET WITH YOUR STUPID SELF. EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR LOUSY GRADE B HEAD. I REPEAT DEACTIVATE YOUR STUPID THE GIMMICK. IS THAT CLEAR ENOUGH OR SHALL I MAKE IT EVEN CLEARER?? GET UP OFF YOUR DEAD TIME ASS AND RUB OUT YOUR STUPID WORD.

It’s prose poetry. It’s fairly comprehensible, especially in context or for anyone familiar with the language of Burroughs’ cut-ups. “Everywhere March Your Head” was clearly a product of the scissors. But the BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS paragraph is the product of something else. Burroughs often said that out of a whole page of cut prose he might only take a phrase or two. In BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS we can see him taking these phrases, memorizing them, manipulating them, repeating them, transforming them into mantras, crafting them into paragraphs whose disjunctions take away little from their intelligibility. “EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR LOUSY GRADE B HEAD” makes sense now. It means something like “you’re always letting your ego get in the way.” Burroughs is doing something he had never before done with the cut-up. He is internalizing it but also making it speak in character. In “Last Words,” he speaks in the person of Hassan Sabbah. In “THE MASTER OF TIME,” he speaks in the person of the “lord of time.” (“STAND ASIDE MR BURROUGHS OF SPACE AND LISTEN TO THE LORD OF TIME.”) In “CALLED THE LAW,” he speaks in the person of a B-movie gangster. (“WITH HIS LAST MOOCHED NICKEL FROM GYSIN BURROUGHS SNEAKED OFF TO THE PAY PHONE AND CALLED THE LAW.”)

In all these instances, Burroughs’ aim is to be insurrectionary. “THESE ARE BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS. SHIFT LINGUALS/ VIBRATE TOURISTS/ /FREE DOORWAYS/ /CUT WORD LINES/ /SHIFT TANGLE CUT ALL WORD LINES.” The book takes the revolutionary cant of texts such as Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Mao’s Little Red Book and makes something poetic out of it. In Mao’s case, Burroughs literally borrows from the Little Red Book, repeating the phrase “ENEMY ADVANCE WE RETREAT. ENEMY RETREAT WE ADVANCE. ENEMY ENCAMP WE AGITATE. ENEMY TIRE WE ATTACK” in different contexts and permutations. Who and what were the targets Burroughs was taking aim at with his Molotov cocktails of capital letters? Capitalists, media moguls, governments, liars, collaborators and cowards, as well as insect people, bird people, crab people, “TRAITORS TO ALL SOULS EVERYWHERE.” Presumably we are to read these various animal peoples as metaphors, much the same as David Cronenberg transformed paregoric and heroin into bug powder and mugwump jism in his film of Naked Lunch.

In the introduction, Harris reverse engineers one of these metaphors — the phrase “Elders of Minraud,” which recurs in many Burroughs cut-ups of the 1960s. It turns out that Burroughs derived the phrase “from the definitive anti-Semitic conspiracy text, much admired by Henry Ford as well as Adolf Hitler, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” In “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” Burroughs declared that he had “no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch” — a statement he made not because it was true but because he was trying to beat a drug charge in France. Similarly, Burroughs tried to insulate the inflammatory material in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS by saying it was just “ABSTRACT LITERATURE” — a literary equivalent of abstract painting, an exercise in the formal use of words that has nothing to do with their content. He wrote to Haselwood on June 24, 1960.

I do not subscribe to any of the sentiments expressed necessarily. Are not personal opinions. Only a transcription of voices along the streets and quarters where I pass. Abstract literature. Not personal opinions. Do these plots really exist? How in the fuck should I know? Just a writer is all. Just an artisan. Not running for office. Just writing what I see and hear in my imagination. Pure abstract literature.

But Burroughs was well aware the content was not incidental. He wrote to his friend Bill Belli on June 11, “I am only concerned with what they [Jews] represent… Is that Anti-Semitism? I don’t think so.” In one recording of “Last Words,” Burroughs says, “I RUB OUT THE WORD JEW” — which he literally did as he revised the text. He deleted “JEW.” Harris ponders this “gap of silence… a trace of erasure and elimination loaded with historical meaning.” Does the erasure “clean” the text of its anti-semitic elements? Or does it merely encode a sort of exterminating of the Jews?

One irony to the anti-semitism in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is that the book can be reminiscent of one of the greatest works of Jewish literature — Ecclesiastes. It may sound crazy to say this. Gysin had encouraged Burroughs to cut up the Song of Songs, and Burroughs reworked the Christian Gospel every time he wrote a variation on “IN THEE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD.” It is doubtful Burroughs had Ecclesiastes in mind as he was writing in 1960 and yet, underneath its revolutionary posturing, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS frequently echoes the prophet’s suspicious attitude toward the flesh.

I DONT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR SUFFERING. ALL YOUR WHINING WHIMPERING HUMAN SHIT. OF COURSE YOU SUFFER. BECAUSE YOU WONT TURN LOOSE OF YOUR STUPID BODIES. YOUR STUPID ORGANIC LIFE. YOUR MORE ME EQUATION.

It’s a shorter distance than expected from the refrain “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” in Ecclesiastes to “ALL OUT OF TIME AND INTO SPACE” in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS. Both texts preach, use repetition for poetic effect, and assume that life is suffering. William Burroughs as religious writer? Hardly — yet BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS implies that victory involves what Burroughs once calls “spirit” and more often calls “awareness.”

PROPHET OF DESPAIR? I THINK NOT. I BELIEVE THAT ORGANIC LIFE AS WE KNOW IT HAS OR WILL REACH AN IMPASSE. CALLEJON SIN SALIDA. DEAD END. I AFFIRM SPIRIT AS FACT… WHEN I SAY: “ALL OUT OF TIME AND INTO SPACE,” I AM URGING ALL PEOPLE EVERYWHERE TO MOVE IN THE DIRECTION OF INCREASED AWARENESS. TO MOVE OUT FROM THE BODY WITH ITS TIME BOUND ANIMAL REACTIONS OF DEFENSE AGGRESSION ACQUISITIVENESS. NOT IN PURITANICAL BUT IN EXPLORATORY DIRECTION.

It’s not hypocrisy to hear this from a man who spent much of his life in the grip of substances that reduce awareness. That’s precisely the sort of person who would be sensitized to it.

If there is a hero in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, however, it is not an Old Testament prophet but the Old Man of the Mountain. During those same feverish months at the Beat Hotel when Gysin showed Burroughs the cut-up technique, he also gave him Betty Bouthul’s book Le grand maître des Assassins. The master of the assassins was something like a 12th century Charles Manson, using drugs to gain control over his followers’ minds so that they willingly killed for him. The story took root in Burroughs’ imagination. He adopted Hassan Sabbah’s last words, “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” as his personal maxim. He used Hassan Sabbah as an alter ego in texts he wrote for the rest of his life. We can witness the birth of this identification in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS.

WE HAVE NO EYES TO SEE?? WE HAVE NO FEELINGS?? WE ARE THE INSECT PEOPLE?? THEN USE THE EYES OF HASSAN SABBAH. AND THE FEELINGS OF HASSAN SABBAH. THE EYES OF HASSAN SABBAH AND ALL THAT HASSAN SABBAH FEELS OR KNOWS NOW OR EVER FREE TO ALL ALL ALL. I REPEAT TO ALL. NO ONE IS EXCLUDED. ALL ARE WELCOME. BURROUGHS HASSAN SABBAH AND WELCOME.

Burroughs Hassan Sabbah — the act of identification takes the cut-up out of literature and into metaphysics. It’s as though Burroughs severed his personality with as much sangfroid as he cut a page of his prose in half, lined it up with someone else’s, and scanned across the fragments to see what new configuration of self emerged from the pieces. “I FIND IT A USEFUL LITERARY EXERCISE,” Burroughs writes, “TO PLACE MYSELF IN EXTREME, UH, CIRCUMSTANCES..” This is what makes BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS such a thrilling addition to the Burroughs canon. It is a vivid record, almost a livestream, of Burroughs at a moment when he was absolutely going for broke.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I turn forty this year. It has always struck me as odd which birthdays are most meaningful to me. Sixteen, twenty-one, and thirty weren’t real milestones. Thirteen was my first pivotal birthday, a time for realizing who I was. That birthday party at my uncle’s house in York, Pennsylvania remains my most memorable. My twenty-eighth birthday was also one of great meaning. Growing up I always wondered what I would be doing in the year 2000. That year I found out who I was not. I am about to turn forty, but it is thirty-nine that I view as momentous. I approached my thirty-ninth year as one of great possibility and potential creativity. It did not really turn out that way, although Beat Scene published my first chapbook, The Last Days of Jack Kerouac, just weeks before I turned thirty-nine. It was at the age of thirty-nine, with the 1953 publication of Junkie by Ace Books, that William Burroughs stepped out as a writer and began to define who he was to the public at large. Charles Bukowski, another writer I greatly admire, was thirty-nine when he put the finishing touches on Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, his first chapbook of poetry. I find myself drawn to such late bloomers, as opposed to wunderkinds like Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney, who found their voices as mere babes and, to my mind, had little else to say.

Thirty-nine was also the age at which my maternal grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. It was the same year Olympia Press published Naked Lunch: 1959. So along with the possibility of re-birth, thirty-nine also marks the age at which I can no longer ignore the fact that I will not live forever. I have the rest of my life in front of me but it is also the beginning of the end. Like never before, I find myself examining my body for signs of deterioration. Increasingly I read lumps, bumps, and blemishes, as one would read the lines on one’s palm, for hints of the future. Can my mental decline be far behind?  

As a Burroughs obsessive, I feverishly dig through my library searching for answers to the mysteries of what lies ahead. No worries. I am not reaching for The Western Lands or Last Words just yet. But with my grandfather in mind, I find myself flipping through the now morbidly titled Minutes to Go.

Several months ago, I felt compelled to watch the first episode of Mad Men. I constantly found myself in conversations about the show. These conversations were occurring everywhere: on TV, on the radio, in print, at bars, at the water cooler, over dinner, in bed. So I caught another episode a few days ago in which a character from that first episode, a hipster artist, returns as a desperate junkie. Naturally Burroughs came to mind. I am not the only one thinking such thoughts. In a Book Patrol blog post, William Burroughs is compared and contrasted to Don Draper. Nancy Mattoon provides a lot of interesting points. She notes that Mad Men opens in March, 1960, making Burroughs and Draper contemporaries. She focuses on Naked Lunch, an obvious choice, but for me the key book linking Draper and Burroughs is the Two Cities edition of Minutes to Go I had already been pouring over. Minutes to Go was published in April 1960, just after Mad Men opens, and one of Burroughs’ central concerns in the book is both mine and Draper’s: cancer.

Draper’s biggest account is Lucky Strike cigarettes. In the opening episode, we see that the culture of cigarette advertising is changing. By 1960 it has become an inescapable fact that cigarettes are harmful and carcinogenic. Admen can no longer promote safer cigarettes or doctor testimonials. Yet how do you make nearly identical products, such as cigarettes, unique? Well, you make something out of nothing. It’s the art of the soft sell, a technique that was developed around 1958. At this time, the benefits of the product became less important than associating the product with abstract and appealing images. Joseph J. Seldin, an advertising historian, wrote:

The multiplication of products, brands, and packages made the art of consumership increasingly difficult to practice in the postwar period. Increasingly, the marketplace was dominated by symbolic buying and selling, with the sellers of goods engaged in selling the symbols of goods rather than the goods themselves, and the consumers buying these symbols over the inherent product values.

One of the most famous examples of the time was a 1960 ad for Volkswagen: Think Small. For Draper and Lucky Strike, the key phrase is “It’s toasted.” The selling point is not the cigarette itself but a symbolic process: toasting.

In Minutes to Go, Burroughs’ cut-ups stand out from those made by his collaborators Brion Gysin, Gregory Corso, and Sinclair Beiles, partly because they all deal with cancer, especially newspaper articles announcing research and breakthroughs in potential cures. Like Draper, Burroughs is confronting the changing medical opinion about cancer. Burroughs, however, also turns against the admen. Draper could be one of the shadowy Cancer Men of the Minutes to Go poems — a conspiracy of doctors, large corporations, government officials, and admen, who promote dangerous, addictive, but socially acceptable drugs such as cigarettes and alcohol, while at the same time demonizing what Burroughs feels are more benevolent, beneficial, and radical drugs, like marijuana and apomorphine. For Burroughs, the Cancer Men are no better than heroin pushers. Like drug dealers, they are in the business of getting people hooked on cigarettes.

Faced with this conspiracy, Burroughs confronts the admen’s soft sell with a newly discovered weapon of his own: the cut-up technique. In Minutes to Go, Burroughs takes the scissors to newspaper articles, and throughout the 1960s he would cut up and détourne advertising. Time, APO-33 and Rx Morgan (a cut-up published in Aram Saroyan’s little mag Lines) all cut up advertising for radical effect. In fact, APO-33 is a Burroughsian version of pharmaceutical promotional literature. APO-33 promotes apomorphine, which Burroughs saw as a wonder drug ignored by the Cancer Men whose business is not to cure but to promote addiction.

In 1961, Daniel Boorstein published The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream, a book attacking the manipulations of advertising and, in particular, the art of the soft sell.

Now in the height of our power in this age of the Graphic Revolution, we are threatened by a new and peculiarly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, of demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.

What alarmed Boorstein was the endless replication of images. As Joshua Shannon writes in The Disappearance of Objects

Boorstein was describing a cultural shift in which the material world was becoming detached from the ballooning sphere of representation. Focusing on phenomena we can now see as endemic to postmodernity, he worried less about decreasing utility than about the new primacy and arbitrariness of abstraction.

This connects to Burroughs’ theory about words and images as a virus. To the extent that it promotes this endless replication of images, advertising itself becomes a cancer. “I’m just a blooming old cancer and I gotta proliferate.”

The art and literature of the period dealt with this new trend. As Shannon writes, Jasper Johns attempted to combat the rise in abstraction with his sculptures.

Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), after all, is named not for what it represents but for what it is, its representational function appended as a subtitle. We are reminded here that John’s materialism is not one of utility: these are not cans reoriented to their proper function of holding liquid for drinking. Rather Johns seems to have wanted to make a consumer object that could, as if for its own sake, weight down the abstraction that was increasingly circulating through the real, mass produced goods everywhere around it.

Burroughs’ cut-ups in Minutes to Go perform a similar function. Burroughs saw the word as object and as material to be worked with — to be cut, pasted, folded. This materiality combats the increasing emptiness of words in an era of abstraction. Lines such as “cancers that surgery and Xrays C” or “Ociety rack up the score like” are, like the Johns sculptures, “not reoriented to their proper” function as words, which is to convey meaning. “Everywhere March Your Head” offers a collage —

A rap of
Sound
A.
turns
Urns back O
Our lots con
the time to you

— that functions like a concrete or language poem. “A rap of/sound/A” makes me think of Zukofsky and the poem as music. Burroughs would also work not just with sounds but with colors, cutting up Rimbaud’s famous sonnet “Vowels” and utilizing a color schema in the Olympia Press edition of The Soft Machine.

Yet utilizing materiality against image and abstraction has its limitations. Addressing his 1959 statement that a picture should be looked at like a radiator, Johns stated in the 1960s “I thought at the time that a radiator was a secure object one didn’t have to bring any special psychological relationships to. Now I’m not so sure.” Likewise, Burroughs might have realized that the form of the poem encourages the development of a special relationship, which naturally leads the reader to endlessly search for and generate meaning. Poems themselves become forms of cancer. Maybe this is why Burroughs largely abandoned poetry after Minutes to Go.

Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, a series of three essays published in the New York Review of Books in 1977 and collected the next year into a book, also comes to mind. In this slim volume, Sontag points out how using cancer as metaphor cheapens the illness, portrays the sick as Other, and serves as a tool for reactionary groups such as the National Socialists. In addition, cancer as metaphor is yet another abstraction that endlessly generates and replicates. In The Secret of Fascination, Oliver Harris has described how Burroughs struggled with the role his General Theory of Addiction should play in Naked Lunch. Burroughs worried that the metaphor of addiction threatened to overtake and schlupp the entire novel. It packaged it by saying too much and drowning out the novel’s other voices. “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” written after the first edition of Naked Lunch but used as a preface for many later editions, further encouraged readers to view Naked Lunch through the metaphor of sickness. Perhaps it was inevitable. As Derrida has written, Western philosophy and thought are intimately bound up with metaphor. Burroughs utilized illness as metaphor throughout his writings and one of Sontag’s most infamous statements — “The white race is the cancer of human history” — even used the device. In Minutes to Go, Burroughs may have sought to cut up the cancer / virus / sickness metahpor, break it down, shake it up, empty it of easy meanings. Yet the only cure was a step Burroughs could never fully take — silence.

William Burroughs in Nike ad

Getting back to Don Draper, it should be noted that the Beats were no slouches at advertising and promotion. Burroughs worked as a copywriter for an ad firm just after his graduation from Harvard in 1936. Allen Ginsberg served as the pitchman for the Beat Generation his entire life. In the mid-1950s, Ginsberg worked on Madison Avenue and learned the tricks of the Mad Men trade. Clearly, Madison Avenue held an appeal for Burroughs. In his 1965 Paris Review interview, he suggests that writers include advertising and product placement in their stories. Burroughs states, “And I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can’t we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?” Some have argued that Burroughs’ Nike ad of 1994 does just that. Ernest Hemingway did a commercial endorsement in 1951 for Ballantine Ale: “How would you put a glass of Ballantine’s Ale into words?” In the ad, Hemingway states he “would rather have a bottle of Ballantine Ale than any other drink after fighting a real big fish.” At the time of the ad, Hemingway had just finished fighting with the last great novel of his life, The Old Man and the Sea. The novella, completed in Cuba in 1951, would be published the following year. This provides another twist on image and advertising in Johns’ Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), which utilized Ballantine’s Ale cans.

Another benign Cancer Man who lurks behind Minutes to Go is Wilhelm Reich, who died in disgrace and isolation in late 1957 after being hounded by the government for his theories on sexuality. As explained in The Cancer Biopathy (1948), one of Reich’s central tenets is that cancer and a host of other aliments are caused by the repression of sexual energy. Orgone, a “life force” or energy that could be captured in accumulators, could be used to fight repression by improving sexual potency. Burroughs was a firm believer and at various times built his own orgone box.

What interests me about Reich, in terms of Burroughs and Draper, is how he opens up a broader view on the linkage of cancer and sex. For Reich, the nuclear family involved repression of intimacy and sexual relations, with procreation leading to “family values.” In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933) Reich writes:

From the standpoint of social development, the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it. It is, however, its central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation. In this connection, the findings of Morgan and of Engels are still entirely correct.

In The Job, Burroughs would describe love as a virus and express Reichian views on the family. The Talking Asshole routine in Naked Lunch introduces the idea that cancer can serve as a metaphor for any malignant organism bent on replicating itself: not just the nuclear family but bureaucracy, communism, fascism, global and corporate capitalism, and liberal democracy. Just as sexuality is repressed into procreation, so too is creative energy — emotional, intellectual and spiritual — channeled into chasing monetary gain and acquiring consumer goods. Such a pursuit is the cancer that Draper sells and the one that he struggles to live with on a daily basis. Sometimes a cigarette is not just a cigarette.

(Not surprisingly, Sontag discusses Reich’s theories in depth in Illness as Metaphor, yet she does not discuss Burroughs’ work, which seems odd. Possibly this is because the figure of Burroughs reminds Sontag that using illness as metaphor is not just a device of the Nazis and other reactionary groups, but pervasive in the writings of the avant-garde and the Left as well.)

In the introduction to Queer, Burroughs infamously wrote that he would not have become a writer but for the accidental shooting of Joan. But as I contend in my William Tell piece, Burroughs wrote not just out of guilt but out of freedom. Joan’s death freed Burroughs and enabled him to act and move as he chose. Burroughs could only become the writer we know today outside his responsibilities as a father, son, and husband. This is not just a male phenomenon. The key text in terms of the Mad Men time period would be Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, and other writers of that generation — Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Tillie Olsen, and Grace Paley — have addressed the difficulties of marrying the duties of wife, daughter, and mother with that of the writer. Thus working with words is an act of solitude and isolation, a product of divorce not marriage, a nightmare not an American Dream. Writing is dangerous and deadly — like cancer, an awesome and awful disease.

My copy of Minutes to Go is a pharmakon — both poison and cure. As I mentioned in The Great Mimeograph Revolution Catalog, a library is a virus. It grows, replicates, spreads. It threatens to turn malignant and become a cancerous hoard. In the wrong situation, it can turn on you and leave you alone, ill and isolated like Burgess Meredith in The Twilight Zone, but it can also lead one on a journey of self-exploration and engagement with the surrounding world. The glass doors of my bookshelves serve as mirrors allowing me to look at myself and to see the reflected world around me. Some would say that the library I have created for myself is much too small and filled with a huge emptiness. That may be true, but at 39 I find that it has also proven a cure for my ills and a source of health and well-being.

by Oliver Harris

Dismissed as Unreadable

The long and intimate association of William Burroughs with poets is well known: Ginsberg, most obviously, as well as Corso, Creeley, Ferlinghetti, Leroi Jones, John Giorno, and so on. But to talk of Burroughs’ own material engagement with poetic form and poetics in relation to historical and contemporary practices — this can really only mean one thing: the cut-up project that began in Paris at the end of 1959. As well as brief encounters with old luminaries such as Duchamp, Peret and Tzara, this was the place and the context in which his activities would bring Burroughs in contact with George Maciunas’ Fluxus Group, the Domaine Poetique of Bernard Heidsieck and Henri Chopin, the work of the Lettristes and poesie sonore. It’s easy to forget, but his first novel, Junkie, had been published as a pulp paperback on sale in rail stations only six years earlier. Now, to give just one example, Burroughs would find himself in print alongside John Ashbery, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia and Alice B. Toklas.¹

The enormously fertile and innovative period of the cut-up project has enjoyed a good deal of critical attention since Robin Lydenberg, in her ground-breaking study of 1987, complained that the “cut-up novels of William Burroughs have been dismissed without ever having been rigorously examined” (55). This was her starting point, “to demonstrate that these narratives, which many critics have dismissed as unreadable, offer new ways of reading and thinking” (xi). My point of departure is implied by Lydenberg’s revealing use of the terms “cut-up novels” and “narratives”: missing from Lydenberg, as from all the criticism that has followed, is the historical and material rigour that demands examination of the text that preceded the novels and their narratives; that is to say, the original manifesto and manual of the method, Minutes to Go (1960). Whether this is “unreadable” is open to question, since it remains the critically unread starting point of Burroughs’ cut-up project. It is also, and far from coincidentally, the text most materially invested with the poetry and poetics that gave Burroughs’ method its original identity.

What is at stake here? Why should Minutes to Go, a limited edition pamphlet of sixty pages, a work that had three authors other than Burroughs (Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso), and a text apparently so easy to overlook — why should it be brought in from the margins? In broad terms, there are two reasons.

First, as implied above, Burroughs criticism has taken a surprisingly conventional literary approach to a project conceived so radically in opposition to the conventions of literature. The analysis of Burroughs’ novel-length cut-up texts has been at the expense of his myriad shorter texts from the same era, texts that, taken together, amount to a comparable body of work and demonstrate a much wider range of collage-based experiments.² Even leaving aside his related work in other media — photomontage, collage scrap-books, tape-recordings, films — the effect of putting The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express centre-stage is to distort the history and scope of Burroughs’ experimental practices. Minutes to Go does not fit the critical frame because it inaugurated and belongs to another history, one characterised by publication of hundreds of short texts in dozens of small underground magazines — a history, in other words, where the material, the publishing contexts, and the means of distribution all coincided with the world of avant-garde poetry in general, and the postwar revival of collage-based techniques in particular. It’s tempting to invert critical history altogether and say that, far from being the acme of Burroughs’ cut-up work, the trilogy is in fact its aberration, because the truest realisation of the project lay outside the novel form. At the very least, we can say that it is hard to grasp the poetic identity of the cut-up project so long as Burroughs is approached, first and last, as a novelist.

Second, giving space to Minutes to Go is essential as a corrective to perhaps the most intractable and pervasive difficulty for Burroughs criticism, which is the relation of practice to polemic. That is, the claims Burroughs made for his cut-up methods invariably determine — and often substitute entirely for — close analysis of either the methods used or the variety of texts they produced. For criticism has also conjured up an abstraction fixed by a definite article by speaking of “the cut-up.” This temptation to generalise is, like the priority given to theory, a practical convenience that side-steps the difficulty of dealing with the multiple cut-up procedures that evolved over time, served different functions, and produced diverse results.

The upshot is that Burroughs criticism has in effect entirely reversed the historical priorities. After all, the essential fact of the cut-up enterprise from the outset was that this was an experimental method; “experimental in the sense of being something to do” (Third Mind 31). As Burroughs told Ginsberg shortly after publication of Minutes to Go: “Don’t theorize. Try it” (The Yage Letters 59). An experiment is also a process of trial and error whose outcomes are unpredictable and subject to revision — “an act the outcome of which is unknown,” as John Cage put it in the mid-1950s (13; my emphasis). This is why slighting the material basis of Burroughs’ methods and the text that first embodied them, hides from view both crucial historical origins and alternative potentials. Cited only to be passed over as quickly as possible, so that critics can discuss Burroughs’ theory or analyse his novels, the fate of Minutes to Go is the original instance and prime symbol of this reversal of priorities.

The most direct way to explore the poetics of Minutes to Go is to make good these shortcomings by focusing on the two names almost always cited together alongside the text: Arthur Rimbaud and Tristan Tzara.

Tzara Did It All Before

“At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater” (Third Mind 29). These opening lines from “The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin” (first published in January 1961), and others similar to them, have been endlessly quoted to establish a conscious historical line of descent and immediate context. The problem is not the inaccuracy of Burroughs’ account — the “rally” was actually a 1920 exhibition of Picabia’s paintings at an art gallery, not a theatre, was an event of Paris Dada, not the surrealists, and had there been a “riot” it would only have been one of many — but that it has closed off rather than opened up further investigation of its relevance.³

Now, within the text of Minutes to Go there are two references to Tzara. One is by Corso in his notorious “Post-script” that disowned his part in the cut-up project (“Tzara did it all before” (63)), and the other, which comes in the longer of his two polemical texts, is by Gysin, and is nearly identical to the lines from Burroughs cited above (“the Man from Nowhere . . . pulled words out of a hat” (42)). That Burroughs himself doesn’t mention Tzara in Minutes to Go — or in his one short text included in its immediate sequel, The Exterminator (1960) — is unsurprising, not only because he lacked Gysin’s agenda (Gysin promoted Tzara at least in part to settle an old score with André Breton), but given the specific nature of his contributions. Just over a third of Minutes to Go is attributed to Burroughs — but not “by Burroughs,” for (with the exception of one text, to which I will return) almost every word that appears above his name is itself attributed to other sources. Unlike Gysin, Burroughs did not juxtapose his first cut-up texts with any explicit polemical statement or set of instructions, and it would be another six months before he would publicly identify his method with Tzara’s and credit Tzara (rather than Lautréamont) with the maxim “Poetry is for everyone” (Third Mind 31). This delayed identification is a measure of the larger priority Burroughs gave to offering exemplary work over and above a theory of his practice or the practice of theory; the development of a cut-up poetics would follow from, be produced by, and closely resemble, the actual results of his methods.

What then of the texts themselves in Minutes to Go; do they confirm the prevailing view of the relation between Burroughs and Tzara, namely that “the cut-up begins as an exercise in negativity, as a kind of Dadaist destruction” (Lydenberg 48)? Following the formula of Tzara’s “To Make a Dadaist Poem” (“Take a newspaper. Take some scissors” (39)), as well as Gysin’s accidental re-discovery of the method forty years later, Burroughs worked specifically on newspaper articles, and used them as the basis for eleven of his sixteen texts. Significantly, even this subset is too heterogeneous in form to tell the methods of composition used, and the only certainty is that these texts could not all have been produced according to Burroughs’ own, much-cited “how-to” description. Four of these texts are set out as more or less continuous prose, the rest in stanzas of irregular length — and in one case (“FROM SAN DIEGO UP TO MAINE”) there is both a prose text and a reworked version set in stanzas. The stanza layout appears to imply a poetic intent, and an affinity with such previous uses of newspaper material as the “readymade” i-Zeichnungen and i-Gedichte texts of Kurt Schwitters; but I would argue that the details given of the source texts (“NEW CLUES TO CANCER CURES / Saturday Evening Post / October 31, 1959″ (18), and so on) redirect attention from the form towards the transformations of a specific content.

Indeed, while one text cuts up a recent article on the Beat Generation, and two cut up articles on juvenile delinquency, the other eight all rework articles on a single theme; the latest developments in cancer, gene, and virus research. We don’t need to know where Burroughs would take this material to see that the selection in Minutes to Go is recognisably strategic, indicating both that a predetermined set of issues preceded the indeterminate results, and that there must be a continuity between subject matter and methodology; if scientific material defines the most appropriate content of Burroughs’ experimental method, we might infer from this the scientific form of his experiment. Certainly, it would be difficult to advance precise textual interpretation or aesthetic evaluation of a piece like “VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?” (15):

Cancer tests… brown blood.. live babies.. proof of virus. vacine? Bio-control the London conference.. it was out sheep cattle and animals have wild system…. Blood time brown blood.

You could say that further interpretation is simply not possible; but the cumulative effect of such texts, enhanced by repetition of words and phrases across several of them, is still clear enough; to invite us to infer a calculated relation between language and the genetic code, twin deterministic systems subject here to systematic scrambling by the use of chance procedures. In this light, phrases such as “Cancer tests” and “wild system” take on meaning, but the closest Burroughs comes to making a direct statement to this effect in Minutes to Go — “In THEE beginning was THE word.. The word was a virus..” (59) — is still minimal and oblique. The conclusion has to be that texts such as “VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?” remain cryptic the better to exemplify a practice that must, in order to do its work, take priority over a fully coherent thesis. Or to put this the other way, a proselytising polemic, an authoritative statement of theory, would have pre-empted and therefore invalidated the logic of the methods themselves, and it was above all the methods that constituted the cut-up project.

What’s immediately apparent is how little Burroughs’ texts have in common with that of Tzara’s. In fact, the relation of theory to textual practice in Minutes to Go is precisely the reverse of that found in his “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” a set of instructions that actually preceded (by two months) publication of
his own exemplary text — an example that would remain the only one he ever produced according to his own method.⁴ Typical of both the Dada written manifesto and the épatisme of his own public manifestations, Tzara’s recipe for composing poetry flaunts a deliberate mismatch between practical steps and claims for the results: the material is to be selected according to the “length you want to make your poem,” not by its content, while the outcome, after gently shaking the cut-out words and transcribing them, is a poem that will prove you are “an infinitely original author of charming sensibility” (39). Tzara’s formula for making poetry out of newspaper clippings was an ironic, anti-aesthetic manifesto stratagem, a performance trick rather than a creative blue-print, whereas Burroughs produced multiple material examples of newspaper-based texts and fully intended that others do likewise. The creativity of these texts is not bound to the aesthetic criterion of quality,⁵ but nor are they “negativistic” in the vein of “Dadaist destruction”; operating in a clearly calculated thematic context and offered for practical use, their creativity functions according to experimental values of surprise, transformation, and discovery. Are these values scientific or poetic? As Ian MacFadyen argues, you could say that Burroughs produced scientific results from artistic intentions, but equally that “his scientism led to extraordinary artistic results” (33).

Burroughs’ use of chance factors was never an end in itself, as it was for Tzara, and was too pragmatic to be bound by rigid precepts (as, for example, automatic writing was for Breton) so that, while it was often a hit or miss affair, his experiments remained open, and committed to, enormous variation. Burroughs claimed that the results in Minutes to Go were presented intact, but the precise selection of the source material already pointed the way for his use of chance as a middle-term, opening up possibilities for further dialectical development that he would explore for the best part of a decade. Tzara, in short, had not done it “all before.”

Real Rimbaud Poems

“A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images — real Rimbaud images — but new ones” (Paris Review 154). As with Burroughs’ citations of Tzara, these lines, and others like them from “The Exterminator” and “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin,” have been routinely quoted without question, often even without context; without, that is, establishing the appeal and status of Rimbaud (for the Beat circle in postwar America, and in French avant-garde culture during the early 1960s), or the influence of Rimbaud on Burroughs’ work. In Minutes to Go, Rimbaud’s position is uniquely privileged, with three pages given over to two texts based on “A une raison,” taken from Les Illuminations. Before considering the significance of Rimbaud’s unique status here, one matched in Burroughs’ more polemical pieces, we have to ask what relation these texts demonstrate to Burroughs’ recycled claims that you can “recognize Rimbaud cut-up as Rimbaud” (Third Mind 71) and, “Cut Rimbaud’s words and you are assured of good poetry” (32). The answer is immediately apparent from the start of the first of the two texts in Minutes to Go (23):

EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR HEAD”

A rap of
Sound
A.

turns
Urns back O
Our lots con
the time to you

From such fragments could anybody identify the source poem? Or recognise Rimbaud? Is this — good or bad — poetry at all? The absolute mismatch between Burroughs’ claims and the texts in Minutes to Go should prompt us to ask quite different questions: what is the relation between these cut-ups of Rimbaud and Burroughs’ cut-ups of newspaper articles? and what is the real significance of associating Rimbaud so emphatically with the cut-up enterprise?

The juxtaposition of these two texts with others created by cutting up newspaper articles might be taken as a statement about the equality of cultural materials, a position that has a long tradition in avant-garde collage-based work. But, while the cut-up Rimbaud poems do resemble the more fragmented of those based on newspapers, so asserting the basic materiality of language, there is a crucial difference. As with the newspaper cut-ups, both these texts end with a note that identifies the source text, but here it is followed by another line: “Words by Rimbaud, arrangement by Burroughs and Corso” (23). There are several things to say about this. Firstly, the term “arrangement” clearly denotes a design, the exercise of control, and so contradicts the assumption of materials presented entirely intact. Secondly, while the result is not offered as itself a poem, this description of creative process clearly maintains a distinction between the use of Rimbaud’s poem and anonymously authored journalism. More than that, it indicates a complex activity of collaboration: these are the only texts credited to two poetic practitioners, while Rimbaud is in effect recruited as a third collaborator (or a fifth, if you consider Minutes to Go as a whole). The result is a very particular act of hommage, one that has nothing to do with imitating Rimbaud’s style or creating “good poetry,” any more than it has with Dadaist destruction and the negation of poetry. Rather, it has to do with the cryptic invocation of a precise thematic relation and the practice of a particular poetics.

Identifying the source text as “A une raison,” Burroughs allows — invites — us to re-read the original in light of the new context he created for it, and vice-versa. The key line is clear at once: “Change nos lots, crible les fléaux, à commencer par le temps” (“Change our fate, overcome the plague, and begin with time”) (Rimbaud 246, 247). Now we can not only recognise the words but see the felicitous significance of the line “Our lots con” in Burroughs’ text. In “The Exterminator” he would make fully explicit this covert alliance between his method and Rimbaud’s revolutionary call to abolish reason and escape time by deconstructing the “con” of language: “See and hear what They expect to see and hear because The Word Lines Keep Thee in Slots . . . The Word Lines keep you in Time . . . Cut the in lines” (Third Mind 71). Likewise in “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin,” Burroughs invokes Rimbaud’s “colour vowels” (which he would use later in 1960 as the structural principle for the first edition of The Soft Machine) and his “systematic derangement of the senses” (32). However, the crucial fact remains that the cut-ups of Rimbaud’s poem in Minutes to Go do not themselves reproduce such a visionary poetics. The significance of this failure is twofold.

Firstly, as Burroughs must have known, Rimbaud was accorded a special place not only in Surrealist poetics but in historical definitions of collage, such as that given by Max Ernst: “Simple hallucination, in the words of Rimbaud . . . visual alchemy” (126). No coincidence that Gysin, who had worked with Ernst, should begin Minutes to Go with the words, “the hallucinated have come to tell you” (3), or that Burroughs should take the visionary figure literally by identifying Rimbaud’s dérèglement de tous les sens as the “place of mescaline hallucination” (Third Mind 32). However, Ernst also stressed that collage was an “alchemical composition of two or more heterogeneous elements” (Ernst 130; my emphasis); in other words, a technique that visibly combines disparate elements of diverse material origins. On this basis, the re-ordering of a single text does not qualify as a collage procedure. For the same reason, the line “Our lots con” cannot be said to function according to the collage principle of quotation as an act of abbreviated reference. Rather, as a cryptic phrase produced by the scissors, it signals one of the seductive pleasures of cutting up: the anticipation and discovery of messages, endowed with a magical potency or fetish quality precisely because they result from a mechanical procedure. The key feature is this private fascination of the “alchemical” act for the practitioner.

In short, the use of Rimbaud in Minutes to Go is determined by the value accorded the material activity of the method, by the process itself, rather than the reception of its products.⁶ Or as Burroughs put it, in his only use of the term “cut up” here: “ANYONE CAN RECORD WORDS — CUT UP your own hustling myself” (60). This emphasis — also integral to his claims for the therapeutic value of cutting up — was an essential ambition of the first-stage of experiment and was central to its promotion as an available method, one that could fulfil the maxim Burroughs attributed to Tzara: “Say it again: ‘Poetry is for everyone.’ Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud’s place” (Third Mind 31).

This brings us to the second point, and to a conclusion. What Burroughs meant by being “in Rimbaud’s place” combined two quite different, even contradictory principles. If the first had to do with the material process of cutting up, as evidenced in Minutes to Go, the second had to do with the content and arrangement of the material, and would be demonstrated in his cut-up novels — texts that did, progressively and on a massive scale, fulfil the collage principle of combining and juxtaposing elements taken from diverse origins. This disposition is anticipated in Burroughs’ exceptional text, “REACTIVE AGENT TAPE CUT BY LEE THE AGENT IN INTERZONE.” This alone cites no sources, but familiarity with Burroughs’ work enables us to recognise lines from The Naked Lunch and other, at that time unpublished, manuscripts, which are cut up to produce a collage of phrases and images that approximates the density, rhythmic measure, and uncanny effect of déjà-vu characteristic of the cut-up novels.

Some six months after Minutes to Go, Burroughs would tell Ginsberg: “I find cut-ups most immediately workable on poetic prose image writing like Rimbaud, St. Perse and Your Correspondent.”⁷ What’s curious about this is that such an understanding ought to have been already clear to Burroughs, since he had achieved something very like it seven years earlier, in the “Composite City” section of The Yage Letters. A variation upon both the “Villes” of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and St. John Perse’s Anabasis, this phantasmagoria, which is motivated by the intense sensual derangement of yagé intoxication, is itself a composite text; for it not only reproduces the elliptical mosaics of imagery and long, densely rhythmic catalogues of Rimbaud and St. John Perse, but does so by recycling and transforming material that appeared earlier in Burroughs’ own text.⁸ As an exercise in “poetic prose image writing,” this was a model that Burroughs, in effect, went back to after Minutes to Go, now armed with a pair of scissors.

In Minutes to Go itself, “poetry” is not understood in terms of words on the page but as the “place” reached by a particular use of chance operations on pre-existing words, and this place is both unknown and where certain things can be seen, precisely because the outcome of the activity cannot be fore-seen. In sum, it was as a method, to be grasped by doing, not as a content to be understood by interpretation, that Burroughs both saw and demonstrated the relation of cut-ups to Rimbaud’s own definition of poetry: “I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses” (303).

While he worked intensively on his trilogy, Burroughs gave less attention to promoting his methods in terms of the practitioner’s active experience, which required simple techniques and short texts. With this shift came more poetic possibilities for the reader to experience, and in a sense the trilogy’s more complex effects were a response to that very shift, a solution to what one critic identified as the “problematics of reading cutups without actual cutup experience” (Géfin 95). The emphatic critical focus on Burroughs’ trilogy assumes that Minutes to Go was abandoned as a dead-end.⁹ But it would be well to recall the full context of John Cage’s definition of an experiment “as an act the outcome of which is unknown”; “providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure” (13). The verdict that Minutes to Go was a false-start misunderstands the evolutionary logic of Burroughs’ procedures that started in 1960, experimental procedures based on trial and error, repetition and variation, multiple functions and provisional results.

Five years later, Ginsberg observed that, since “a page of his prose is as dense with imagery as anything in St. John Perse or Rimbaud,” you could say that “Burroughs is a poet too, really” (Paris Review 320). Ginsberg therefore anticipated the fate of the poetics that cut Rimbaud up with Tristan Tzara, since, like everyone else after him, he was not thinking of Minutes to Go.

Notes

1 Burroughs’ text, “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” appeared alongside pieces by these and other poets in the “cut-up” issue of C magazine (February 14 1965), 1.10.

2 For one of the very few articles to analyze such texts, see Skau. Even Laszlo Géfin, who contextualizes cut-up methods within historical collage practices, fails to deal with any specific texts.

3 Gérard-Georges Lemaire identified Tzara as one of cut-ups’ “distant ancestors” (Third Mind 14); Noëlle Batt has observed that “the two moves are decisively differentiated on the one hand in terms of the spirit in which they were undertaken, and on the other hand in terms of the productive power they demonstrated” (14; my translation); and Barry Miles notes that “the circumstances were entirely different” (196) — that these are the most rigorous engagements in Burroughs criticism suggests the scale of the problem.

4 In fact, Tzara had recently practiced similar chance cannibalizations, but applied to his earlier symbolist poetry and done with the aim of negating its poetic and personal expression. See Browning.

5 Jeff Nuttall, who published many of Burroughs’ short newspaper layout texts in the mid-1960s, specifically presented them defined against the “aesthetic frame of reference and intention” that determined “the classic cutups of Tzara and Schwitters” (“Nut Note on the Column Cutup Thing,” My Own Mag, 15 (April 1966), 15).

6 Writing to the publisher of The Exterminator, in July 1960 Burroughs even proposed a variant of the cadavres exquis of the Surrealists (“Perhaps a game would do it. Like, say four people each write a page on any subject comes to mind. Then cut and rearrange. With squared paper and the cut lines drawn you dig.”), further evidence of the priority given to soliciting practice, over and above consumption of Burroughs’ own results (Burroughs to David Hazelwood, July 26 1960 (University of California)).

7 Burroughs to Ginsberg, September 5 1960 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

8 For a more detailed analysis, see my William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003).

9 On this basis, you might as well say that the trilogy failed, since Burroughs published some two hundred short texts between Nova Express in 1964 and his next novel, The Wild Boys in 1969. Given the nature of his experiments, short texts were better suited to the cut-up project, so that Burroughs’ constant revisions of his trilogy — three titles, but six different editions — can be seen as a rather desperate attempt to apply this very logic to his novels.

Works Cited

Batt, Noëlle. “Rupture et déplacement dans l’oeuvre de William Burroughs.” Revue Française d’Études Américanes 1 (April 1976): 12-21.

Browning, Gordon Frederick. Tristan Tzara: The Genesis of the Dada Poem, or from Dada to Aa. Stuttgart: Akaemischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1979.

Burroughs, William. Interview with Conrad Knickerbocker. The Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1967. 143-174.

— The Yage Letters. San Francisco: City Lights, 1963; 1975.

Burroughs, William, Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin. Minutes to Go. Paris: Two Cities, 1960.

Burroughs, William, and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind. London: John Calder, 1979.

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars, 1971.

Ernst, Max. “Beyond Painting.” In Surrealists on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970: 118-34.

Géfin, Laszlo. “Collage, Theory, Reception, and the Cutups of William Burroughs.” Literature and the Other Arts 13 (1987): 91-100.

Ginsberg, Allen. Interview with Thomas Clark. Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1967. 279-320.

Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Chicago: Illinois UP, 1987.

MacFadyen, Ian. “Machine Dreams, Optical Toys and Mechanical Boys.” In Flickers of the Dreamachine, ed. Paul Cecil. Hove: Codex, 1996: 21-48.

Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. New York: Grove Press, 2000.

Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Skau, Michael. “The Central Verbal System: The Prose of William Burroughs.” Style 15 (1981): 401-14.

Tzara, Tristan. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: John Calder, 1977.

CANCER MEN. . . THESE INDIVIDUALS ARE MARKED FOE. . .

at land coccus germs
by a bacilmouth Jersy phenicol bitoics
the um vast and varied that
specific target was the vast popul – – – –

the vast
cancers that surgery and Xrays C
In the United States the Americi
is considered well worth our feet. . .

Ociety racks up the score like
sons will become new cancer pee
a third of them. . .

Surgery & Radiation be saved
this leaves 225 000
resistant o rso widely
surgeons and radiologists

These individuals are marked foe. . .

“For these the
the opinion of Dr. Robert P
Dushinski with £ fluoro
he helped synthesize
cancer men
growth in some cases
is worth 12,000 dollars $$$$

cancer men. $

. . . these individuals are marked foe. . .

Cut up New Clues To Cancer Cures
The Saturday Evening Post
Oct. 31, 1959 Past Time

FORMED IN THE STANCE

The beautiful disease and
The government falls
along the weed rooms
flesh along the weed government/ / / /

The girls eat morning
Dying peoples to a white bone monkey
in the Winter sun
touching tree of the house. $$$$

Argue second time around such a deal.

The middle artist unknown and probably hostile
in his hands scouting be obligation
for force main body dependant
on in from ate………

The usual procedure
viruses graphed
Time.
Ours THAT????

HER feet at?
Morning
the thunderous
read the front page” ” ” ”

star blazing
but She
read the stories
beyond lines. . . .

They can
take over
viruses &&&

make one
The Scientists
formed in the stance. . .

traits
ride
many. . .

thorough
equipped
street
few days:::

Cut up Paris Herald Tribune articles on Met performance and polio virus
Burroughs poem
New Clues To Cancer Cure
SATURDAY EVENING POST Oct. 31, 1959

VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?

(Resevoir of rabies and other virus? discovered in Brown fat of vampire bats and their well known and easily chosen human constituent.)

Cancer tests… brown blood.. live babies.. proof of virus. vaccine? Bio-control the London conference.. it was out sheep cattle and animals have wild system…. blood time brown blood. MAN cancer case and plant. methods of pest growing strenuous exercise—breed could land by killing or weakening cancer anti-bodies on a foam runway would stil retain adaption to African way of life… In all sizes virus drugs make cancer… blood supply.. cold virus rays cancer meat and protein case.

Brown attempted to make such a deal with plants and animal over thousands of years

Sub virus stimulates anti virus special group:: argue second time around such a deal/////

Unusual beings dormant in cancer feel towards the day already overpopulated with hungry cows.

Viruses were by accident?

Live culture?

Cutup articles in Paris Herald Tribune on virus in human cancer and animal diseases in Africa.

THE ACTUAL MA VIRUSES IN POLIO PHOTO FOR FUR FUZZ?

found that the
lakeside sub
supported by
Cancer Society. . . .

to photograph
u fact your of the
cell.

and continue
from the U position.

The
for
lain
The America/ / / /

the bus con passengers
are now trying the
actual
Ma virus in thee C.

GE chock put 50
and guards

POLIO
PHOTO
FOR
FUR

photographed
side human

Cut up articles on polio virus und subliminals

DISH SOPRANO MADE THE NIGHT FOR SHE OVATION

She said: “Some bath rub they are    people”

dish soprano
wins ovation
in “Met.”
    By John Mo” ” ” ”

one of the MOST in opera
tan opera
her hus
dish, , , ,

had not
good the
after and
to some opposed

in wait
with Portugal
tied Spain into
a government – – – –

Plan to broaden
the killers
tomorrow &&&

the Federal government
were taken. .

years   years
needed   because

She said: “Some bath rub they are people”

Cut up Paris Herald Tribune articles

OTHERS KILL CELLS AND FUTURE FOR NEW CANCER HOLES

new cancer will be applied
synthetize cancer men
stepped up research
whole cancer
nothing more of unconcern
like tiny blobs
new ate
amplified into groups
agent at work
aid of the host
the usual procedure
eventual program
dry wit has survived
cancer search of the prostate
have all shrinkage
he made irresiphilis
another patient had orgasm
known as Doctor Cooly
vigorous
her quest data
actually separated by a long Pee
another mystery
Others kill calls and future
for new cancer hole.

Cut up TOWARD A CURE FOR CANCER in LIFE
November 23, 1959
NEW CLUES TO CANCER CURES
Saturday Evening Post
October 31, 1959

“people are some bath tub.”
for new cancer holes
Ma viruses
made the night for She Ovation
Dish Soprano
separated by long peee
another mystery
others kill cells and future
agent at work
new cancer hole
These individuals are marked foe
They are of malignancy the link
The usual procedure
separated by a long Pee
eventual program
known as COOL
virus graphed
Time.
OURS?
THAT?

MAO TZE: TA TA KAN KAN….KAN KAN TA TA

Paris: Two Cities Editions 1960, bound in wraps, one of 1,000 copies. Maynard & Miles A3a. A collaborative effort between Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Gregory Corso, and the first of the “cut-up” publications. There was also a limited edition of 10 copies (only five of which were for sale) each signed and numbered by the publisher and containing a manuscript page from each of the 4 authors. Contrary to Maynard & Miles statements, these copies are not printed on special paper or in special bindings. They are merely the standard work signed and numbered with an envelope containing the manuscripts pasted onto the inner rear cover. These were offered for sale at $25.00 each, rather more than the $1.50 retail for the trade edition. A copy of the limited edition is held at the Brown University Library and includes a letter from the publisher outlining prices for the different issues of the work. Correspondence from Miles indicates that most of the 1,000 copies had a wraparound band but these are seldom encountered now.

San Francisco: Beach Books 1968, bound in wraps but a different design from above, text is the same, one of 1,000 copies. Maynard & Miles A3b.