Excerpt from the Conduit Interview
Richard Hell’s Mysterious
Control
For a junkie the daily fix is like Russian roulette—every time the needle pierces flesh, there’s a pause in which bliss and oblivion hang in the balance. Similarly, for a writer there’s danger in that moment when pen touches paper—who can tell whether the silence will be followed by inspiration or blankness? Perhaps no one understands this better than Richard Hell. Runaway Rimbaud, New York poet, and publisher, Voidoid voice of the Blank Generation, and today a rehabilitated drug addict churning out words with a vengeance, Hell’s more than familiar with the crapshoot gallery of fate.
conduit: Do you
ever use techniques similar to Burroughs’s cut-up method, where chance plays
a part in how the wording appears?
hell: I’m trying to think about if I’ve ever done that exactly.
I don’t think I have, but I definitely respect how things out of my control
have an effect on a piece of work. In fact, I think the welcoming of so-called chance
into artwork in the twentieth century is pretty important. I mean, I’m sure
there are specific examples of it happening before the twentieth century, but I don’t
know them, while I do know that it definitely matters recently.
Still, that doesn’t mean it’s used uniformly now either. When Burroughs
used chance, it was different from when Duchamp or John Cage did it. Burroughs was
really strange. He had all these notions about discovering hidden meanings. That’s
what he thought he would find when he did cut-ups. He thought there were all kinds
of secret patterns going on in life that were not visible to, you know, normal perception,
but that there might be ways of uncovering them. And he thought that cut-ups were
one of these ways. Like they were kind of a Ouija board or TV feed or something like
that.
I mean, there was an aesthetic component too, but he mainly thought that since his
cut-up sentences had been freed from the deliberate manipulation of language and
born of chance, they would reveal things to him and let him discover things about
reality. Like they would tell him something about the future, for instance. Like, “something
terrible is going to happen tomorrow, be careful.” He was really weird that
way.
Burroughs was always looking for ways to get out of his ego, out of his own control,
out of the ways that he usually interpreted things. Cut-ups was just one of them.
He tried Scientology. He tried Orgone boxes. He had all kinds of strange ways of
trying to do this.
And the Surrealists and Dadaists employed chance too. People like Duchamp and John
Cage also relied on chance, though in their case it was more in the spirit of Bresson
or Buddhism—the way things happen is exactly as they should be. [Laughter] I
think that was a big part of it for Cage at least. And for Duchamp too, though in
his case it was more ironic and amused, and bent on puncturing the pretensions of
high artists, “retinal” artists.
Of course, ultimately, all of these experiments in chance just ended up providing
evidence that predestination is also a factor, and that you can’t really escape
who you are. For instance, I can immediately tell a Burroughs cut-up from a Corso
cut-up. And the way that John Cage uses chance to write a silent composition is going
to be very different from the way another composer employs chance in his music.