Context
Reading Kathy Acker
Kathleen Wheeler
"I
need new instructions . . . new blood," she wrote, since power and
control relations are a "code of death." In searching for a language
and text "past failure" and "beyond deconstruction" ("I got sick of
doing it"), Acker wrote of boredom, "borderdom," and the transgression
of borders. She wrote of poverty (as proverbial), and of their
opposites, namely, wonder. (See her Bodies of Work: Essays, 1997, for some of her nonfiction writing.) She sought to articulate
this idea of wonder—as at the basis of art and beauty—through myths and
metaphors of the body, sex, travel, permanent and positive exile, and
wandering. When asked, in an interview with Sylvere Lotringer (in Hannibal Lecter),
what it meant to work "past failure" in a text, she said, "To go into
the space of wonder . . . that’s what I like, all writers like. To have
that sense of wonder." "Spaces of wonder" are those "wild
places"—geographical, intellectual, and bodily/emotionalmdash;places
explored that go beyond known narratives, texts, and experience. A
space of wonder, one of those wild places, will be "a human society in
a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn’t just disgust" (Empire of the Senseless).
Someday, she argued, there will have to be another New World, and a new
kind of woman/man/human being to live in its sunshine. Before these new
realities can occur, before one can stand "there, in the sunlight," we
have to become explicitly aware of social programming. For Acker
believes it has dehumanized us, and has created a "reality" more like a
"hyperreal" realm of codes and simulacra, where desire has been
programmed in a certain, repressive way, as, for example, she
anatomizes in My Mother: Demonology, a Novel (1993) regarding heterosexual desires from the point of view of a woman. Acker, like Jean Rhys fifty years earlier, broke through the boundaries of propriety in all areas: Quin’s Berg, Three, Tripticks, and Passages are the most obvious literary precursors to Acker’s "wild places." Jean
Rhys’s representations of the demimondemdash;along with Stevie Smith’s
wilder narrative and modernist experiments (especially in Over the Frontier, 1938)mdash;are instructive, however, for the "tradition" within which
Acker was working, as are such writers as Henry Miller and Anais Nin.
Yet Angela Carter and even more so Leslie Marmon Silko, in Almanac of the Dead (1991), provide an interesting and contemporary counterpoint to Acker’s
artistic, polymorphous perversity. More importantly, Silko’s writing
articulates Acker’s own self-acknowledged fascination for dream and
myth, particularly in the last decade of her life, when Acker was
moving out of her earlier disruptive techniques into something "new."
Silko uses familiar magic realism and Native Indian myths to explode
the delusions of respectable society in two of the most impressive
novels of the last quarter century. Acker’s artistic development
parallels Silko’s own move, far away from "story" (in Ceremony, 1977) to episodic "narrative" (in Almanac of the Dead).
Silko did manage, however, to wrest power away from conventional
narrative writing with less obvious violence than Acker. Silko’s
critique is more firmly located in apparent use of some conventions, in
order to make the text more accessible and more apparently "legible."
This "legibility," however, collapses beneath the scrutiny of close
reading. Acker was also profoundly fascinated, like Silko, with the
idea of magic worlds, "strange worlds," those wild places: In this vein, the primitiveness of the body takes the place of
the "I" as subject in many of Acker’s early texts. Yet she also
described herself as a "conceptualist"; hence, there is no room for any
mind/body dualism in Acker’s writing or in her representations of
ordinary experience. In spite of all the attacks on society et al., she
sees herself as, in a weird way, a kind of humanist, who has gone from
primitive instinctual deconstruction, through, and then beyond, theory.
In In Memoriam to Identity (1990) and Eurydice in the Underworld (1997), she explored, explicitly, the myth of romantic love which had run throughout her work since her earliest
writing, and which has such a crushing effect on the development of
viable individualities. But, after that, she wanted to move on, like
Silko and Quin and others, into something different. Acker
has explored the limits of experimental fiction more, perhaps, than any
other writer published today. Like William Blake before her (another
iconoclast thought during his time to be so outrageous, sexually
explicit, and indecorous as to be held mad for some 150 years), she
explicitly appealed to the importance of shock in awakening her readers
from the sleep of familiaritymdash;Blake’s Ulro. She blasts out
a clarion call to awaken us from the stereotyped selves, roles, and
forms of behavior that so horrifyingly, convincingly pass for our own
personal experience. Her novels are ribald exposures, as in Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), of the forces both within the psyche ("mind-forged manacles")
and without, which construct and dominate identity through gender,
class, race, and so on. Her experiments represent a quest to find out
what could liberate us from these habitual fictions we call reality and
ordinary life. She is famous for her deconstructions of narrative
personae, of story or plot, of characterization, thematics, and so on.
She is well-known for her Foucault-like articulations of the dynamics
of political, social, and psychological power, and was for a time
notorious for satirizing realist, conventional feminist fiction (Hello, I’m Erica Jong, 1982) which, she argued, props up the very structures it seeks to challenge.
Her techniques of plagiarism, her constant challenges to "intellectual
propertymdash;which got her into serious legal trouble in both England
and Germanymdash;are favorite topics for readers. Others are her
erotics, or near (if not actual) pornographics, her blasts at social
decorum as well as literary proprieties, her incoherent thematics,
plotless texts, chaotic character non-identities (taking the
"anti-novel" to its most extreme form), her mix of autobiography, fact,
and fiction, or madness and sanity. These well-known narrative
experiments are characteristic of most of her work; they are designed
to shock the reader out of complacency, much like Blake: "You’re
dealing with shock. To me nothing’s interesting unless it’s slightly
shocking. Otherwise I am just dealing with my own habits. Lulled into
habits again and again. It is good to be shocked." What has
often been overlooked, however, is the deeply-moving humanity at the
basis of Acker’s writingmdash;which should put paid to notions that
such experimental writing is somehow apolitical and therefore escapist.
Recent extreme forms of experimentation in theory and in fiction, such
as postmodernism, are said by many to be apolitical, because they do
not discuss explicit political topics overtly. This notion is an
indication of the misguided lengths to which criticsmdash;unconsciously
committed to tradition (whatever their conscious assertions)mdash;will
go in order to perpetuate confusion, inequality, and the status quo. Acker, taking society and us individuals as a series of interrelated
texts, "bodies of writing," seeks in her writing to achieve a direct
connection between herself and the reader. As William Burroughs put it,
"Her author moves and shifts before you can know who ‘you’ are, and
that gives her work the power to mirror the reader’s soul." Her efforts
to decentralize power and reappropriate it are in the service of a more
humane way of constructing societies and personal identities. There, in
those sunlit places, those wild places, those spaces of wonder, those
moments of beauty, people will be able to seek out more fulfilling ways
of "realizing" themselves, their relationships with others, and their
desires/pleasures/needs. Acker, like William Blake and others, knew
sexual repression was the fundamental social instrument for the
imprisonment of the human body/spirit. Escape for all of us from
boredom and povertymdash;whether spiritual or materialmdash;was a
constant quest for her, as it was for Jean Rhys and Ann Quin.
Regrettably, exactly like all the writers mentioned here, Acker has
often been misread and misunderstood, mixed up with her characters,
thought to be hard, unfeeling. If the views of some critics prevail,
that Acker’s writing is "rubbish," it will only be we who lose. She died of breast cancer four years ago.
"I opened my mouth, but no words. Only
the words of others I saw, like ads, texts, psalms, from those who had
attempted to persuade me into their systems. A power I did not want to
possess. The Inquisition."
Well, no, not Acker; Ann Quin, actually, in her marvelous Tripticks. Not one of Acker’s "plagiarisms" either, although it could have been. She did remark, however, in Empire of the Senseless (1988) that "ten years ago it seemed . . . nonsense would attack the
empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning."
Maybe this was a "plagiarism"? Especially since she concluded that
"nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the
normalizing institutions." On the same page, she wrote about past
failure, about going beyond "deconstruction [which] is always a
reactive thing . . . reinforcing the society that you hate" (Hannibal Lecter, My Father). Earlier, in Empire of the Senseless, Acker wrote (copied? plagiarized?) that we do not "lovingly relate to
each other in equality, whatever that is, or means, but out of needs
for power and control. Humans relate to other humans by eating each
other." Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978) is a graphic account of this
power/control dynamic. Margaret Atwood had, ten years earlier,
humorously portrayed this conspicuous consumption of women in our
society in her short novel, The Edible Woman (1969). Her
character bakes a huge cake, shaped like her body, and gradually eats
it all up, in an effort to communicate her awareness of and objection
to this status quo. Like Atwood, Acker uses wit and humor in
the service of a compelling call to her fellow humans to wake up to the
tragedy of much of our lives. Tragicomedy is her genre, too, in many
novels, such as those in the collection Portrait of an Eye (1992) and Literal Madness (1988).
Christ was right about publicans (and about sinners, too, in my
opinion). They are nicer than other peoplemdash;and I sincerely hope
they will walk first into Heaven leaving the holy righteous and
respectable outside looking very puzzled.
Rhys’s novels about the demimonde in Paris and London are
instructive, as are Ann Quin’s, for reading Acker’s overtly outrageous
challenges to the complex of power/money/prestige she attacked. Acker’s
experimentation with every aspect of the novelmdash;her frontal assault
upon prevailing values and moralsmdash;rests on the belief that one
must destroy the bastions of:
logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive
society. Property’s pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and
reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be
perceived and so controlled. . . . Reason is always in the service of
the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes,
at this base . . . [it] denounces and slashes apart the repressing
machine at the level of the signified. (Empire of the Senseless)
Unlike Rhys, however, both Quin and Acker dispensed with almost
all familiar conventions of the novel. They both sought to reveal the
fact that familiar order and logic are much less native to our
experience than we realize, whether we mean inner mental experience or
the apparent order of nature and the "external" world. Sanity is,
arguably, merely the most familiar form of irrationality. Both authors
challenge conventional assumptions about individual identity. They also
examine its construction, perpetration, and its breakdown, as for
example in Quin’s Berg (1964) and Three (1966), and in Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (both in Portrait of an Eye). Like Jane Bowles, in her wonderful novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943), and in numerous of her witty short stories, Quin and Acker play
with gender categories, as well as with stereotypes within gender which
limit pleasure and creativity. Indeed, social programming is shown
deliberately to prevent genuine individuality, since characters impose
on each other and themselves roles and cliched forms of behavior.
I like that landscape much better. You’re allowed to just move,
you’re allowed to wander. It’s like travelling . . . I guess I just
want to go on a journey and so I start with a sentence and then the
language twists and turns and you don’t even remember where you’ve
been, you’re always faced with the present. You’re always going
somewhere, you always end up somewhere. You want to be surprised. [my italics] (Hannibal Lecter)
Surprise, as Truman Capote had argued decades earlier in relation
to Jane Bowles, is at the heart of aesthetic pleasure, along with that
other element not normally associated with Acker, namely, beauty. "It’s
all about beauty, isn’t it?" said one contemporary artist recently when
asked what he thought of recent experimentation in the visual arts. As
Acker put it, it’s all about a beautiful world, where power and control
and consumption no longer run the show.
