Knowledge is what lies at the very basis of freedom. The people in the world of The Masters are held in oppression as they are forced to take an oath to never learn more than the “Light of the Common Day” (42), or that which is already within the common knowledge of all people. The act of computing original numbers causes the people to be “accused of heresy” (53). Ganil, the main character, develops his own beliefs as he is forced to “struggle with [this] evil power and suffer in the process” (Scholes). He faces inner turmoil as he decides to refute the rules dictated by his society, and join an underground system dedicated to mathematical invention. Ganil finds that his beliefs lie congruent with the groups. The group believes in the freedom of the individual as they say, “come freely, day or night. And go freely. If we’re betrayed, so be it. We must trust one another. Mystery belongs to no man” (50). This line, “Mystery belongs to no man,” is a very profound way of illustrating the main theme of combating oppression. This story supports the “idea that knowledge itself, particularly self-knowledge, is a way to pass through power and into wisdom” (Scholes). Even though a member of the group is killed in his pursuit of knowledge the others are able to continue their journey into wisdom behind the backs of their Overmasters. They are able to rise against the oppression, and use their ethical beliefs to seek this wisdom and become free. Not free in the society, however, but free of society and its constricting parameters, for it is evident that there are times one cannot have both.

A world that at first seems to have both freedom in, and from, society is Omelas. In Those Who Walk Away from Omelas exists a utopia “without clergy, [and]…without soldiers” (280) and seemingly without oppression. Pages upon pages describe a city of which the freedom of the people can only be marveled over. The system seems to have been created perfectly, as the ultimate goal of life is reached as, “the people of Omelas are happy people” (278). But their happiness is tainted; for their utopia is built upon the retched treatment of one small, tortured child. “They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships…depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery” (282). Most are appalled at first but almost all of the Omelisians are able to rationalize this behavior. As Collins explains it, the conscience must do a lot of rationalizing in order to believe that the child would not be able to live outside of the life that has been created for it. And so the people are able to move on, they accept this one rule imposed upon their conscience by society in exchange for their own happiness. “In Omelas, the mean and the vulgar are accepted as a necessary part of existence” (Knapp). But there are others in Omelas, citizens who Sobeloff describes as being unable to “accept this bargain” as they feel “its hideous nature, even though an impulse arose within…to clutch at the happiness so offered.” These are the people who ‘walk away from Omelas.’ They rise against the single constraint of their society, based on the fact that their own morals will not let themselves live with the guilt. These people know that “they, like the child, are not free” (283) because “human beings ‘are not objects’ but subjects’. Hence, ‘whoever…treats [them] as objects is acting inhumanly, wrongly, [and] against nature’” (Burns). And for these few people, acting against nature and against their own beliefs is their personal oppression, present even in a city as ‘perfect’ as Omelas. And so, “they leave Omelas, and they do not come back…but they seem to know where they are going” (284).

One of the ones who walk away from Omelas sets the stage for the revolution of a society. Odo’s extreme criticisms of oppression, and the actions she takes to follow her beliefs, make her the guiding light of the revolution. In The Day Before the Revolution Odo can live in harmony with society “so long as people [are] free to choose…just so long as it wasn’t the business of the Business” (300). Wytenbroek comments on Odo’s abilities to assess “what is wrong or unhealthy in [her] world…to suggest a way out--an alternative society.” Odo makes the conscience decision to carry on after her years in jail for causing an upheaval in the system. She does not stop writing because “that [i]s her work” and “to die was merely to go in another direction” (291). The story follows her journey to success which peaks when the revolution that she had sparked is about to happen tomorrow. Odo’s definition of an anarchist is “one who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice” (298); and as this story supports, “anarchical states…generally create a natural, unified, free, and intrinsically peaceful way of life” (Wytenbroek). Odo’s strong set of morals lends itself to her success. She is able to rise against the constraints of society by developing her own belief system, one which she is able to act out. This also completely reforms the system around her. This story is a very powerful demonstration of how it is possible to overcome oppression when morals are used as the basis for the conscious decision to act.

All of the characters in The Masters, Those who Walk Away from Omelas and The Day After The Revolution are able to overcome their personal oppressions as imposed by the restrictions of societal order. It is when the character is unwilling to participate in acts that, to them, feel morally wrong, although are condoned by society’s standards, that they gain moral victory. Ganil is able to hold on to his love of computing and continue in the exploration of new knowledge. Those who walk away from Omelas are able to find freedom from the guilt that the conditions of their cultural structure once made them feel. And from those who walked away, one is able to learn and reform an entire social system based on the belief in the freedom of choice. The characters of these stories are liberated by their choice “either to function within the trap of an immoral…universe, or to vote against it”, in the pursuit of their individual satisfaction (Knapp).

Beatrice is a prime example of a woman who is exploited by the men in the story. She is exploited by Giovanni for love and mere curiosity, Baglioni for revenge on her father, and by Dr. Rappaccini for scientific purposes. Giovanni felt he had a destructive need to dominate and possess Beatrice and as critic Richard Brenzo writes, "[this need for domination] is precisely the quality Giovanni finds most threatening in his idea of [Beatrice] (Brenzo 163)." Dr. Baglioni used Beatrice to gain revenge on her father and because he felt intellectually threatened by her. Brenzo explains, "If Baglioni feels threatened by Doctor Rappaccini, then the thought of a woman being his intellectual superior and displacing him from his position must be doubly frightening (Brenzo 161)." Beatrice does not purposefully harm these men mentally or physically, Brenzo asserts, "All of the men profess a desire to help her, while secretly fearing her ‘embrace of death'. Consequently, they have offered her help in their own selfish, vengeful, scientific ways, and for her, their embrace has meant death (Brenzo 164)."

In contrast to the male dominance concept of Richard Brenzo, critic Kent Bales analyzes Beatrice through historical criticism. Bales explains how Beatrice is based on a woman named Beatrice Cenci who was raped by her father and subsequently killed him. He attests that Dr. Rappaccini did not rape Beatrice, but impregnated her with poison, "The pervading sexual innuendo derives largely from his role as Adam and the curious circumstance that his helpmate is his daughter rather than his wife (Bales 136)." The poison in the story comes from, "the constricting conventionality of male consciousness and manifests itself in sexual and political victimization (Bales 134)."

According to critic Thomas St. John, Nathaniel Hawthorne based this story on a personal, but similar, event that happened earlier in his life. Hawthorne's father-in-law, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, overdosed Hawthorne's wife, Sophie, using opium, laudanum, mercury, arsenic, and henbane (St. John 3). In Hawthorne's story, Sophie became Beatrice, and Dr. Peabody became Dr. Rappaccini. "By writing ‘Rappaccini's Daughter,' Hawthorne finally exorcised his terror of what it might have been like, had he failed to cure his beloved wife (St. John 3)." Dr. Peabody also had the same purple flowers from the garden in Rappaccini's daughter in his own garden (St. John 3). Another event in Hawthorne's life that St. John said further inspired Rappaccini's Daughter was "Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes created the scandal of the Boston social season in 1942 by attacking popular Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft as a quack, and driving him away to Brattleboro, Vermont (St. John 1)." In Hawthorne's story, Holmes becomes Dr. Baglioni and Wesselhoeft becomes Dr. Rappaccini. They have an intellectual fight, which Baglioni wins in the end by giving Giovanni an antidote which he uses on Beatrice, killing her and Dr. Rappaccini's experiment at the same time.

Besides being viewed as historical writing based on actual events, Rappaccini's Daughter has been interpreted by other critics as based on circumstances of the time period. During his life Hawthorne was an avid anti-transcendentalist. Throughout his stories he constantly mocks transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. In Rappaccini's Daughter, Dr. Rappaccini has all of the characteristics of a typical transcendentalist, "...to learn from nature rather than authority, to rely on observational evidence, and to attempt experiments. And his regard for the ‘creative essence' of his plants appears to correspond to the neoplatonic hermetic mysticism of the Paracelsians (Bensick 60)." Dr. Rappaccini displays these transcendentalist qualities and is the antagonist in the story because Hawthorne disbelieves transcendentalism. Dr. Baglioni, in contrast, is portrayed by Hawthorne as a traditional academic, who bases his decisions on fact and reason, an anti-transcendentalist who Hawthorne agrees with.

Another critic, Michael T. Gilmore, viewed Rappaccini's Daughter as Hawthorne's tribute to his lack of a popular audience for his stories (Gilmore 62-63). He interpreted it as an allegory, where each character represented an aspect of Hawthorne's life at that time. "Giovanni is specified as a reader from the moment he appears in the text (Gilmore 63)," while Beatrice, "The most dazzling creation in the garden...is intended as an allegorical representation of Hawthorne's writing (Gilmore 64)." In fact, Gilmore believes that Hawthorne, "emphasizes his identification with Beatrice by translating his name into French and so making even more evident its meaning as a shrub or plant - aubépine being the French word for hawthorn tree (Gilman 64)."

"If Giovanni corresponds to Hawthorne's reader, and Beatrice to his art, the rival physicians in the story evoke the two kinds of writers whom he characterizes in the preface as monopolizing current taste. Rappaccini is Hawthorne's fictional Transcendentalist, a remote and shadowy creator likened at the action's climax to ‘an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary' (Gilmore 64)."

Baglioni, on the other hand, "is Hawthorne's ‘pen-and-ink man'... a native of the sunny south of Italy; his genial manner suggests the hypothetical ‘brighter man' (Gilmore 65)." Ultimately, Baglioni conspires with Giovanni (the reader) to destroy Hawthorne's art and stories (Beatrice). Thus, ironically, "Hawthorne presents himself as its innocent victim, a writer deprived of an audience because the public persists in mistaking his grim exterior for his inner character (Gilmore 68)."

Hawthorne's ironic voice is also apparent, at least to the critic Lois A. Cuddy, in the correlation between Rappaccini's Daughter and Dante's Divine Comedy. Cuddy writes about these similarities, "Thus, examination of Hawthorne's ironic strategies for using Dante and the related setting, narrator, point of view, characters, and religious diction offers us access to an unique garden and a rather gloomy philosophical statement (Cuddy 39)." By writing Rappaccini's Daughter, Hawthorne makes the point that "Man's nature dictates that if he were offered a woman as virtuous as Beatrice - who is the symbol of Divine Truth, Light and Beauty - modern man would not recognize that Truth, appreciate that beauty, or understand the revelation (Stallman 10 citing Cuddy 42)." Cuddy says that, "Hawthorne has offered us an ironic, bleak and unambiguous vision of existence in this tale, and what he says with the help of a medieval garden world and a Dantean vision reversed to make a modern skeptical statement about life and human relations is consistent with the philosophy in his major fiction as well as with life as he observed it (Cuddy 52)." His observations, although bleak to some, are still pertinent to the world today.

Perhaps the first thing to understand about Stein is that her main focus is almost always on writing as such; she is constantly examining how writing is accomplished. What one has to say is relatively unimportant; she has little interest in plot as normally understood. Words and syntax for Stein often function without regard for conventional notions of meaning. A noun is a noun is a noun is a signifier. The signified is not necessarily irrelevant, but it can no longer be taken for granted. Stein probes how we use language to describe and define reality, and she does so by calling attention to the fact that we usually do so unconsciously.

By forcing us to try and make sense of what appears nonsensical, Stein is teaching us to read consciously and actively. We are not passive listeners of a master storyteller, but makers of meaning in the act of reading. The sensation is of creating the text right along with her. This helps establish one of Stein's key critical concepts, the "continuous present."

The problem of time as it relates to narrative was a constant concern for Stein. The problem with conventional narrative, as she saw it, is that the reader is constantly out of step with the present. You have to remember what happened two chapters back to make sense of what you are reading now, which of course also makes you speculate about what the next page has in store. Stein attacks the problem with what critics have called her "repetitive" style, or what she preferred to call "insistence." Inspired in part by the cinema, Stein proceeds frame by frame, repeating sentences over and over with slight variation.

She approaches characterization the same way. A person's character, or "bottom nature" as she called it, is defined by the intensity of existence, not by what he or she does. So, instead of telling us stories about someone, Stein uses strings of general nouns, participles, and various tenses of the verb "to be" to define character through repeated behavior. She strives for the same effect, using different techniques, in her poems about objects and in her plays. She attempts to get at the essence of a thing or event without resorting to narrative. Sensitizing oneself to the sounds and rhythms of her writing in these pieces goes a long way to understanding it.

Aside from those terms already discussed, keeping the following in mind will help in understanding Stein's procedures. As we have seen, Stein is intent upon keeping the reader totally in the present moment, undistracted by past events or future considerations. As Stein points out, stories in and of themselves are not particularly exciting; the newspapers are full of them (I should note that Stein makes a distinction between "interesting" and "exciting", the latter being a necessity for creativity, the former merely incidental to it). Character and narrative involve description, and to describe something is to note its resemblance to something else. Resemblance in turn involves the act of remembering. For Stein, this is the antithesis of creativity, since true creation takes place only in the present moment. Stein defined genius as one talking and listening at the same time. One who is always talking is not aware of the demands of his age, one who is always listening is not responding to those same demands. Only the genius lives within her generation in the act of also creating it. For Stein, the true artist lives and works at the very crest of the wave of time--there is no margin for looking back on what has been done before.

So, without further ado, here are seven simple rules for reading Gertrude Stein. By all means, copy and paste them, highlight the whole bunch, reduce them to your tiniest type. Print them, cut them out, laminate them. Better yet, put them on a sheet of business cards. Keep one in your wallet and use another as a bookmark as you make your way through Geography and Plays. Give them to friends and family. They make a great Christmas gift.

So here are the 7 rules for reading Gertrude Stein:

1. Relax. Don't worry. Have fun. Stein is fun.
2. Stein is about the process, not the product.
3. Read out loud. Stein's syntax is not passive.
4. Signifier does not equal signified. Subject/object/verb equals sentence, not sense.
5. There is no paraphrase. Interpret at your own risk.
6. Stein does not tell stories. People and things have a "bottom nature" revealed in a "continuous present."
7. If you laugh out loud occasionally, you are on the right track.

Therein lies the perfect question. What is the result of a society that expects too much from the people who make up that society?

According to Mrs. Cheveley, the answer to the question posed above is, “You all go over like ninepins - one after the other” . In other words, scandal ensues from any breach of propriety, regardless of how big or small, and the person around whom the scandal surrounds is forever a pariah. Scandal in today's world doesn't have the same effect as it would have had in Victorian England. Sure we love a good scandal, but it doesn't necessarily mean the banishment of the person involved. In fact, many times it can push the career of someone further than if the scandal hasn't existed, giving credence to the saying, “There's no such thing as bad publicity.” In Victorian England, however, scandal would have ruined anyone.

Sir Robert Chiltern is a man seen by society as having an impeccable reputation - he is above and beyond reproach. That, in itself, carries with it a burden of unimaginable proportions. Add to that a wife who has placed him on a pedestal and states, “All your life you have stood apart from others. You have never let the world soil you. To the world, as to myself, you have been an ideal always” .

Imagine having to carry that on your shoulders. It is human nature to strive to be the best, but striving for perfection is a battle always lost.

Imagine further being blackmailed for something one did eighteen years previously - something that would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, place an indelible black mark on an otherwise perfect character.

Mrs. Cheveley's blackmail of Sir Robert Chiltern with the knowledge, and a letter to prove it, that he began his fortune by selling cabinet secrets concerning the Suez Canal, threatens to bring about his demise both in society and in his wife's eyes. No one, aside from Sir Robert Chiltern and Mrs. Cheveley know of his youthful transgression, and if it were known Sir Robert, in the words of Mrs. Cheveley, would be “hounded out of public life…” .

Additionally, Lady Chiltern, though she knows nothing of this secret, would withdraw her love and affection from her husband. Society has its expectations of perfections, and so does Lady Chiltern who vehemently exclaims that, “One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged” . In that statement there is no room for anything other than perfection, and in holding to that belief she denounces her husband.

Of all the characters, Lord Goring seems to be the only person with a sensible head on his shoulders. Initially, we think he's nothing more than a dandy - he plays the societal game well, but by the end of the play he is much wiser than those around him. Lord Goring single-handedly rids society of Mrs. Cheveley's presence by blackmailing her with a stolen bracelet in exchange for returning the letter with which she is blackmailing Sir Robert, reconciles Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern after she finds out about his youthful transgression, and prompts Lady Chiltern to answer the question of what constitutes an ideal husband by stating that there is no such thing, because the concept is based on the idea of perfection; something which, by its very nature, is impossible.

Although Jane and Mr. Rochester come from different socio-economic backgrounds, they undoubtedly began their respective journeys at virtually the same point - emotional deprivation. Jane, having grown up an orphan, is neglected by her aunt, abused by her cousin John, and essentially left to rot in a boarding school for children who come from low-income backgrounds. Mr. Rochester's affluent background, while alluded to in the fact that he's the owner of Thornfield, isn't spoken of until the day of his wedding to Jane when Mr. Biggs, a solicitor from London, calls the wedding to a halt by proclaiming an impediment “exists in the existence of a previous marriage. Mr. Rochester has a wife now living” (p. 351)*.

This declaration hints at what lies beneath and the implications bring about more questions than answers: Where is his wife if she's still living? Why the charade with Jane given the circumstances of a wife? Is it a charade?

After finally meeting Bertha and seeing her unfortunate decline into mental illness we're inclined to write Mr. Rochester off as a cad. While it makes sense that he is angry, frustrated and unhappy given the circumstances, it certainly doesn't explain why he should, to use a cliché, have his cake and eat it, too. He married Bertha, after all; willingly, we presume.

It is Mr. Rochester's divulgence about how he came to be married to Bertha that places a clearer perspective on the aforementioned questions. He tells Jane how his father “could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving me a fair portion…He sought me a partner betimes” (pgs. 371-372).

This explanation, however, beckons an additional question: How could Mr. Rochester stand idly by and let his father dictate to him who he should marry? He answers this question by stating, “I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her” (p. 372)*. A love, we discover, that was based on falsehoods and hidden agendas.

In an effort to hide Bertha's predisposition to madness, both the Rochesters and the Masons conspired to keep the information hidden until the wedding had taken place, thereby allowing no means of escape for the duped Mr. Rochester. Both families were, obviously, more concerned with their respective agendas, (the elder Mr. Rochester wanted to provide for his son, albeit with someone else's wealth and the Masons want to provide for their unmarriable daughter), than they were with Mr. Rochester and the emotional turmoil the situation would eventually cause him.

It is, without a doubt, Mr. Rochester's emotional state that leads him to omit the existence of his wife, not to mention the games he plays with Jane during their courtship. He blatantly tells her that, “…I feigned courtship of Miss Ingram, because I wished to render you as madly in love with me as I was with you; …jealousy would be the best ally I could call in for the furtherance of that end” (p. 319)*.

Jane, proving to be the equal Mr. Rochester says she is, calls him on his game, asking, “Do you think Miss Ingram will not suffer from your dishonest coquetry?” His reply of, “Impossible! - when I told you how she, on the contrary deserted me: the idea of my insolvency cooled, or rather extinguished, her flame in a moment” (319)* (referring to his starting a rumor that his wealth wasn't nearly what everyone thought it was and Miss Ingram's subsequent coldness), tells us that he matured in his journey and has learned how to be more discerning in his choice for a wife.

It isn't until after both Jane and Mr. Rochester go through the final pits of hell that their journeys come full circle. Each obtains the one thing they've wished for - Jane, family she never knew existed; Mr. Rochester, freedom from being married to Bertha - but neither finds what they've truly been searching for: love and acceptance. It is only in the final turmoil that they realize what they've both been searching for can only be found in each other.

Although closely related, as father and daughter, two of the main characters in Field Trip still interpret the setting very differently. Returning to the site where his close friend and fellow solider fell 20 years earlier, Tim, who is also the narrator, understands the field much better than his daughter, Kathleen. “I stood with my arms folded, feeling the grip of sentiment and time. Amazing, I thought. Twenty Years” (p.182). As Tim was remembering the past and honoring his old friend his daughter was sitting in the jeep with the interpreter, talking softly and quickly becoming friends. Neither of them seemed to grasp the significance of the place or the reason why they traveled on bumpy dirt roads for two hours in the blazing sun. They had not experienced what Tim had experienced. War changes someone and in this case makes relating to a ten-year-old girl very difficult.

This passage shows how Kathleen does not understand what is going through her father's head as he is looking out at the field. “I took out my camera, snapped a couple of pictures, then stood gazing out at the field. After a time Kathleen got out of the jeep and stood beside me. "You know what I think?" she said. "I think this place stinks. It smells like…God, I don"t even know what. It smells rotten” (p.182). This sounds pretty thoughtless at first, saying how this place smells as her dad is remembering fighting on the same grounds and watching his friends fall, but then you realize that she really just does not know any better. There is no way a ten-year-old girl can realize the intensity of battle and relate to how her father is feeling.

Something is revealed about the narrator's character when you learn that this trip was kind of a birthday gift to Kathleen. It makes the reader think that maybe Tim wanted to try to connect with his daughter better, or show her why he feels the way he does by bringing her to Vietnam. Does he realize that she cannot relate and does he realize that he may be expecting more out of her than he should be?

When she asked him why he had to go to this place during the war he answered, “I don't know, because I had to be” (p.183). She did not accept that answer, wanted to know why he had to come back, and kept asking why, only to get the same answer. Tim really could not find a reason. It was just something he knew he had to do. It felt right and he had business there, a final laying to rest. She could still not understand this.

He thought it was appropriate to bring his 10-year-old daughter to a battle scene to see where his best friend had died. This was probably because he was attempting to connect with her and help her understand why he felt the way he did. In an interview of O'Brien a few years after he published The Things They Carried he explains how he attempted to make non-veteran readers understand the feelings of veteran readers by asking certain questions, such as “How would you feel if this happened to you,” and “How would you feel if suddenly you were drafted”( Literary Events Featuring O'Brien). This is just his attempt at getting readers to think through to the other side and realize what some people went through. Asking questions like these was for the same reason he brought his daughter to Vietnam. Aside from his personal tasks he wanted to educate his daughter on something that was very important to him; something that he felt his daughter should understand just like his readers. “Indeed, much of O'Brien's fiction seems to be concerned with probing the limits of trauma and attempting to find ways of overcoming the division between those who experienced the war in Vietnam and those who did not” (Acts of cultural identification.) Many people believed getting un-traumatized readers, meaning ones who did not go to war, to share the same feelings as traumatized readers was impossible.

Christopher Mc-Donough writes in Incense and Ashes that Tim O'Brien's stories are of a postmodern theme, meaning he writes from experience and therefore people who have not experienced can never fully understand. This view opposes O'Brien's by saying that getting his daughter to fully understand the past is impossible because she did not experience the thing being taught.

By the end of Field Trip, it is apparent that his daughter still does not understand everything that her father went through. As much as he wants his daughter to understand how he feels, the theme of post modernism proves that that is not possible. She was not there therefore she can only experience what she has been told, which is not the full experience.

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)

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:

Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images - real Rimbaud images - but new ones.

Of course, such an interpretation of "new" Rimbaud images is highly problematic. On the one hand, Burroughs is suggesting that his reworking of a pre-existing text is, in effect, a new, original text. On the other, he is simultaneously stating that the original author's work remains somehow intact and recognisable, but simply realigned. How can this be reconciled in terms of notions of authorship? Their response to this lies in the concept of "the third mind." Citing a book entitled Think and Grow Rich, which suggests that when you put two minds together, there is "always a third mind... a third and superior mind... as an unseen collaborator," they theorised that the cut-ups represented not a joint work between the two of them, but the product of a different origin altogether, something greater than the sum of the parts. Hence, the cut-up Rimbaud text, while containing "new" Rimbaud images, represents a collaboration between Burroughs, Gysin and Rimbaud, and thus stands, theoretically at least, as a legitimate revision of the existing text.

Following a number of short cut-up texts, Burroughs attempted to apply the cut-ups, and a variation called the fold-in, to "the novel," producing a trilogy of books consisting of The Soft Machine (1961, 1966 and 1968), The Ticket That Exploded (1962, 1967 and 1968), and Nova Express (1964). Fold-ins are created whereby "a page of text… is folded down the middle and placed on another page, the composite text is then read across, half one text and half the other." These texts were a composite of many authors:

Joyce is in there. Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people haven't heard about, someone named Jack Stern. There's Kerouac. I don't know, when you start making these fold-ins and cut-ups you lose track. Genet, of course, is someone I admire very much. Also Kafka, Eliot, and one of my favorites is Joseph Conrad. My story "They Just Fade Away" is a fold-in from Lord Jim. In fact, it's almost a retelling of the "Lord Jim" story. My Stein is the same Stein as in Lord Jim (TM).

Here, we see Burroughs explicitly stating that the fold-ins can be used to retell existing narratives. He suggested that the fold-in functioned not as a device by which the precursive text was in any way desecrated, but retold in a new chronology, that is to say, when a page from a halfway way through the text is folded against a page from a quarter of the way through, and then again with a page from near the end, an effect akin to the cinematic flashback - or, depending on the page selection, a flash forward or dramatic foreshadowing is created. Such re-tellings expose the artifice of narrative, and demonstrate the fact that the possible ways a story can be told are endless. In this way, retold narratives constructed using cut-ups and fold-ins show in a practical, as well as theoretical manner, the way in which the writer does indeed manipulate the words at their disposal.

It is interesting to note that Burroughs was keen to cut up texts by writers he admired as he was those texts he wished to expose or attack, which included news items and transcripts of political speeches. Precisely how this stands in terms of theories on influence is too great and complex a subject for discussion here, although Bloom would perhaps contend that this is illustrative of the author attempting to write his precursors out of existence by claiming their work for his own. I would argue that this is no example of anxietised influence, however, as Burroughs acknowledged his sources and made no effort to hide or claim these words as "his own." Fragments of "The Waste Land" are littered throughout the trilogy, with the following passage from Nova Express providing a particularly interesting example of Burroughs' reworking of "the first great cut-up."

“What thinking, William?-Were his eyes-Hurry up please its half your brain slowly fading-make yourself a bit smart-It's them couldn't reach flesh-Empty walls-Good night, sweet ladies-Hurry up please it's time-Look any place-Faces in the violet light-Damp gusts bringing rain-” Got up and fixed in the sick dusk-Again he touched like that-Smell of human love-The tears gathered-In Mexico committed fornication but-Cold spring-besides you say-could give no information-vast Thing Police- (NE)

While it is not often easy to tell the original sources of each cut-in phrase within a composite text, the presentation, by which the fragments are separated by ellipses or em dashes, does expose the intersection of different "original" texts. The presence of lines more obviously culled from existing texts penned by others - here in the form of the "hurry up please it"s time' refrain, cut from "The Waste Land," serve to lay bare further the mechanics of the "writing" process for such passages. Closer inspection reveals this passage contain many phrases from "The Waste Land," sections two and five featuring heavily. "What thinking" is culled from line 113, while the phrase "were his eyes" is a fragment of lines 125-6, which reads "I remember / those pearls that were his eyes." The seemingly abstract images, "Faces in the violet light" and "damp gusts bringing rain" are also both lifted directly from the fifth part of "The Waste Land" (lines 379 and 393-4 respectively), and when placed in succession serve to form a shifting scene in which the faces and the damp gusts are located within close physical proximity - one is compelled to envisage the faces as if appearing in the rain, and in doing so, not only is a new image created from the pre-existing images embedded within the original text, but a scene is created within a new time/space frame from the original writing in which the images appear separately, divided by text and context.

Burroughs also cut up his own work - much of what became The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded was a cut-up not only of newspapers, science journals and the writers Burroughs listed, but also large sections of Naked Lunch. But more than this, The Ticket That Exploded included cut-ups of its predecessor, The Soft Machine, while the final volume of the Nova trilogy, Nova Express included many cut-ups from the previous two volumes. In this way, Burroughs can be seen to be revising - and retelling - his own text. For this reason, Philippe Mikriammos describes the Nova trilogy as a "false trilogy, a single book completed in three versions, under three different angles."18 These different angles are effectively re-tellings of the same story. Through the cutting and rearranging of his own writing, Burroughs showed that it was possible to revise, retell his own stories through the relinquishment of his authorial control and allow the words a "freedom" of sorts.

Freedom was a key focus of Burroughs' work throughout his career, and during the 1960s he believed that the cut-up and fold-in methods were the most appropriate literary devices for attacking the control systems inherent within society. At the core of all of these control mechanisms, according to Burroughs, lay language, by which mankind is held in thrall. However, he was also aware of the capacity for the manipulation of language by those in power. As Burroughs explained in The Job, The word of course is one of the most powerful instruments of control as exercised by the newspaper and images as well, there are both words and images in newspapers… if you start cutting these up and rearranging them you are breaking down the control system (Job 33).

The juxtaposition of words and images can produce different narrative slants. Around the same time, Marshall McLuhan was producing texts which juxtaposed different words and images in order to practically demonstrate the effects of the media, and, moreover, the ways in which words and images in combination can be manipulated to create bias or even an entirely different narrative from that conveyed by the same words and images in their original contexts. Through the cut-ups, Burroughs strove to achieve a similar objective, namely to "cut through" the controlled information circulated by the mass media and to reveal the "truth" by retelling the "official" versions of stories and articles. According to Burroughs, "the function of art is to make us aware of what we know and don"t know that we know.' By cutting the texts and "exposing" their true meanings, this function is, in theory, made easier for the reader.

With regard to the cutting up and "retelling" of news items from the press, Burroughs argued that"

…cut-ups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That's a cut-up (TM 4).

Thus, the cut-ups are intended to tap into the psyche of the individual reader, and connect with the subconscious, affecting the reader, as Caveney puts it, "almost by a sort of osmosis." Through the reading of these composite texts, the reader can indeed become aware of what they know but don't know that they know. By incorporating existing, sometimes popular texts, and presenting them in a manner that, arguably, brings the narrative form closer to "real life," the cut-ups function by infiltrating the levels of subconscious, making us aware of those things we know and don't know we know, and by triggering recollections by literal déjà-vu, or perhaps more accurately, déjà-lu.

The Nova trilogy plunders many genres, spanning science fiction and the hard-boiled detective style, and incorporates works from many sources, while continuing to extrapolate the "true meanings" of the various source texts. The following passage from Nova Express is exemplary:

Now you are asking me whether I want to perpetuate a narcotics problem and I say: “Protect the disease. Must be made criminal protecting society from the disease.”

The problem scheduled in the United States the use of jail, former narcotics plan, addiction and crime for many years - Broad front “Care” of welfare agencies - Narcotics which antedate the use of drugs… Addiction in some form is the basis - must be wholly addicts - Any voluntary capacity subversion of The Will Capital and Treasury Bank - infection dedicated to traffic in exchange narcotics demonstrated a Typhoid Mary who will spread narcotics problem to the United Kingdom - finally in view of the cure - cure of the social problem and as such dangerous to society - (NE 52)

This passage can be unraveled to show that it "reveals that the anti-drug rhetoric of the fifties and sixties served merely to cover up the real intention of the government agencies assigned to tackle the problem: to “Protect the Disease” of addiction," thus again in Burroughs' eyes exposing the "true" meanings of the cut texts. As Burroughs observes, political speeches proved a fertile source of exposure through cutting up, commenting that "quite often, you'll find that some of the real meanings will emerge. And you'll also find that the politician usually means the exact opposite of what he's saying.' This idea corresponds with the "algebra of need" principal and Burroughs' suggestion that "the police have a vested interest in criminality. The narcotics department have a vested interest in addiction. Politicians have a vested interest in nations. Army officers have a vested interest in war…" (Job 61).

These vested interests include a coherent recording of history. Like all other "recordings," history is also subject to manipulations, for a number of reasons, not all of which are entirely connected to conspiracy and oppression. As Linda Hutcheon argues, "the historian"s job is to tell plausible stories, made out of the mess of fragmentary and incomplete facts, facts which he or she processes and to which he or she thereby grants meaning through employment… historians suppress, repeat, subordinate, highlight and order those facts,' through totalization. But this process clearly allows considerable room for alteration and even outright fabrication, as Burroughs explained in a 1974 interview:

We think of the past as being something that has just happened… but it is nothing that could be further from the truth… The past only exists in some record of it. There are no facts. We don't know how much of history is completely fiction… There's no record this conversation ever took place or what was said, except what is [recorded]. If the recordings were lost, or they got near a magnet and were wiped out, there would be no recordings whatever. So what are the actual facts? What was actually said here? There are no actual facts.

Hutcheon concurs, at least to an extent, writing:

If the archive is composed of texts, it is open to all kinds of use and abuse. The archive has always been the site of a lot of activity, but rarely of such self-consciously totalizing activity as it is today. Even what is considered acceptable as documentary evidence has changed. And certainly the status of the document has altered: since it is acknowledged that it can offer no direct access to the past, then it must be a representation or replacement through textual refiguring of the brute event (The Politics of Postmodernism 77)

History, therefore, is not fixed, is subject to questioning. At present, there is much discussion over the use of Internet sources, both in academia and in everyday life. critics contend that the Internet is a medium by which myths and misinformation are propagated, and can circulate the globe in minutes, tales being told and retold, twisting and mutating like Chinese whispers. This may be true, but it has always been so, the only difference pre-internet being the time in which information - or misinformation, or propaganda, took to travel, to read its widest dissemination. The fact - if, indeed, there are any facts - remains that the information made available to the public is always received via a series of filters. Any written recording is always subject to editing or censorship of some sort, and this level of filtering only occurs after the initial process whereby the writer writes with their own personal slant or bias and makes their own selection of words and word order.

The writer is just one individual, and is therefore fallible, and represents only of one perspective out of a near infinite range of possible perspectives. Similarly, information circulated by a company or official body is almost inevitably coloured by an agenda of sorts. And so information is suppressed, adjusted, manipulated. Burroughs' objective was to empower his readership, not only by exposing the processes of manipulation that occur in the formulation of any recording, but also to uncover hidden truths for themselves, and, within the body of his own cut-up works of fiction, implores the readers to try cut-ups for themselves, and states "cut-ups are for everyone" (TM 31). Burroughs and Gysin went on to extend the application of the cut-ups to experiment with audio recordings:

We went on to exploit the potentials of the tape recorder: cut up, slow down, speed up, run backwards, inch the tape, play several tracks at once, cut back and forth between two recorders. As soon as you start experimenting with slowdowns, speedups, overlays, etc., you will get new words that were not on the original recordings.

On such recordings, Burroughs' intention is to alter the meaning of the words, the same words, by constantly varying their ordering, presenting an almost infinite range of permutations of the same sentence through random sequence changing. "Recalling all active agents" thus becomes "calling all agents," "calling all agents active," "calling all reactive agents," and so on and so forth, from the more obvious variations to some which would perhaps have remained inconceivable were it not for the formulation of the experiment using audio tapes. Not only is this is almost unquestionably the earliest example of tape looping, but also another means of highlighting the possible alternatives to any given narrative. The continued prevalence of the method is testament to the impact of the breakthrough made by Burroughs and Gysin, and represents an infinite continuum of recycling, revision and retelling in what could be considered "audio narrative."

The second republication of The Electronic Revolution (1971, 1972) in 1976 occurred shortly prior to the development of Industrial music, spearheaded by Throbbing Gristle, whose Genesis P. Orridge was responsible for the compilation and release of Burroughs' early experimental recordings on the Nothing Here Now But the Recordings LP (1980). Along with Cabaret Voltaire and Coil, and also Swans and Foetus, Throbbing Gristle were amongst the first to explore the possibilities of using tape loops, cut-ups, samples and "found sounds" to make music, thus following Burroughs' lead and reinforcing the suggestion that "cut-ups are for everyone" (TM 31). “A lot of what we did, especially in the early days, was a direct application of his ideas to sound and music,” recalls Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk.27 This was true of many of the bands involved in the Industrial scene which exploded on both sides of the Atlantic between 1978 and 1984, who immersed themselves in studio experimentation and the application of techniques first explored by Burroughs and Gysin some 20 years previous.

This involved taking Burroughs' ideas and, through application and adaptation, mutating them. The idea of "sampling," which is of course rife within not just Industrial music, but popular music in general, functions exactly as the cut-ups do, by realigning sections of narrative in an alternative context, and thus creating a new retelling of sorts.

But what do the cut-ups, and their subsequent adoption in both music and literature by other artists really amount to? Is it simply experimentation for its own sake, justified by a raft of complex theories that try to render it meaningful? Is it not simply another example of avant-garde destruction, a wanton defacement of the canon, or an example of high postmodernism, in which high and low cultures collide in an egalitarian melting pot, and whereby the death of originality is celebrated through endless recycling and clever plagiarism? I would contend not.

While the cup-ups do, unquestionably transgress notions of ownership and conventional authorship, they also serve as a mode of retelling - a practice which has been conducted since the beginning of human communications, from cave-paintings and hieroglyphs, through the oral transmission of information through to the present. Stories have always been told and retold, with different embellishments and from angles, and the cut-ups simply represent another means of doing this. But they also represent a whole lot more. Rather than mark the fin d'originalité some critics consider the negative face of postmodernism, I would argue that they serve as one of the most innovative modes of revision and retelling devised thus far, and to that end, marked the dawn of a new originality, borne out of the old.

More than this, by addressing and challenging notions of authorship, authority and order within the framework of works of fiction, the cut-ups engaged directly with contemporary critical discourse, the areas of engagement remaining the subjects of great debate today. In short, by prefacing postmodern literary practices and modern cinematic and musical trends, the cut-ups were, ultimately, every bit as revolutionary as Burroughs had hoped and set a new precedent in the practice of revision.