by Kathy Acker
GROUP: How did your readings of these African narratives enter into Don Quixote?
ACKER: The last part of Don Quixote is all African narrative. What I do is, when I think I have something to learn, I start copying things because that’s how I learn. And I picked [up] on something [of] Aimé Césaire’s, and the last chapter is all Aimé Césaire. And then there are other African tales before that…It’s like tales within tales. I think I have this method of “slippage,” where I will never talk directly about what I might be or who I am. And it’s very much Talmudic tradition.
GROUP: African writing is an oral tradition isn’t it?
ACKER: But I’m terribly based on oral traditions, I make my money by giving readings. Most chapters in my writings are for readings, and usually I’m performing with rock and roll, and so it has to work—and if it doesn’t work I’m a dead duck because the audience just barracks you.
KATHY ACKER: GRAMERCY PARK HOTEL BAR, NYC
CONVERSATION WITH DEAN KUIPERS
JULY 2, 1988
KUIPERS: I’m going to try to stay off biography; I really want to get commentary on the works themselves. I’ve read everything, and I’m on the last twenty pages of Empire of the Senseless.
ACKER: Good. Oh, really? How did you get hold of that?
KUIPERS: Ira [Silverberg, of Grove Press] gave it to me for the Splash review. It’s going to come out in August, which is just the right time…
ACKER: The book is coming out in August?
KUIPERS: No, the book comes out in September or October, but the magazine comes out again in August, so it’s good timing. Is it a reasonable assumption that the books are largely autobiographical?
ACKER: No, it’s not a reasonable assumption. I use autobiographical material, but then I use other material too. It differs from book to book. I’ll say two things: I don’t know what percentage—maybe a fourth of the material is autobiographical. I think that for every fiction writer, to say that something’s not autobiographical is false. I mean, you obviously use your own life when you’re writing and the emotions come up from somewhere and they have to do, obviously, with what’s happening to you as you’re living. But that’s not autobiography. That’s simply what happens in the process of writing.
Direct autobiography? My first work was concerned with fake and actual, fake and real autobiography, and since then I’ve always played around with this kind of autobiographical mode. But the actual material is not very autobiographical.
KUIPERS: Some of the books—especially Blood and Guts in High School and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini—seem to be whole in the way that a long poem is a whole: the completion seems to be your completion rather than ours. What is the novel format, to you?
ACKER: I think that what I’d call a novel is different. What I call a novel is so many pages put together. So it’s not a poem, because it’s two hundred pages of text. The novel is obviously narrative—I mean, there are various temporal structures; it’s a temporal structure in words. That’s what a novel is. And there are various temporal structures that are going on. One that you can’t avoid is that the reader starts with the first page and ends with the last page. There’s that structure—Cortázar played around a bit with that in Hopscotch. But, you know, in whatever order you read the pages, you were still going from whatever you started with as page one to whatever you ended up with as page final. The other temporal structure that there is no way of avoiding is that you start writing at one point and you end at another; so there are two temporal structures always counterpointing each other. There’s a third, if you’re using narrative. So on most novels you have three temporal structures. I’d have to talk about each novel—and it’s different for each novel—but I don’t think I ever was using what you’d call traditional narrative, which would be more sort of postindustrial narrative—you know, from Richardson on upwards. Until Empire of the Senseless, which, still, is more epic narrative—which still goes back to earlier narrative structures. If anything, that sort of journeying thing is very early novel structure. The structure of the bourgeois novel—you know, as Barthes talks about in Writing Degree Zero—is something I’ve never used. I’ve never written a Balzacian novel—except, a little bit, Kathy Goes to Haiti, but that was a joke. That I did for a reason: to say, “Hey look; I’ve done it.” Now I never want to do it again.
KUIPERS: All of your work seems to involve a journey of some sort, other than My Death My Life.
ACKER: My Death My Life is probably the most far-out of all the novels I’ve done. I’m glad I did it—I think it failed—I don’t know, maybe fail and succeed aren’t the right words; I took something to a certain point to see what would happen. I’m glad I did it and I saw what that point was, so I never have to do that again. But that was it; I got to that extreme and I see no reason to do it again. I wanted to structure a novel—rather than vertically, that is, based on causality, which is your usual narrative structure—I wanted to structure it horizontally, based on themes, so it was all based on pun structures and things like that. No need to go into detail. I did it, I saw what would happen, and that was that.
KUIPERS: That movement, especially in Empire of the Senseless, is it one of flight or is it movement toward something—for example an actualization of personal power? Is it a completion of sorts or a flight?
ACKER: I think Blood and Guts was flight. Or a scream. I don’t know if it was even flight; everyone, or Janey, was fleeing all the time. Everybody was fleeing all the time, but there was nowhere to go. Pier Pasolini was something else; I don’t think it had anything to do with flight. As I say, it was my—I hate the word postmodernism—it was when I was most influenced by notions of decentralization. So that was something else. Don Quixote was a flight somewhere, but I didn’t know where. It was when I moved—here, autobiography comes in—from the United States to England, and I think that—not directly, but very much, when I reread the book—[that] comes into it. It’s a book about exile. About being lost because you’re exiled. And about looking for something. And I think I found something at the end that, at the beginning, I didn’t know that that’s what I was looking for. At the end, I got very disinterested in avant-gardism, you know, in this lack of narrative. And I started looking toward primitive narratives as a way to go.
KUIPERS: As in?
ACKER: I don’t know what other word to use. I guess anything out of the First World…I mean, away from the First World…I mean, I was looking to African novels…So I was looking to—I don’t know how to put it—non-White structures? It’s not quite that, but you get the point. If all these words don’t smack of racism. Empire of the Senseless is obviously about flight somewhere; Abhor and Thivai are both looking. It’s probably the first book where there is some kind of resolution at the end, or to me there is, definitely.
KUIPERS: Absolutely. They seem to move toward solutions.
ACKER: Yeah. It’d be hard to say, I mean, it’s not an easy solution, what that solution is. But I felt that there were definitely solutions.
KUIPERS: One of those that I’m most interested in is the movement from powerlessness to power.
ACKER: Well, that’s what Empire of the Senseless is about. It’s the first time I think I’ve ever gotten to any sense of power, ’cause most of my books are about powerlessness.
KUIPERS: How do obsessions relate to power or powerlessness?
ACKER: I’ve never really thought about it…
KUIPERS: There’s so much in your work about…
ACKER: Obsession, yeah. Empire of the Senseless, in the way it’s structured, might have something to do with obsession in that it’s about taboos. The first part is about the patriarchal taboo, about the oedipal taboo. So it’s sort of an homage to the world of the fathers, or the world of the patriarchs. It was my description of the world of the patriarchs. So the chapter is very much about the father, both politically and personally, and about Abhor’s relation to her father. And about incest. It’s about the oedipal taboo;
it’s also about an obsession, right? For Abhor, her relation to this patriarchal society wasn’t simply one of hatred; that would be very simple, and I think this is where you get one of the double-binds that women are in: her relation is love/hate. Certainly, for women, what’s happened is because women were defined by their sexualities for so many years, they were either wife or whore, and that’s how they earned their living. Their sexuality was defined economically, and yet their sexuality was the area of freedom for them, was their area of survival. There’s an immense double-bind in a lot of ways going on. Which is the patriarchal society. I don’t know if that’s a clear statement about obsession and whatever you asked about—power—but that has to do with it.
KUIPERS: Could, for example, sexual obsession reflect on notions of power?
ACKER: Yeah, well, people…what happened to Abhor in this first part, since it’s mostly about her, is she was put in this position of being obsessed. I mean, is the word obsessed even accurate? Somewhat. I mean, of being in this double-bind, of having this love/hate thing with her father, which was a sort of obsession.
KUIPERS: It definitely ruled her life. Whether that was a positive or negative was…
ACKER: Blockage. It defined her feelings toward the world. The second section of Empire of the Senseless is about what society would look like if it had other taboos than the oedipal one. So, what I tried to do was break taboos. I did my research on various taboos and sort of went through them.
KUIPERS: How so? When you say “research”…
ACKER: Oh, homosexuality, child sex, tattooing. I mean, there are others—I didn’t get into eating, but, you know. And there’s been a furious reaction to the book in England, and I think it’s partly that, that I was breaking taboos.
KUIPERS: Furious reaction?
ACKER: Oh, God. In absolute hatred. Vogue said I should be exiled. The Independent, which is a big newspaper, called me a junkie. It made the front page of most literary sections.
KUIPERS: You’re a success!
ACKER: Well, in a manner of speaking. If I don’t get exiled. It’s kind of calmed back there now.
KUIPERS: Would they do that?
ACKER: I was very worried for a while. Because my residency is not permanent. I think it’s okay now, ’cause it’s kind of turned. But for a while it was very rough.
KUIPERS: [silence]
ACKER: So I can’t think of an instance of breaking these taboos where you find obsession. I mean, I can’t think of any obsession in the second chapter. The characters seem to slip it out in their acts.
KUIPERS: Do the characters fixate upon the taboos?
ACKER: Well, you’ve read the book. I can’t think that they do. Abhor follows…Abhor fixates upon following the sailor. Obviously, the line between fixation and fascination—you know, that looks a bit like fixation or fascination, which desire does. But, if we’re talking about real obsession, no. ’Cause you know, she sees it, she goes. Thivai escapes from jail and gets fucked by Mark and says: “Okay, thank you.” I don’t see any fixation going on, especially in the second chapter. And in the third chapter there isn’t any fixating going on.
KUIPERS: Maybe a way to characterize the relation is that, for example, in a situation of powerlessness, where you can’t act, like being in jail, is perhaps where there is more obsession than there is any actual fascination or desire because you can’t express it.
ACKER: Well, in jail I think there’s fantasy. The obsession is fantastic. You’re in the world of your mind.
KUIPERS: How much does the actualization of what you perceive to be your own personal power—or that of the characters in your books—have to do with one’s identity?
ACKER: You mean do I identify with any of the characters in the book—in this one? Not directly, no. At times, of course; that’s how I write them. They’re sort of like voices I hear, and they’re in my head, and, after a while, they become real people. And then they do things they do, rather than what I’d do. But in the beginning, they’re what I’d do. In the beginning, there’s a question of…the grain of sand in the oyster…what’s bothering me. And obviously, this book was something about: “How are things possible?” “How can you not live nihilistically in what looks like a fairly nihilistic society?” So that was the question mark that I started with, and I wanted both a female and a male voice ’cause I wanted…this was a conscious decision. (’Cause, obviously, you work unconsciously; you don’t just work consciously. I can tell you my conscious decisions. I can’t tell you my unconscious decisions.) Consciously, I wanted a male and a female voice ’cause in all the other books I had only had one voice, and usually a woman’s voice. Or else a man/woman or whatever.
KUIPERS: To me they come off completely androgynous, dominated to a certain extent by the female voice.
ACKER: Yeah, or androgynous.
KUIPERS: That’s interesting that you say these characters do become parts of you. Which ones stay with you the most?
ACKER: Abhor, in this case. See, Thivai came to resemble a friend of mine. And Mark, I must say, was different. Thivai and Abhor were in me, and then became out of me—became other people, but they were very much in me. Mark is truly out of me; he’s based upon a friend of mine, almost literally, named Mark. And I did ask Mark’s permission to do this.
KUIPERS: I was going to ask if that ever happened. They seem to be characters in a dreamscape.
ACKER: Yeah, they’re usually characters in a dreamscape.
KUIPERS: That you create them in order to express an inner necessity.
ACKER: I think that’s true in all the books before this. I think that Abhor and Thivai were more characters than that—for me. It was the first time I ever had a sense of molding a character. I never had before. I mean, Janey Smith wasn’t a character: she was a fiction I made to join together the chapters.
KUIPERS: How much do you think you spend time developing them, as opposed to using them as a voice?
ACKER: I think until Empire they were just a voice. I wasn’t involved in creating character. It wasn’t so much a voice that I was involved in finding; it was really just theoretical journey. I was involved in going through various, whatever, theoretical…
KUIPERS: Sort of a journey for yourself, as a writer, as a passage through characters, rather than taking the characters and moving them somewhere.
ACKER: Specifically, what I do—say, in Great Expectations—is I remember that in that third chapter I had a problem about rape—no, about S&M—so I took texts that were about S&M and put them next to each other. I think I took Sartre’s business about the emotions and the Story of O and put them next to each other, to try to find out what I thought of this situation. So that’s what I meant by a theoretical journey. Pasolini was certainly structured that way.
KUIPERS: Chunks of theme material.
ACKER: Yeah. It was all about theme, and that was the narrative. Don Quixote, again, absolutely, yes. Empire of the Senseless, no. I mean, it’s partly structured on this business of taboo, but it’s also that the characters are real for me. I’ve never thought about a character before that. I mean, the dogs weren’t…the dogs came alive for me in Don Quixote, but I can’t say that they did in the same way as Thivai and Abhor did.
KUIPERS: As readers, as far as identifying with the character—which is something we do with almost every other type of novel—what we get from your style is a series of statements, of decisions, of judgments. “I’m going to do this. I’m not going to do this.” Lots of times in a very oppositional way. It’s like it’s a kind of catalogue of an analytical mind.
ACKER: Don Quixote—the first part of Don Quixote—is very close to the original Quixote. So it was a bit how Cervantes was working, you know, using his knight as a way of questioning the relation of fiction and reality.
KUIPERS: I guess the essence of my question is: How much can we identify with them?
ACKER: I don’t think I’m interested in you, the reader, identifying with the character. Excep
t insofar as you identify with the search—you know, you say: “This is interesting. I have the same problem; let’s see where we get to…”
KUIPERS: What is it, then, that we are identifying with?
ACKER: You have to identify to read? You don’t identify when you read an historical text. You don’t identify when you read philosophy. I mean the process of identification seems to have to do with…
KUIPERS: I’m assuming a different kind of involvement.
ACKER: Well, if you read a novel full of horrible characters…I mean, I’m not sure that one always identifies, other than to say: “Oh, I have those horrible things in me.” But that would seem to mean that every time you read you would have to be able to…
KUIPERS: Find the one closest to yourself? No, I don’t think that’s essential, either.
Why do you think this technique of having characters which you just didn’t develop as real people—why is that technique more effective to you than just writing a straight, like you say, Balzacian novel?
ACKER: You’re making the problem of character central, which it never was to me. What the Balzacian novel is is the reality—novelist sits down and says: “There’s a certain ordered reality—or else maybe it’s not so ordered—but I’m going to either order that reality or I’m going to express that ordered reality.” And it’s very much, as Barthes says, the feeling of someone who’s an owner, who knows…that people have names, they’re identifiable through time. And they act in certain understandable ways and causality is still fairly understandable and the Aristotelian unities hold. You know—it’s about the fact that the human knows the world and the world is a knowable situation, that time is fairly ordered, and that things work—you know, in a sort of Newtonian manner. I don’t think we live in such a world anymore. Certainly, any artist since Cubism hasn’t been working in that kind of world. I wanted the same freedom in a novel. You know, I come out of the poets. I wanted to be able to examine the relations of language to what isn’t language—if you want, call it reality. I wanted to be able to examine how different texts…I write by using other texts, and I really write in a way that some of the early Cubists worked: I put texts next to other texts…