Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture by Cran Rona

Author:Cran, Rona
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 2.2 Photograph of archival cut-up material by William S. Burroughs held at the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Selection of cut-up fragments from the Allen Ginsberg Papers, Series II, Box 16, Fols 7–8. Copyright © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

This internal liberation, or freeing of the mind and the imagination (and silencing of ‘sub-vocal speech’ [TE, 43]), is, as Tanner suggests, a ‘two-way movement – out into reality, up or back into space’.167 It resembles, in its idealism, Vladimir Tatlin’s spatially limitless suspended counter-reliefs, which, like Burroughs’s writing, are ‘both deeply immersed in the lowest forms of materiality and serenely withdrawn from them’.168 This kind of work has been referred to as a form of skywriting, in which a message diminishes even as it is given. Regarding Burroughs’s skywriting in particular, Joan Didion perhaps puts it best:

To anyone who finds Burroughs readable at all, he is remarkably rereadable, if only because he is remarkably unmemorable. There are no ‘stories’ to wear thin, no ‘characters’ of whom one might tire. We are presented only with the fragmented record of certain fantasies, and our response to that record depends a good deal upon our own fantasies at the moment; in itself, a book by William Burroughs has about as much intrinsic ‘meaning’ as the actual inkblot in a Rorschach test.169

Burroughs’s writing is most significant at the moment in which it disappears, melting into the seams of the collage that has delivered it. Recurrent images of windows and sky permeate the cut-up trilogy, whilst words such as ‘fading’, ‘melting’, ‘dwindling’, and ‘falling’, are used repeatedly; The Soft Machine ends with ‘dead fingers in smoke’ (129), The Ticket That Exploded with a modified quotation from The Tempest (IV.1.150): ‘cut the prerecordings into air into thin air’ (159) – and Nova Express concludes as noted above, with ‘fresh southerly winds’, following the repetition of the phrase ‘melted into air’ (157). Burroughs’s work has the potential for longevity not because, as he had hoped, it is either ‘spectacular’ to look at or to read, but because it is mutable, subjective, and elusive, with the source of its power located, to quote Barthes, ‘not in its origin but in its destination’, ultimately governed by no law other than that of the reader’s imagination.170

For Burroughs, the act of withdrawal, of egress, was ‘the most subversive move to any establishment’,171 because it rendered the imposition of law by any control mechanism obsolete. He proved this, not only by exiling himself in Europe and Africa following his various transgressions in the US and Mexico, but also by embodying it in his writing. Collage, which involves ‘both placing and ellipsis’,172 is simultaneously the brazen avatar of vociferous protest and the apostle of silent resistance. Burroughs uses the collage practice to this end, to create a sort of absent presence, ‘a speech beyond silence’,173 a latticework through which glimpses of vision might penetrate. In this sense they carry more weight as

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