William Burroughs and Jazz: Contexts, Functions and Resonances

By Benjamin J. Heal

Abstract

Jazz and the Beat Generation are so closely related in the cultural zeitgeist as to be almost synonymous. Yet, there are no book-length comparative studies of the topic, while articles on jazz and the Beats focus on the more prominent Beats Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, or the more overtly jazz-affiliated Ted Joans, Amiri Baraka and John Clellon Holmes. William Burroughs is mostly overlooked, despite the fact that in terms of content and experimentation his work echoes the rapid and radical development of jazz as an American cultural form against the backdrop of social change in the US in the twentieth century. His first novel, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953) presents a first-hand account of the criminal underworld of junkies that would have been familiar to jazz narcotics addicts like Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, and was in-part inspired by jazz saxophonist Mezz Mezzrow’s memoir Really the Blues.

Burroughs’ controversial anti-novel Naked Lunch (1959) breaks the rules of genre and form, utilizing improvisational and collage techniques that can be seen to resemble aspects of jazz composition. It uses jazz as a signifier of race relations and experimentation, a feature that would continue both on and off the page with the aleatory technique known as ‘cut-up’ which Burroughs and Brion Gysin explored further during the 1960s (Burroughs & Gysin 29). The Cut-up project led to extra-textual experiments in sound and voice recordings that further resonate with the experimental progressions of jazz and its culturally diverse contexts. With a focus on Naked Lunch and the Cut-up trilogy, and using Roland Barthes’ broad notion of ‘text’, this essay seeks to demonstrate the importance of jazz and music to Burroughs’s preoccupation with language and extra-textual experimentation in order to open up a new dialogue on ways to interpret the matrix of literature and music in twentieth century US contexts.

Keywords: Jazz, Beats, Burroughs, collage, cut-up

William Burroughs and Jazz: Contexts, Functions and Resonances

When critics connect William Burroughs with music they often recall his later collaborations such as the grungy 1993 Kurt Cobain guitar-noise backed The “Priest” They Called Him and the hip-hop beat-heavy Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy collaboration Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales (1993), or they consider his tape experiments and articles on music for Crawdaddy magazine, or as Casey Rae does in his recent book highlighting Burroughs’ influence on countercultural musicians; his arranged meeting with David Bowie for a Rolling Stone article (Rae 109).[1] This range of hip cultural touchstones fits defining Burroughs as a countercultural icon, but fails to fully consider the contextual importance and function of music in his work. If we consider Burroughs as part of the Beats more broadly, then they are commonly associated with the more progressive 1940s iterations of bebop jazz, of the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, a vibrant musical hybrid vitally important to the development and success of the Beats in the 1950s. The influence of this form can be seen through Allen Ginsberg’s use of jazz solo phrasing and loose rhythm in “Howl” (1956), Jack Kerouac’s theorizing of the use of jazz in prose in his 1958 essay “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and expressed in On the Road (1956) and elsewhere. It is rarely, however, associated with Burroughs’ wild, freeform and collage-like novel Naked Lunch (1959), unless we consider Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman’s startling avant-jazz score for David Cronenberg’s 1992 film adaptation of the novel. This use of jazz at first appears a superficial attempt to tap into those broad associations of the Beats and jazz, to make Cronenberg’s movie more about the Beat ‘movement’ rather than the more controversial figure of Burroughs. However, Shore and Coleman, whose 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation represents a radical highpoint of rule-breaking jazz, an explosion of cacophonous atonality and jarring notes, tones and key changes, together produced a film score that is subversively deconstructive, fusing classical music, Coleman’s aggressive free jazz and Moroccan folk in a broad palate that resonates with Burroughs’ collage phantasmagoria.[2]

As Burroughs’ biographer Barry Miles rightly points out Burroughs’s taste in music was not the cutting edge bebop enjoyed contemporaneously by the other Beats, instead it was largely rooted in his early years, and early jazz in particular, “he enjoyed early stuff – Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives, and liked Lester Young” (Warner). Connecting Burroughs’ tastes with an imagined past, where Burroughs “preferred the jazz he’d grown up with,” (Ravens) allows Burroughs’s appreciation of jazz to seem primarily nostalgic, and therefore easily dismissed as an unimportant cultural influence. It also makes it possible to miss the existing contextual radicalism present in these pre-World War II iterations of jazz. The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens were revolutionary in transforming the focus of jazz from the group to the soloist, while Young redefined the role of the tenor sax (Gioia 71,199). Although Burroughs was far from a jazz or music aficionado, the radicalism of the jazz he is known to have listened to is reflected in the key themes and later experimentation of Burroughs’ writing and extra-literary ‘cut-ups’.

This simplification of the role jazz plays in the Beat Generation, and literature more generally is a common approach, as Stephen Paul Scher notes:

… juxtapositions now all too familiar, like “music and poetry,” “word and tone,” and “sound and poetry,” recur with formulaic frequency in critical discourse. Though rarely substantiated by a precise definition, such commonplace juxtapositions lend a deceptively axiomatic aura of legitimacy to comparisons of the two arts. (225)

This is perhaps to be expected given that critics of literature are rarely schooled in the complexities and contexts of different forms of music. Jazz is not only difficult to define and locate historically, but it is also an often difficult, complex music to grasp formally. Even studies of Jack Kerouac, who references jazz and jazz musicians throughout his work, are often limited in their scope. In this context, then, it is important that the function of jazz in Burroughs’ works be explored, as they are, ironically and in contrast to Kerouac’s works, often classified as difficult and complex.

A correlation between the different, albeit roughly delineated, periods and styles of jazz and different social contexts in the US can to an extent be seen in Burroughs’ work as published during different periods of upheaval in American culture, society and politics, often reflecting directly on those changes. Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz (2021) includes chapter headings that divide eras into “New Orleans Jazz” (1900-20), “The Jazz Age” (1920-30), “The Swing Era” (1930-40) and “Modern Jazz”, and although this does a great job of contextualizing jazz, such divisions are, at best, reductive. Despite such problems it remains difficult to see precisely why jazz and race has been so overlooked in Burroughs’ work, perhaps, as noted, the more contemporary links to popular music are more visible, with race rarely explored in the context of Burroughs in part because there are so few non-white scholars analyzing his work. By using Roland Barthes’ extra-literary notion of ‘text’ as both being beyond the page and active, not passive, this article attempts to demonstrate the importance of jazz (and music) to Burroughs’s preoccupation with language and para- and extra-textual experimentation, beginning with an exploration of the black cultural influences on his work.

A Racialized Backdrop: Junky, Naked Lunch and Jazz History

The connections made between the Beats and jazz tend toward placing the music as a vague, racialized backdrop to justify what Sharin N. Elkholy describes as an “African American cultural world, jazz musicians, bebop where the Beats saw a style of improvisation and spontaneity an affirmation of life and dynamism worth emulating” (4). Certainly jazz was of great cultural importance at the time when the notoriety of the Beats was peaking in 1958, as historian Eric Hobsbawm, points out noting that it had “practically no cultural parallel for speed and scope [with] probably no major city in the world where someone is not playing a record of Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker” (xlii). Jazz is certainly referenced, and has a multiple and often contradictory function in Burroughs’ work, but as already noted it was part of his consciousness long before 1958, and as such its seismic cultural development from castigated form to being heralded as America’s music can be seen to parallel his development as a writer. As a form intricately bound with issues of race, therefore, jazz can be seen as something of a signifier of race issues in Burroughs work. This history is evolutionary, as Lynne Seago states, “In the beginning, jazz was distinctly Southern and distinctly Negro. By the end of the 1920s, however, both white and black jazz bands existed in the city of Chicago, and jazz was played for a national audience.” (43). Gioia posits this as a form of syncretism, a blending of cultural elements that merges the Americanization of African music with the Africanization of American music (3-4). These views miss the importance of songs and music as a means for slaves to preserve African culture, which developed into a means to challenge white power, as Neil Campbell and Alasdair Keen point out, in quoting Ralph Ellison, stating that music has the power to present voices from a “hidden African American past” in addition to carrying ‘“a whole unrecorded history” (ibid.: 379) [that offers] the listener and performer access to emotions and ideas little expressed in the mainstream dominant culture.” (98). The developing narratives of jazz, race and American culture can be seen coalesce in the work of the Beats that emerged in the 1950s, but which were forged in their experiences of the 1940s.

An interest in the edges of mainstream culture is central to Burroughs’s project in Junky, and any interest in jazz is likely symptomatic of his longstanding interest in anthropology and ethnology, having studied it while living in Mexico City from 1949 to1952, just prior to the novel’s publication.[3] While there he developed a nuanced understanding of ‘primitivism’, the veneration of ‘the primitive’ or a ‘primitive’ culture, society or artefact in Western culture, as can be seen in this 1981 interview, ‘I was trained in anthropology. I learned to disregard what is commonly known as the “primitive mind” or “primitive people.” There is no such thing. People are different but they are not primitive.’[4] He certainly showed a longstanding interest in peoples often referred to in anthropology as primitive, particularly in their use of magic and mythology.[5] In the 1920s jazz was routinely referred to as a product of “culturally inferior negros”, yet it was also linked to magical practices, “Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds….[lt] has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality.’” (Faulkner). Michael Bell notes how Modernist writers often use the ‘primitive’ as a heroic and pre-lapsian symbol, and draw on traditional myths, to express dissatisfaction with the immorality of contemporaneous Western civilization, and Burroughs’ later work exploring Mayan and Egyptian symbolism can be seen to clearly employ this mode (2-5). The trans-cultural status of jazz, its uncomfortable vacillation between ‘primitive’, African-American culture, and a profoundly modern, complex and archetypical American form appears to reflect Burroughs’ own vacillating positions on a range of issues.

If it is possible to equate formal music practice across media with formal practice in literature, are there traces of jazz formal practice visible in Burroughs’ work? What are the functions of the references to jazz that appear in the work? Such questions are problematized by the near impossibility of generalizing about a whole genre of music and a writer’s entire oeuvre, while also being clear that there are rewards in making the attempt. It is interesting to note that jazz overshadows Burroughs’ first serious attempt at novel writing for publication, as the title of his and Kerouac’s co-authored And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, written in 1944, may have emerged from:

… some early “cut-up” speech and radio-news experiments that their friend Jerry Newman used to make on his sound-recording devices. Newman was a Columbia student and jazz aficionado who, before magnetic tape recorders were available, got his hands on some portable disc-recording gear (264). [emphasis mine]

Newman, a jazz fan who had already made a paper disk recording of Charlie Parker in 1942, would go on and make recordings of Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum, so in the early 1940s Burroughs was already mixing with real jazz aficionados who were clearly interested and invested in radical experimentation (Gioia 253, 285).

Jazz forms a central nostalgic motif that connects Burroughs’ heroin use, which began in the 1940s, with the African-American jazz subculture and its documented connections with drugs (Singer). It also connects to his 1920s childhood and interest in Armstrong’s Hot Five. This fits the sense with which jazz is dismissed as a recollection of the past, as noted by Ravens above. However, the first direct reference to jazz in his semi-autobiographical novel Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953, hereafter Junky), gives the connection between jazz and drugs a therapeutic rather than nostalgic angle: “When you’re sick, music is a great help. Once, in Texas, I kicked a habit on weed, a pint of paregoric and a few Louis Armstrong records” (135). Although foundational, the New Orleans style jazz of Louis Armstrong’s early records is distinct from the more progressive bebop sound of Charlie Parker (a junky himself) that was being embraced wholeheartedly by most of the other Beats, as a profoundly new form, while Burroughs was writing Junky. Connecting Junky to the early jazz of New Orleans links it to the quasi-mythic status of the city as the Big Easy, a site of licentious abandon and vice. Like the straightforward and scholarly foundations of Junky as a sociological analysis of illegal drug use in America in the 1940s, New Orleans and the origins of jazz are symbolically easier to understand when associated with memory and resistance. The aforementioned reference to Armstrong evokes an underlying dialogue about jazz and race more broadly that filters through Burroughs’ works via this aegis of memory and resistance, as noted by A. Robert Lee, “Burroughs’s laconic assaults on Anglo-White power structures can be found in Junky (1953), with its plethora of race marked monikers … [which] amplify in Naked Lunch …” (198). If we consider Burroughs as particularly sensitive to race issues, and he was certainly exposed to the arbitrary distinctions of race inequalities and music from an early age, one can begin to see the racial aspect of references to jazz in his works.[6] Jazz certainly fits Burroughs as a rebellious, resistant form, in terms of both culture and society. It is by nature a defiantly African-American music, the music of an emerging, unified African-American working class, preoccupied with “the freeing of time, pitch, and harmony from fixed, regulated, predictable standards,” which challenged European classical music and American pop music (Wei-han Ho 285). Across his works, in a range of media, and in his life-choices, Burroughs seems to recognize this description of jazz, engaging as he does with the working-class/underclass criminal underworld as he does in the 1940s (as documented in Junky) while experimenting with form and style in the contexts of American and European avant-garde literary traditions.

Junky was not without mainstream precedent, however, as Nelson Algren’s 1949 Pulitzer winning novel The Man with the Golden Arm, a key influence on Junky, has as its junky hustler protagonist an aspiring jazz drummer, and member of the marginalized ethnic Polish community in Chicago. Algren’s sympathetic identity politics is implicit in the novel, yet can be seen more overtly in his 1947 short story “He Couldn’t Boogie-Woogie Worth a Damn”, a text that Nathaniel Mills argues “lets us judge how far cross-racial imagination can travel, within capitalism’s material and ideological parameters, toward envisioning inclusive, transracial, and transnational sociopolitical desires” (147). Algren’s attempts to highlight racism and apparent negrophilia seem to be echoed in later Beat texts such as Ginsberg’s Howl and Kerouac’s On the Road, right down to his reference to “Negro streets” in The Man with the Golden Arm (302). David Courtwright’s sociological study of narcotic addiction in the US notes how Algren’s protagonist, Francis Majcinek, demonstrates a key realignment in cultural stereotypes of drug addicts, which he defines as that of a hustling street criminal, not a white ethnic jazz musician. As Ian Peddie notes Algren’s focus on race and ethnicity “shifted from the specific white ethnic focus of Never Come Morning and The Man With The Golden Arm to a kind of generic lament for the urban poor”. In Junky protagonist Lee does not make his race politics explicit, although it is clear that the junky identity supersedes all other considerations; the only use of the n-word in the novel is in the context of an apparently anti-Communist, proto-white supremacist character who notes ““Who gets the jobs over there in the NMU Hall? American white men like you and me? No. Dagos and Spiks and Niggers. Why? Because the union controls shipping, and Communists control the union.” Lee leaves without reply (99). In this context, then, it is odd that Mezz Mezzrow’s memoir Really the Blues (1946) is sometimes overlooked as another of the novels that influenced Junky, given that Mezzrow is very much the jive-talking, negrophile white jazz player, and that his memoir is a text rooted in the race and drug underclass issues surrounding the jazz scene of the 1920s and 30s. In Bill Morgan’s biography of Burroughs the use of the n-word is again notable as it is used in reference to negrophilia, as after spotting Neal Cassady reading Really the Blues Burroughs remarked: “sure a nigger lover ain’t he” (Morgan 156). If taken as irony (as I think it should; Burroughs frequently parodies racist attitudes in Naked Lunch), a parody of racism that notes Mezzrow’s – and hence Burroughs’ – affinity with African-American culture, Burroughs’s comment slyly denigrates the patronizing white hipsterism and mythologizing of black culture that became central to the later Beat aesthetic, as seen through Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” (1957). Jack Black’s1926 hobo memoir You Can’t Win overshadows Really the Blues in terms of its influence on Junky, but Mezzrow’s book feels like the book Junky could have been had Burroughs not tried to reign in his own scatological, impulses that would erupt unrestrained in Naked Lunch. It also shares with Junky references to Andre Gide and Romanticism, along with a glossary of ‘hip’ and ‘jive’ slang terms:

‘“Jive talk” is used more in connection with marijuana than with junk. In the past few years, however, the use of junk has spread into “hip,” or “jive talking” circles, and junk lingo has, to some extent, merged with “jive talk.”’ (129) 

The African-American-derived vernacular ‘jive’ in Mezzrow’s text denotes not just a blending of the free-form non-linguistic communication of the jazz group or orchestra, but also “a strange linguistic mixture of dream and deed; it’s a whole new attitude towards life” (235). The importance that Mezzrow places on jive as “a private kind of folk-poetry” also fits Burroughs’ own understanding of the materiality and arbitrary nature of language, and his later attempts to disrupt it via his application of Alfred Korzybski’s linguistic theories (Miles 125).[7] Mezzrow and jazz are important to this reading of Burroughs because of their bridging of art, racial, drug and criminal subcultures; Mezzrow, a white man, clearly via his disenchantment with mainstream culture felt more comfortable in the company of African-Americans at a time of racial segregation in the United States; Burroughs, perhaps surprisingly due to his upper-middle-class Southern upbringing, also felt comfortable connecting with African-American culture and society.

This makes considerable sense given his travels in the 1940s and 50s, following a path that includes employing migrant farmers in the Texas/Mexico border town of McAllan, the home of jazz New Orleans, living as an emigrant in Mexico City, finally following the footsteps of composer/novelist Paul Bowles to the expatriate community of Tangier, Morocco. In the later novel, Naked Lunch (1959), written in the years from 1953 to its publication,jazz appears in the melting pot of times and culture context of the “City of Interzone” with the line “Opening bars of ‘East St. Louis Toodle-oo’”, a reference to Duke Ellington’s 1927 swing classic (also used to score the 1983 documentary Burroughs The Movie), a key example of what was known at the time, in racist terms, as ‘jungle music’ (89).[8] Interzone is, like the novel itself, a multi-cultural mess, a future dystopia as possible (ironic) heterogeneous endgame of capitalist free-market economics and race war; the chapter is aptly titled “The Market”. Whiteness is notably excised, and the reference to Ellington’s early jazz is placed harmoniously alongside other non-white music forms: “High mountain flutes, jazz and bebop, one-stringed Mongol instruments, gypsy xylophones, African drums, Arab bagpipes …” (90). Jazz and bebop are the North American, and progressive, cultural forms here, not the emerging, white dominated Rock ‘n Roll of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. Black cultural forms fuse the traditional sounds of the past, and Burroughs’ birthplace, St Louis, to a more positive multi-cultural future.

Considering Burroughs’ dramatic shift in formal approach from the straightforward first-person narrative of Junky to the collage-like heteroglossia of shifting genres, registers and perspectives of Naked Lunch, it is possible to see Burroughs’ ‘routines’, the satirical, comic monologues Burroughs developed mostly in correspondence while developing Naked Lunch, and which form the core of the novel, in a sense as improvised jazz solos, which are built on top of a composed template of chords and melodies. The routines are similar, as Jed Birmingham notes, as they rely, “on existing literary structure in order to maintain meaning and coherence.” Returning to the key formative jazz influences on Burroughs, mentioned above, the element that unites Lester Young and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five is their radical early commitment to improvisation and surpassing the primacy of the collective in favor of the solo. Their improvisation also, like Burroughs’ use of nostalgia, incorporates earlier pieces, as John Fordham notes, “from the honky-tonk music, funeral parades, operas and immigrant songs he had heard and uncannily memorized as a child, to the blues of Bessie Smith, the call of his mentor Joe Oliver’s cornet, and the roar of Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra he had played with a couple of years before.” Burroughs stresses the similarly improvisational and fragmentary nature of his routines in a letter from December 1954: “Routines are completely spontaneous and proceed from whatever fragmentary knowledge you have. In fact a routine is by nature fragmentary, inaccurate. There is no such thing as an exhaustive routine, nor does the scholarly-type mind run to routines” (244). He instead uses familiar literary structures and genres, the novel form, crime fiction, confessional, sociological report, etc., to maintain a level of both coherence and familiarity. Naked Lunch is itself bookended with familiar crime scenes, while the routines in-between are, as Jed Birmingham states:

a series of improvisations of the themes of control and addiction. Statement of theme, improv, climax, return to theme, new improvisation until close of theme. The cut-up novels [The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962)and Nova Express (1964)] use repetition of key phrases, words, and scenes in much the same manner.

This process can be seen in ‘The Talking Asshole’ routine of Naked Lunch, which references both performance and dual consciousness. The centerpiece of the chapter ironically titled “Ordinary Men and Women”, the routine intersects a sequence of scripted dialogue where a “Nationalist Party Leader” is warning that a “Dr Benway” is not to be trusted (103). This leads to a section where oppressed individuals express their predicaments before a dialogue between a Drs. Benway and Schafer leads to Benway’s monologue (or solo if you will) of a carnival performer who has trained his asshole to talk, but who ironically has his consciousness parasitically taken over by the asshole. The routine continues with a reference to music, and the aforementioned liminal spaces in-between enabled by  popular culture: “That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there’s always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness …” (112). The routine ends with a reference to an “Arab boy who could play a flute with his ass” who “was a great artist when it came to improvising new combines and special climaxes …” (113). Such a reference fuses classical music with primitivism, sex and improvisation. The use of racialized exoticism was also a trope in jazz, with song titles such as “Oriental Strut” and “Cornet Chop-Suey” designed to emphasize the exoticism of early jazz, as Gioia notes, artists like Armstrong would ironically use the same tropes to deride bebop as “Chinese music” (73). An ‘inscrutable Chinese’ stereotype similarly runs through many of Burroughs’ works, from the “hard to make” Chinese junkies in Junky to the pidgin English “No Glot Clom Fliday” of the Chinese pusher in Naked Lunch (92, 121). Such references demonstrate an acknowledgment of the complex and highly civilized nature of Chinese culture while also dismissing it, while Burroughs’ references in part reveal how his routines are formed; contrapuntally between the poles of crude sexual language and romantic poetry, high culture and low culture (which jazz also traverses), racism and prejudice, literature and correspondence, art and commerce. The “No Glot Clom Fliday” line is important in the way that is acknowledges the way language (like music) is always culturally ‘impure’, and that multicultural elements will always disrupt and reinterpret language and cultural forms in new, innovative and radical ways, and it is fascinating to consider how jazz and Burroughs demonstrate this.

On and Off the Page: Music and Literature/Voice and Cutting

In terms of the formal similarities between the Beats and jazz, studies have centered on the apparent jazz phrasing in Ginsberg’s “Howl”, and Kerouac’s attempts to emulate jazz-solo cadencies in his prose stylings.[9] That being said Douglas Malcolm makes a useful observation regarding the notion that jazz influenced Kerouac’s writing in On the Road, stating that while “jazz does play a significant role it’s impact lies in the music’s ideological, behavioral, and semiotic implications – in particular their roots in African American culture – rather than in the direct application of its formal rules” (85). While Malcolm’s contention fits Kerouac, Burroughs’ routines, in addition to his increasingly frequent use of prosody and allusions to sound and extra-textual experimentation with sound and film in the 1960s, reflect a broader resonance with the formal innovations of jazz that were developing in the late 1930s and 40s. That is to say that Burroughs’ work is not derived from or impacted by jazz, but rather that the work is developing in a radical way that is concurrent with jazz. Due to a lack of functional critical vocabulary to compare literature and music this is a necessarily vague transmedial translation that is, nevertheless important to consider.[10] The bebop that Kerouac refers is most likely that of Charlie Parker, yet arguably nowhere in Kerouac’s work exists revolutionary and acerbic writing to match Parker’s alto saxophone playing and its assault on the formal (albeit unwritten) rules of jazz. Gioia notes Parker’s surgical precision, “Each phrase is affirmed with clear intent. All in all, no saxophonist before Parker had such a cutting sound.” (247). The sentimentality of earlier jazz was replaced by “surgical sharpness of attack”, that like Burroughs’ call to arms with Naked Lunch and the cut-ups was “an art music with the emotional pungency of a battle cry.” (248).

Malcolm’s earlier disregard of the application of the formal rules of jazz to literature points to a central problem with what Roland Barthes calls ‘literary discourse’ (70), essentially referring to the difficulties of analyzing the musical qualities of literature. His 1973 essay “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” addresses this issue: “classic (readable) literary discourse, … has for such a long time now abandoned prosody, music, is also a representational, geometrical discourse in that it cuts out segments in order to depict them” (70). Music is separated from the visual arts, in that there is nothing visual about the ‘musical text’, bar an imagined notation in the musically trained or the synesthesia reported by some. The notion of a discourse that “cuts out segments”, in the sense of repeating musical phrases, motifs, and choruses, or translates sound into writing and vice-versa, evokes the process and effects of Burroughs’ cut-ups. Indeed, Barthes’ writing about music makes many links with Burroughs’ preoccupation with language (as virus), particularly Barthes’ concern with art’s ephemerality and materiality, and the notion of the active ‘text’ “experienced only in the activity of production” (157). Burroughs’ preoccupation with ‘cutting-up’ language can therefore be seen as part of a fluid, practical process that has much in common with musical performance.[11] Active ‘text’ might usefully be interpreted in a Burroughsian context as that shifting liminal space through which the transmission of meaning takes place, and which is not restricted to medium. The inclusion of musical references and prosodic techniques in Burroughs’ work, in various forms, can be seen as ‘intertext’ which can invoke feelings (such as the evocation of memory) often distinct from language’s semantic content, and which acts alongside its physicality and close association with performance as an active art form. Burroughs’ cut-ups bring a more pronounced prosodic quality to writing that show Burroughs’ work to be invoking aspects of music, jazz in particular, as part of his wider transmedial project.[12]

The musicality of Naked Lunch is further revealed by the narrator describing himself as a “recording instrument,” a reference that appears to be to a recording tool, such as a tape recorder, defining ‘instrument’ as a tool or device, rather than a musical instrument (184). But the use of the word ‘instrument’ is incongruous, and implies a musicality. It is a particularly apt description because, as several writers have pointed out, Burroughs’ speaking voice has been described as having specific musical qualities. One of Burroughs’ London contacts, Melville Hardiment, notes:

…the voice of Burroughs is such a flexible, dra­matic, pointed, colorful, positive, and compelling vehicle of expression. Reading him is fine. Listening to his voice on one of his tapes is an ultimate in un­ion between speaker and listener. … Burroughs at his finest and most impressive, and most effective, is the Burroughs as a thin nasal voice issuing from a dark corner of a smoke-filled lonely hotel bedroom. (Battle Instructions XXXVII).

Hardiment uses musical adjectives for Burroughs’ speaking voice, and links it with that clichéd jazz-club style “smoke-filled” room. Indeed, Burroughs’ compositional method while recording with Hardiment in 1961, resembles a jazz jam session:

He dictates walking up and down the room. Stumbling into bits of furniture … And each interruption of the word flow, … ensures the whole passage of dialogue is repeated again and again with modifications of stress or nuance, with modifi­cations of word-meaning, with changes of words and sentence structures, over and over again and again. (XXXVIII)

The repeated passages act as riffs or refrains, with modifications to sound echoing the jazz soloist improvising on a theme, spinning off into random errors that are made to work within the context of the whole composition. The “repetition of key phrases, words, and scenes”, such as the final line of Naked Lunch, “No Glot, C’lom Fliday”(196), which also occurs twice in the revised The Soft Machine (31, 121), and again in Nova Express (189), create a scintillating sense of déjà vu and are not unlike the bookending refrains in bebop jazz. A piece like Thelonious Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” (first recorded in 1951) is useful to consider in this context. It begins with a drum rhythm, cut-in with slightly offbeat accentuated snare hit, followed by a fairly orthodox jazz piano riff. Then a snare roll cuts between the piano and sax repeating the riff. After the sax Monk improvises on the riff, gradually moving away from the original. Another sax joins the variations, as does a vibraphone, with the drums and piano in the background just keeping rhythm. Finally, the first sax returns to the original riff, repeated twice, cut in the middle by a snare roll. Similar patterns of varying complexity, such as Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” noted above, recur throughout the jazz experimentation of the 1950s, for example Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” (a ‘Brubeck’ character even recurs in Naked Lunch), and if considered alongside Burroughs’ use of cut-ups, we can see a similar improvisation on a theme, with relevant digressions, and routines, acting like riffs, returned to at certain points to remind the reader of where they are, providing a foundation, in the disorientating world of cut-ups.

Barthes refers to the dual production of voice and music as “the grain of the voice”, and this can be applied to jazz (in terms of both straight and scat singing) and Burroughs’ recorded voice, as a language, “lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat … a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning” (The Pleasure of the Text 66-67). Philippe Mikriammos observes that Burroughs’s breathing is a core element in his spoken word performances, and he describes it in terms that could easily apply to a jazz brass or woodwind player, “he breathes in noisily, making the air he breathes in rattle, almost whistle through his lips … Burroughs breathes in noisily as one does when one is about to spit or blow violently” (101-102). Joan Didion similarly refers to Burroughs as “less a writer than a sound” noting not just his distinctive voice and ability to mimic, but also his ability to capture our acoustic environment in words (2). This focus on Burroughs’ sonic qualities was taken further by Josef Rauvolf, Burroughs’ Czech translator, who took a “structural rather than semantic approach […] by listening to recordings of Burroughs reading his text, following the sound and rhythm as much as the sense.” (Harris 43). Jürgen Ploog and others have noted the importance of the phonetic, prosodic elements of Burroughs’ text in part because of the difficulties of translating them (42). The 1961 Olympia Press edition of The Soft Machine does indeed contain some startling sound experiments, such as the scat-like beginning of  “the word strip” section:

He in tone phrases: “I am that I am yo soy lo que soy je suis ce que je suis Ich bin das Ich bin ana eigo io ese quello io eseyo soy ca je suis soy am est eso ana ist that eso am es Ich das ce que bin am that quello eigo soy eso am ist ese quiego sat that am ce que ist is es am cat dam anoy iegos oys soys boys tat ta hat tama taick sick joys ass quam loy stickythyyoanncnesnsosnnntatatamattatmattamaick-sick soy cn es n sos nnn.” (112)

Emerging in the 1920s most famously with Armstrong’s 1926 recording of “Heebie Jeebies”, scatting is the non-linguistic verbalization unique to jazz music, and as Brown, Goldblatt and Gracyk state, it exists due to “the improvisational aspects of song performance, traditionally connected to jazz instruments”, while arguing that ‘scatting is more than either “gibberish” or pure musical display”. (109-110). As with cut-ups, scat singing removes a layer of semantic meaning with the loss of lyrics, instead the sole focus is on the arrangement of sounds themselves; it is “a genuinely Dionysian activity […] untethered from representation.” (111). Sound words and onomatopoeia are often of central importance in Burroughs’ works, a point noted by Douglas Kahn, in particular via the ‘schlupp’: “the word made flesh, the sound of soft organs” (300). Impressively it is a word, a sound and an erotics, that appears in both Naked Lunch and Queer (1985). Through this experimentation with prosody, sound and rhythm, it is possible to see in the cut-up texts a similarity with music, as Barthes describes it, as a “geometrical discourse” that “cuts out segments” (70).  This links to bebop, where, as Michael Hrebeniak notes in attempting to tie bebop to the Beats via experimental radicalism, stating that: “Stop-start lines work in quotations from popular melodies, replacing the narrative linearity of a previous jazz generation with an intertextual barrage. The order of sounds placed within the chorus frame is collage” (258). He is referring to Parker’s saxophone assaults, but could just as easily be referencing the “do you love me?” section of The Ticket that Exploded, a cut-up barrage of chorus lyrics from popular songs, a sequence of samples that may create its own musicality via the reader’s memory; so it is strange that Burroughs is not mentioned (49-50). The physical rearrangement of elements, and the use of voice to make sound are central themes of The Soft Machine, appropriate when using Barthes as a point of reference, in the sense of the importance placed on form expressing theme. Indeed the relationship between jazz and The Soft Machine were clearly apparent to Burroughs, as sections appeared in the jazz magazine Metronome in 1961. As Jed Birmingham rightly notes, “These appearances are quite unusual as this is quite early for a mainstream magazine to publish Burroughs, particularly a difficult work like Soft Machine.” There is a sense here of convergence, that the avant-garde leanings of jazz and Burroughs’ cut-ups were meeting in the middle-ground of this magazine that, although hardly cutting-edge in contemporaneous terms, was also that year covering the new directions of Ornette Coleman and other free-jazz practitioners, and publishing articles such as Leroi Jones’ “The Jazz Avant Garde”.

There is resonance too with the choice of the title ‘cut-up’ for Burroughs and Gysin’s literary technique, which could easily have been called simply a new collage or montage technique. “Cutting” is a term used in jazz with a somewhat different connotation to Burroughs and Gysin’s physical act of assemblage. Mezzrow associates it directly with collaborative, improvisational jam sessions known as “cuttin’ contests”, essentially soloists would ‘cut-in’ to the performance and try to outdo the previous soloist, but with the idea being to “make our improvisation really collective […] to see [if we could] fit together and arrive at a climax all at once (159). One can see elements of both improvisation and collaboration with Burroughs’ cut-up operations, despite the cutting not usually taking place in a live, performance setting, as the rearrangement of words (often by other writers) into a desired, composed order, with sections cutting into each other building to a climax of sorts – indeed Burroughs’ frequent use of sexual imagery illustrates a different form of climax. Cutting up in this context is also a metaphorical operation, and in terms of the elements of separation and reformulation that Burroughs invokes across the cut-up project (which involved experimentation with a range of media; text, magazine, pamphlets, tapes, film and photo-collage), represents a more conceptually decisive break with the Western metaphysics of dualism. W.E.B Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness feeds directly into the exposé of duality presented by both the cut-ups, and the transatlantic dichotomy of jazz, “One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (2-3). Burroughs’ concurrent sense of a racial duality is revealed through his visionary experience of taking the drug yage in South America, just as he was beginning his radical experimentation leading to Naked Lunch, as this extract from a July 1953 letter to Allen Ginsberg shows, “I feel myself change into a Negress complete with all the female facilities. Convulsions of lust accompanied by physical impotence. Now I am a Negro man fucking a Negress” (504-505). This was also the same year bus boycotts began in the US as a protest against segregation.[13] Racial duality is also embodied in Burroughs’ later, more experimental, cut-up work through the recurring character ‘Mr Bradley Mr Martin’.[14] The first reference to jazz in The Soft Machine appears just after the only reference to ‘Bradly-Martin’ in the revised text, as: “New Orleans jazz thin in the Northern night” (2014 edition, 200). The nostalgic reference to early New Orleans jazz is juxtaposed by the “Northern night”, the Northern hemisphere being predominantly white; jazz having associations with the liberal revolt against puritanism in the Northern states as the music spread in the 1920s, while New Orleans jazz is a decisively black form (200-202).

This intense focus on dualism and juxtaposition recalls the oppositional nature of jazz, and how contradiction and improvisational ambivalence play a central role in jazz composition (O’Driscoll). This is not to be understood as existing to the extent of mutual exclusion, or what is often termed ‘either/or’ thinking. Burroughs was acutely aware of the problem of either/or thinking in terms of Count Alfred Korzbyski’s theories, but in jazz opposites can coexist.[15] One example of this is how the collective improvisation of New Orleans jazz was both reformed and disrupted by Louis Armstrong’s experimentation with lead soloing.[16] Jazz embraces both individual expression and collectivity, not as mutually exclusive opposites but as elements that can be utilized. As Paul Rinzler notes when describing the progression from swing to bebop: “To the extent that bebop adopted characteristics of swing, it expressed tradition and was not creative; to the extent that bebop departed from the characteristics of swing, it was creative and not traditional” (6). Rinzler highlights four binary oppositions in jazz, individualism and interconnectedness, assertion and openness, freedom and responsibility, and creativity and tradition. Collapsing such binaries is central not just to jazz but also to Burroughs’ thinking, certainly in the 1960s: “As soon as you get two you get trouble. Dualism is the whole basis of this planet—good and evil, communism, fascism, man, woman, etc. As soon as you have a formula like that, of course you’re going to have trouble” (The Job 164).

Sounds and Crossing Boundaries

Kerouac acknowledged Burroughs’ ear for sound, as Ginsberg contends in a 1980 interview: “Jack always thought Burroughs arrived at great music. His favorite early line was ‘Motel, motel, motel loneliness moans across still oily tidal waters … that’s what turned him on to your prose, that one sentence, as music in his ear” (Burroughs Live 472). The key aspect of this misquoted reference is that it is from the “Atrophied Preface” section of Naked Lunch, a section that although appearing to be an attempt to explain the novel, is perhaps the most fragmented chapter, and is the closest to a cut-up. The “Atrophied Preface”, as Kerouac surely noted, contains some of the finest prosodic ‘riffs’ in the novel, with experiments in tone, rhythm, voice, accent, theme, irony, and taste. Like a free jazz solo improvisation, it does what it says, “This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises” (191). By moving “off the page,” it makes its reference to both image and sound, specifically “tunes and street noises.” Burroughs is moving towards the next textual innovation with roots in jazz practice, a free-form novel that also points to both the cut-ups and the future direction for more experimental boundary-crossing jazz such as Coleman’s, whose groundbreaking The Sound of Jazz to Come was released the same year as Naked Lunch. The cut-up trilogy of novels would increasingly dabble with science fiction tropes, producing what he calls in a 1964 interview with Eric Mottram a “new mythology for the space age”, a mode similarly adopted, at a key historical moment in the 1960s as the US faced frontiers both in civil rights and in space via the Apollo missions, by Sun Ra and his Arkestra, an avant-garde free jazz collective that utilized an afro-futurist aesthetic alongside the embrace of “Asian and African music, dissonance, atonality, at times aural anarchy”. (Gioia, 318). Burroughs’s voice even appears on The ESP Sampler, a 1967 compilation album issued by Bernard Stollman’s New York based jazz/experimental label ESP-Disk alongside artists including Sun Ra, Coleman, and The Fugs.

As previously noted, the repetitions in cut-up texts, such as“No Glot, C’lom Fliday”, create disorientating dissonances and a sense of déjà vu not unlike the bookending of melodies or riffs, that often occur in bebop jazz. At some point Burroughs became aware of this tactile similarity, as revealed in his description of Jeff Nuttall’s cut-ups, in the preface to his 1969 novel Pig:

Jeff Nuttall is one of the few writers today who actually handles his medium. He moves pieces of it from here to there using the repetition techniques of recurring themes in music. His structures are essentially musical as is his prose. (Nuttall).

Although not overtly referencing jazz, Burroughs is alluding to the repetition of phrases and themes that occur in jazz, and can clearly see the value of regarding cut-ups in a musical context. Alan Ansen makes a similar remark to in a 1964 letter to Burroughs regarding Dead Fingers Talk (1963), a cut-up composite, stating “I find it fascinating technically with all sorts of analogies to music”. Harris remarks that Ansen is “probably thinking of classical music’s structural use of leitmotifs”, yet the same could also be said of jazz (xx). Indeed, one of the working titles for Burroughs’ second cut-up novel, The Ticket that Exploded (1962), was the nursery rhyme “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair.” This use of the familiar to break up the cut-up disorientation is itself disorientating, and it recalls Parker’s tendency to insert quotations in his solos, as Hrebeniak states, “The countless performances that conclude with a facetious rendering of ‘English Country Garden’ are endemic to a broader tendency to substitute duplicity and disjunction for a rhetoric of mimesis” (260). The Ticket That Exploded is the cut-up text with most musical allusions, as Oliver Harris states: “Whole pages consist of nothing but song titles and sampled lyrics, collages of nursery rhymes and jazz standards, torch songs and blues ballads, cowboy tunes, Negro spirituals and Tin Pan Alley sentimental melodies” (xi). The cacophony of voices and sounds in The Ticket that Exploded certainly echoes this tendency, yet there is more to it than this.

To underline Burroughs’ apparent preoccupation with the ability of jazz to cross racial boundaries, the 1929 pop song, which became a jazz standard, “Moanin’ Low” appears twice in the revised edition of The Ticket That Exploded. “Moanin’ Low”, like Louis Armstrong, links the white acceptance of jazz with its African-American roots. It was recorded by both Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, but perhaps most well-known is Claire Trevor’s rendition in the John Huston movie Key Largo, which won her the 1948 best supporting actress Oscar. This also provides a final point of jazz and Burroughs’ work as disorientating sites of border crossing, moving from Burroughs’ use of Duke Ellington’s “Jungle Music” of “East St. Louis Toodle-oo”, from the earlier iteration of 1920s jazz presented in racist terms, performed by black musicians for white audiences in gangster-run speakeasies, to this quintessential appropriation of black culture in a Hollywood movie scene in which a white character sings a jazz standard written by whites in the style of a broken black jazz singer, to a room full of gangsters. Although this border crossing persists, as Fumi Okiji rightly states, “The boundaries separating music and discourse are routinely trespassed in black expression”, primarily through its opacity, or resistance to analysis (83). Okiji references Andrew Bowie’s point that music is impossible to understand in a definitely discursive manner, and therefore that “non-understanding might be philosophically very significant” (11). Such a point is directly relevant to discussion of cut-ups, where meaning is not so much produced but rather disrupted by apparently broken syntax; the non-understanding is significant as the reader learns to see and hear the text differently. It is by reference to jazz that Burroughs gives his readers hints as to the lineage of such ruptures; the radical developments in jazz music, a radicalism that can only have been formed out of the dichotomous ruptures of black experience in twentieth-century America.

By way of a conclusion, it is useful to return to Barthes via the consideration of our own reception to the cut-ups in jazz/musical terms. Is our reception passive, as reader/listener, or active as writer/player? The answer is perhaps bound with one of the key elements of the cut-up project, whose manifesto opened with Gysin’s announcement in Minutes to Go that “the writing machine is for everybody do it yourself” (5). How passive is listening and reading; is Burroughs’ intention to encourage readers to write, and does this relate to the sense that jazz is (or was intended to be) accessible, a music for the people? Jazz in context, as Brown, Goldblatt and Gracyk assert, is originally a form with origins in African tribal ritual and as part of the African-American response to slavery and oppression, that musicians and listeners engage with physically through dance as a kinesthetic response (29-30). This demonstrates that jazz, as with the cut-ups, involves the need to make something happen, that they are forms of performative communication where meaning is not transferred directly through semantics, but indirectly through feeling and mood, and a more physical, convulsive interaction that is somewhat beyond language; it is not reliant on the written form, as is the case with classical music.[17] As Jacques Attali points out:

… listening to music is to receive a message. Nevertheless, music cannot be equated with a language. Quite unlike the words of a language-which refer to a signified-music, though it has a precise operationality, never has a stable reference to a code of the linguistic type. (25)

This ‘message’ of music is beyond language, it has something words do not have, and yet of course words can also have a musicality. This is how music and jazz function in Burroughs’ work, as a reference to meanings beyond words, and as a means for using words that is beyond language.

For Barthes music is resistant to language in that it is:

plural… which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely acceptable) plural… not a co-existence of meanings, but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination (1977, 159).

The cut-up, like the scat vocal line or a free-jazz improvisation, follows what Barthes describes in “Rasch”, as he underlines his point: “the musical text does not follow… it explodes: it is a continuous big bang” (original emphasis, 1991, 301). If we return to Burroughs’ 1993 collaborations, it can be argued that Cobain’s guitar improvisation is drawn directly from late avant-garde improvised jazz, while the hip-hop of The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy has its roots in blues and dissonant bebop. It seems Burroughs’ contemporaneous musical collaborations were not so far from his written work’s connections with jazz after all, cutting as they do across the developmental stages of jazz and twentieth-century social change in the US.

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Notes

[1] For other examples, see: Lydenberg pp. 409-37 ; Murphy pp. 227.

[2] Coleman had accompanied Burroughs on a visit to the Master Musicians of Joujouka in Morocco in 1973, where he recorded the album Dancing in Your Head, see: William S. Burroughs, “Face to Face with the Goat God”, Oui, Vol. 2, No. 8, Chicago: August 1973, pp 68, 92, 94.

[3] See: Paul H. Wild, ‘William S. Burroughs and the Maya Gods of Death: The Uses of Archaeology’, College Literature, 35 (2008), pp. 38-57.

[4] ‘Jerry Bauer: Trip to Hell and Back, 1981’, in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-97, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), pp. 505-14, (p. 511).

[5] For example see: William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, p. 47; Matthew Levi Stevens, The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs, (Oxford: Mandrake, 2014).

[6] Burroughs maintained a correspondence with black neighbor and childhood friend Otto Belue, see: Garner, Anne, “A Burroughs Christmas Story”. New York Public Library, 23 Dec. 2009, http://www.nypl.org/blog/2009/12/23/burroughs-christmas-story. Accessed 28 September 2020.

[7] See also: Robin Lydenberg “Notes from the Orifice: Language and the Body in William Burroughs”, Contemporary Literature, Spring, 1985, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 55-73

[8] See: Kimberley Hannon Teal (2012) “Beyond the Cotton Club: The Persistence of Duke Ellington’s Jungle Style”, Jazz Perspectives, 6:1-2, 123-149.

[9] For example see: M. A. Hamdan, Jazz Aesthetics Speak Loud in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl: A Thematic Cultural Sketch. International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (IJELS), 4(1), 2019,  Preston Whaley, Blows Like a Horn : Beat Writing Jazz Style and Markets in the Transformation of U.S. Culture. Harvard University Press 2004, and, Douglas Malcolm, “‘Jazz America’: Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.’” Contemporary Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 1999, pp. 85–110.

[10] I discuss these issues here: Heal, Benjamin. J.  “Cut-Up Transmediality: From Text to Image”. The Intermediality of Contemporary Visual Arts [Working Title], IntechOpen, 20 Apr. 2023, doi:10.5772/intechopen.111441.

[11] For more on Burroughs’ theories on language see William Burroughs and Daniel Odier, The Job, John Calder, 1984, pp.12-20.

[12] See: Heal, Benjamin. J.  “Cut-Up Transmediality: From Text to Image”. The Intermediality of Contemporary Visual Arts [Working Title], IntechOpen, 20 Apr. 2023, doi:10.5772/intechopen.111441.

[13] Civil Rights Digital Library. The University of Georgia Libraries, 2023.
 https://crdl.usg.edu/events. Accessed 13 July 2023.

[14] Burroughs explains the mythology of ‘Mr Bradley Mr Martin’ in the transcript of the 1962 International Writers Conference.

[15] See: Institute of General Semantics – Alfred Korzybski. https://generalsemantics.org/Alfred-Korzybski. Accessed 16 July 2023.

[16] Burroughs states in a 1966 interview, “It is unfortunately one of the great errors of Western thought, the whole either/or proposition. You remember Korzybski and his idea of non-Aristotelian logic. Either/Or thinking is just not accurate thinking … Cut-ups are a movement toward breaking it down …” (Burroughs Live: 1960-1997)

[17] “The purpose of writing is to make something happen. What we call art – painting, sculpture, writing, dance, music is magical in origin – that is, it was originally employed for ceremonial purposes to produce very definite effects.” William Burroughs, Painting & Guns, Hanuman Books, 1992, p. 32.

Published Jul 16 2023

An alternate version of this article appears in Jazz and Literature: An Introduction, edited by Maria Antónia Lima and Mia Funk, Routledge, 2024. https://www.routledge.com/Jazz-and-Literature-An-Introduction/Lima-Funk/p/book/9781032264325?srsltid=AfmBOoorsEwFgpOZtGfOsWZISR20HHXFm7blkIPT3aBpkvSuU_-E4sPh

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