All in the Family: Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School

[T]he idea that art has nothing to do with politics is a wonderful construction in order to mask the deep political significance that art has—to uphold the empire in terms of its representation as well as its actual structure.

Kathy Acker, "A Conversation with Kathy Acker"

During her career, Kathy Acker produced fiction that is aesthetically outrageous, unrepentantly political, and singularly offensive. Larry McCaffery, who interviewed her several times, aptly evaluates her career this way: "Kathy Acker . . . produced a major body of experimental, shocking, and highly disturbing . . . work" (14). Such descriptors highlight Acker's typical fictional scenarios. Beginning with her first book, Politics (self-published in 1972), and proceeding to her last, Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), Acker's texts insistently return to scenes of sadistic violence, rape, incest, masochistic pain, and sexual abjection of every sort. Her penchant for plagiarism, parody, pastiche, and other antirealist techniques has marked her work from the beginning as radically postmodern. No other contemporary writer so determinedly eschewed "originality" by stealing from such an amazing array of both canonical and noncanonical writers: Dickens, Hawthorne, Keats, Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, the Brontës, Sade, Bataille, Rimbaud, and so on. She appropriates portions of journals and letters by real people; fiction by her contemporaries, for example William Gibson's Neuromancer in Empire of the Senseless (1988); political theory, primarily that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; Harold Robbins; pornography. Any text is fair game. Textual piracy becomes an act, albeit small, of feminist guerrilla warfare, for Acker's method always serves political purposes.

Acker very much saw herself as part of "the other tradition" within American writing, a counterpractice visible in the works of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and the Beats, William Burroughs, the Black Mountain poets—writers dismissed as "experimental" rather than considered in "the tradition of political writing as opposed to propaganda" ("A Few Notes" 31). Propaganda denotes for Acker the bourgeois world view which privileges realism in art and celebrates the universal "I," whereas political writing means the "political truth," the way things work in America ("Interview" 29). As a woman who wrote from inside her skin and her mind, Acker's contribution to this "other tradition" involves her acute awareness that the metaphor of the body politic begins as gendered experience, as actual and material.

Blood and Guts in High School (1978) occupies a pivotal position structurally and politically in terms of Acker's trajectory as a writer. Formally it marks the beginning of her serious use of plagiarism—in actuality a self-conscious appropriation of others' texts—as a technical device, "with the Genet stuff" ("Devoured" 10). The novels after that, Great Expectations (1982) and Don Quixote (1986), obviously signal this textual pre-occupation by rewriting two classics of Western literature. While she forsook such blatant deconstructions of the literary fathers as "simplistic" thereafter ("Devoured" 13), Acker continued to "us[e] language the way a painter would use paint. I use other texts—that's how I write" ("Kathy Acker" 279). Although she frequently dismissed the word "shocking" when applied to her work, Acker did admit to one interviewer that she "was really out to shock" with Blood and Guts in High School ("Kathy Acker" 276). And the novel retains its power due, in part, to the sheer material excess of Acker's rage, her version of a postmodern inferno, out of which no one breaks except spasmodically, through dreams, drugs, incessant fucking, criminality. But these manifested forms of resistance and escape serve as vehicles for the abiding tenor of politics throughout Acker's fiction. Her political analysis, always informed by a national and international critique of late capital, utilizes the distortions of family structure as a micromodel for the discursive and actual asymmetries within this larger political frame. Capital's deformative failures and violent disarticulations reveal themselves within the family, just as family structure models the inequities and oppressions of capital. In Acker's fiction, the father's power—like the lover's, or the capitalist's, or any president's since Nixon...