Like Lauren and Adam, I was fascinated with Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up Method” and the implications it has for writing and art writ large. In fact, I just read the article and realized I had to post my thoughts right away.
The introduction immediately brought my mind back to that passage on page 128 of If on a winter’s night, when the reader is “subjected to the uninterrupted reading of novels and variants of novels as they are turned out by the computer.” Clearly, there’s something about this image that makes me uncomfortable, similar to the feeling that must have been aroused in the surrealist riot of the 1920s, when Tristan Tzara proposed to write a poem entirely by pulling random words out of a hat. Like Adam, I thought back to the times I’ve looked at the paintings of Jackson Pollock and famous collage art and questioned–not whether or not it was art–but what it implied about art in general.
What’s becoming apparent to me is the importance of the author to the reader. When we read, we read assuming that the work in front of us is of another person’s mind. How much more we assume is variable depending on the work and what we know about the author. For example, if I read a book authored by William Faulkner, my favorite author, I am of course assuming it was penned by his hand. If I found out that The Sound and the Fury was actually written by someone else and was credited to Faulkner by mistake, the entire work would change. This goes on to remind me of the Shakespeare authorship debates–a very real, historical incident of the kind of situations Calvino discusses in his novel. What does it mean if Shakespeare didn’t write these plays? How does it change the way we study them? Are they still important plays, once they become non-Shakespearian?
Further, when we “read” a piece of visual art that is actually a collage of other artists’ works, we can immediately see that it is a collage, and we’ll keep this in mind as we draw further conclusions from the work. When we listen to a remix or mash-up on the radio, we can hear right away that it is the work of a DJ. We give the DJ proper credit, but also can acknowledge that the art he is creating is a re-structuring of previous art. However, in a published poem or piece of literature, it can be less obvious that the language has been “cut-up.” Unless the author specifically states this, as Burroughs does at the end of his piece (“…here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections and rearranged”) we tend to assume when we read books that the words are completely original, extracted only from the author’s mind.
This leads us to some of the issues Calvino deals with in his novel, and the question of authorship that we are trying to address for our class. For example, what does it mean if a text doesn’t have an “author”–if that author is a computer? How would this influence the way that we read the text? What does it mean when a text has the wrong author? I can speak for myself and say that if I found out that my favorite novel was actually the product of an inanimate machine, my understanding of it would dramatically change. When we read a piece of great literature, or a great poem, (as subjective as the idea of ‘great’ can be) we assume that it is a stroke of genius coming from an insightful person. We read hoping to catch a glipse of that ‘genius’ so that we can experience it and somehow make it a part of us. I think that a certain level of credit must be given to artists who “cut up” and rearrange previous works to create their own…after all, there’s always the argument that no artwork is truly ‘original,’ that it is always a call and response to a previously generated work. When anyone writes, they are recycling conventions they internalized from previous readings, no matter how broadly these conventions may be. In this way, maybe we all are cutting up and rearranging other people’s words. But in this broad sense, the idea of “cut-up” writing becomes less interesting.
I feel like I am digressing. I suppose I am just fascinated with this idea of to what extent can artwork be considered ‘original,’ versus artificial, and how this affects the way we read it. There is definitely a certain point where it becomes artificial, but where do we draw that line? Is it arbitrary, based purely on personal preference, or can we all agree that a computer-generated novel isn’t art? But what if you genuinely enjoy reading it? What a crisis. I will note that in my methods class for my English education minor, we’ve been encouraged to have students create “cut-up” poetry, whether by rearranging those magnetic words (you know the ones), composing a collage of words cut out of magazines/books/newspapers, or by having them rearrange actual poems we’ve already read in the class (for example, one assignment was to rearrange MLK’s “I have a dream” speech). Interesting that Burroughs’s technique has already won merit in the unfortunately conservative territory of the English Literature and composition classroom.
As an aside…in a somewhat eerie coincidence, a daily blogfeed that I subscribe to just emailed me the following links on automated writing, and the perceived threat of the ebook to writers and publishers. As more and more of what we read is published–and written–digitally, these questions seem to become more and more relevant.
And for the record, I was very, very tempted to write my blog post entirely as a “cut up” of all the other blog posts that have been posted, just to make a point…but I didn’t think Prof. Sample would have been very amused.