William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique

Historical background & origins

From Dada to the Beats — In literature the cut-up can be traced to post-WWI Dada. Tristan Tzara famously proposed making poems by drawing words from a hat (1920s). The idea fed into Surrealism and, in the 1950s, painter-writer Brion Gysin “discovered” the method by slicing up newspaper columns and rearranging them, developing it in works like Minutes to Go. Argentine writer Julio Cortázar also experimented with cut-and-reordered text, helping the method diffuse into avant-garde fiction.
Gysin and Burroughs — In 1959, in Tangier, Gysin consolidated the approach and then introduced it to William S. Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Paris. Burroughs pursued the technique across print and tape, claiming that if you “cut” the present, fragments of the future leak through—treating cut-ups as a way to expose hidden meanings and prophetic seams.
The Third Mind — In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published The Third Mind, collecting theory and practice of cut-ups and fold-ins. Burroughs advanced his provocative idea that “language is a virus,” and that recombining text can make new realities emerge—an influence that radiated through counterculture and experimental writing.

Physical cutting and re-ordering — Take printed prose (newspapers, pages from books), physically cut it, and shuffle the fragments into new sequences. Burroughs often described slicing a page into quarters (a cross or grid), swapping their positions, and retyping the resulting text. The forced juxtapositions fracture continuity and generate shocking, accidental connections.
The fold-in method — Take two separate texts, fold each page in half, and read them overlaid—one half aligned atop the other—so unrelated phrases collide. This produces novel phrasings without scissors, simply by “folding” streams together.
Collage and chance — Like pictorial montage, cut-ups are a literary collage that engineers chance. By literally cutting language, the writer invites the unconscious and subliminal material to surface in the text, turning editing into a generative device rather than a tidying step.

The Soft Machine (1961) — The first book of the Nova Trilogy. The English original was assembled with cut-ups, incorporating earlier manuscript fragments. The style splinters narrative continuity to attack shared linguistic codes and control structures.
Nova Express (1964) — The second volume. Here Burroughs leans on the fold-in technique, overlaying disparate pages so alien phrases touch. The novel thematizes linguistic control (“Nova Mob”) and deliberately scores “fold lines” into the prose.
The Ticket That Exploded (1962) — The third volume, intensifying fold-ins and recycling its own and prior fragments. It foregrounds Burroughs’ thesis that “language is a virus,” sometimes staging characters who perform cut-ups within the fiction itself.
Other notes — While Naked Lunch (1959) wasn’t composed as a pure cut-up, later insertions and re-ordering produced its famous discontinuities. The Third Mind includes Burroughs’ and Gysin’s explanations and demonstrations and remains a primary source on the techniques.