Seminal Beat author, William S. Burroughs, recounted the event variously: "In 1959 Brion Gysin said: “Writing is fifty years behind painting” and applied the montage technique to words on a page." Gysin recalls the event as follows:
I had a big table on which I worked very often with a Stanley blade, and I had cut up a number of newspapers accidentally. They had been underneath something else that I was cutting. The pieces sort of fell together, and I started matching them up, and I thought Wo-o-o-o-ow, it's really very funny. And I took some of them and arranged them in a pattern which was visually pleasing to me and then typed up the results; and I have never laughed so heartily in my entire life.
The texts which caused such mirth were the first cut-ups, and appeared under that title in Minutes to Go (1960), 'unchanged unedited' and included the following:
Miss Hannah Pugh the slim model - a member of the Diner's Club, the American Express Credit Cards, etc. - drew from a piggy bank a talent which is the very quintessence of the British female sex.“People aren't crazy,” she said. “Now that Hazard has banished my timidity I feel that I, too, can live on streams in the area where people are urged to be watchful.”
… There seemed little doubt, however, that Mr Eisenhower said, “I weigh 56 pounds less than a man,” flushed and nodded curtly.
… He boasted of a long string of past crimes high-lighted by a total eclipse of however stood in his path when he re-did her apartment. (MTG 7-8)
And so occurred the advent of the cut-up. Of course, to give Burroughs or Gysin individually or jointly the full credit for the "idea" of the cut-ups would be unjust, as James Grauerholtz observes:
Aleatory techniques of literary composition was nothing new; Lewis Carroll had hinted at the idea, and Tristan Tzara's poem pulled in pieces from a hat is now famous.
Despite many critics subsequently hailing Burroughs as the technique's great innovator, he was himself well aware of the literary precedents to the cut-ups, and spoke of these frequently and at length:
When you think of it, “The Waste Land” was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea on “The Camera Eye” sequences in U.S.A. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done' (TM ).
Gysin initially considered the power of the collage texts to be limited and short lived. Burroughs, however, was particularly excited by the potentials of the cut-ups, and encouraged Gysin to assist him in the beginning of a lengthy spell of rigorous experimentation. however, he was insistent on substituting what he referred to as the "piss poor" material Gysin had first accidentally cut with "his own highly volatile material" as he recounts:
…we cut up the Bible, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, our own writing... We made thousands of cut-ups. When you cut and rearrange words on a page, new words emerge. And words change meaning. The word “drafted,” as into the Army, moved into a context of blueprints or contracts, gives an altered meaning. New words and altered meanings are implicit in the process of cutting up, and could have been anticipated. Other results were not expected.
These words "not in the original text" appear by the rearrangement of words and phrases, and through the conjoining of part-words separated in the physical act of cutting the page and then spliced with other severed part-words. Among the less expected results emerged what they saw as the "exposure" of a text's true meaning. "A text may be “found out,” exposed as empty rhetorical gesture or as a system of manipulations," explains Robin Lydenberg. Based on these discoveries, Gysin and Burroughs began to formulate numerous theories concerning the capabilities of the cut-ups. These theories revolved around the ideas of language preconditioning and control, word as virus and the revision of precursive texts. They also strove to address the issues of the ownership of words and the "the author function." While Gysin, and Burroughs in particular, developed many quite complex theories regarding the power of the method, this paper is concerned with the idea of rewriting existing texts and using the technique as a means of "retelling" the texts from which the composite texts are composed.
As Lydenberg again notes, the "cut-ups defy copyright and ownership, transgressing the regulations of boundary and convention." Gysin - and Burroughs - contended that words are the property of no-one, and that an author manipulates words just as they would other media such as paint, and as Gysin stressed, "the poet"s function is to free words.' As such, it was their belief that they were at liberty to reorder and manipulate the words contained in existing texts at will - or at random. Burroughs contended that such composite texts, formed using "freed" words, remained 'quite coherent and meaningful prose,' and believed it would be possible to re-educate the reading public to process and respond to cut-up composite texts in the same way as to conventional prose.
When asked what cut-ups offer the reader that conventional narrative doesn't, Burroughs replied that:
