Kathy Acker

by Kathy Acker

  LOTRINGER: You still have these catch-all themes, things that keep the whole book together in some way, Dickens, Cervantes…

  ACKER: Oh they’re structured, they’re carefully structured. There’s always a beginning and an end. To some of the…Some…Great Expectations has no beginning nor end, but there’s a cumulative effect.

  LOTRINGER: It’s like a continuous text.

  ACKER: I wanted to do some sort of environmental writing, the way Bob Ashley was doing environmental music. And that was Great Expectations, Blood and Guts, the English got the end mixed up. They got the last two chapters in the wrong order…No one noticed! I told them they’re in the wrong order and they said, Have a glass of champagne. [laughs] So I guess it’s not the most tightly structured after all.

  LOTRINGER: But what holds everything together? I have the feeling it’s rhythm.

  ACKER: Yeah, it’s rhythm. Writing more and more is just like music, rhythm. If the rhythm’s right, you’re okay.

  LOTRINGER: That’s the major element; another one may be introducing a maximum of confusion. [both laugh] Contradicting yourself, playing all the voices at the same time, switching abruptly from here to there. Compared to your first stories, your writing’s got so much looser. I mean it’s totally loosened up.

  ACKER: I get bored when writing’s too simple and you know what’s going to happen. Then I think, Why do I waste my time writing this thing? Partly coming from the poetry world, what I really like to do, I guess, is go on a journey. Its like traveling. I’ve always envied men this and I can never travel being a woman. I always wanted to be a sailor, that’s really what I love.

  LOTRINGER: When you returned to San Francisco six or seven years ago, didn’t you plan to go sailing around the world? I remember a postcard I received then. You were very excited about it.

  ACKER: Yeah, but we didn’t know how to sail…I guess I just want to go on a journey and so I start with a sentence and then it goes somewhere. The language twists and turns and you don’t even remember where you’ve been, you’re just always going somewhere, you know, you’re always faced with the present. It goes somewhere in the sentence, it goes somewhere in the paragraph, it goes somewhere in the story, you always end up somewhere. You want to be surprised. That’s what I like, all writers like. I mean I don’t see any reason why all writers should, but what I like is to learn something. You know, to have that sense of wonder. I’ve always made myself write two pages a day, sometimes more, never less, but I’m not satisfied until I have that sense of wonder. Of course you can’t always do that on the final draft.

  LOTRINGER: You connected the method of plagiarism to the idea of postmodernism.

  ACKER: I’m not the only one who connects appropriation to postmodernism…

  LOTRINGER: But do you feel connected to this idea of postmodernism, or is it like a handy way of getting rid of the question?

  ACKER: It’s funny, when you use words like postmodernism or deconstruction, you’ve got such a questioning in your voice. There’s two things. One is why I work the way I work. Two is how people talk about my work. The two aren’t separate, and after a while it becomes a chicken–egg thing. They join. When I first met you, I wouldn’t have used the word postmodernist. However, fifteen years later, since the most accurate critical stuff that’s been done on my work has been using words like postmodernist—unless they’re into Oh-Kathy-Acker-is-a-Punk business, that sort of nonsense—yes, I do connect it, because you don’t operate separate from society. The community decision has been to use the word postmodernism about various ways of working, about a decentralized narrative, about switching genders, about various feminist techniques and explorations, so yes, I do use the word postmodernism.

  LOTRINGER: You didn’t use “deconstructions” in the Derridean sense, so I guess you don’t use “postmodernism” the way Baudrillard has it either—or rather the way it’s been adopted by the art world here—of the collapse of reality into hyperreality and the extenuation of all political stakes. I mean, appropriation isn’t simulation.

  ACKER: This business about postmodernism has exploded in all sort of ways, some of it really ugly really. Its apolitical, surface-crap—not that Baudrillard is apolitical, it’s not apolitical at all, but it’s a different sort of politics. I have been out of the art world for many years, so I’m not terribly interested. And in England it mainly means designer-chic. But I don’t know any other word to use. My work always reached beyond simply theoretical play. I’ve always had a kind of concern with politics.

  LOTRINGER: Frankly, it was difficult for me to reconcile your work with the superficiality and loss of affect associated with Baudrillard’s conceptualization.

  ACKER: Well, there’s a certain way—a certain sleek way—that you can talk about surfaces because you’re using other texts. But if I have to talk about why I have decentralized narrative, why I don’t have what’s known as well-rounded and flat characters (which would be a nineteenth-century way of constructing them), why I basically don’t have character at all, or if I do, why they’re very much defined by surrounding contexts—you know, basically I’m writing environment, I’m not writing character—why I don’t deal with psychology in the Freudian sense, I have to talk about postmodernism. But that’s different from Baudrillard.

  LOTRINGER: They often use the word collage and punk together with postmodernism to talk about your work.

  ACKER: Yeah, but I don’t work collage. I mean, you could say it’s collage, but I’ve never worked by chance methods. That’s the only thing. There’s always a reason why things are the way they are. It’s just not linear narrative, not linear causality. If we talk about the attack on the oedipal myth, then we can really start seeing why things are the way they are in my books. I’ve got to have that, otherwise it’s just like, Oh hi! Its like Dada. And I don’t think I’m really a Dadaist. I’m not John Cage. John Cage is really the one who did chance workings. To me it’s real ‘60s movement.

  LOTRINGER: Actually you’re pretty deliberate about your choice of material.

  ACKER: Yeah. Sometimes I play with nonsense, but I’m not really interested in that. The language poets of the early days were playing with nonsense, cutting down a sentence. In my last two books, the whole emphasis is about sense. It’s just that I don’t like the sense that’s given us. So it’s toward a reformation of what would be sense. If you scratch hard, you find that I’m a humanist in some weird way. Well, humanist…you know what I mean.

  LOTRINGER: Why do you think there’s a change in your writing? (Why are you trying to build…characters more?)

  ACKER: After Don Quixote I got sick of—all right, you don’t call it “deconstruction”—whatever I was doing. At one point, I thought there was a real need to examine certain things because there was so much hypocrisy. But it really broke down, especially after Watergate. Everybody now knows what’s happening. They might not want to see it, but certainly all the information is out in the open. You don’t have to keep examining everything to see how it works, people sort of know. They just don’t give a damn. We all know the CIA has done lots of chemical warfare testing and things like that. And I thought—you know, we’re wandering around and we don’t know what to do, basically living in a sort of hell, with AIDS and crack and everything else—what was needed now to do is to start constructing, to start actually making things. I don’t like the nineteenth-century novel, so I started reading a lot of either Third World or very old narratives and trying to use them. I became very interested in myths.

  5. MYTHS

  ACKER: What I tried to do in Empire of the Senseless was to start to make a kind of myth that would be applicable to me and my friends. I mean it was just the beginning of doing something. It was still the old stuff, but there’s a narrative there, there’s some way of trying to find something…

  LOTRINGER: Myth’s the primitive side of narrative anyway.

  ACKER: Yeah, and that’s what I’m really interested in. The new book, In Memoriam to
Identity, is very much more that, so a lot of the old stuff’s been taken out. I mean, I still use other texts—mainly William Faulkner and a little bit of Rimbaud—I still plagiarize, I still do everything I’ve done, but it’s cleaned up so that the primitive narrative is coming through more strongly.

  LOTRINGER: Why used Rimbaud and Faulkner at all then?

  ACKER: I have to use other texts when I write. I mean, that’s just how I am. Now I’m using writers mainly because I want to learn from them, and there’s always something I want to learn. I wanted Rimbaud as a visionary, and Faulkner because of the Americana business. I want to learn from Rimbaud and Faulkner about myth because they’re both myth-dealers.

  LOTRINGER: Myth-dealing, I agree, is essential, especially after the collapse of cold socialism. Myths aren’t just a narrative you can identify with, they’re meant to mobilize. They’re a powerful emotional bond. No society can do without them, and unless their absence is dealt with promptly, in the proper fashion, they’re bound to creep back either through violence (fascism) or vacancy (the void of the media). At this point, studying myths isn’t enough, you’ve got to create them. Bataille understood that perfectly.

  ACKER: I think it’s time we start making our own myths really. We’re not controlled by economics, we’re controlled by myths. It’s becoming more and more clear now that the information revolution’s happened.

  LOTRINGER: So where do you go to find myths? The Aztecs or the Yanaomanis?

  ACKER: No. Me, I go to classical Greek myths. That’s what I grew up with. At the moment. Who knows about the future? I mean, that’s what tattooing is for me, it’s myth.

  LOTRINGER: You seem to become more and more myth. I mean, I see more and more tattoos cropping on you each time we meet. [laughs] They’re just proliferating. You must have been very busy. Are you going to have tattoos on both shoulders and in the back?

  ACKER: No, I’m not going to have them on that shoulder. I’m going to have these come down diagonally on the back. I’ll leave the shoulders as is, for the moment. I mean, it’s been growing for two years. [laughs] I’m now getting these tribal things.

  LOTRINGER: You’re always going for the powerful stuff: sex, politics, tattoos, stuff that’s close to the chest and capable of stirring strong emotional reactions. I think they’re mythical triggers, not realistic descriptions. Some people, of course, take them literally…Last time you performed in Germany, didn’t they have you tour these porn places!

  ACKER: That’s in the new novel. I had to perform in sex shows…They were very literal about sex, Jesus!

  LOTRINGER: Didn’t you have problems at one time with women’s groups in California because of that?

  ACKER: Yeah, but that was a long time ago. I had trouble with the old feminists because of my interest in the nexus of sexuality and politics, and that was anathema to them. That was what I would call the con of equality, that was the flag the old feminists were waving, so there was a lot of antagonism. However, that’s not true now, especially not true of feminism in the United States.

  LOTRINGER: They’re not afraid of sex.

  ACKER: No, not at all. [laughs] I’m not a straightforward feminist, but my interest is in the feminism, that’s a change since I left New York. And my best critics are feminist. That’s simply where I would locate myself. It’s when feminism came together with postmodernism, that’s when I could locate what I was doing. So I don’t have a problem with women’s groups anymore. In fact, it’s the opposite. But I’m banned in Germany because of it.

  LOTRINGER: By women’s groups?

  ACKER: No, banned. Real censorship. Court verdict. The whole business.

  LOTRINGER: Did they realize that your stuff has been lifted from books that aren’t banned…

  ACKER: In this court verdict they wrote down the plot—it’s Blood and Guts that’s banned in Germany. And the poor guys couldn’t even figure out what the plot was. So they banned me for three reasons, and one of the reasons is experimentality…

  LOTRINGER: That’s a good one. [both laugh]

  ACKER: Could you see these judges, I mean…

  LOTRINGER: And experimentality was the major accusation?

  ACKER: No, there were three major reasons. First, kinder sex…

  LOTRINGER: Kinder sex, ah ah.

  ACKER: Which is great. That’s between Janey and her father. They didn’t get it that it was a sort of double-play. They thought it was real. They took everything absolutely literally? Janey has sex with her father—that’s kinder sex. I kept wondering where’s kinder sex in the novel at first. Then there’s S&M, which is probably the most correct thing they came up with. Yes, there’s S&M in the book. And then there’s experimentality. So they got a précis of the plot, and when they came to the Persian poems…

  LOTRINGER: What did they do with that?

  ACKER: Oh, God! [laughs] They didn’t know what to do, obviously! I mean, you read this court verdict and it’s sort of like, Get it out of here! Just don’t want this thing! [laughs hysterically] Then they investigated me and found out I had worked as a stripper and said, Though she’s well known by women to be interested in the Women’s Questions, she doesn’t discuss the Women’s Questions enough and she’s worked as a stripper. [laughs]

  LOTRINGER: And working as a stripper, that’s not working at the Women’s Question?

  ACKER: God!

  LOTRINGER: Well, I know for a fact that you’re totally different from what you write.

  ACKER: Well, it’s a big question. It’s a problem personally. It’s a horror story. I mean, for the writing I don’t have a problem. For making friends…That’s one of the reasons I’m coming back to New York, my community knows who I am. In England it was absolutely horrible. In England, when I went there, the media had made this huge image of Kathy Acker. I mean—I used to joke with a friend of mine—there’re two Kathy Ackers and everybody talks to this other…person. It was a problem with friendship, especially if you wanted to have sex with anybody. Because the media image is so much this kind of sexual image, and if you try to say, Hi! Me! Person…[whispers] I’m sure there’re tons of Kathy Ackers, some who know each other. But this media image is, you know…I mean, I’m very well-known there and I get tons of work. But to say that they like what I do, no, I wouldn’t say that. They fetishize what I do.

  LOTRINGER: It’s also something you obviously play with.

  ACKER: Of course.

  LOTRINGER: But you don’t expect people to escalate it.

  ACKER: Oh, it was pretty absurd there. At a certain point it’s hard to play with it, it’s just, Oh Jesus Christ! I mean, you can say anything to them, you giggle. Most people think I’m much harder than I am.

  LOTRINGER: I always knew that. But I think it’s part of the Black Tarantula syndrome. One of the ways of making your work legitimate is to work it through yourself. If you are not the I, but the I becomes you, then you have to, like, offer it as some sort of performance.

  ACKER: Yeah, I think that’s very precise. So it’s like an actress or something. I act through the novels.

  LOTRINGER: And beside the novels too. [laughs]

  ACKER: Yeah. When I’m writing I become the characters in the novel, but the characters in the novel aren’t me. People always think they’re me. And it’s a drag.

  LOTRINGER: That’s what happens when you’re a dealer with myths. You become myth. Genet, Pasolini, Artaud, Rimbaud, Burroughs, they all went through that. But that was mostly before media…Now you don’t even need a real biography—sex, drugs, jail, murder, madness. All you need is—what—tattoos? One problem is that you don’t have the straight mythical element that saves in Genet or Artaud, I mean the saving grace: the sacred, the ritual…

  ACKER: Well, I think more and more I have the body. I am very much a primitive if you scratch me.

  LOTRINGER: Yes, but it’s all on the surface. It’s like myth-making. You don’t have a body, you’re a body-dealer. A body-maker. The body takes the place of the I.

/>   ACKER: Yeah, because the body’s more text. That’s right. But I wouldn’t call that sexuality…

  LOTRINGER: What would you call it?

  ACKER: Well, I guess everything’s sexual, it depends how you define sexuality. But obviously I do bodybuilding and that’s starting to work into my text. There’s no way it can’t. I spend too much time bodybuilding. And it became a real crisis for me, because either I had to stop bodybuilding or I had to stop writing because the two are starting to conflict.

  LOTRINGER: You do a lot of bodybuilding?

  ACKER: Right now I train five times a day with a trainer.

  LOTRINGER: Really?

  ACKER: Yeah. I mean I could train for competition if I wanted to. Which I don’t. This is as serious as I ever got, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last because it’s pretty serious. I love it. I really love it. And it’s teaching me a lot about writing.

  LOTRINGER: How so?

  ACKER: Because it’s about focusing and about consciousness. And it’s about focusing through pain. I mean, it’s how the bodywork and writing, as you said, is about rhythm. It has a lot to do with the body, writing. People assume it comes from up here, right, it’s not material, whereas bodybuilding isn’t cerebral. But those are ridiculous distinctions, as we both know. So in a way they’re complementary. They work together. And how they work together I’m really fascinated by. It’s only Mishima, I think, that’s really talked about it.