PARIS — With determined indeterminacy, young Mathilde Louette initiated a perplexing but hip four-hour English-language celebration of William S. Burroughs’s 100th birthday on December 12 in Paris, where the writer lived, 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’s unforgettable, non-linear narrative work Naked Lunch, a dreamlike, highly sexual, and drug-charged stream of freely associated vignettes that, taken together, make for an impressionistic masterpiece (one that was briefly banned in Boston).
To begin the celebration in fascinating fashion, professor Didier Girard copiously explored Burroughs’s work in comparison to automatons (self-operating, human-like mechanisms) and two literary outcasts: Jean Genet and Denton Welch. Then author Benoît Delaune spoke on the creative cut-up technique and its implications. He reminded the audience that Burroughs, as influenced by Brion Gysin (an artist known primarily for his rediscovery of the Dada master Tristan Tzara‘s cut-up technique and for co-inventing the flickering kinetic sculpture “Dreamachine”) 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.)
In brief, the cut-up method consists of cutting up and randomly reassembling various fragments of something to give them completely new and unexpected meanings. 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 employed the cut-up method. It was the basis for an interesting art show of the same name at the Palais de Tokyo in 2007 that was curated by Ugo Rondinone.