William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century

Joan Hawkins, Alex Wermer-Colan

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253041357
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This definitive book on Burroughs' decades-long cut-up project and its relevance to the American twentieth century, including previously unpublished works. William S. Burroughs's Nova Trilogy ( The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded ) remains the best-known of his textual cut-up creations, but he committed more than a decade of his life to searching out multimedia for use in works of collage. By cutting up, folding in, and splicing together newspapers, magazines, letters, book reviews, classical literature, audio recordings, photographs, and films, Burroughs created an eclectic and wide-ranging countercultural archive. This collection includes previously unpublished work by Burroughs such as cut-ups of work written by his son, cut-ups of critical responses to his own work, collages on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, excerpts from his dream journals, and some of the few diary entries that Burroughs wrote about his wife, Joan. William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century also features original essays, interviews, and discussions by established Burroughs scholars, respected artists, and people who encountered Burroughs. The essays consider Burroughs from a range of perspectives—literary studies, media studies, popular culture, gender studies, post-colonialism, history, and geography. "A landmark in scholarship." — Choice

1

Cutting Up the Century

OLIVER HARRIS

“A RIGGED THOUSAND YEARS”

A perfect phrase to mark the anniversary of Burroughs’ birth and the enduring legacy of his oeuvre, Cutting Up the Century is also an apt term to describe the project formed by Burroughs’ most experimental creative work. Naked Lunch (1959) may always remain his singular masterpiece, but the decade-long engagement with cut-up methods that Burroughs began after that book’s publication was an enterprise of a categorically different nature, a project, in which the book was just one form of writing, and writing was just one medium among others. The Cut-Up Project aimed to “cut up the century” because its revolutionary goal was to change the future by changing time itself—as Burroughs announced in the blistering block capitals that mark his earliest cut-up texts and polemics: “ALL OUT OF TIME AND INTO SPACE. FOREVER” (Burroughs 2006, 71).¹ What he meant by “time” is the very texture and causal logic of the world we know, the “IMMUTABLE REALITY OF THE UNIVERSE,” and he called this natural-seeming continuity that masks its alien and artificial construction “THE SOFT MACHINE.”² Cut-up methods assumed that reality was not represented by words and images but produced by them, so that cutting up was a way to shatter the illusion by denaturalizing appearances and making visible the conspiracy that sustains them in time: “This is war between those of us who want out and those who want to keep us all locked in time. The cut ups are not for artistic purposes. The cut ups are a weapon a sword. I bring not peace but pieces. Time cut to pieces. Cut time to pieces” (Burroughs 1961a). When Burroughs spoke of cutting up time, far from being historically and philosophically abstract, however, he was being strictly material, referencing the temporality and ideology of the specific project and specific uses of words and images against which he defined his own. That’s to say, he was cutting up the American Century.

The American Century was first popularized as a term in the early 1940s and was relaunched fifty years later as the Project for the New American Century, the right-wing think tank that was a driving force behind the Bush-Cheney administration and the War on Terror. During the decade of the Cut-Up Project, Burroughs in effect launched his own Century as a terroristic counter-project to the American Century, which in broad terms embodied everything he opposed: monopolistic consumer capitalism and conservative ideology at home taken to a higher power by an imperialistic ambition to remake the entire world in the image of America. The 1990s relaunch was more militaristic and jingoistic in how this imperium would be established, but the fundamentals had already been laid down when the term was used on the eve of America’s entry into World War II.

Burroughs was implacably against all that this American Century stood for, and his work can be read as a vitriolic counterattack and visionary mapping of alternative futures—all the more powerful because of course Burroughs came from the imperial class himself. That’s why in his fiction he could play the Ugly American so convincingly; as a descendent of “Poison Ivy” Lee, the father of public relations and PR man for Rockefeller, and grandson of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, whose computers for big business and the military rivaled IBM in the postwar era, William S. Burroughs had the empire of the American Century written into his DNA.

However, the content of the term American Century is not its main significance for understanding what we might, ironically, call “the Burroughs Century.” More important was the medium in which the term was popularized and through which it operated, because this directs us to not just the content of the Burroughs oeuvre but also to the particular experimental methods and forms it would take. Cut-up methods have usually been contextualized within avant-garde and literary history—citing Burroughs’ own citations from Tristan Tzara to T. S. Eliot—or have been related to other postwar subversive cultural movements, such as the Situationist International. Yet to see the Cut-Up Project chiefly in terms of artistic predecessors and fellow radicals is to misread how Burroughs worked at a material level, and it is through its materiality that Burroughs’ oeuvre is most integrally connected to the American Century as its binary opposite.

The American Century was promoted in and embodied by a set of highly influential material practices, and the term appeared as the title of a February 1941 editorial, in the flagship of American photojournalism: Henry Luce’s LIFE magazine. Burroughs’ antipathy toward Luce’s magazines is very well known; there are hostile references in numerous texts and interviews during the 1960s, most famously his declaration to the Paris Review in 1965 that “Time, Life, Fortune is some sort of police organization” (Burroughs 1965a, 35), and in the same year Burroughs produced his own cut-up edition of TIME (Burroughs 2001, 73). While he would often speak in broad terms about wanting to expose the “true criminality of our times,” his attacks on Luce were always very precise in associating “our times” with Luce’s Time and in recognizing his project’s temporal ambitions as indeed criminal (81). A 1962 draft for the revised Soft Machine accordingly magnified Luce’s American Century into a full blown millennium: “Past crimes high lighted Luce—he boasted of a rigged thousand years—.”³

Luce’s 1941 editorial championing the American Century in LIFE will seem bland to anyone reading it for the first time in the rearview mirror of the Project for the New American Century. Taken at face value, the American Century meant simply time for America: time to end its history of isolationism and take its place as a global power by entering World War II. But when Luce says “it is America’s first century as a dominant power” and then repeats the phrase, the inference leaks out: the twentieth century is the first American Century in the sense that a second must surely follow, and then a third … (Luce 1941, 64–65). Luce’s text operated as an imperialistic mission statement, a blueprint for America as the measure of all things and for the Americanization of the globe. Its subtext was a world that runs on American time, to the end of time, to the end of history: universal and immutable. In effect, Luce fantasized bringing temporality itself under permanent American control, and so leads straight to Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and one of the founding signatories of the New American Century.

Indeed, for Luce the “end of history” was already being shaped by what he called an “immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products” (1941, 65). TIME, LIFE, and Fortune were themselves part of this emergent globalization, and we have to remind ourselves that they did far more than dominate the US newsmagazine market; TIME, LIFE, and Fortune set the global standard for how the news was represented in word and image, and for how complex events were synthesized and reduced to predigested sound-bites that served a single narrative vision. Although they had a narrowly conservative agenda, the magazines successfully gave an impression of objectivity and omniscience, while their promotion of American culture and commerce as the new universal currency served Luce’s goal to project a vision of the nation to itself and the world until the two visions fully coincided. The owner of the TIME-LIFE publishing empire didn’t advocate a coercive imperialism of force, therefore, because unlike the Project for the New American Century, he had faith in the soft sell of an empire of images. Luce believed in exercising soft power, using media representations rather than military hardware, which is why we can understand Burroughs’ cut-up oeuvre as a guerrilla counter-project to the American Century.

Burroughs opposed Luce’s magazines not only for their reductive reportage and conservative content or even for their brutal reviews of his books—he actually sued Time because of one in 1963—but, more important, he opposed them because he took their titles literally, took Luce at his word. He saw that Luce’s magazines projected a world that would embody the American way of life, that would run on American time, and that would define fortune in terms of the American Dream. Quite literally, Luce ensured that whenever anyone referred to time they named his magazine, so that Burroughs’ refrain “ALL OUT OF TIME AND INTO SPACE” (Burroughs 2006, 71) referenced both one of Luce’s titles and the temporal order of his magazines; that’s to say, the ways in which they recorded events to make narrative sense of “the times” and therefore projected the onward march of history, whose commanding voice had narrated Luce’s March of Time radio and newsreel programs throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Burroughs’ cut-up magazine TIME was one of many works, including his Moving Times three-column newspaper format texts of the mid-1960s, that took the temporality of Luce’s title literally, experimenting with “time travel” by scrambling media reportage.⁴ The uniquely disorientating temporal experience of Burroughs’ book-length cut-up texts, with their nonlinear recyclings of material and vertiginous flashes of déjà vu, can also be read as ways to disrupt and escape both “time” in a philosophical sense and “the times,” the teleological drumbeat of Luce’s American Century, the universal time of global capitalism.

Burroughs’ understanding that the man who owned TIME, LIFE, and Fortune was in effect seeking to copyright the terms, is clearest from an unpublished manuscript composed shortly after he began using cut-up methods: “When Tzara first pulled words out of a hat the conspiracy of Life Time Fortune to monopolize Life Time and Fortune would have been smashed before it started.”⁵ Here, as elsewhere, Burroughs backdates cut-up methods to Tristan Tzara, but in a distinctive invocation of his Dada predecessor of the 1920s he ties the methods even more closely to Luce’s news media and their imperialistic postwar agenda. Projecting the “conspiracy” of Luce’s Time back in time and imagining defeating it through cut-up methods, this was Burroughs’ first attempt to retroactively rewrite history, a project that would become fully explicit in his “Red Night” trilogy of novels. The nightmare of Luce’s endless American Century, “a rigged thousand years,” animates Burroughs’ visionary mapping of alternative futures—of alternative times and alternative temporalities. At the high-water mark of the Cut-Up Project in 1970, Burroughs famously created his own time zone in the form of a “‘Dream Rat’ Calendar.” The Calendar of ten months with 23 days attempted to make an everyday practice out of the revolutionary aim announced in The Revised Boy Scout Manual that it is “Time to forget a dead empire and build a living republic”: “Step 1: PROCLAIM A NEW ERA AND SET UP A NEW CALENDAR” (Burroughs 1982, 9, 5).

A WAR OF TWO TRILOGIES

The “new era” of the Burroughs Century was a direct counter to Luce’s American Century, and it is tempting not only to see the Cut-Up Project as the story of a writer who took on Luce’s media empire but also to speak of a War of Two Trilogies: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded versus TIME, LIFE, and Fortune. However, this isn’t quite the case, and not simply because the war against Luce informed hundreds of short cut-up texts, scrapbooks, photo-collages, films, and audio tapes as well as a trilogy of books. Rather, it’s not the case because Burroughs’ rival trilogy was never planned or conceptualized as such.

One of the most startling discoveries to emerge from researching the “restored” editions of The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express was to realize that Burroughs never once referred to the three as “The Cut-Up Trilogy.” In fact, whenever he grouped three books together in the early 1960s, it was always to conjure different trilogies. Most materially there was Dead Fingers Talk, published in England in 1963, which creatively collaged together parts of Burroughs’ three Olympia Press titles, The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. While that trilogy left out Nova Express, other permutations left out The Ticket That Exploded. Indeed, the trilogy in “Introduction to Naked Lunch The Soft Machine Novia Express” [sic],⁶ published in Evergreen Review in January 1962, is also named in the text of Nova Express itself. The only instance when Burroughs actually uses the word “trilogy” at all (in an unpublished manuscript also from early 1962) is again for these three titles: “My present work is Novia Express […]—This is the last book of a trilogy—Naked Lunch The Soft Machine.”⁷ But even if we do group the three cut-up book titles together, we still don’t en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Biographical Timeline
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Cutting Up the Century
• Section I: Icon/Viral
• Section II: Space/Time
• Section III: Word/Image
• Section IV: Cut/Fold
• Section V: Body/Spirit
• Index