rough bur(s)

The cut-up calls attention to the act of reading as an interpretation of arbitrary signs, assembled in an arbitrary order. The reader's first reaction is to declare it non-sensical, and yet the cut-up is composed of words and phrases that, in their original order, the reader would have had no issue taking as a direct discussion of the concepts or things that they, the word-signifiers, represented. That is, the words in their initial arrangement were oriented so as to provide no break in the reader's interpretive process. The reader did not have to think about what the words meant in specific, but what they meant as a whole as ascribed by their assigned linear arrangement. In the cut-up, the reader becomes aware that they are reading, and when confronted with the task of interpreting utterances in specific, and not as a whole, the quest for meaning breaks down.

Or rather, the literal meaning breaks down--are not the same concepts, as embodied by their word-signifiers, being put into conversation? They are, but lacking the adornment and comfort of the qualification of a supposedly 'logical' order. The reader must confront them as a direct communication between the ideas within the larger utterance (the passage being cut-up). This is difficult, and jarring, for a reader--the reader trolls for intention, re-reading in search of the one phrase, the key, that will expose the reason behind this new orientation of words. The reader seeks the author; the author presents himself not in a fresh assignation of meaning to particular words, but in the very act of the cut-up.

And so the cut-up becomes as much about the act of authorship as it is about the designations of meaning associated through word order. Burroughs, then, is calling attention to himself. What he thinks about himself as an author, and about the role of authorship, can be difficult to discern in the cut-up--mostly, he is establishing himself as one who cuts-up, and offering it as a role analogous to authorship.

Then, to find a discussion of his role as an author, we can look to a passage in which Burroughs writes about one who cuts-up: namely, the provided excerpt from Naked Lunch concerning surgery.

Is Burroughs, he who cuts-up, embodied in Dr. Tetrazzini, hurling a single sharp word into language, emotion, narrative (the reader) to indicate his balletic entrance? or the espontaneo, leaping into the ring to put an end to artifice, authority? With his surgical cut-up, he is both. To create what he calls a 'myth for the Space Age,' he must ascribe to a certain degree of artifice, of performance. After all, he is using myth in the conventional meaning, and so functions with at least a nod to its conventional parameters.

That is, the 'hero' must be superior in kind to both other men and his environment: he must border on the divine; Tetrazzini is precisely that, able to operate at such a velocity as to not 'give [his patients] time to die.' Tetrazzini proves his superiority not only over other men, other doctors, but over death itself--an attribute of the deific. So then Dr. Tetrazzini is a mythic hero, or, if the analogy of cut-up man and author is to be continued, he is the mythic author whom the reader can be sure to rely on because he is faster than they are; he is aware of exactly how a breakdown of interpretation could occur, and he fixes it at precisely the moment before it happens. And, as each word marks a potential moment for the corruption of interpretation (be it through poor grammar, word-choice, or misspelling), he chooses each one perfectly, and the reader remains prostrate, unaware of their proximity to danger.

Then, if Burroughs were to be Dr. Tetrazzini, then he would be describing himself as a traditional author--something he does not wholly deny, citing Satyricon, Petronius' famously ribald picaresque novel, as an influence from antiquity. Yet that does not seem to fully satisfy his authorial intentions: where as Satyricon is not a complete narrative arc, and is composed of a series of set pieces, small vaguely related scenes, the linear flow, word-to-word, remains functionally intact. With his cut-ups, Burroughs takes the picaresque to its logical conclusion--placing each word in its own context, forcing each one to stand on its own, independent of grammatical fortification. So Burroughs is demonstrating his connection to the tradition, to Tetrazzini, but he is extending it, or, if you will, simplifying it. He makes words solely about words.

And what is more of a simplification than the espontaneo? He wishes to bypass artifice and gut the patient, to bring death, and, by analogy, enact the disruption of interpretation. He does not play by the rules of tradition, and wishes to call that what it is: a wound a wound, a scalpel a tool for the infliction thereof. He wishes to cut-up for the purpose of calling attention to the cutting-up. Here, Burroughs is easily found. He desires to be the espontaneo, to wield the words of others in such a way that the reader must read each word for what it is: death as death, time as time, cancer as cancer.

He wants the reader to wrestle with the concepts behind their word-signifiers, to feel the gravity and depravity of life. To witness the inadequacy of language, as a system of symbols, to effectively and completely reveal the truth behind the things which it purports to discuss; to see that as soon as two words are connected grammatically, logically, the reader becomes focused primarily on that connection, that linear progression, and as our cogitation possesses a certain shallow depth of field, the words themselves become fuzzy, indistinct. He both wields and undermines artifice simultaneously, as he must, given that his commentary on the imprecision of language is voiced in language. Because language, like any fundamentally flawed thing, is its own ultimate detractor.