Cutting Up The Illusion of Reality

The Beat generation was fond of anything that expanded the mind and consciousness. Reality was something of the past, something to be manipulated and revealed for what it was: an illusion. Drugs, the Dreamachine, and meditation were some avenues in which this could be achieved. But cut-ups, a writing technique involving chance and literary tradition, were thought to reveal the meaning behind articles and poems, the writer’s REAL words. Cut-ups became the scrying of the Beat literary scene. Brion Gysin described it as table tapping, saying that it was, “certainly an improvement on the usual deplorable performances of contacted poets through a medium.” (195). Essentially, all writers, in some way, must be possessed by the muse for inspiration, and cut-ups were no different. It was simply a re-evaluation of language, which is ambiguous in and of itself. Gysin explained that they, “began to find out a whole lot of things about the real nature of words and writing. What are words and what are they doing?… If you want to challenge and change fate, cut up words, make them a new world.”(196). This is an excellent example of the Beat scene as a world-making endeavor. “All writing is in fact cut-ups… you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors…” (198).

Brion showed how cut-ups defined literature for their generation, but Burroughs introduced them as a psychological weapon. “As far as he was concerned, Cut-ups were a deconditioning agent, almost a new form of psychotherapy, a way to see reality clearly without nostalgia or sentimentality.” (140). It redefined his reality by cutting it up and rearranging it to what he felt was the truth. He believed that by “fracturing the surface of reality” he could protect himself against control. He began to think that he had psychic powers, and that “the only way to find out what someone was really saying was to cut up their words and get at the deeper meaning hidden inside,” “metaphorically dissecting” people to find the truth (240). Burroughs also felt that the act of creating a cut-up was another function of the muse; when he uses the word “random,” he means “divinely inspired.” He explained, “How random is random? You know more than you think. You know where you cut in.” (215). His deep-seated belief in this literary strategy reveals not only his paranoia, but his mysticism as well.

~ Andrea Lau