Priam Thomas

‘The Watering Eye of the Mirage’ : Brion Gysin’s Deconstructive Project

Abstract
Looking back over his life’s work in 1982, Brion Gysin lamented that while most artists followed one path, developing into either writers or visual artists, he had unwittingly sabotaged his own chances for success by devoting himself equally to both professions (Here to Go 32). In fact, in addition to writing and visual art, Gysin made experimental films, pioneered early sound poetry, and incorporated projections, recordings and his own paintings in performance art as a member of the Domaine Poetique in Paris. Rather than the product of an unfocussed attention, Gysin’s diverse body of work is evidence of his ardent rejection of artistic categories. This important distinction has led to the rediscovery of his work in the first decade of the 21st century, culminating in a recent major retrospective exhibition at New York’s New Museum.
While Brion Gysin worked in a variety of media, the intersection of visual arts and writing is an important locus that serves to put his poetics into perspective. Gysin declared his intention to “apply the painter’s techniques to writing” (“Cut-Up’s Self-Explained” Back in No Time 132) through the “cut-up” method, which turned writing into a tactile manipulation of material in imitation of collage. Inversely, he painted using a style he termed “silent script” (“Eight Units of a Permutative” Who Runs May Read 21), which drew on his formal training in Japanese and Arabic calligraphies to transform the written word into an illegible visual image, free from semantic meaning.
In a short contribution to the book Brion Gysin: Dreamachine published in conjunction with a 2010 retrospective at New York’s New Museum, visual artist Jesse Bransford argues that Gysin’s experiments with painting confound the boundaries between seeing and reading, exposing “a space of indeterminacy” (166), “a space that is neither apocalyptic or utopian but simply other” (167). Rather than translating the expressive impact of the visual image to writing, or bringing to painting an interest in semiotics, Gysin work in both media involves a dialectic between communication and discourse and an “other” indeterminate space, often figured as silence.
While Gysin continually expressed his desire to move “out of the area of words” (BNT 77), the area he was moving towards was largely defined in his work by opposition. Allen Ginsberg explained that his impression of the shared project of Gysin and his collaborator William S. Burroughs was that “further awareness lay in dropping every fixed concept of self, identity, role, ideal, habit, and pleasure. It meant dropping language itself, words as a medium of consciousness” (Beat Book 78 qtd. in Lydenberg 51). As these statements suggest, Gysin’s work is negative in its radical attempts to escape from the determination of structures of language over thought, the restrictions of individual subjectivity on perception, and any fixed self-image that would shape or limit the potential of individual identity.
However, Gysin’s did not “drop” language, rather he disrupted it in a series of diverse literal and symbolic deconstructions. Gysin work in different media dramatize or narrate processes of deconstruction in order to gesture towards and give meaning to a space proposed to be outside linguistic understanding.
This paper is divided into two chapters. The first chapter focuses on Gysin’s material preoccupations in his work with the cut-up method and his calligraphic paintings and drawings. The second consists of a close reading of Gysin’s 1968 novel The Process. The two parts of this paper are intended to be complimentary to each other. While part one focusses on Gysin’s multimedia experiments and his work with language as a material, part two examines the implications of this work to his formal innovations with narrative development and narrative perspective in his work with the novel.
The first chapter will argue that the cut-up method in Gysin’s work is part of a material interest in directly manipulating the “matter” of verbal communication in order to demystify language and disarm its privilege as a “medium of consciousness”. I will contrast Gysin’s use of the cut-up, to the literary strategies developed by his close friend and collaborator William S. Burroughs. While Burroughs repeatedly argued that the cut-up technique brings to writing representational techniques of collage or montage, I found that this disciplinary comparison did not account for Gysin’s approach to visual art, and his most interesting work in performance art and sound poetry.
In the first chapter, I develop a flexible theoretical approach to Gysin’s multimedia work that is capable of connecting his experiments with manipulating literary content through material means in the cut-up method of writing to his attempts to silence the written word by turning it into a drawing in his calligraphic work. Chapter one culminates in an analysis of the performance art piece “Brion Gysin Let the Mice in,” which combined a live demonstration of Gysin’s calligraphic painting and an aural cut-up, played back from a tape recording. Focussing on this piece, I argue that Gysin’s multimedia work is not just a material reduction of words to sound, and writing to image, but also a more complex attempt to render language opaque in order to reveal the networks of discourse and the constant linguistic exchange that make up everyday experience.
While the first chapter explores Gysin’s attempt to move outside of the “area of words” in his multimedia work, the second chapter examines his novel The Process, a complex fictional world where written and spoken language have symbolic power, and the act of narration features within the plot to construct and deconstruct the fiction. Gysin mediates the reader’s experience of novel’s fictional world through a series of subjective narrations spoken by different characters, and transcribed from tape recording made by the protagonist Hanson. What is produced can be likened to a “multistable image” (Mitchell 45), a narrative space and a narrative trajectory that continually changes shape and direction based on the presentation of a different “picture” of the novel in each narration.
Drawing on Wittgenstein’s “picture theory,” and a comparison with Burroughs’ non-linear cut-up work, I argue that the disorienting space of the novel created by its collage of voices is part of a strategy for depicting Hanson’s experience during his personal development. I read The Process as Gysin’s attempt to rework representation in the novel to depict the development of a nomadic open identity. Gysin’s material experiments are reflected in his depiction of Hanson’s symbolic act of “rubbing out the word,” which liberates him from the roles and narrative directions introduced by the other character’s narrations. I will argue that an interplay between narrative illusion and its deconstruction is fundamental to the reading experience and the book’s meaning.

Part I: ‘Machine Age Knife-Magic’ and ‘Paintings Like Television Screens in Your Own Head’ : The Cut-Up Method and Visual Thinking of Brion Gysin

“Word Falling. Photo falling. Break through in grey room”- (William S. Burroughs Nova Express).

In a 1969 review of the novel The Process for the Village Voice, William S. Burroughs likens its author Brion Gysin’s writing techniques to the narrative techniques of a filmmaker and describes how his background in visual arts has influenced the field of creative writing. Burroughs cites Gysin’s 1959 statement “Writing is 50 years behind painting,” explaining that “the painter can touch and handle his medium, whereas the writer cannot” (VV 7). He argues that: “The writer does not yet know what words are,” and that she “deals with abstractions from the source point of words” (7). Burroughs states that words appear to be “secret untouchable objects” and that this “cultivated distance” from her medium puts the writer at a disadvantage against film and television. Burroughs warns that “Unless writing can bring to the page the immediate impact of film, it may well cease to exist as a separate genre” (7).
For Burroughs, “immediate impact” in writing involves a disruption of logical and literary conventions, most importantly teleology and narrative sequence. In place of these structures, Burroughs advocates for the juxtaposition of content through direct work with the written word as a material object.
Gysin’s opening quotation and Burroughs’ statement about the need to “establish tactile communication with words” (7) reference the experiments these two writers undertook using the “cut-up” method of writing. The cut-up technique turns composition into a tactile arrangement of material rather than an abstract cognitive process. As Gysin explained in an interview with Jason Weiss in 1980, “the sentence, even the word, becomes a real piece of plastic material that you can cut into” (qtd. in BNT 69). Like a film maker cutting and arranging lengths of celluloid in the editing room, or a visual artist piecing together a collage of images, the cut-up’s treatment of written words as material allows the artificial arrangement and juxtaposition of sentence fragments, as well as images, scenes, and voices. It also allows the author to move beyond individual expression, and work with material appropriated from literary and non-literary sources.
While Burroughs suggests that The Process is reflective of Gysin’s “visual” influence on writing, the cut-up method itself was employed selectively in the novel. In response to an interviewers declaration that “The Process is cut-up,” Gysin interjected that though there are “lots of cut-ups in it and lots of things that came out of using cut-ups,” the work is “very thoroughly assimilated” (RE/Search 55). There is a key different between the cut-up method itself, and the seemingly “visual” influence it had on Gysin and Burroughs’ writing. This chapter examines the background of the cut-up, and the deconstructive dimensions of its material procedure.
Though Gysin and Burroughs explored similar writing techniques through the use of the cut-up, Burroughs aimed to present the reader with a juxtaposition of fragments which he or she must endeavour to make sense of. Gysin’s work by contrast, often takes its meaning from the intention behind the deployment of the cut-up as a means of deconstruction. The cut-up is in Gysin’s work less of a method of juxtaposing fragments, than a coordinate point in a material approach to language. A great part of Gysin’s body of work involves taking literature off the written page in an exploration of the aural and visual qualities of the spoken and written word apart from its semantic meaning.
Owing to their collaborations, Gysin and Burroughs’ different artistic ideas and methods become inextricably fused together. It is extremely difficult to extricate the meaning of the cut-up method in Gysin’s work from the meaning it accrues in the enormous body of cut-up texts, and theory that Burroughs generated.
Gysin and Burroughs believed in the power of collaboration to fuse their individual efforts into a collective enterprise they called “the Third Mind.” Gerard-Georges Lemaire explains, in an introduction to the work of that title, that their aim in collaboration was “the complete fusion in a praxis of two subjectivities” (Third Mind 20). Lemaire explained that “it is from this collusion that a new author emerges, an absent third person, invisible and beyond grasp” (20). Burroughs and Gysin’s collaborations reflect the cut-up method’s potential to produce new unpredicted meanings, or an indeterminate web of possibilities through its juxtaposition. Their collaboration helped them to develop ideas and strategies about writing, but it also forms a dense, intersecting and contradictory body of work that rebuffs interpretation.
Hopefully without undercutting the principles of their collaboration, this chapter will attempt the difficult task of approaching Gysin’s material work with language as a project separate from Burroughs’ literary strategies. While I will draw heavily on Burroughs’ writing to interpret and give context to Gysin’s work, my aim will be to form a separate picture of Gysin’s project that is capable of standing on its own.
We will begin with Gysin’s first written cut-ups, and endeavour to understand the significance of their juxtaposition of fragments. I will argue the importance of the cut-up as a means of exposing the diverse potentials for meaning inherent in the writer’s medium, independent of his or her intention of expression. We will then examine how Gysin reworks written material to exhaustively tease out its possible variations of meaning in his “permutation poems,” a form of the cut-up that mathematically reorders the words in a short sentence. I will argue the deconstructive dimensions of the cut-up in terms of its attack on expression and fixed linguistic meaning in a close reading of Gysin’s reconfiguration of the tautology “I am that I am.” I will then relate this work with the cut-up, to Gysin’s material deconstructions of written and spoken language is his painting and sound poetry.
While the implications of its experiments are complex, the basic cut-up method is simple.
In “Cut-Ups Self-Explained,” Gysin writes: “Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint . . . lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message” (BNT 132). The cut-up method is similar to the compositions made by the Dadaist Tzara, who notoriously pulled individual words out of hat one at a time and transcribed them as a poem.1 However, the cut-up extends this aleatoric method by combining and rearranging longer fragments of text which often retain traces of the original speaker’s voice, and have a potential for more complex combinations than individual words.
Gysin implores the reader to “Use any system which suggests itself,” applying it to “your own words or the words said to be ‘the very own words’ of anyone else living or dead” (132). He argues that the application of his method will reveal that “words don’t belong to anyone,” and that they have “a vitality of their own” which allows “you or anybody [to] make them gush into action” (132). By this Gysin is referring to the cut-up’s ability to make another person’s words take on new meaning through a change of context. This context is constituted by the literary work, but also more importantly by the intersection or disjuncture between adjacently arranged fragments.
In 1959 Gysin made a series of experimental poems with material from the Paris Herald Tribune, the London Observer, the London Daily Mail and advertisements taken from Life Magazine. Published as “First Cut-ups,” these texts illustrate the basic results of the cut-up method which were refined in subsequent experiments. The first poem begins:
It is impossible to estimate the damage. Anything put out up to now is like pulling a figure out of the air.
Six distinguished British women said to us later, indicating the crowd of chic young women who were fingering samples, ‘If our prices weren’t as good or better, they wouldn’t come. Eve is eternal.’ (BNT 70)

The text included in the first line is predisposed to meanings that were not available in its original journalistic context. Given the experimental nature of the poem, the opening line becomes suggestive of the cut-up’s break with literature “put out up to now”. The method of writing through a collage of written material might be compared to the immateriality of conventional composition, suggested by the image of “pulling a figure out of the air”. The statement “it is impossible to estimate the damage” connotes the method’s potential for a violent disruption of conventional ideas about intention and meaning in poetry.
However, in the next line, the initial statement seems to be subsumed within the voice of “six distinguished british women” as something that preceded their “later” statements referring to “the crowd of chic young women”. The reader is put into a position to determine the relationship between the poem’s opening statements and the statement in quotations which is attributed to the six women. Are these two statements spoken by the same speaker(s)? Is there a logical relationship between them? Can or should the later statement be decoded for a symbolic meaning? These questions of interpretation are inherent to the work’s juxtaposition of material.
Throughout the early cut-ups, voice is difficult to locate and the space of the poem is inconsistent or impossible to imagine. In another fragment from the first poem, “Miss Hannah Pugh the slim model” states that “Now that Hazard has banished [her] timidity,” she feels that she can “live on streams in the area where people are urged to be watchful” (70). In the following line, “A huge wave rolled in from the wake of Hurricane Gracie and bowled a married couple off a jetty” (70). Though the woman’s disregard of warnings about water suggests a causality to the next fragment, knowledge of the poem’s arbitrary composition may cause a reader to be reticent about making a connection between the two events.
As if avoiding the resolution of its own uncertainties the poem ends with the objective information that “Tomorrow the moon will be 228,400 miles from the earth and the sun almost 93,000,000 miles away” (70). Through its sudden break with the disordered voices and events that preceded it, the information introduced by this disembodied and impersonal voice is given a sense of poetic finality, suggesting a shift of attention to a larger cosmic level, indifferent to human concerns.
There is no doubt that Gysin’s first cut-up poems are artistically limited. None the less, they provide the basis for a series of more complex literary experiments. The resulting work of the cut-up method is in Burroughs’ words, “immediate” in the sense that texts it produces present the the reader with an unexplained array of juxtaposed fragments which they must actively engage in connecting. The author merely combines fragments of text that already have a “vitality of their own.” She may shape the possibility of intersections through her selection of material and her decisions about which combinations to preserve or discard, but she has become a curator of potential meaning already inherent in the fragments and their fortuitous intersection. As a result, the author becomes a reader of her own work and reading and writing begin to converge in a single position as a process of interpretive meaning making.
As Burroughs argues in an interview included in The Third Mind alongside collages, drawings and cut-up texts undertaken in collaboration with Gysin, “Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands” (4). What is perhaps more important than the possibility for intersections of arbitrary material in the poem cited above, is that even the logical gaps between fragments, such as the disjuncture between the couple’s drowning and the poem’s final line, have the potential to be endowed with meaning through the reader’s interpretation.
However, the cut-up method was for Gysin primarily a way of manipulating language, rather than a style of writing intended to provide the reader with an array of fragments. While Burroughs likens the cut-up method of writing to the visual techniques of both collage and montage, Gysin suggests differences between the two media that serves to distinguish his project. In an essay titled “The Fall of Art” Burroughs suggests a parallel between representational painting and conventional writing, arguing that the cut-up method’s juxtaposition of fragments is equivalent to montage. He writes:
Now montage is actually much closer to the facts of perception than representational painting. Take a walk down a city street and put what you have just seen down on canvas. You have seen half a person cut in two by a car, bit and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows—a montage of fragments. And the same thing happens with words. Remember that the written word is an image. Brion Gysin’s cut-up method consists of cutting up pages of text and re-arranging them in montage combinations. (“The Fall of Art” The Adding Machine 61)

The use of the cut-up to produce “montage combinations” is a technique Burroughs has developed rather than Gysin. The cut-up for Gysin is primarily a treatment of words as material, rather than words as images. While Burroughs likens it to filmic montage in opposition to representational painting, Gysin links the cut-up to the non-representational material strategies that painting adopts in response to film and photography.
Gysin explained that in the twentieth century emphasis in the visual arts shifted from representation to “the matter of painting” (RE/Search 54). Previously, the painter’s materials such as “oil and linseed oil and lengtheners like turpentine . . . were used as a medium in which to float colors and produce an image of the world” (54). Then, according to Gysin, it was perceived “that image was not sufficient” (54). Rather than competing with photography in terms of realism, Gysin interprets that an attempt was made to change the focus in painting from representation to material. According to Gysin it was realized that “the matter of painting . . . could be changed by adding pieces of cut-up news paper as the Cubists did, or throwing sand into the mixture” (54). Gysin also interprets that it was out of these material developments that collages were invented.
Gysin states that it was his awareness of this experimentation with the matter of painting that led him to declare that writing was fifty years behind painting (55). He explained that the cut-up was a method of “taking the actual matter of writing as if it were the same as the matter involved in sculpting or in painting . . . and handling it in a plastic manner” (54).
Burroughs’ repeated appeals to collage and montage as precedents for the cut-up method seem to be a way of justifying a treatment of writing based on juxtaposition in contrast to more conventional models of exposition and narrative development. Collage and montage give writing a precedent for a move outside of conventional modes of literary sense making. The cut-up method reflected an approach to writing Burroughs had already began to develop in Naked Lunch, in which material was organized not through a plot or overarching logical development, but through what Robin Lydenberg calls a “mosaic style” (Word Cultures x). This involved displacing “metaphorical habits of assimilation and vertical transcendence”(x) with metonymic patterns of horizontal juxtaposition.
Burroughs was interested in producing and defining a new kind of readership. Gysin’s work on the other hand is primarily concerned with the material treatment of the language rather than with the literary possibilities of its written results. The cut-ups can be understood as Gysin’s strategy in the face of cold war rhetoric and ideology and the insidious corporate language of advertisement. “Minutes to Go” announces that “yr utilities / are being shut off dreams monitored thought directed” (BNT 73). In various instructional texts, such as “Cut Me Up * Brion Gysin,” he advised the reader to “Cut-up everything in sight and make your whole life a poem” (BNT 75). The cut-ups offered the reader a radical alternative to various interpellations of thought: the option of becoming a writer.
Gysin wrote: “The way out is here and it CAN BE WRITTEN. You can start writing it now by cutting up this whole book. Add what you like and make a new book of it” (75). For Gysin, the cut-up method was an alternative to the passive reception of words and ideas, rather than a method for producing a body of radical literature. As Gysin concluded in “Minutes to Go,” “the writing machine is for everybody” (73). Though he claimed it could be used to “piece together a masterpiece a week” (74), this writing machine was more a form of critical engagement, a substitute for a “Reality Machine” Gysin humorously promised would be released once it could be produced “in commercially reasonable quantities” (“CUPDS” BNT 132).
Gysin’s most successful work with written cut-up’s were in fact instructional poems that expounded on the value of the method as a democratic tool able to empower the users critical faculties and expand their perception. As Gerard-Georges Lemaire wrote about the cut-up in his introduction to Gysin and Burroughs’ collaboration The Third Mind: “It is a strategic device for confronting semiotic assaults” (15). Lemaire suggested that the Gysin and Burroughs’ collaborative work with cut-ups requires a reader to “establish the operational field of another book, an invisible book” (15), which we might conceive of as a linguistic and discursive network in which the reader and the text both exist.
Gysin used the cut-up method to play with a process of disordering words and sentences out of fixed meanings through disruptions of grammar and syntax as well as the rearrangement of word order. He aimed to break down an aura of words as “untouchable objects” by dramatizing their excess of potential meanings outside of expression. This can be seen in Gysin’s work with what he calls “permutation poems,” poems which enumerated the possible variations of word order of a short sentence. Permutation poems such as “I Am That I Am” and “No Poets Don’t Own Words” involve the artificial, even mathematical treatment of written and spoken language (BNT 80 ; 89). In these works the order of five words is rearranged and enumerated in all of its possible variations.
In particular, the permutation of the phrase “I am that I am” is significant as a symbolic deconstruction of expression and individual identity. Permutation was able to turn what Gysin called “one of the most affirmative statements of all time” into “a question, and a poignant one, simply by changing the word order” (qtd. in Geiger 136). Gysin encountered the famous phrase, originally spoken by Jehovah in the King James version of Exodus 3.14, cited in the appendix to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. In its original context, God tells Moses that “I am That I am” “is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (Exodus 3.16). Gysin explains:
I saw the phrase on paper and I thought, ‘Ah, it looks a bit like the front of a greek temple,’ only on the condition that I put the biggest word in the middle. So, I’ll just change these others around, ‘am I,’ in the corner of the architrave. Then I realized, as soon as I did this, it asked a question. ‘I am that, am I? And I said ‘Wow, I’ve touched the oracle!” (Interview with Jason Weiss, 1980 qtd. in BNT 79).

The permutation “I am that, am I?” changes the sentence from a tautology to a rhetorical question. It suggests the equivalent to ‘so you think that is what I am?’, connoting the speaker’s refutation of an accusation or an interpellation, as if God were rebuking human kind for actions carried out in his name. Gysin appropriated the original phrase, reworking it into a series of question and statements to suggest the ambiguous fluid potential of his own identity.
In his unpublished notes on painting, Gysin explains that “Thee, Word, begat Me” (BNT 119). His choice of “thee” instead of the definite article “the” personifies language as a conscious agency that gives rise to the conception of the self. Gysin explains that “the potent phrase is a word-lock of static intention [. . .] meant to keep me in my place” (119). He argues that language fixes individual identity into a single shape through interpellation, but also through a person’s own expression. Gysin explains that personal expression is a kind of argument which limits the speaker to a holding a single position. He states “Any point in space is an argument place and I will not be confined to one point. I will argue out the word-lock so that I can move. I want to travel everywhere in Space” (119).
The term “argument place” derives from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In its original context, it reads:
A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument place.)
A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on. (2.0131)

Gysin did not seem to be interested in the context of this passage to the larger philosophical argument being made in the section of the Tractatus. Instead, the term “argument place” is appropriated as the perceived essential quality of something that distinguishes it from surrounding matter.
In a collection of writing published as Brion Gysin Let the Mice in, explained that “Am” was a position, like an argument, and that the tautology enacted a “coincidence of fields,” by trying to keep “I” in one place (Tuning in 97). Just as he resisted being pegged as painter, writer or performance poet, Gysin claimed the fluidity and mobility of his own identity, stating “My field shifts,” and declaring “I am here to go” (97).
Gysin’s work with “I am that I am” can be illuminated by a passage in The Job where Burroughs describes “the IS of Identity,” an idea he has adopted from the work of the philosopher Alfred Korzybski (200). As an example, Burroughs states: “You are an animal. You are a body” (200 emphasis mine). He explains:
Now whatever you may be you are not an “animal,” you are not a “body,” because these are verbal labels. The IS of identity always carries the implication of that and nothing else, and it also carries the assignment of permanent condition. To stay that way. All naming calling [sic?] presupposes the IS of identity. (200)

For Burroughs, “the word BE in english contains, as a virus contains, its precoded message of damage, the categorical imperative of permanent condition” (200). We can relate Burroughs’ antagonism towards “the IS of identity” to Gysin’s desire for impersonality through his material treatment of the writing process.
The elimination of expression in favour of the external combination of different material with innate “vitality” of it own suggests that the author does not need to write from a single perspective, or conversely, be defined by what they write. Gysin stated his desire to get away from an expressive model of poetry, through an experimental play of meanings and the exploration of the aural and material qualities of recorded speech. He wrote: “poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing” (BNT 132).
Burroughs’ work breaks apart expression by appropriating vast amounts of material from other literary and non-literary sources and combining it together through “unkind cuts” (Gysin, Here to Go 170). Like the combination of different voices and perspectives we saw in the first cut-up poems, Burroughs produced texts that have a kind of multi-personal voice. What Gysin and Burroughs referred to as “The Third Mind” can be interpreted, according to Lydenberg, as “the collaborative consciousness which could be generated by the cut-up method: a third mind free of the restrictions of context, culture and subjectivity” (45).
While Burroughs annihilates expression, creating work “without boundary, self, paternity, or ownership” (46), Gysin’s poem “I am that I am” begins with a declarative statement, and proceeds to systematically break it apart through an exhaustive series of variations, thus dramatizing a symbolic deconstruction of identity. He explains: “The permutation poems set the words spinning off on their own; echoing out as the words of a potent phrase are permutated into an expanding ripple of meaning which they did not seem to be capable of when they were struck and stuck into that phrase” (“CUSE” BNT 132).
In addition to producing questions, permutation also resulted in numerous variations on the statement such as “I AM I THAT AM” (BNT 80, 88). These variations undercut the tautology by turning it into the speaker’s deferral of their self-definition. Gysin and Ian Sommerville, a mathematician, used a computer, permute the sentence “I am that I am” in two variations per line to expand the number of possible combinations, resulting in pages and pages of printed readouts. Gysin accentuated these variations through his inflection in voice recordings, some of which were broadcast on BBC Radio in 1960 as “The Permutation Poems of Brion Gysin.”
In addition to mathematically rearranging written words, Gysin was also able to manipulate the tapes of his recordings. He explained that the use of equipment at the BBC’s recording studio and the possibility “dealing with sound as material measurable in centimetres” delighted him because “the whole point of the exercise was to do things treating sound as if it was material . . . tangible material; as indeed it had become since the invention of the tape” Gysin qtd. in Geiger 138). Gysin’s work with recorded speech enabled him to turn language into a kind of music. His recording of the permutations of “I am that I am” becomes a rhythmic cascade of sound, accentuated by echoes and artificial fluctuations in the speed of his recitation.
We can compare the concrete treatment of language as music in Gysin’s sound poetry to his calligraphic paintings and drawings which turn the written word into a deliberately illegible image. Gysin’s calligraphic paintings relate to the cut-up’s treatment of the written or recorded word as a material, but rather than also being interested in what unthinking combinations and juxtapositions could produce in terms of signified content, the aim is a form of aesthetic materiality of the words themselves. Gysin’s calligraphic paintings and ink drawings which date from 1958 onward, consist of flowing horizontal and vertical lines in mock imitation of Arabic and Japanese script. In later paintings, these marks are layered repeatedly to create rich abstract palimpsests reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings.
Laura Hoptman argues that Gysin’s most important discovery is “the notion that the written word as well as the symbol can and should be loosed from their received meanings” (58).
Gysin’s calligraphic work liberates an aesthetic experience of written language from its function of signification in order to privilege the materiality of the signifier. Two untitled ink drawing from 1959 illustrate the derivation of Gysin’s work from his study of calligraphy (see fig. 1 and fig. 2, in appendix). In the first picture, Gysin’s marks have the appearance of horizontal Arabic writing. Like in an illuminated manuscript, a border holds the main content, while mock script in another colour depicts an illegible annotation. In the second work, the structure Gysin’s calligraphy gives way to a freer vertical exploration, though a loose grid pattern and the structure of margins maintain a sense of writing on a page.
Gysin’s calligraphic method replaces the writer’s intention of signifying content with an art of knowing how to handle the pen or brush. As he explained about his own formal training in Japanese and Arabic calligraphy: “Really the only thing I got out of it was the way of holding a brush, and the use of a brush, and the language of a brush, and…the whole business of running ink onto the paper” (Gysin qtd. in Tuning in 53). Gysin speculated that if he had learned Arabic writing he would have been writing sacred texts, commenting “I didn’t want to be doing that . . . I just insisted to myself that I had to be inventive” (53).
Similarly to the permutation of the statement “I am that I am,” Gysin developed a signature out of his monogram “BG,” and then proceeded to render it into an illegible image through repetition and variation. Gysin expressed the importance of developing “a sign of [his] own,” describing how he “looked deep into plant forms and found what [he] wanted in the soja sprout whose explosive power can overturn monuments” (“Calligraffiti of Fire” qtd in. Tuning in 57). He then set about writing this script backwards and forwards across the canvas, varying the shape of the letters to form a web of lines often indistinguishable as letters within the design. Gysin would paint in one direction across the page or canvas he was working on, and then rotate it 90 or 180 degree to mark it again in another direction, combining his monogram with other gestural marks in a variety of sizes and colours until his canvases became elaborate abstract images.
Gysin’s treatment of his signature dramatizes a symbolic deconstruction of personal identity in the same controlled manner as his permutations. Hoptman interprets that “rather than promoting his authorship, the aim of Gysin’s repetitive invocation of his name was to erase it” (64). Gladys Fabre similarly argues that in Gysin’s work, the “author dissolves, directs the disintegration of the self, starting from the word, and from the name too” (Tuning in 164). She interprets that “To delete the name is to abolish the social stamp and affirm the Being” (164). For Gysin, such “being” is, as we have seen, conceived of as an ambidextrous potential.
The success of Gysin’s art is that the variation of his personal script, its adaptability and multi-directionality, renders its characters almost illegible to the viewer as writing. His work fluctuates between letters and gestural marks, often depicting elemental or organic themes such as fire or grass (see fig. 3). In Gysin’s work, Guy Brett argues that “something resembling a coherent sign, or sense, continually emerge from and fall back into an undifferentiated flux” (Tuning in 56). It is this interplay between gesture and sign which distinguishes Gysin from abstract expressionism. His work is not simply a replacement of the written sign by abstract strokes of paint, but a dramatized process that takes its meaning from its acts of breaking down writing and the signature.
The importance of the oppositional relationship of the rubbed-out word to semantic meaning can be inferred from Burroughs’ article “Ports of Entry” which describes his experience of Gysin’s calligraphic paintings. Burroughs explains how upon finding what he calls a “port of entry,” defined as “any number of little details or a special spot of colour,” “the entire painting will suddenly become a three-dimensional frieze in plaster or jade, or other precious material” (Tuning in 32). Burroughs writes: “Suddenly you get a whole violet world or a whole grey world which flashes all over the picture. The worlds are as it were, illuminated by each individual colour . . . world[s] made of that colour” (32).
This description can be compared to a passage in The Doors of Perception where Aldous Huxley writes about the material vision produced by his mescaline experience. Describing his impression of the the books which line his study, Huxley writes:
they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colours, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose colour was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention” (19).

Importantly, in this form of perception, the written content of the books, as well as the conception of their purpose in the transmission of knowledge, disappears to be replaced by a direct “profounder” aesthetic experience of their concrete materiality.
The meaning of this visual experience for Huxley is later elaborated in his description of his impressions of the striped patterns of light falling across a garden chair. Huxley writes: “I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else” (53). He explains “Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow – these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event” (53). As Paul de Man’s states in his essay “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”: “the eye left to itself, entirely ignores understanding” (Aesthetic Ideology 127).
Similar to this “material vision” (de Man 82), Burroughs explains that influenced by Gysin’s paintings, he has begun to take “colour walk[s]” through the streets of Paris, in which he focusses his perception on specific colours in the environment (Tuning in 32). Describing one such walk, he states
when I looked I was seeing all blue in the street in front of me . . . blue on the foulard . . . blue on a young workman’s ass . . . his blue jeans . . . a girls blue sweater . . . blue neon . . . the sky . . . all the blues. When I looked again, I saw all the reds . . . of traffic lights . . . car lights . . . a cafe sign . . . a man’s nose. (32)

Burroughs describes a form of perception that has been atomized into a succession of immediate impressions of colour. Burroughs tells Gysin that his paintings make him “see the streets of Paris in a different way” (32). The figurative silence of the “rubbed out” word seems to symbolize
a defamiliarized experience of the ordinary conceptually processed world.
Gysin’s calligraphic paintings and drawings can be understood in context of the tradition of the genre of the painterly depiction of the “scene of reading” which Garrett Stewart explores in The Look of Reading: Book Painting Text. Stewart traces the development of the tradition of depicting figures in the act of reading as a changing visual discourse of the “’inward’ human subject” (3). Gysin work falls within “the later stages of anti-figural abstraction,” when the focused attention of a figure depicted reading is replaced by “assembled shapes or signs rather than an achieved scene” (Stewart 7-8). Rather than just laying bare “the drawing beneath all writing” (Stewart 347), as Picasso does by subsuming writing to visible marking, Gysin’s calligraphic “ecritures” (Brett 53) suggest that “mental formulations, are always in the way of seeing” (Stewart 347).
In Gysin’s calligraphic painting, and to varying degrees in his cut-up experiments, the author attempts to disappear from the work of art, leaving the reader or viewer with a non-expressive material product that offers no clear instructions in how it is to be received. Gysin suggests a shared purpose between the cut-up method and his own painting in deliberately creating a non-sensical space outside the normal interpretive acts of reading or listening.
In a performance art piece at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London in December 1960, a cut-up tape recording was played aloud while Gysin painted a six-by-six foot calligraphic painting. The piece begins with a coherent passage in which Gysin announces:
I talk a new language. You will understand. I talk about the springes and traps of inspiration. IN SPIRATION –what you breathe in. You breathe in words. Words breathe you IN. I demonstrate thee, the Out-Word in action both visual and aural, racing away in one direction to sounds more concrete than music and, in the other, to paintings like television screens in your own head (BNT 95)

In Gysin’s performance, this initial recorded address to the audience is dislocated and recombined with other material through the cut-up method. Like the work we have looked at so far, it moves from expression to the non-expression of arbitrary, or near arbitrary material reconfiguration in order to dramatize a process of deconstruction.
In the opening passage, Gysin deliberately breaks down the word “inspiration,” into its component parts. Invoking the unification of speech and breath as markers of authenticity and presence in an oral model of poetry, Gysin however, reverses this formulation, suggesting it is the words that “breathe in” the listener, acting on them as a kind of trap over the imagination. Gysin explains: “In the beginning was the Word – been in You for a toolong time. I rub out the word” (95). His introduction suggests that a typical exchange between writer and reader, or performer and audience is one where the author’s words are consumed by the receivers, inspiring them with images and ideas.
Gysin’s calligraphic work refuses to give the audience a written message they can read, and the illogical combinations of the cut-up tape provides only a chaotic, deluge of illogical sentences and sentence fragments rather than a coherent expression. The permutations repeat certain key terms such as “painting,” “word,” “breathe,” “sentence,” “trap,” “magic,” “spells,” and “music,” producing a thematic consistency to its variations. However this does not build into any kind of meaningful structure. Instead, Gysin suggests a desire to disappear “into my picture” (98) and “into the words”(100), and enacted this as effectively as he could by walking away quietly from his easel at the end of his performance.
The transcription of the tape recording from “Brion Gysin Let the Mice In,” published as a text in 1973 in a book of the same title, is an ineffective substitute for the experience that would have been produced in its original multi-media context. The words of the recording are not meant to be close read, but experienced as a chaotic bombardment of the senses. Similarly to Gysin’s recordings with the BBC, the manipulation of the spoken material is meant to turn speech into “sounds more concrete than music”. The illegibility and unintelligibility of the aptly named “Out-Word” in its visual and aural forms takes its meaning from its relation to normal expressive language, and conventional poetic performance. Through its illogical treatment of speech and writing the performance aimed to render discourse opaque and defamiliarize the everyday intake and processing of information.
In an article published in Evergreen Review in 1964 Gysin states that the cut-ups are “Machine Age knife-magic, revealing Pandora’s box to be the downright nasty Stone Age gimmick it is” (132). The significance of the cut-ups, and perhaps what inhibited their success, was that they were a method, something to do, rather than something to read. Gysin’s use of the cut-up was part of a material project that involved taking literature off the written page. While Gysin’s first cut-up poems involved appropriating written material from different literary and non-literary sources, he quickly realized that the cut-up as a style of writing better suited his friend Burroughs. Gysin pursued the cut-up into experimental and conceptual territory in his material experiments with performance and sound poetry. Burroughs was the one who developed the cut-up into an infamous and often maligned writing style in his experimental refashioning of the novel. In the second chapter of this essay, we will investigate Gysin’s approach to the genre of the novel in The Process and connect his formal techniques to his material experiments.

Part II: ‘The Creation and Destruction of the World in Flames’ : Fiction and Narrative
in The Process
Brion Gysin’s novel The Process was published in 1968, approximately a decade after the development of his calligraphic style of painting, and his first work with the cut-up method. The novel diverges from what we might expect based on his material work with language in that it has a strong narrative focus. While I have argued that the cut-up is for Gysin largely a deconstructive method, this chapter looks at his attempts to establish “a new form of readability” (Lemaire, Third Mind 14) through his re-imagining of the novel.
The Process combines linear progression with the horizontal juxtapositions of the cut-up method. Its formal aspects are extremely complex, and difficult to summarize. Since The Process is not a well known novel, my first step will be to outline for the reader its structure as well as its plot and themes. My argument will be that, like the work examined in the previous chapter, Gysin dramatizes a “process” of symbolic narrative deconstruction rather than simply presenting the reader with its end result. The deconstruction of the narrative form of the novel reflects Gysin’s depiction of his principle protagonist’s nomadic personal development. This is defined negatively as his attempt to escape from the predetermined narrative developments imposed on him by the other character’s interpellation of his role in the narrative. I will put The Process in context by comparing its form to Burroughs’ use of the cut-up method, and his claims about its “immediate” juxtaposition of material.
The principle protagonist of The Process is “Ulys O. Hanson, III, of Ithaca, NY” (Process 21) an African American Fulbright fellow, and beneficiary of the fictional Swedish “Foundation of Fundamental Findings” (16). In the first-person narration which opens the novel, he explains that he is retracing the trails of the slave trade across the Sahara, before taking a ship “around the big bulge of the continent, stopping along the way at all the old slave markets as far around the hump of Africa as St. Louis in Senegal, north of Dakar” (18).
Hanson sees himself as “the newly manumitted slave who has worked out his indenture to the Great Library of Alexandria” (18). He is surreptitiously using his grant from the Foundation to finance his escape from the western world and his profession as an academic. Hanson states: “One thing I neglected to tell the Foundation when I applied is that I have left not one foot back in their world, as they think, but a mere fading footprint. This foot I put forward into the Sahara is already firmly implanted in this African world” (18-9). Hanson suggests that he is escaping from a system of modern day mental slavery, and his own conflicted western cultural identity, in search of the individual freedom of complete self-determination. The initial premise of the novel is Hanson’s personal journey of self-discovery and Homeric style “return” to his racial origins in “Black Africa” (84).
However, Hanson’s first journey across the Sahara is interrupted, and he is forced to return to where he started in the small Moroccan town of Tanja. While taking stock of his journey in the second section, he purchases a “UHER” tape recorder. In the succeeding chapters, this device functions in the narrative to record and play back monologues spoken by other characters. The tape recorder allows different characters to narrate the novel in the first person in the same way that Hanson has done in the opening section. As Burroughs interprets, the “tape recorder is the point of observation that brings each narration into present time” (VV 7), by which he means the space of the narrative development.
After a long section that transcribes a monologue spoken by his Moroccan friend Hamid, the fourth section introduces the main episode of the novel, Hanson’s involvement with the Foundation. Hanson is on the verge of writing a letter to ask for a second grant in order to make another trip across the desert when he is contacted in person by one of his sponsors Thay Himmer. Thay initiates Hanson into the Foundation’s elaborate and absurdists secret operations by giving him a large emerald with apparently metaphysical significance called “the Seal of the Sahara” (137). Thay describes the Seal as “the Beginning and Ending of words” (138), telling Hanson that it gives him some kind of unspecified authority within the Foundation’s operations.
Hanson is swept up and implicated in an indeterminate “game” (203), where members of the Foundation deceive and manipulate each other. This episode spans approximately two-hundred pages and consists mostly of long monologues addressed to Hanson by the Foundation’s individual members. Most of these section are primarily intended to brief Hanson on the Foundation and its aims, however the characters also make substantial digressions, recounting the stories of their own personal and spiritual developments in a way that mirrors the novel’s opening section. In between these chapters, Hanson narrates short sections in the first person to introduce the other narrations, and explain what is taking place.
The purpose of the Foundation, and the nature of its designs on Hanson continually shift as new information is introduced. Thay suggests that Hanson has been recruited as part of the Foundation’s mobilization against the imperialistic projects of “evil monopolistic double-criss-crossed corporations” (143) in Africa. He explains that Hanson has been selected because of his race; the Foundation needs him to be political figure head in their plan to “save the Sahara and give it back to itself” (142).
However, in subsequent sections, another character Mya gives the impression that the Foundation’s aims are less altruistic. Mya offers Hanson the power and privilege of being “Emperor of Africa” (219), but also refers to him as “Uncle Tom” (214), suggesting his complicity in some form of enslavement of the African continent.2 Mya explains that she controls two million members of a tribe called the Foulba, and that the Foundation is “absorbing new ethnic groups of previously nameless nomads in the southwestern Sahara every day” (219).
Hanson and the reader’s understanding of the meaning of the Foundation’s operations in the Sahara are later undercut by information that suggests that Thay and Mya may both be low level members, and that the director of its operations may be a man named Amos. A private conversation between Amos and his sister reveals that the absurd information that the emerald Seal given to Hanson contains a map that the two will use to navigate a spaceship he has obtained from a Chinese diplomat through a “cosmic crack” in the universe (327).
The Foundation seems to be a kind of indeterminate “non-organization” like the ambiguously named “White Hunters” in Burroughs’ novel The Ticket that Exploded (10, 9). Burroughs’ narrator asks rhetorically: “Were they white supremacists or an anti-white movement far ahead of the Black Muslims? The extreme right or left of the Chinese? . . . No one knew and in this uncertainty lay the particular terror they inspired” (9). Similarly, there seems to be no coherence to the various personal motivations of the members of the Foundation. Like the undefined metaphysical power of the emerald, the Foundation and its cast of complex characters provide an indeterminate potential for a narrative development that is continually deferred, and finally undercut.
The episode involving the Foundation ends with Hanson’s erasure of the other characters. In the section following Amos’ monologue, Hanson records permutations of the phrase “Rub out the word,” on a piece of tape spliced into a loop on his tape recorder. After suffering an experience he calls “[a]brupt word withdrawal” (332), He finds himself back in the cafe in Tanja where he first met Thay. The dramatization of the act of narration is crucial to The Process. Narration is not a transparent window onto a series of events and developments, but an active component in constructing the novel’s fictional world.
Burroughs’ review of The Process for the Village Voice is the only substantial critical work available that engages Gysin’s experiments with narration. Its comparison of the visual mediums of film and television with writing is a useful point of departure for putting the novel into perspective. While Burroughs’ review initially suggests the “immediate impact” of Gysin’s writing techniques, invoking the conception of a montage approach of juxtaposition, he ultimately suggests that we interpret The Process skeptically as a “film scrip” rather than a film, recognizing the fundamental absence of the scenes and events its characters narrate.
Burroughs argues that the difference between film and writing is that film cannot create its reality through narrational description, it must provide visual evidence: “Any writer of film scripts must specify his source of information. ‘It was Saturday evening in July 1923.’ Fine, thank you, but how does the audience know it is a Saturday afternoon in July 1923?” (VV 7). Burroughs argues that in the genre of the novel, the “omniscient author who can move into the past, the future and the minds of his characters is an outworn device” (VV 7). Rather than an objective point of view that puts the novel’s world into perspective, Burroughs implies that Gysin presents the reader with an unverifiable series of narrations like a kind of schizophrenic film script, which seductively calls up vivid scenes through its descriptive writing.
Burroughs constructs a model of The Process within which he arranges the various monologues: “Unexpected rising of the curtain can begin with a tape recorder against a white wall. There is a round opening in the wall, through which we see the blue sky of Africa. A black hand presses the button PLAY I…” (VV 7). This screenplay style description has the effect of a cinematic closeup. The camera is focussed on the tape recorder while in the background of the frame, our vision is blocked by a wall, except for a circular window that looks out not onto the novel’s setting, the desert, but the sky above it. Of the principle character, we see only a black hand, its skin an anonymous marker of racial identity and his voice, as well as the voices of the other characters, come to us dislocated and disembodied by their mediation through the tape.
“Scenes rise from the recorder” (VV 7), their vividness determined by the effectiveness of their description, but Burroughs sets the reader at a skeptical remove from the events the tape recounts. Well formulated description may evoke imagery, but the mediated speech act of narration remains forefront in the reader’s attention. Burroughs undercuts the fictional space of the novel by presenting it not as a visual work of immediate language that ‘shows’ instead of ‘tells’, but rather as a complex work that self-consciously mediates itself, limiting what it claims to show directly in order to dramatize its own acts of narration.
Though the sections of The Process take the form of long narratives, Burroughs argues that Gysin destabilizes the illusion of a representational fictional world by replacing a coherent narrative with a succession of scenes and material. The narrative structure of The Process is, I believe, more complicated than Burroughs’ interpretation. Gysin fuses linear progression and horizontal juxtaposition, in a way that is different from Burroughs’ cut-up novels. However, I want to draw on Burroughs use of the cut-up as a mode of juxtaposition in order to illuminate the differences of the narrative techniques of The Process.
In an essay entitled “The Fall of Art” Burroughs calls the novel a “sequential representational straightjacket [. . .] as arbitrary as the sonnet and as far removed from the actual facts of human perception and consciousness as that fifteenth-century poetical form” (The Adding Machine: Selected Essays 61). Burroughs argues that “Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors” (61). For Burroughs, the cut-up is horizontal in the sense that its fragments are presented without the convention of linear progression. The aim of Burroughs’ destruction of what he calls the “sequential representational straightjacket” seems to be to present fragments outside of a conception of narrative, as if they occurred simultaneously in the horizontal juxtaposition of a mosaic.
What Burroughs achieves in a work like The Ticket that Exploded, a novel that was written with the help of the cut-up method is like a series of vivid scenes and images that resolve into focus out of the illogical and associative noise of “a series of oblique references” (TTE 10). Longer sequences are set into a background of disjointed often incoherent cut-up material that confounds narrative space, development and setting. While the scenes and images themselves are often quite clear in their visceral literalization of Burroughs’ ideas about things like language and media, a progressive narrative framework is rejected in favour of the immediacy of these diverse self-contained fragments.
There has inevitably been critical debate over Burroughs’ work in terms of what type of reading experience his fragmented writing style produces, or is intended to produce. Burroughs visually thematized ideas about writing reflect the concept of a “pictorial turn,” defined by W.J.T. Mitchell as a “complexly related transformation” occurring in the fields of philosophy and human sciences and the sphere of public culture (Picture Theory 11). In The Job, Burroughs attributes the direction of his own work to an image-focussed cultural environment. In response to an interviewer’s question about the “end goal” of the “breaking up of novelistic form” (The Job 27), Burroughs responds that “[t]o compete with television and photo magazines writers will have to develop more precise techniques producing the same effect on the reader as a lurid action photo” (27).
Similarly to the claims made in his review of The Process about the need for “immediate impact” in writing, Burroughs suggests the popularity of visual images derive from their ability to enact a visceral experience by making present that which they describe. As Burroughs articulates it in The Job, reason, logical coherence or narrative sequence do not seem to matter as long as the individual scenes and images of a novel are compelling. This leads Marianne DeKoven to point out that Burroughs emphasis on visceral impact diverges from the project of a modernist writerly text.
Dekoven argues that “The reflex effect on the reader of a lurid action photo invok[es] passive, prepackaged, visceral responses rather than consciousness-altering engagement in the invention of new meanings” (Utopia Limited 167). She interprets that this is “precisely what the modernist/avant-garde ideology of the writerly intends to blast apart,” and that “Burroughs looks directly here, along with McLuhan though with far less utopian optimism, at the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy: the advent of postmodern postliteracy” (167).
As I explored briefly in the first chapter, Burroughs argued that his work was aimed at getting the reader to make connections between juxtaposed fragments. In The Third Mind, Burroughs states that cut-up texts encourage the reader to “learn to leave out words and to make connections”(4). In opposition to DeKoven, Timothy S. Murphy argues that “The whole labour of the cut-up method—the key to its success or failure both in writing and film—is contained in [the] question” “what kinds of connection (if any) can be established between randomly juxtaposed images?” (215). According to Murphy, the reader does not simply receive passive pre-packaged impressions, or read into the cut-up material their own unconscious “pre-established identification of images,” but rather they are encouraged to actively bridge “established associations with other, novel points of view to form a new and disjunct set of perspectives” (215).
It seems to me that the cut-up method is capable of accommodating both a readerly and writerly reading experience. I do not believe that the positions outlined above are mutually exclusive. However, I am less interested in debating the significance of Burroughs’ use of the cut-up, than bringing the visual model of writing, and its problematic to bear on a reading of The Process.
The reader’s experience of The Process is determined by the interplay between the fictive illusion created by the novel’s individual narrations, and the disorientation and dis-illusionment of their complex and unstable relationship in a progressive narrative development. I do not believe Gysin intends the reader to bridge the gaps between the content of its different narrations, so much as develop an understanding of their shifting relationship.
While Burroughs skeptical reading of The Process is a valid formal interpretation, it is not necessarily accurate to what it is like to read the novel. Rather than an arbitrary juxtaposition of scenes and voices, Hanson’s short narrations tie the other characters monologues together in an uncertain layering. While Burroughs’ writing gives the impression of an arbitrary horizontal arrangement of unassimilable material, Gysin gives the reader a succession of different views of the novel’s space and the meaning of its developments.
An important dimension of the Foundation episode is its framing within the larger narrative. This frame allows the episode to take on different status in the narrative. Hanson begins and ends his experience with the characters that belong to the Foundation with the statement “I clench my eyes tight for one pico-second, just the time for one all knowing blink, and I open them again” (133). We are thus led to believe that the whole narrative of the Foundation occurs in the blink of an eye. Rather than a series of disjointed ruptures of narrative continuity, the scenes of the Foundation episode itself unfolds progressively. It is the episode’s framing that calls into question its status to the narrative continuity, demanding an interpretation of the relation between narrative and sub-narrative.
After he finds himself back at the cafe in Tanja, Hanson’s experience with the Foundation is potentially reduced to the status of a kind of dream or hallucination, even though this episode spans the majority of the novel. Hanson states:
“I clench my eyes tight for one pico-second, just the time for one all-knowing blink, and I open them again. They are . . . gone! Gone, leaving me speechless! What a relief to be back again at my own station in life [ . . . ] One thing I can tell you, I have come a long way but I’m back. I am not about to sign any more of that crew on again, ever! I learned my lesson with those characters. I have changed and, I think, progressed” (332).

The reader is left to establish the relation between the opening sections, the long middle section involving the Foundation, and the novel’s concluding section, again narrated in the first person by Hanson. Hanson’s claim that he has “come a long way” is juxtaposed against the followup statement “I laugh at the idea of letters. How can mere words get me across half a lifetime in the Sahara and back again in a matter of minutes!” (333).
One interpretation Gysin makes possible is that the Foundation and its “characters” are part of a fictional world Hanson has unwittingly created through “the magic act of writing” (83). In the second section, Hanson tells Hamid that he is writing a “desert diary” (83). This is presumably the content of the novel’s opening section.
The Process begins by giving the reader the impression that Hanson’s narrated self-representation corresponds to an actual experience of his journey across the desert. In Burroughs’ words, the novel’s descriptive narration seems to be “done on location” (VV 7). The Foundation episode would then seem to arise from Hanson’s confusion between his real experience and his own fictional representation of that experience in his manuscript. That is, Hanson literally enters into a world produced by his own narration.
The foundation episode can be interpreted as a literalization of Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” that “In a sentence, a world is put together experimentally” (Wittgenstein Notebooks September 29, 1914, qtd. in Nordmann 37). For Wittgenstein, writing does not necessarily record reality from an angle or perspective as a camera might, rather it furnishes its own picture of a state of affairs, like a miniature model. Georg Henrik von Wright explains that for Wittgenstein, “a proposition serves as a model or picture, by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world” (qtd. in Nordmann 37).
The Foundation episode seems to precede Hanson’s experience as a kind of simulacra. Immediately before Hanson’s act of rubbing out the word, Amos’ suggests that the fictional space of The Process “is a split universe run between the Image and the Real Thing” and that “one is the mirror image of the other but the point is to tell which is which” (328-9). Hanson’s extrication from the world of the Foundation thus at first appears to be an act of distinction between a hallucination and reality. In the following section, the Himmers make a “dimmed out” (VV reappearance as a dull couple from Illinois called the “Hymners” (Process 337), suggesting that this is an objective version of the previous episode. However, Hanson’s return to his “own station in life,” is called into question by the novel’s ending, which frustrates the distinction between the different narrative levels.
Rather than making a distinction between his real experience and an illusory sub-narrative, Hanson “content[s] [him]self with repeating the saw”: “As no two people see the world the same way, all trips from here to there are imaginary; all truth is a tale I am telling myself” (351). Embarking by train on another journey into the Sahara, Hanson “condemn[s] the whole thing,” and world around him seems to break apart (351). The reader’s interpretation of different fictional levels from the perspective of the end of the novel is destabilized by the suggestion that the episode involving the Foundation and its characters are not any more or any less real than anything else Hanson narrates.
The Process is a difficult text because the impression of the meaning of its events and the status of its narrative levels change depending on the point in the novel from which they are interpreted. The end of the novel brings us to a point of indeterminacy, but up until that point, the reader is given a succession of different impressions as to the meaning of the novel’s events. Rather than being a non-linear horizontal array of unexplained contiguous fragments, the novel unfolds progressively over time. Character’s monologues and the novel’s narrative developments are framed through Hanson’s first person narration in the order in which he encounters them. Gysin gives us a series of perspectives on the text. Each narration provides a new model for the narrative space.
Rather than moving between different self-contained fragments, the reader gets the sense of a single fictional world that morphs from one narration to the next. The reader’s experience as she move through the novel’s different sections is like a desert mirage that Hanson describes in the novel’s opening chapter. Hanson explains that:
The watering eye of the mirage is the great Show of the World. On its dazzling round screen you assist at the creation and destruction of the world in flames. This overwhelmingly present act or erosion, scouring and pulverizing the landscape under your eyes, throws up a demoniacal vision of glittering marshes forever just out of reach. But this is neither water nor fire. Perhaps, it is a vision through eons of time, back into the unthinkable past hundred millions of years, into that long Mesozoic afternoon when protoplasm fumbled with blind fingers through boiling-hot shallows on the baking shores of a planet that cooled” (51).

This image of a primordial swamp implies a fertile formlessness at the heart of Hanson’s visions; the potentiality out of which things take shape. The mirage figuratively attacks the landscape, ‘eroding’, or ‘pulverizing’ it into a kind of shifting elemental state characteristic of fire or water. Just as the protoplasm is the fundamental material composing all living things, the mirage is like a visual material given form by the perceiver’s vision.
After establishing its power to destabilize perception of a fixed landscape into a fluctuating visual material, Gysin describes how mirage works to transforms a pile of stones into an identifiable manmade structure:
A black disk neatly balanced on a big white stone carries two red blocks topped by another white stone, round as a ball, on which stands a blade of basalt to twist into a spire—and it does! Mirage bends the air, throwing out long veils to catch up these stones into one little show. While you look, the stones swell into a fortress seen from a distance; a citadel with turrets and towers. No, it is a gaudy temple of Shiva somewhere in Hind and, now, it falls back again into a pile of stones as you approach” (51).

The mirage distorts perspective, and seems to change shape based on the location of the viewer. Similarly, the meaning of the novel’s events, and the reader’s sense of the status of narrative and sub-narrative, change as she moves through the various sections of The Process. In the various monologues by the members of the Foundation, different pictures of the meaning of the novel’s previous events, and different perceptions of the narrative trajectories for its future events rise out of and fall back into a seething mass of information.
In Burroughs’ cut-up novels, instead of “condensed liquefaction into a single image,” his experiments produce “a random and infinite variety of implosions and explosions, the pulsing rhythm of life itself” (Lydenberg 52). Like in Roland Barthes portrait of the reader as “empty subject,” the narratives of these novels are “multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives” (qtd. in Lydenberg 54). The cut-up for Burroughs allows the production of highly complex and intertextual works that give the impression of not being focussed through the perception or understanding of a conscious mind. We can infer that Burroughs uses the cut-up in his novels in order to harness the randomness and indeterminacy of the Third Mind for the purpose of representing an experience of reality before its ordering into structures of causality and narrative.
The Process suggests a similar makeup in terms of being an indeterminate substance but it dramatizes for the reader a process of narrative deconstruction, rather than presenting them with its end result. The novel’s initial trajectory of Hanson’s Homeric journey across the desert to “Black Africa” (84) is derailed, as are the narratives of his rise to power as emperor of Africa, and his destruction by Amos. At the end of the Foundation episode, Hanson states “I learned my lesson with those characters. I have changed and, I think, progressed” (332). Gysin suggests that Hanson’s act of rubbing out the word in order to escape the other character’s narrative trajectories is “the process” (331) designated in the novel’s title.
Hanson’s permutation is transcribed as “Rub out the word . . . Out-word rub Thee . . . The Rub-out word . . . Word out-rub Thee . . . Word rub Thee out . . . Out the Rub-word . . . Rub out the Word . . .” (331). He explains that he plays his tape “double speed and, then double that” to turn it into a sound “like a garbage-disposal unit built into a kitchen sink” (331). What he calls “the word-process in reverse” (Process 331), is the reduction of words to sound in an elimination of verbal meaning. Hanson calls his permutation “the zikr,” invoking the ritual of a group of Sufis in the novel’s opening section.
In the first chapter the ritual chanting of the name of Allah by a group of sufis is transformed from “AL-lah . . . AL-lah . . . AL-lah” to “HA-ha . . . HA-ha . . . HA-ha” by exhaling on the first syllable and inhaling on the second, and then further transformed to “A-a . . . A-a . . . A-a” (36). Hanson calls this “the cyclical, rattling word of our zikr, a pair of unvoiced aspirates” (36). The speed of the recitation is then altered by the overseer, the “shekh” and the participants begin inhaling with a “sharp gasp” on the first syllable and exhaling “at great length” on the second (36). The ceremony disrupts the name Allah, slowly transforming speech into its components of sound and breath. By likening his permutation to a zikr, Gysin suggests that the cut-up method has a similar mystical dimension.
The difficulty of distinguishing between illusion and reality in The Process gives meaning to Hanson’s act of “rubbing out the word.” Hanson’s material manipulation of narration suggests an emphasis on what Paul de Man call’s “language of power” which has freed itself from “the restrictions of cognition” (qtd. in Michaels 9). Hanson’s deconstruction would seem to liberate him from the various narrative directions the other characters introduce, but it does not imply his understanding of the narrative space.
In Gysin’s performance piece “Brion Gysin Let the Mice in,” he advises the audience to “Stop. Change. Start again. Lighten your own life sentence” (BNT 95). Hanson’s education similarly seems to be his process of realizing the ability to regard his own life as a fiction. This is not about his understanding of the novel’s events, but a nomadic ability to avoid getting caught in any one conception of the novel’s illusory fluctuating world. The narrative of his personal development turns out to be an anti-narrative; the story of Hanson’s escape from the various roles and narrative developments, “trap[s] . . . woven of words” (351), introduced by the other characters and by his own narration.
While the early cut-up experiments conducted by Gysin and Burroughs explore the possibility of creating new meanings through juxtaposition of material, Burroughs takes the cut-up to an almost unbearable extreme as an “infinitely plural intertext,” where meaning continually skids, refusing “a final signature of signification” (Lydenberg 49, 52). Gysin argued that Burroughs “pushed cut-ups so far with variations of his own that he produced texts that were sickeningly painful to read, even to him” (Here to Go 167). Burroughs’ work forces the reader to adapt their approach to the sliding meanings of his novels’ continual evolutions and changes. He makes it seemingly impossible for the reader to forge connections between the juxtapositions of fragments and draw a cohesive picture of the meaning of his novels.
Gysin’s multimedia work takes a different trajectory, which involves taking literature off the written page. In an interview with Terry Wilson, Gysin disagrees with Wilson’s assertion, similar to Burroughs, that “a cut-up is not necessarily just these scissors on paper, it’s a juxtaposition of street signs, newspaper, anything you see” (Here to Go 105). Gysin replies: “No I don’t agree with that… my point of view has always been from the beginning that it was the physical action of cutting through the material, the word material” (105).
In The Process, Gysin deliberately represents the act of rubbing out the world as a valuable tactic in a complex intertextual environment. He sets its depiction inside a narrative development that incongruously combines the convention of a consistent character and his process of education with the non-linear deconstruction of narrative fiction. At the opposite ends of the novel are Hanson’s state of being a student, “unsure just who I am, where I am going or why” (1), and at the end, his final realization, fortified “with all the conviction of a man who has found himself, finally: [. . .] Whether I like it or not, I guess I’m a teacher” (352). The novel implies that an important personal development has occurred between these two points, but Gysin sets the reader the challenge of inferring this development for him or herself.
I have tried to make sense of The Process based on the depiction of the act of rubbing out the word, and its connection to the deconstruction of the narrative. I believe that the novel’s peculiar effect is constituted by the interplay between the fictive illusion of its individual narrations, and their complex and unstable relationship in a progressive narrative development. As Burroughs’ review states, it is a novel that exposits “How things are made to happen or not to happen,” but “It is also first class entertainment. Start to read it and you will find that it reads itself” (VV 8).
The Process can be likened to Gysin’s invention the Dreamachine, a stroboscopic flicker device that causes its viewer to experience shifting coloured patterns. This is not to say that the work is an indeterminate material given form by the reader’s imagination. Rather, the reader “assists” in the creation and destruction of narrative illusion by reading the novel’s succeeding chapters. Walter Benn Michaels argues that Paul De Man’s idea of material vision replaces “the idea of the text’s meaning (and the project of interpreting that meaning) with the idea of the readers experience and with a certain indifference to or, more radically, repudiation of meaning and interpretation both” (Benn Michaels 6). While The Process does offer a different possible readings, it dramatizes these deliberately to invoke a specific kind of experience. Gysin described the visions produced by the Dreamachine as being not “seen” but “perceived” (“Dreamachine” BNT 113). Similarly, the nature of the fictional world of The Process is never directly seen, but rather perceived from its changing shapes.
From a contemporary perspective Brion Gysin’s antagonistic attitude towards “the Word,” an indiscriminate designation for all forms of verbal discourse, seems limited. His work does not outline new forms of communication, but rather seeks to break down existing ones in the hope of uncovering “other ways” that have been obscured by the dominance of written and spoken language. Burroughs famously proclaims in the opening to The Job that human beings must learn to “live alone in silence,” leaving behind “the old verbal garbage”: “God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk” (21). Similarly, the values Gysin’s work espouses are radically individual. In “the Great Desert called Life” (Process 352):
There is no friendship: there is no love. The desert knows only allies and accomplices . . . Everything is bump and flow; meet and good-by. Only the Brotherhood of Assassins ensures ritual continuity, if that is what you want and some do; for the lesson our zikr teaches is this: There are no Brothers. (38)

Hanson declares that the beliefs of the “Brotherhood of Assassins” are apt to make most people “collapse with a whimper or run screaming for the police” (38). Indeed Allen Ginsberg wrote that the cut-up method “threatened everything I depend on” stating that it constituted “the loss of Hope and Love” (Beat Book 78 qtd. in Lydenberg 51). He explained that “the poetry [he'd] been practicing depended on living inside the structure of language, depended on words as the medium of consciousness” (51), while the work of Burroughs and Gysin involved various illogical and irrational manners of dismantling “fixated habit pattern Reality” (51).
The motif of the assassin is apt to describe Gysin’s oppositional and deconstructive style. Gysin was fascinated with the myth surrounding Hassan-i-Sabbah, an eleventh century Persian leader who commanded a group of dedicated followers from a remote fortress called Alamut in the Alborz mountains, located in modern day Iran. The “Old Man of the Mountain” (38) and his small group of followers were able to terrorize the leaders of nations throughout the Islamic world through calculated assassinations.
Gysin’s work can be interpreted as a series of assassination of language. Individual works dramatizes for the reader, viewer, or listener, a process of deconstruction. “I am that I am” begins with an expressive statement and turns it into an exhaustive series of questions and variations, symbolically exploding individual identity into a multiplicity. Gysin’s calligraphic work transforms his signature characters into a field of gestural marks and ghostly half-legible signs. The Process begins under the pretence of being the story of a personal development, aimed towards the final trajectory of a Homeric homecoming. While it still contains a series of narratives, the novel’s ending undercuts its developments by suggesting its contents are an indeterminate mirage of voices and material that has been given structure by the reader’s engagement with its different themes and references. Gysin’s multifaceted body of work “allows itself to be read, only to slip away” (Lemaire 23).
As a scholar, forming a cohesive picture of Gysin’s diverse intertextual multimedia work is extremely difficult. Writing about Gysin and Burroughs’ imagetext The Third Mind, Lemaire argues that the collaborative work is “a negation of the book” (20), in that it is “open to all optics, to all possibilities that can bring about the interaction of texts and graphic and scriptural inventions, of texts and texts, of photographic montages and calligraphies” (21-22). Gysin’s work can be unified in terms of its various deconstructions, however, this representation sacrifices its actual content, which consists of a multiplicity of images and ideas in echoing variation. Gysin’s work is not ideologically driven, or rather, its various drives are not coherently focussed. It juxtaposes and layers ideas, themes and explorations in different media.
While this essay has attempted to focus on Gysin’s deconstructive strategies, I will readily admit my own limits in the face of Gysin project. The visual artist George Condo writes that of Gysin’s work that “There is no material proof of his genius, no single text painting, object or novel that can attest to his influence, unless one looks to his collaborations” (Dreamachine 150). Indeed, it is Gysin’s extensive collaborations with Burroughs and the diversity of his inter-related work in different media that makes him a complex and inexhaustible subject of study. In a reading in London in 1982, Gysin explained that “teaching is anything you like except what you expect it to be. And if you think it is something your thought has been molded by that form . . .” (“Teaching” Live in London CD). This seems to come at least part way towards summing up Gysin’s work. While he proposed artistic and intellectual strategies, Gysin’s real teaching lies in the rigorous creative and intellectual engagement his project demands.

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