The Cut-Up Method

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

William S. Burroughs, working with the artist Brion Gysin in Paris in the late 1950s, developed the cut-up technique of literally cutting typed pages into pieces and rearranging the fragments into new sequences, treating chance recombination as a way to break language free of what Burroughs called the control of linear narrative. Naked Lunch, assembled from years of fragmentary manuscript pages Burroughs had written while addicted to morphine in Tangier, already showed this nonlinear, modular structure before the cut-up method was fully named, and Burroughs continued using the technique in later novels through the 1960s.