I’m sure you’ll have grasped Dada by now, because, after all, there’s not a great deal to understand. But the fact remains that someone had to do it: we had to travel to the far right of the Meaning Line somehow, and courtesy of the Dadaists, we’ve arrived there, at least in theory. And Dada did leave an important two-fold legacy: the idea of randomness in meaning; and surrealism. Let’s trace the development of the first of these. Around 1916, Tzara began to perform poetry whose meaning was designed to be almost totally arbitrary. He would begin by cutting words from the printed text of some 'old' poem (by Shakespeare, for example), shaking them up in a hat, and reading them aloud as he pulled the bits of paper out, thereby creating a “new” poem on the spot. And this act of book desecration was destined to exert an enormous influence on both literature and music over two generations later, when it would be dubbed the “cut-up” method of random composition. Time to fast forward to 1972: At the start of his rather wonderful song “Moonage Daydream” from the ‘Ziggy Stardust’ album, David Bowie informs us “I’m an alligator”, a line he “randomly” selected to get the lyric started using the cut-up method he borrowed from its most famous contemporary exponent, the novelist and poet William Burroughs (who admits he in turn nicked the idea from his artist friend Brion Gysin, who clearly owed a debt, whether conscious or subconscious to Tzara). Using this technique, Bowie became the latest in a long line of artists who were genuinely interested in the creation of art which owed as little as possible to acts of conscious choice. Here’s William Burroughs’s own do-it-yourself cut-up instructions: The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different-cutting up political speeches is an interesting excercise-in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition [itals mine]. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: "Poetry is for everyone." And Andre Breton called him a cop and expelled him from the movement. Say it again: "Poetry is for everyone." Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud's place. Here is a Rimbaud poem cut up. "Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions . . . all harmonic pine for strife. The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and drunken penance. Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle. The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist." What larks. Burroughs began his formal experiments in the late 1950’s, culminating in his “cut-up trilogy” of novels ‘The Soft Machine’, ‘The Ticket That Exploded’ and ‘Nova Express’ (1961, 1962 and 1964 respectively), in which he stirred transcripts of sound and film cut-ups into the mix. Tzara might have been miffed at Burroughs’s appropriation of a method he had pioneered (he died in 1963, so he might well have known about what the younger man was up to), but whatever the case, Burroughs’s status as a counter-culture icon was cemented by what was considered mould-breaking literature at the time, a reputation also fuelled by his somewhat colourful biography. He never went out of fashion, and managed to recruit a whole new generation of passionate fans before his death in 1997: take this assessment of ‘The Soft Machine’ from a current cyberpunk website: The book is the logical answer to Burroughs that served us the sliced up meal of contorted reality in order to make us see the truth. The battle is now raging in the language itself. And therefore in our own minds. The sentences with which humanity has manipulated its existence are under siege. Their order is cut up in the hope that through the black holes that are thus struck in them we may reach the silence so we may hear what's going on. Sometimes this means we have to struggle through a heap of rubbish, until we are no longer repelled by it and are free from its diseases. As a reward new ways of giving words to things are singing their strange but compelling songs to us in phrases that defy one dimensional meaning. The real sound of silence. To make us realize that these experiments are more than 'thoughtplays' and to keep us engaged in the process of 'unwriting' glimpses of stories weave themselves into this amalgam of prosepoetry and cut up text. And if you ignore the appropriately affected style in which it’s written, no doubt as an act of hommage, this is a pretty accurate summary of what Burroughs was up to. He created the potential for randomness in two ways; a) in the language and b) the subject matter of his books: a) Examining the prose of Burroughs’s novels, we find a clear envy of the flexibility enjoyed by musical composers, who, orchestrating themes and variations on those themes can instantaneously move forwards and backwards within their composition without troubling their listeners to do anything as clumsy and distracting as turning the pages in a book. The same with film-directors and their jump-cuts. He’s also jealously eyeing visual artists, who use collage to juxtapose meaning in three dimensions (unlike the writer who’s only got the flat page as his arena). And, of course, Burroughs worked in both these media as well as print. But his main beef with literature, in common with several other writers we’ve looked at in this section, appears to originate with its inflexible “flatness” when published in book form. The potential for randomness in three dimensions is that much more exciting - so he’ll aspire towards it as best he can in two. b) Burroughs’s chronicles of the extremes of human behaviour, and his frequent excursions into science fiction, reveal a similar impatience with the contents of day-to-day reality. This hardly singles him out as unique among writers, but the lengths he went to did. Of his contemporaries, Norman Mailer shot his wife. Jack Kerouac took speed. Truman Capote took speed and was openly gay. Allen Ginsberg took speed, was openly gay and lived for a while in a Tangiers brothel. But Burroughs did all these things, and much more besides, including trekking through the Amazon jungle in search of the ultimate drug fix, Yage, an expedition chronicled in ‘The Yage Letters’ which he published in collaboration with Allen Ginsberg in 1963. His life reads like a disaster movie, and even the briefest perusal makes Hunter S. Thompson and Rimbaud look like a pair of struggling wannabes. It was this recklessness (and let’s not forget the self-mutilation; Burroughs amputated his finger when his lover Jack Anderson left him) that made him the king of the Beat movement, celebrated in Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ as “Old Bull Lee”; He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at café tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In English hotels he read Spengler and the Marquis de Sade. Yet for all this anarchy and decadence, the resulting books are surprisingly comprehensible, and are certainly no more difficult than those of, say, his fellow novelist Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps surprisingly to anyone who arrives at these works aware of Burroughs’s reputation, a significant proportion of them are written in more-or-less conventional prose; after all, he had the sense to recognize that the novelty of pure randomness would soon outstay its welcome. And amid all the literary showmanship, there is actually a point to why Burroughs chose to write in the way he did. As our cyberpunk commentator noted, after reading his work “new ways of giving words to things are singing their strange but compelling songs to us in phrases that defy one dimensional meaning”. Through randomness, Burroughs sought to destroy meaning in order to rebuild it by “cleansing” the reader’s perceptions. So, as we noted in a) and b) above, he’s both exploding language and broadening our minds at one and the same time. That’s the theory, anyway. Whether it works for you is another matter. It’s possible to trace this yen for the cleansing qualities of absolute randomness back (once again) to Ancient Greece, and those poets who claimed they were “possessed” by the Gods or Muses, and were conduits for meaning rather than its creators; you could cite WB Yeats, with his experiments in “automatic” writing (courtesy of his wife), or practically any poet or rock star who’s ingested substances to help them unlock the doors of perception. Over the years art has recruited chance, religion, spiritualism or pharmaceuticals as weapons in meaning’s war with logic, causality, social conditioning, prejudice, language - anything that threatens to bring some order to it. And why? To try and cultivate the “innocent” eye, which the writer uses to absent himself from aesthetic decisions of any kind.