Kathy Acker

by Kathy Acker

  KUIPERS: Your own, or someone else’s?

  ACKER: What? Almost all of my work is plagiarized. Very little is written by myself. It’s always other texts. Like I say, I have this theme or this problem, and what I do is take all these other texts and structure them next to each other—for various reasons. Sometimes it would be to deconstruct. Sometimes it would be to construct, sometimes to compare, sometimes to find out, sometimes I say: “Oh, well, what’s this thing S&M?”—then I take a whole bunch of S&M texts in. The text was reality, for me. It’s certainly seeing language as primary reality. I think in the works—Blood and Guts was slightly different, but from Great Expectations through Don Quixote—the main work was that kind of structuralism. It was putting these texts next to each other, like I say, for various reasons. I’d have to go over the book to say exactly how each thing was structured. And I simply wanted that: I wanted that textuality; I wanted that sensuality—as a novel. Much as a painter could have that. I didn’t see why I couldn’t have that freedom when all of my friends who were painting had that same freedom. If Dave and Sally could do it, why the hell can’t I do it? So, as I say, I had no interest in character. I think that in Great Expectations there is a character that develops finally through the novel, but it is the character of my mother or something. It’s hard for me to say why, but there’s no character in the Balzacian sense.

  Now, in Don Quixote I didn’t want to do that anymore, and Empire of the Senseless is something else, but that’s what I wanted to do with those novels, that’s all.

  KUIPERS: Even Ira [Silverberg] was saying that Empire is more accessible.

  ACKER: Oh, yeah, because it’s more traditional.

  KUIPERS: I want to go back to these questions of power, because it’s something I work on myself. Again, in Empire of the Senseless we find that personal identity is linked to political power—in certain ways, all of the oppressed or people who are not of the multinationals are the Algerians in Paris or are the IRA in Ireland or are the blacks or poor in America. We can be the Algerians? That can be a symbolic people?

  ACKER: I guess I sort of see what’s happening, although this isn’t why I picked the Algerians. It’s that I see that this distinction that’s been made, historically, between the First World and the Third World, has now become a distinction not so much between the Anglo-Saxon/United States/English world, for instance, and the black South Africa, but a distinction which can occur within the urban center. So, within an urban center, you have your First World and your Third World. And most of us belong to the Third World; that’s quite true in our daily lives.

  The reason that I picked the Algerians is partly because sometimes I find that the most direct way of talking about things is to talk about them indirectly, and I wanted to talk about the Puerto Ricans in New York. I felt more freedom to pick Paris. Also, I happen to have a lot of Algerian friends in Paris. This is a true situation, which I sort of embroidered on. And I always work fairly literally—I don’t make up things…

  KUIPERS: Are these distinct realities: personal liberation and political liberation?

  ACKER:…Oh, I was going to say, anyway, that the model was the early Haitian revolution. I don’t think that the personal is separate from the political, in any way whatsoever.

  KUIPERS: It certainly feels that way in the novels. A piece about someone’s escape from their father or some cycle of abuse is placed right next to the IRA running to blow someone up. It doesn’t feel separate at all.

  ACKER: When you say: “Are they autobiographical?”—if there is autobiographical material in the novel, it’s seen in large scope.

  KUIPERS: This condition of powerlessness. Can you talk about the distinctions you made in My Death My Life between Something and Nothing.

  ACKER: I don’t remember. Oh, that’s Pasolini.

  KUIPERS: How Ireland had Nothing and the English had Something. There was a distinction there between a state of emptiness—not emptiness, but Nothing—and Something.

  ACKER: That’s certainly what the English think the Irish are. I don’t remember the exact thing, I must say. I wrote it a long time ago. I hadn’t lived in England when I wrote it, so I don’t think I meant this when I wrote it, but the English make themselves. They have very clear self-identities. They’ve got a myth of the Empire, though the Empire’s been long since dead, and they see themselves—if I can describe it—as leaders, really. Very good leaders: that they’re not arrogant, they’re not loud, they’re quiet, they’re well-behaved, they’re highly cultured…

  KUIPERS: Confident of their power.

  ACKER:…Very confident of their power. And their power is the power of the word; it’s a verbal power. They’ve got the language of Milton and of Shakespeare. An Englishman would never be something…a distinction that my mother used to make between the nouveau riche and the old rich: the old rich didn’t need to show their money and the nouveau riche were cheap because they had to parade their money. Well, the English don’t need to parade their culture and their power. There’s a real arrogance. Whereas the Irish are uncouth, boring, loud, do everything a bit too much…

  KUIPERS: Peasants.

  ACKER: Yes. And so are the Americans, to the English. Frankly, all of the colonies are the same to the bloody English.

  KUIPERS: There’s a real sense of identification, on your part, with the side of Nothing, rather than the side of Something.

  ACKER: Yeah.

  KUIPERS: Does that represent a truer state of being or a state of Nature? Not having the underdog.

  ACKER: I’d rather not be a snob than be a snob. I’d rather be Irish than English, any day. Oh, the snob system there! There’s nothing—well, I can think of a lot of things I wouldn’t like to be—but being an upper-middle-class English prat is one of the more unfortunate things to be, I think. I’ve really had it! Not the most pleasant people in the world. I mean, the lower class is great, but this culture is run by the class system…

  KUIPERS: What about the United States?

  ACKER: No. Racism. We have a class system, but not the same. I mean, if we were sitting here in England, we would immediately be in a certain class, everybody would know what class we were; if we were in the wrong class, the waiters would hardly serve us. You’d be well-aware that you were not in the right place. Everywhere you go, you’re told what class you are, because of the accent; everybody knows everybody’s accents. It’s class, right?

  KUIPERS: So those people who belong to minorities who enter into the middle class in America—blacks who are successful in business, and so forth—do you consider them exceptions, since our system is supposedly based on race? I still see it largely as class; there are blacks who discriminate and hold down other blacks.

  ACKER: Yeah. But England is different. See, ’cause a person here—not that they can come up that much—but, in a way, a person can. There is a certain amount of freedom. That person of whatever race…race will hold a person down here, but…say, in the art world, I think most of the people are middle class, but if your parents are lower class and you’ve actually made it into the art world, you’re not going to be held down ’cause your parents were from the lower class. You absolutely would be in England. In fact, you don’t even try. And that’s the whole thing: everyone’s accepted, interiorized the class system. And they don’t even try to get better.

  KUIPERS: It’s a caste system, then.

  ACKER: It’s caste, yes.

  KUIPERS: I’ve never been there long enough to pick that up.

  ACKER: That’s why India and England went along so well together.

  KUIPERS: It was understood.

  ACKER: And it’s really repressive. It’s just…[sigh].

  KUIPERS: That’s why you want to come back here? One of the reasons?

  ACKER: Oh, it’s Thatcher. I just miss my country.

  KUIPERS: Do you equate the position of women, when you talk about prostitutes, whores, with that sense of powerlessness? Is there a similar powerlessness in, say, the
Algerians in Paris or the Puerto Ricans in New York as there is with your perception of the position of women, as far as power is concerned?

  ACKER: I would say that all those groups are powerless, but it would be a bit simplistic to say that women are the same as Algerians in Paris or anything like that. The situations are different. Powerlessness applies to both groups in certain ways.

  KUIPERS: We talked earlier about how part of your work is to find solutions to these situations; the ones I’ve identified in my notes are: becoming as corrupt as the system in order to get on top and stomp on people…

  ACKER: Does that seem like a solution?

  KUIPERS: No, but it was offered there.

  ACKER: Yes.

  KUIPERS: “The only way to beat the corruption is to become as corrupt,” is how I think it went. Another one was to sow anarchy wherever you can, and one of the ways that comes right out of the structure of the book is in the language.

  One of the comments that you made—I think it was in My Death My Life—mentioned that writers are down there chopping away at the institutions and institutionalized power structures. In what way? What are your tools?

  ACKER: That was a very idealistic statement. I think that when I wrote that I was thinking of the Dadaists, or certain kinds of writers. Like I say, it’s a very idealistic statement. I think that to the extent that words are part of a control system—William Burroughs has gone into this fairly well; no need to go over that terrain. Or other people, Karl Kraus and the people who came after him. And to the extent that language is used, that language is changed and used in order to exert political power and control in certain ways. You can attack those control systems through language. That doesn’t mean that you can topple a government; that would be incredibly idealistic.

  KUIPERS: Do you see a real separation there between writing about such acts—like you say, toppling a government—and actually doing it?

  ACKER: I think that writing about toppling a government never got anyone very far. I mean, that’s sort of social realist literature—obviously, a bit of muckraking helped somewhere along the line—I don’t really know what books like The Jungle actually did in those days. I’d be curious to find out. But my feeling is that muckraking never did too much and that the real revolutionary books have been things like Burroughs, where they went to examine the center of the systems, see how the systems work, and say: “Well, we could work this language in other ways.”

  KUIPERS: How effective do you think that’s been?

  ACKER: I think that it’s not a question of how effective it’s been; it’s a question—I don’t know how clear this is in the United States, but it’s certainly clear in England—that the only chance now is through the imagination. I can talk more clearly about England, ’cause I think that it’s just a much clearer situation over there; I think Thatcher and Company are trying to repress everything. It’s incredible. She said a few days ago that she wants to repress any representation of violence on television, which means she wants to repress the news, right? You can’t show the IRA being blown up anymore. And more and more the effect of things like Clause 28 [Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988]…

  KUIPERS: Which is?

  ACKER: Most of the arts are government-funded in England, and Clause 28 says that there can be no government funding anything that shows anything homosexual in a good light. Which means, basically, that you can’t have a Michelangelo in the museums. No one’s figured out yet how this is going to be enforced, but it’s quite a brilliant law. One of its effects, of course, is to stop sexuality. Real gay-bashing is going on there. And thank God there’s been a lot of fighting about this clause. In every way possible, she’s trying to normalize life. She’s trying to attack every aspect of life so that you have less possibilities. You have less and less sexual possibilities; you have less and less economic possibilities. You know, the country’s being economically polarized very fast. Of course, in a Yuppie society, which is what she wants—which is a huge change for the English, ’cause it used to be a welfare state—what’s happening is that you’re losing—I know how corrupt and terrible the art market is right now, and I’m not talking about that—what would be good about art, you’re losing. You’re losing possibility. What art is to me is partly the opening of possibilities. Obviously, if I imagine five fabulous ways in which two people can get along together, that doesn’t mean that it’s really going to happen; but it means that there’s a model, therefore it’s happening. I remember when I was a kid and I was told that sexuality was absolutely wrong, I read Madame Bovary and it made a huge, huge change for me to have this text that said: “Hey, it’s not so bad.” If we lose that…to me, that’s the real radical thing art can do, and that’s what’s really necessary right now, ’cause the Marxist alternative just isn’t a reality right now. It just doesn’t make sense in our society.

  KUIPERS: Does it make more sense in England?

  ACKER: No. England’s in a real mess because the Left is Kinnock, and Kinnock they still call, poor soul, their little Labor business, and everybody knows that it’s for shit ’cause industry’s dead. It’s a technological society that has to change…

  KUIPERS: Management is king…

  ACKER: Yeah. The Thatcherites are the only people making sense economically, but they’re disgusting; they’re doing horrible things otherwise. Kinnock’s in a real hole, but Kinnock owns the things otherwise…Kinnock’s in a real hole, but Kinnock owns the Labor Party right now ’cause everybody’s making fun of Tony Badden [sic]. Another mess.

  KUIPERS: Revolution in the imagination seems to necessitate a total separation between the world that you and I would live in—desperately wanting some sort of solution to the horror it is to try and live here—and the imagination. Is that some place in which we can live, with a separation like that?

  ACKER: I think that we just have to fight. As is said, you can talk about what’s been more successful, tactically, but I think that when you’re up against the wall all you can do is fight. I don’t think that there’s a choice. One doesn’t want to separate the imagination from your reality. But, if it is separate, to deny that separation is stupid. To say: “I love my factory work and I love punching a time clock and I love having to sell paintings that…whatever…

  KUIPERS: The separation seems to be running through all of the elements of culture: language is separate from its meaning; the signifier from the signified…

  ACKER: That’s one of the problems…

  KUIPERS: And labor separated from whatever it is above it or below it…

  ACKER: Look at how Reagan uses language; it’s about total separation.

  KUIPERS: Doublespeak.

  ACKER: Oh, God, yeah.

  KUIPERS: You have to have a decoder attached to your televisions.

  ACKER: Yeah, it’s brilliant. I mean, what?

  KUIPERS: To solutions, again. You do talk about demolition, about destruction of the structures that are there. How does a terrorist function in there? In Blood and Guts, you began equating terrorism with an action towards health.

  ACKER: Obviously, I’ve changed about it. I used to be a total romantic about terrorism. Blood and Guts was just like: “Let’s just blow the whole thing up.” A scream, right? I think that I saw the terrorists as the screamers. There’s a very good sentence that I just used in a short story I’ve done, by a guy named Sanguinetti—what’s the pamphlet called—“On the Italian State”?—he writes about the Moro killing—Eduardo Sanguinetti [sic; Gianfranco Sanguinetti, On Terrorism and the State]—and the whole piece starts with the sentence: “Terrorism is the last enigma of the modern state.” And he goes on to explain what he means by that. His case about the Moro killing—and I think it’s a pretty good one—is that it was basically a right-wing presentation. Which I’ve heard from a few journalists. He talks about two kinds of terrorism: offensive terrorism and defensive terrorism. He said that offensive terrorism never wins. Offensive terrorism is like the IRA; now the IRA does
not see what it’s doing as terrorism—they see what they’re doing as war against England. We can hate war or whatever we feel about war, but, come on, a lot of people go to war. England went to war with the Falklands and with a lot less reason than the IRA with England. It’s the English who call it terroristic. So I think that we’re finding…[side two tape]

  The other thing is defensive terrorism, and that’s when the government, which is usually a right-wing government, makes up a situation where it looks like the most radical part of the left wing has done a very stupid killing or a very stupid act. And they do this in order to splinter the Left.