The cutup is a mechanical method of juxtaposition in which Burroughs literally cuts up passages of prose by himself and other writers and then pastes them back together at random. This literary version of the collage technique is also supplemented by literary use of other media. Burroughs transcribes taped cutups (several tapes spliced into each other), film cutups (montage), and mixed media experiments (results of combining tapes with television, movies, or actual events). Thus Burroughs' use of cutups develops his juxtaposition technique to its logical conclusion as an experimental prose method, and he also makes use of all contemporary media, expanding his use of popular culture.
Burroughs unknowingly gave names to several bands. Steely Dan of course, and to this more obscure fusion ensemble Soft Machine, whose lead guitar player was none other than Allan Holdsworth.
The Soft Machine consists of seventeen relatively brief chapters, or routines. (Most are fewer than ten pages: the longest is a little over twenty pages.) Each routine contains both improvisational narrative episodes similar in style to the satirical fantasies of Naked Lunch and cutup material. The narrative episodes within routines, however, are usually much briefer than those in Naked Lunch. The shorter narrative passages in combination with cutup collage passages make up a highly fragmented work in which the juxtaposition technique dominates the consciousness of the reader. The book must be read slowly and carefully, like a poem, and one must focus on imagery, theme, and associative relationships, rather than on chronological causal structures.
The Ticket That Exploded continues the basic
montage/collage form of The Soft Machine, but carries the experiments with cutup and mythology
much further. This second novel of the trilogy makes more extensive use of cut-ups and develops
the Nova mythology more explicitly and at greater length, leading to the inclusion of expository
passages that were not present in The Soft Machine. In The Ticket That Exploded Burroughs
exhibits a technical control that is not attained in the previous novel. The cutups are often effective and moving prose poems, and the increased prominence of the Nova mythology gives the work a coherence and structure that balances the fragmentation of the cutups. Cutups also become meaningful as narrative elements since they play a part in the plot of the myth.
The Ticket That Exploded is dominated by Moroccan and outer-space imagery and the creation of new myths in science-fiction forms. In Ticket Burroughs makes use of the science-fiction convention of portraying the present in a fiction about the future, a purpose clearly announced in the very first routine: "I am reading a science fiction book called The Ticket That Exploded. The story is close enough to what is going on here . . . "