1. Introduction
Articles by Werner Wolf and Jens Schröter elucidate both the “intermedial turn” and “ontological intermediality,” yet they have done so without much recourse to concrete examples. The problems with considering intermediality lie in part with the difficulty of “fixing” a medium, such as a novel, in the first place. Schröter notes that “media are determined only relationally and differentially so […] do not possess any absolutely constant ‘being’”. While we may consider a particular film, novel, painting, etc. to possess a very clear sense of its medium, that medium is itself merely a construction, holding no ontological essence outside of its relationality to other media [1]. In his defense of literary studies, Wolf discusses the importance of the need to study “(inter)mediality,” along with a need for “sound disciplinarity with regard to a well-informed focus on individual media” [2]. This article will attempt to do both, and while moving away from the term “intermedia” will focus on “the cut-up project,” a key twentieth-century avant-garde art movement predominantly associated with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, that I argue led to a thoroughgoing material examination of the spaces between media.
“Intermedia” remains a term most closely associated with Dick Higgins and the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, with his comment that “Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is no accident. The concept of the separation between media arose in the Renaissance” [3]. His point is that as an artistic mode it was nothing new, as in a sense primitive cave paintings, in their ability to be both aesthetic and linguistic, are “intermedia.” Higgins is rightly referencing the reductive tendency in Western traditions to categorize “disciplines” and focus on the singular genius of the artist, author or auteur, elements touched upon by French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. In her exploration of Barthes’ position on interdisciplinarity Diana Knight writes, “In line with the values he was developing elsewhere in his work, he moved too towards something resembling an ethics of interdisciplinarity, whereby a non-competitive intellectual environment would replace disciplinary protectionism. Underpinning Barthes’s approach to interdisciplinarity was the conviction that the human sciences needed to question the status of their discourse” [4]. Barthes’ critical exploration went far beyond textual analysis to include readings that defied structural boundaries of discipline and media, indeed in many ways this can be seen as one of the central tenets of his theoretical project.
In his response to Barthes’ 1966 essay “The Death of the Author” Foucault too considers the problematic connections between the constructed and fluid categorizations that have come to be known as “author” and “work.” Marshall McLuhan’s theory that the medium/media that carries content holds an additional, easily overlooked message is another way of considering the power of intermedial approaches, as he states, “it is only too typical that the ‘content’ blinds us to the character of the medium” [5]. In this context he is not referring to “medium” as synonymous with “media,” as in the technology that carries content (book, movie reel, tape, etc.), but rather the social and/or environmental effects of that technology. Wolf defines medium as “a conventionally and culturally distinct means of communication, specified […] primarily by the use of one or more semiotic systems in the public transmission of contents that include, but are not restricted to, referential ‘messages.’” [2]. This allows an inclusivity that can include both “book” and “novel,” while remaining necessarily vague. He adds that “media make a difference as to what kind of content can be evoked, how these contents are presented, and how they are experienced,” which is the central point that needs exploration, these differential notions of evocation, presentation and most importantly, experience [3].
Although Schröter’s attempts to describe the discourse of intermediality are insightful, particularly his notion of “ontological intermediality” which determines media existing relationally, “intermedia” can be seen more simply in current parlance as synonymous with “transmedia” and “multi-media,” with only subtle differences. “Multimedia” was first coined after Higgins’ introduction of intermedia by Bob Goldstein for his 1966 “LightWorks at L’Oursin” art show, and only in the 1990s did the term develop its more simplistic and physical meaning of a multiplicity of text, still photos, animations, videos, audio, and interactive applications. It is occasionally, though perhaps inaccurately, used to describe artists or stars that work in different media, for example famous actors who sing can be described as “multimedia stars” [6]. As noted above intermedia fits works that fall between media, an extreme example Higgins uses is the “intermedium between painting and shoes,” while also noting Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” as falling between sculpture and “something else” [2]. Such problems persist both with defining a particular media, and “intermedia” itself, for example, film is effectively an intermedia blending photography, sound and potentially many other media, which makes “intermedia,” in this context, a particularly vague and confusing term.
“Transmedia” is predominantly associated with the tendency for contemporary franchise entertainment to develop media across a range of formats, such as Star Wars, which began as a 1977 George Lucas-directed movie but which continues to expand into an ever-growing array of literary, comic-book, graphic-novel, and interactive video-game formats, though these are perhaps better defined as media franchises, or simply mixed-media. The notion of transmedia as storytelling across multiple platforms and formats, developed by Henry Jenkins, is one that allows for a richer development of highly complex worlds with more detailed plot-lines and characterization, filling in any gaps with additional media [7]. Transmedia storytelling, broadly defined as storytelling across media, is problematic and ill-defined as Donna Hancox notes, “literary theory, narratology, semiotics, film theory, media studies, and so on—all contribute important perspectives to the scholarship and practice of transmedia storytelling, but [...] none is sufficient on its own” [8]. It is this notion of “intermediality” that most troubles Wolf, particularly in terms of approaching it as a literary scholar without the expertise in the analysis of other media, reaching into the field of comparative literature. The key problem is that while in franchises like Star Wars the use of different media has created a bewildering narrative universe that holds little continuity or canonicity, merely a vague sense of styles and features that has allowed a great deal of artistic freedom. Within this contemporary, ill-defined “intermedial” context, it is helpful to consider Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s fundamentally rebellious cut-up project of the 1960s.
In the context of considering the continuity of Burroughs’ works as not just a form of transmedia storytelling, but also profoundly “transmedial” in the sense that, corresponding but further than Schröter’s relational ontological intermediality, cut-ups have a fluid relationship to mediality; always and importantly located in an unstable position between media highlighting the instability of such constructions. It is useful to note his response in a 1974 interview that, “In a sense, it’s all one book. All my books are all one book” [9]. I would argue that Burroughs is unintentionally limiting his use of media here, that his meaning should be that all his works are, in fact, one work. That does not mean that his works are transmedia, that is, between media, but that his ideas, situations, characters, etc. are always in the process of transferring between books and other media in his works, and that the meaning and ideas in those works are communicated much more effectively, as experience, via those different media following McLuhan’s dictum of the “medium is the message” [5]. It is in this context that it becomes useful to use “transmedia” to refer to Burroughs’ works more broadly with a contextuality and continuity that crosses between media, utilizing the distinct characteristics of those media, and the problematic liminal spaces between, to produce different effects.
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2. The cut-up project: transmedial from the start?
Burroughs’ 1959 novel Naked Lunch is a ground-breaking collage of text, a phantasmagoria of register and genre blurring the distinctions between memoir, ethnography, fantasy, report, pulp fiction, parody, satire and dialog. It even claims “This book spill of the page” in introducing a section of vivid images and sounds, highlighting Burroughs’ intention to transcend the novel medium [10]. While Timothy Murphy’s suggestion that “Burroughs’ career might be a new paradigm for the writer’s active, shaping involvement with other mass media,” highlights Burroughs’ apparent exceptional status in the transmedial sphere, he does not note Burroughs’ natural lineage in Dadaism, Surrealism, Lettrism and Futurism, movements that explored the blending of word and image, sound and performance [11]. Daniel Punday draws the parallel between the increasing scholarship on Burroughs and his “Multimedia Aesthetic,” arguing that “Burroughs wants to emphasize our movement between media as a way to draw our attention back to the materiality of language that makes up his text, and thus that forms the bedrock of our response to his work” [12]. This focus on materiality misses the importance of the liminality of the inter- or transmedia field, while the focus on Burroughs as exceptional in this field is somewhat reductive. Rather it is important to grasp the origins and effects of the essential starting point of Burroughs’ interest in moving beyond the written word in terms of experimentation and as part of a project that had both its progenitors and collaborators, and consider more broadly the ramifications of his transmedia experimentation.
The “cut-ups” were in-part an extension of the collage form of Naked Lunch, taken much further and incorporating an aleatory and predominantly visual element, in-part drawn from Tristan Tzara’s Dada performance poetics. Gysin, an artist at first associated with the Surrealist movement, is credited with accidentally stumbling upon the cut-up technique of cutting and rearranging text, including works by other writers, at the “Beat Hotel” (9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in Paris) in 1960. Cutting through newspapers while mounting his paintings Gysin noticed how the texts became rearranged, creating random juxtapositions, surreal breaks and neologisms, and he introduced the method to Burroughs and other artistic tenants in the Hotel, including Harold Norse, Gregory Corso and Sinclair Beiles. What developed was a rigorous, dialectical technique for producing a new kind of text, an offshoot of concrete poetry that would develop throughout the 1960s with an array of collaborative publications, three novels The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964), tape/sound experiments, live performances and films. Gysin saw the evolution of the cut-ups through his part in the editing of Naked Lunch (Gysin, Beiles and others contributed), where visual elements informed the textual material: “Showers of snapshots fell through the air […]. Burroughs was more intent on Scotch-taping his photos together into one great continuum on the wall, where scenes faded and slipped into one another […]” [13]. He notes that they stuck pages of text onto the walls next to the photographs, cutting and pasting the pages together. Again highlighting the intersection of visual art and the literary, and the transmediality of cut-ups, Gysin states that the cut-up technique emerged in part from a discussion with Burroughs about “turning painter’s techniques directly into writing” [13].
Defined vaguely as a “project” rather than a “writing experiment” or “transmedial technique,” there is an implication that it would persist and be explored broadly within the scope of writing, yet almost immediately it expanded from the mostly poetic experiments of the first “official” cut-up project, the collaborative pamphlet Minutes to Go (1960). Referring to the aforementioned cut-up novels specifically, Robin Lydenberg makes the results of the technique seem similarly (and vaguely) prose-poetic, stating that their function is “to make the word an object detached from its context, its author, its signifying function […] to bring […] the collage to writing” [14]. While this misses much of the diversity of the project in terms of the intertextual inclusion of writing from a range of sources and genres, Lydenberg makes an important point regarding the visual concreteness that cut-ups bring to language with the word detached from context foregrounded as visual “object.” Burroughs’ mission therefore seems to be to push beyond this sense of the (con)textual, in a turn to the visual. The second pamphlet produced by Burroughs and Gysin using the technique, The Exterminator (1960), contains 4 pages of calligraphic material, marking out the text for Oliver Harris as “the most important early expression of the two men’s creative synergy and of their experiments in verbal-visual form” [15].
Title The Exterminator likely references the surrealist parlor game le cadavre exquis [the exquisite corpse], in which participants take turns to collaborate on writing a story or drawing a picture without seeing the other’s contribution. In this context, the attempt The Exterminator makes to transcend individual authorship is also an attempt to transcend the reader’s expectations by including drawings [15]. While the drawings might at a glance be considered peripheral to the main body text, or to use Gerard Genette’s term “paratextual,” Gysin’s asemic writing is directly associated with his preceding Permutation Poems, short sentences comprehensively and repetitively reordered into every possible permutation, presented in block capitals [16]. The most notable is “RUB OUT THE WORDS,” describing the attempt with cut-ups to remove, or “exterminate,” word associations and the semantic baggage they carry. While the use of block capitals creates an immediate strangeness, not to mention the sense of expressiveness akin to shouting, the following sister poem “RUB OUT THE WORDS” symbolically underlines its title adding further expressiveness, while the poem itself replaces the permutated words with the logogrammatic symbols “#$%&,” highlighting the often arbitrary and purely symbolic meaning associations of words and morphemes. As Harris notes in discussing the recently published cut-up experiment BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS (2020), Burroughs uses block capitals in the page headings of The Exterminator to act as newspaper headlines, yet with the Permutation Poems the block capitals effect is, in a sense, that the poems should be read out loud, the effect similar to what Harris describes as “their visualisation of a technologically-enhanced, spontaneous live quality that models the text of BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS on another medium: radio broadcasting” [17]. The block capitals, as with the calligraphic drawings highlights the transmediality of language, oscillating as it does in the space between sound and speech, and drawing and written text.
While there are distinctions between the writing of each collaborator, particularly in Minutes to Go, it is only the Permutation Poems and calligraphic drawings that are attributed to Gysin, the other texts, the reader assumes (though cannot be sure), are the blended products of both contributors. Both Minutes to Go and The Exterminator have a more paratextual sense of separate experimentation that makes them distinct from the intertextual blending of texts and media that would occur later. The Exterminator is notable as it began the blurring of visual, textual, and authorship boundaries, where it was philosophically, as Harris states, enacting “a deconstruction of language that goes together with a dissolution of self, a project to exterminate nothing less than “the” space and time of the world known to “thee.”’ [15]. Time is of central importance to this equation, on a narrative and poetic level, to the effect cut-ups have, regardless of the source of the materials cut, on the reader (thee). Harris writes that material can be, “cut up to produce a collage of phrases and images that approximates the density, rhythmic measure, and uncanny effect of déjà-vu […]” [13]. The fundamental of cut-up text is distorted narrative, with words (morphing into image) repeating as phrases and poetic rhythms, affecting memory, evoking feelings of nostalgia and recreating a kind of dream logic.
The first edition of Burroughs’ cut-up novel The Soft Machine, which he started writing as Naked Lunch was being published in 1959, demonstrates a preoccupation with invoking image using text in its sectional structure of color “Units” (Red, Green, Blue, White). While this would be largely removed from later editions the importance of the visual is underlined by the 1961 publication of the penultimate chapter of the American edition of The Soft Machine as a hand-lettered concrete poem arrangement “Wind Hand Caught in the Door” in Hamburg based journal Rhinozeros [18]. Similarly, and although not intended as part of The Soft Machine, the publication of “Operation Soft Machine/Cut” in the Fall 1961 edition of The Outsider magazine, is prefaced with an illustrated cover and an image of Burroughs with newspaper text as background, with the following pages presented in a three column newspaper format overlaid with images of insects [19]. Such distortions to the traditional flow of textual narrative, and evocation of color as pure image, recalls Paul Ricœur’s discussions on metaphor, in terms of poetic language, as an exaggerated or distorted imitation of reality. Such texts can, for Ricœur, be read, understood, and importantly, move people to action; in the sense that the writing of the past enables change in the present [20]. The reality distortion of cut-ups can produce unintended and/or random meaning in the reader, and indeed its poetry and prosody can enact a kind of shock, and can therefore be seen as more likely to produce action, than traditional narrative prose; the reader clearly knows something is up here. Such distortions are in part due to the break-up of genre or media expectation; Burroughs is exploring the effects of transmediality in his work, while training his readership to do the same. He notes this in reference to J.W. Dunne’s 1927 book An Experiment with Time, a work that theorizes about precognitive dreams, by stating that within such dreams, “You are seeing not the event itself, but a newspaper picture of the event, prerecorded and prephotographed” [21]. The implication here is that cut-ups, by disrupting narrative expectations, can produce the same uncanny precognitive impressions that Dunne believed were presented by precognitive dreams which have pushed those who experienced them to action in attempts to prevent the negative outcomes of those dreams. This “minutes to go” urgency appears to be connected to the future recording and photographing of the event. However, given the orthodoxies of journalism and photojournalism often the representation of new events is linked to those of the past, for example in the careful staging of war photographs [22]. As Sean Bolton notes, in Burroughs’ cut-up works there is a lack of fixity where there exists, “a simulacrum of material context, settings that not only simulate recognizable physical and temporal locations but replace them” [23]. Bolton is correct in recognizing Burroughs’ experimentation with fixity, but remains rooted in the analysis of narrative, the novels and their readers, “The contexts of Burroughs’ novels are determined, then, by readers during reading and according to their own experiences of the ‘network of differences’” [23]. What this misses is the wider project of transmediality that further disrupts even this “network of differences”.
Burroughs’ subsequent 1961 cut-up novel The Ticket that Exploded ends with perhaps the most jarring transition in the cut-up trilogy of novels, a definitive blurring of text and image with a final section that morphs into a Gysin calligraphic work that itself is half-handwritten text, half-asemic writing [24]. The depiction of handwriting becoming asemic (essentially language without meaning), rather than as separate plates as presented in The Exterminator, and making the more mechanical aspects of language become more “bodily” by using handwritten cursive script, it becomes more expressive, a point made by Walter Benjamin, “graphology is concerned with the bodily aspect of the language of handwriting and with the expressive aspect of the body of handwriting” [25]. It also echoes, effectively, the break-down of semantic meaning that results from the cut-up technique and marks where Burroughs is most keenly aware of the importance of language as image, and his interest in developing the cut-up in the spaces between traditionally demarcated disciplines and media. Burroughs (and Gysin) were also fascinated by logographic writing systems, as Burroughs’ 1960 letter to Gysin makes clear, “I want to go to Hong Kong to learn Chinese. Imagine repetitive poems and cut ups in Chinese. Shift lingual” [26]. Given that Mandarin contains ideograms, characters that directly represent what they mean, there is a sense that they are both words and pictures; this is likely the aspect that appealed to Burroughs as he worked to eliminate what he saw as the confusion of Western thought [27].
Although it can be argued that drawing and writing are fundamentally the same, some, such as Tim Ingold, have attempted to list distinctions, “First, writing is a notation; drawing is not. Secondly, drawing is an art; writing is not. Thirdly, writing is a technology; drawing is not. Fourthly, writing is linear; drawing is not” [28]. The problem with such distinctions is that they do not match up with cut-up writing; concrete poetry, for example, can be an art, and the poetic juxtapositions of cut-up writing can be seen in this context. The three-column newspaper arrangements described as a cut-up technique in Burroughs’ 1964 essay “The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith” certainly challenge the linearity of writing by prompting the reader to read both down and across the columns, “Arrange your texts in three or more columns and read cross column”; by challenging linear conventions Burroughs is creating indeterminacy in both reading and writing, producing unstable, oscillating transmedial texts that can be adapted by the reader, opening up the practices of reading and interpretation and pushing it towards the type of aesthetic interpretation favored by art, rather than literary, critics [29].
In “The Mayan Caper” section of The Soft Machine the narrator makes the importance of the matrix of time, cut-ups and transmediality particularly apparent. This begins with newspapers, which already blend photographs with words: “when I fold today’s paper in with yesterday’s paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to the time when I read yesterday’s paper, that is traveling in time back to yesterday” [19]. The experiments continue with film, “The next step was carried out in a film studio—I learned to talk and think backward on all levels—This was done by running film and sound track backward” [19]. As Harris states, with these new forms of publication Burroughs is proposing, “a different mode of temporality, an irregular temporality” that is designed as part of a broader attack on all forms of traditional conventionality, against any attempt to “standardise time, to narrate it in predictable and commercially stable ways” [15]. Although Dadaists, Surrealists and others had explored collage and aleatory reformulation before him, Burroughs discovered that collage methods removed conventional distinctions between media; what began with cutting up text extended to producing an author as jack-of-all-trades polyglot, utilizing pen, typewriter, and movie camera, although missing from “The Mayan Caper” is the use of the tape recorder [24].
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3. Cut-up sound and movies
The Ticket that Exploded foregrounds the element of intertext largely missing from “The Mayan Caper” section of The Soft Machine; the sounds invoked by words. It certainly contains a broad range of references to music, as Harris notes: “Whole pages consist of nothing but song titles and sampled lyrics, collages of nursery rhymes and jazz standards, torch songs and blues ballads, cowboy tunes, Negro spirituals and Tin Pan Alley sentimental melodies” [24]. As Ian MacFadyen states in a discussion of Gysin’s use of language, “Gysin explored the idea that a word resembles, indeed embodies, in its shape and sound, through alliteration and visual associations, what it describes — that meaning is influenced by the shape and sound of individual letters, and by their combinatory effects” [30]. Such “combinatory effects” mark those same interstices between media forms that can be seen as transmedial. The textual reference to a song evokes notes and lyrics in the reader not on the page, a way of tapping into memory and meaning that exists entirely between the media. A similar consideration seems to have been made regarding the script-like block capitals of BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS; as Harris notes this was a part of the cut-up project yet was written as intended to be read out loud, “as a spoken word transmission” or broadcast via radio [17]. This wide matrix of language use and exploitation of liminality appears to have been part of Burroughs’ consideration during many of the cut-up experiments.
Filmic experiments, aided by British director Anthony Balch, were also a key component of the cut-up project. “Towers Open Fire” (1962–1963) is a more-or-less linear narrative collage film that includes themes and situations from the books, as well as the grid patterns and glyphs Gysin was exploring that would be included in the later book The Third Mind (1976). The soundtrack is a Burroughs narration that includes text from his cut-up novels, alongside stock De Wolfe library music and Moroccan folk-trance music [31]. Also included prominently is Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s “Dreamachine.” The Dreamachine is a further transmedial artifact closely connected to the cut-up project. The title itself is a contraction of “dream” and “machine,” cunningly connecting the two “media.” Similar to a zoetrope cinema, the Dreamachine is a stroboscopic piece of light art, first produced in 1960, that functions by producing a flicker effect that if looked at with eyes closed produces a hypnagogic effect [32]. The cross-over of themes and inclusion of artworks is profoundly transmedial, and it is successful as a means of providing some explanation of the often bewildering experience of attempting to read the disjointed poetics of cut-up text. The apparent linearity of “Towers Open Fire” is disrupted further by the later experimental film “The Cut-Ups” (1966), a more precise expression of the cut-up method on film, in which, as John Sargeant notes, “Balch cut all of the original material into four sections, then handed the footage over to a “lady who was employed to take a foot from each roll and join them up”‘[…] The editing was purely a mechanical task, most importantly “nobody was exercising any artistic judgment at all. The length of the shots (except for the last) [was] always a foot” [31]. The soundtrack has Burroughs reciting a Scientology auditing script designed to produce a “clear,” repeating certain words and phrases intended to elicit an emotional response. Both Balch and Burroughs were interested, following Gysin and Sommerville’s invention of the Dreamachine, in the subliminal effects of the moving image, and so the length of the cuts took this into consideration so that they were the shortest length that still allowed an audience to perceive an image. As Balch states, “a foot... is long enough for people to see what’s there, but not enough to examine it in detail”’ [31]. This consideration of film beyond the conventionalities of narrative cinema challenges the medium itself, and the collaborators took this further with the content of the film itself, which depicts Gysin producing grid-patterned roller painting, and performing asemic calligraphic writing. He is also shown writing phrases before turning the page 90 degrees, and continuing to write over the previous text, which as Sargeant states produces “a visual density of text which transforms into a calligraphic haze” [31]. The film, while still holding true to Burroughs’ themes and preoccupations of the time, such as Scientology, the nascent power of language, and the prophetic power of cut-ups, produces some of the same initial dissonance as the books, pamphlets and other cut-up publications, yet the change in media also creates a range of effects, in particular a sense of entrapment as it forces the audience to watch a series of flashing images. Although the images are presented at random, with scenes structured according to lengths of celluloid rather than lengths of action or narrative, there also persists a sense of linearity to the work. Nevertheless, as Sargeant notes, these film collaborations, “exist beyond the traditionally ascribed borders and limits of cinema [and] cut/edit/splice/jump/fold, beyond the traditionally ascribed limits” [31].
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4. Cut-up books further beyond the text
While the Minutes to Go collaboration between Burroughs, Gysin and the poets Beiles and Corso marks the beginning of the cut-up project, it is arguably ended by the publication of Burroughs’ didactic call to arms essay collection Electronic Revolution in 1970, and also by the belated collection The Third Mind (1978), which Burroughs and Gysin originally envisioned as a visual and textual collaboration. In part developing out of Burroughs’ obsessive use of collage scrapbooks that developed during the writing of Naked Lunch, The Third Mind blends newspaper articles, notes, photographs and drawings. First published as œuvre croisée in French (Paris: Flammarion 1976), the French title of The Third Mind, which can be translated as one piece of art made from combined and mixed artworks, was added by translator Gérrard George Lemaire, a likely planned distortion from the original intention. Yet this title, with its diagraph merged o and e demonstrates practically in letter units that by cutting and reformulating text and image a third meaning can be uncovered in the spaces between. MacFadyen calls the book “misunderstood,” in part because it has still yet to be published as originally intended as the 1970 Grove Press edition was pulled from production even after reaching the proofing stage [30, 33]. This work was started in the 1960s, with an edition planned for publication in 1965, and as Jed Birmingham states, “the visual development of the cut-up that would continue into the 1970s and lead to the collaboration with Malcolm McNeill in the never completed Ah Puch is Here” [34]. As documented in McNeill’s book Observed While Falling (2007), the Ah Puch is Here project, eventually more conventionally published as Ah Pook is Here and Other Texts (1979), was envisioned as an ambitious full-color graphic experimental novel, using comic-strip framing to further blend media as a “visual narrative where pictures and text interacted in whatever form seemed appropriate” [35]. The basis of the original The Third Mind was similarly ambitious, and intended to show the more intensive blended text and art collaborations that Burroughs and Gysin were producing at the time. As Lemaire puts it: “It is not the history of a literary collaboration but rather the complete fusion in a praxis of two subjectivities, two subjectivities that metamorphose into a third; it is from this collusion that a new author emerges, an absent third person, invisible and beyond grasp, decoding the silence” [21]. The dual sense here, of collaboration production, via this liminal space, can similarly be applied to the spaces between media. In a 1966 letter to Gysin, Burroughs considers The Third Mind as not only somehow fitting the zeitgeist but also as a defiantly transmedia production including both tape and film experiments: “Actually it is just as well The Third Mind publication is delayed since people will be more open to it a year from now. Properly timed it could be a best seller. Its going to need some pruning and of course adding any new tape recorder or film experiments” [26]. This is in keeping with other contemporaneous experimental publications, such as Phyllis Johnson’s multimedia magazine Aspen, which was published from 1965 to 1971. Each issue came with a range of media, notably nos. 5 + 6 which included the first English publication of Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” along with a phonograph recording of Burroughs reading “Excerpts from Nova Express (1964),” and even a Super 8 film reel featuring works by Hans Richter and Robert Rauschenberg, with whom Burroughs would later collaborate [36]. Although Burroughs would arguably retreat to some extent from using the cut-up method in his works of the 1970s and later, the sense of transmedial experimentation continued, and in the 1980s he would begin a transition to visual artist that would incorporate the earlier experimentation into a more visual field.
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5. Expanding the field: in time and space
The transmediality of cut-ups, and their legacy on artists and writers has been profound, yet it is in Burroughs’ transition from writer to visual artist that one can begin to see the ramifications of his attitude to media, and one can consider the ways other artists have experimented with and challenged media conventionalities. We have seen some of the key transmedialities that emerged in Burroughs’ work and collaborations, yet the works remain for whatever reason predominantly bound to Burroughs as the dominant figure. This is perhaps most notable in relation to the cut-up films, which were directed by Balch but are routinely ascribed to Burroughs. Foucault considers the issue when considering the author function, stating that it, “manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being” [37]. Burroughs’ status and apparent particularity has allowed the works he is associated with to become subsumed under the power of his name, much like the categorization of media, and in many ways contrary to the emphasis he so often places on the importance of his collaborators and his resistance to such conventionalities, particularly during the 1960s.
It is important, therefore, to resist this tendency and consider other artists and writers associated with the cut-ups and how their work crossed into transmediality, yet as will become apparent, Burroughs still mysteriously looms large. Poet Harold Norse, whose paratextual cut-up book Beat Hotel (1983), composed between 1960 and 1963, and also contained a range of photographs and facsimiles, defies medial categorization. In 1961 Norse exhibited his Cosmograph ink drawings, and Beat Hotel contains both a photograph of Norse with his drawings and a Burroughs introduction to the exhibition in which he notes, “What is painting? What is writing? Art? Literature? These words have no meaning now […]. Only the painting and writing that gives us precise maps of some psychic area serves a function at this intersection point of word and image that we call Present Time” [38]. Here Burroughs directly references transmediality as an “intersection point”. He explains: “Sit down in a café somewhere drink a coffee read the papers and listen don ́t talk to yourself [...] note what you see and hear as you read what words and look at what picture. These are intersection points. Note these intersection points in the margin of your paper. Listen to what is being said around you and look at what is going on around you” [29]. As Antonio José Bonome García notes, these correspond with the “umlaut of semiotic stimuli we may be processing as we try to read a newspaper” [39]. This “umlaut” describes, in effect, a transmediality. Burroughs himself makes this clear with reference to another cut-up text, the aptly named Time, a 1962 collage collaboration with Gysin that Birmingham calls a “stellar example of Burroughs’ attempts to merge the collage technique of art with the cut up technique of literature” [40]. French artist and writer Claude Pelieu and his wife Mary Beach also took to using the cut-up technique, publishing texts such as the former’s With Revolvers Aimed at Finger Bowls (1967) and the latter’s Electric Banana (1975), which both feature collage covers and introductions by William Burroughs. Angus MacLise, whose 1960s New York happenings were occurring separately from cut-ups, nevertheless involved “the uses of multiple screens, multiple projectors, multiple images, interrelated screen forms and images, film-dance, moving slides, kinetic sculptures, hand-held projectors, balloon screens, video tape and video projections, light and sound experiments”, and sound like transmedial phantasmagoria, producing multiple “intersection points” [41]. The “typestracts” of Benedictine monk and artist Dom Sylvester Houédard, who corresponded with Burroughs, present very particular visual poems that utilize the typewriter as an artistic tool, in works where words are, as Guy Brett puts it, “one stream in a convergence of graphic means” [42]. They fail to fit easily into one medium, rather they exist on an intersection point between art and poetry. He was vocal, as Andrew Hunt and Nicola Simpson state, about “the contexts of concrete poetry, opening up its parameters to include mail art, kinetic art, part art and Performance art” [42]. Chinese-born artist Li Yuan-chia moved in the 1960s from painting to kinetic art using magnets to allow viewers to physically interact and move the piece into different forms, to effectively disrupt and “cut” into his work. He was fascinated by what he described as the “cosmic point”, stemming in part from Taoism, as a point connecting the “cosmic” and “human” realms, a concept that bears a striking similarity to Burroughs’ intersection points [43]. There are further examples, but these texts, writers and artists neatly demonstrate that although a looming figure, Burroughs is not unique in his exploration of transmediality.
Unique to Burroughs, though, is the concrete recurrence of themes and characters across media and works spanning almost 50 years, evident in his visual works and collaborations. His 1989 collaboration with artist Keith Haring titled The Valley includes etchings and illustrates sections of Burroughs’ 1987 novel The Western Lands [44]. His “shotgun” paintings are not all titled, but as Robert Sobieszek notes, “when they are, as in Escape from Centipede Troughs and Are You in Salt?, their titles come directly from his writings” [45]. Just as many of his characters, notably Clem Snide who appears in The Soft Machine, Exterminator! (1973) and Cities of the Red Night (1981), recur across works, so do numerous phrases and idioms, highlighting how transmediality, even in its definition as storytelling across media, applies so aptly to Burroughs’ oeuvre. Sobieszek’s book on Burroughs’ visual art, Ports of Entry (1996), takes a quote from the novel Port of Saints (1973), “if you can’t see it, you can’t say it” to point to Burroughs’ wish to be free from what he sees as the straightjacket of language, as “there is no way to effectively portray simultaneous events in writing” [44]. In a 1965 interview with Conrad Knickerbocker Burroughs was asked if he had been successful in “rubbing out the word”, i.e. silencing the inner voice, his answer was, “I’m becoming more proficient at it, partly through my work with scrapbooks and translating the connections between words and images” [27]. From the 1980s Burroughs would focus predominantly on visual works, although his transmediality would continue to expand with acting appearances in film and music videos, music collaborations, an opera, and narrating an interactive CD-Rom. Such experimentation and diversity certainly presents what Rosalind Krauss terms the “post-medium condition”, yet we are still, it seems, firmly entrenched in media and disciplinary straight-jackets [45]. While Burroughs, and the cut-up project more broadly, through transmediality engaged in far-reaching efforts to transcend reductive and dogmatic conventionalities in artistic production, such efforts were, at least in mainstream transmedial storytelling for example, deemed to have failed. What is clear is that there is much more considered analysis to be done on works and artists that defy simple, media-based, categorization.
Open access peer-reviewed chapter
