The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker and "Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective" and "The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the U.S.," by Kathy Acker
reviewed by Robert Buckeye

Untitled document

Kathy Acker. Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker. Ed. Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper. Intro. Jeanette Winterson. Grove, 2002. 335 pp. Paper: $15.00; “Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective” and “The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the U.S.” Grove, 2002. 201 pp. Paper: $14.00.

“I just read passages at random,” a character in Stewart Home’s 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess says. “It makes no sense to read Kathy Acker from beginning to end.” This is the sense of Acker we have to understand if we are to read her. Her project is to reject the master voice of literature because it does not permit her to say what she needs to say. As a woman she is dispossessed, marginalized, and as an American, estranged from her homeland. (One cannot separate language from politics.) Thus she must educate—uneducate—us to read differently, including reading a text from beginning to end. (“Why . . . make a work that cannot be read through?” Stanley Cavell writes in his review of Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk. “Perhaps to remind the reader his or her work must perpetually find its own end. Why make a work that cannot be written to an end? Perhaps to remind the writer of a reason to suffer awakening without end.”) Acker often adapts marginalized genres, such as the detective novel (its charge to find out who did what and why is crucial to her own writing) or pornography (“I won’t go against the truth of my life which is my sexuality,” she writes). She also rewrites texts, layering them against history (not so much plagiarism as an act of rereading). Her method here is analogous to how we use quotations, which we give new meaning by removing them from their original context. “Myself or any occurrence is a city through which I can wander,” Acker writes to describe her method. We do not read such texts from beginning to end, but do so as if walking through a city we do not know, stopping at what interests, puzzles, or confuses us. Such a reading can never be planned or directed, except as aimlessness itself directs attention (or inattention). This does not mean that her work does not coalesce. She returns again and again to what we might consider a primal scene: the patriarchal, repressive father she loves and the mother, a victim like her daughter. (In her last work, unpublished before her death, her last words are for her mother: “For it was you I loved.”) All her history, politics, language, and psychology come from the moment desire was subverted. (R. D. Laing was an early influence.)

Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America are two early works written in the early 1970s and not published before. The first is an example of her use of the detective novel, and the second emphasizes the political nature of her writing. Essential Acker is selections from all of her texts (except essay collections). The title is too academic and, for Acker, misleading. There can be no essential Acker. Only that where each of us finds a foothold.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker and "Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective" and "The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the U.S.," by Kathy Acker reviewed by Robert Buckeye Untitled document Kathy Acker. Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker. Ed. Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper. Intro. Jeanette Winterson. Grove, 2002. 335 pp. Paper: $15.00; “Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective” and “The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the U.S.” Grove, 2002. 201 pp. Paper: $14.00. “I just read passages at random,” a character in Stewart Home’s 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess says. “It makes no sense to read Kathy Acker from beginning to end.” This is the sense of Acker we have to understand if we are to read her. Her project is to reject the master voice of literature because it does not permit her to say what she needs to say. As a woman she is dispossessed, marginalized, and as an American, estranged from her homeland. (One cannot separate language from politics.) Thus she must educate—uneducate—us to read differently, including reading a text from beginning to end. (“Why . . . make a work that cannot be read through?” Stanley Cavell writes in his review of Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk. “Perhaps to remind the reader his or her work must perpetually find its own end. Why make a work that cannot be written to an end? Perhaps to remind the writer of a reason to suffer awakening without end.”) Acker often adapts marginalized genres, such as the detective novel (its charge to find out who did what and why is crucial to her own writing) or pornography (“I won’t go against the truth of my life which is my sexuality,” she writes). She also rewrites texts, layering them against history (not so much plagiarism as an act of rereading). Her method here is analogous to how we use quotations, which we give new meaning by removing them from their original context. “Myself or any occurrence is a city through which I can wander,” Acker writes to describe her method. We do not read such texts from beginning to end, but do so as if walking through a city we do not know, stopping at what interests, puzzles, or confuses us. Such a reading can never be planned or directed, except as aimlessness itself directs attention (or inattention). This does not mean that her work does not coalesce. She returns again and again to what we might consider a primal scene: the patriarchal, repressive father she loves and the mother, a victim like her daughter. (In her last work, unpublished before her death, her last words are for her mother: “For it was you I loved.”) All her history, politics, language, and psychology come from the moment desire was subverted. (R. D. Laing was an early influence.) Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America are two early works written in the early 1970s and not published before. The first is an example of her use of the detective novel, and the second emphasizes the political nature of her writing. Essential Acker is selections from all of her texts (except essay collections). The title is too academic and, for Acker, misleading. There can be no essential Acker. Only that where each of us finds a foothold.

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