by Kathy Acker
BODDY: Do you think when people read to themselves they get these rhythms?
ACKER: People say to me it’s very different to hear me read aloud.
BODDY: William Gass has said that he doesn’t want his readers to speed-read and so he tries to slow them down. How do you slow the reader down?
ACKER: You just increase the tension in language. The first section I read is very open language, and you read it fast. The more poetic it becomes, the more density there is, you slow it down.
BODDY: It’s also punctuation.
ACKER: Well, a comma’s a breath, and a sentence is a thought, and a paragraph is an emotion. This is just pure Charles Olson. You’re always working the paragraph against the sentence.
BODDY: Writing your work to be read aloud means in some ways you are emulating the techniques of oral storytelling as well as poetry.
ACKER: I think I’m totally into storytelling. My interest in narrative is an interest in myth. That’s what I do, is tell stories; I just don’t tell one story, I tell lots of stories and they all intertwine. I mean now, in the later novels. I have very little interest not in storytelling; what I read is mainly storytelling. But it’s an oral tradition.
BODDY: In his 1934 essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin claimed that storytelling was dying out.
ACKER: I think now the novel is dying out, and the big question is: What is needed? What is necessary? The novel is irrelevant in a way.
BODDY: Benjamin linked storytelling with community life; the novel was the genre of solitary individuals.
ACKER: Now people don’t have the kind of lives where they sit and read a novel. Except the most commercial stuff, what you read on a plane just to get through the plane ride—which is when most people read novels. But there is a real need for performative stuff, for oral stuff. In America the oral tradition is huge now, the spoken word is very lively. Dennis [Cooper] is very involved in all that stuff.
BODDY: Does the internet provided a kind of community?
ACKER: I think there was a golden age of the Net, when people were suddenly just allowed to write and they wrote incredible amounts of stuff. People felt free to write however they pleased. One thing that doesn’t go on the Net is punctuation, proper grammar. I think it’s all changing; the Net’s changing. Right now all the publishers want all the rights whenever you do anything for them. And the reason is that they want Net rights. What are they going to do with them? I never sell Net rights. I put everything up on the webpage. But I think Grove can go fuck it. They’re not going to make money out of Net rights, but they just want to own what you do outright.
BODDY: You’ve described yourself as coming out of a poetry tradition—the Black Mountain poets, who were all concerned with finding individual voices. You’ve said that you moved away from them because you couldn’t find your own voice, you didn’t have a voice. Now your novels are certainly recognizable as yours. Do you think you have a voice, or is style different from voice?
ACKER: I guess something’s developed that sounds like me. I would say it’s narrowed. I can’t answer that. I think I’m probably fairly identifiable, but I don’t know what it is. For me, voice meant I want to express this—what Jerome Rothenberg thought was that voice meant “This is my stance in the world, and therefore I’m going to write the piece from this stance.” I think that was what I was revolting against. Do I think that I have a certain stance? Probably one’s developed because there certainly is a kind of history now. I think the main problem when I write is that you get into these troughs where it is too easy, you’ve done it already and could easily do it again. Worse than that is that you build up expectations.
BODDY: How do you resist that?
ACKER: God, you just have to search for new material that’s free, that hasn’t been touched. That’s difficult, because it is so easy to go where you’ve gone before, and it’s such a bad mistake.
BODDY: I was in Brighton two years ago when you spoke about “languages of the body” that you find, and which you distinguished from language about the body.
ACKER: I little knew how that idea would escalate, that’s all I can say! That’s what my whole life has become, because that’s what the cancer was—literally language coming out through the body. It was totally transformative in that way. That’s what I’m writing about now. I don’t know how to say this theoretically—the connections between my body, language, and meaning, if you like—myth or narrative. One thing I learned working with cancer is—and we’re talking metaphorically now—that it’s as if there are different emanations. Only the physical emanations are visible, and behind the physical lies what’s called the emotional body. You can regard cancer as a physical disease and treat it accordingly, or you can go back and search for the roots of it in the emotional, causal body. It has to do with various turnings of meanings, and it has to do with how energy works. So suddenly story, meaning, and energy are very closely intertwined. Now we don’t think that really because we are big old rationalists; we think story basically doesn’t exist—it’s something we make up. But to find out that story lies there, behind material reality, is something incredible. For instance, this parasite thing—I haven’t been able to get well—and then I realized that the thing that led to it was an incident that for whatever reasons was like a little window to something that happened before I was born—that is my father left my mother before I was born. And suddenly I saw the reason I wasn’t getting well. I thought what was it to be in my mother’s womb and have my mother lose her husband. I think it is what Benjamin meant when he was thinking of Karl Kraus, by “breath,” or “in the beginning was the word.” In the beginning was me, “causality is perfect”—it all means something. And that is absolutely antithetical to what we’ve been taught; we don’t really think it means anything. The novel’s all based on “you make it up.” I’m finding the opposite. You don’t make it up. It’s sitting there. The universe is meaning.
BODDY: How does what you are doing, not necessarily now but in the past, link to modernist writing about the body? A sense that when other value systems break down, there is a refuge in the body, in sexuality. Do you feel a connection?
ACKER: Absolutely. I think that is an ongoing tradition. The turn to sexuality is a basic. That’s very American, I think—that kind of physicality: Emerson, Thoreau’s body in nature, Margaret Fuller saying the best thing is waves. I work with my fascinations, and sometimes I don’t know why I’m fascinated—and I’ve always been fascinated with sexuality. Some of the time I was just goofing or parodying; I wasn’t trying to find a meaning there until the later work. I guess that alternative tradition in America is very strong. Sex is something very weird in Britain. It’s always seen as something satanic.
BODDY: How much is coming to language through the body like automatic writing?
ACKER: It’s about language and the body. Coming through the body can also just mean speech; it doesn’t have to mean cut-up or poetic. If you hear it, it’s coming through the body.
BODDY: The Surrealist experiments with automatic language were all to do with the mind and the unconscious, rather than the body.
ACKER: To an extent I was influenced by the Surrealists, but they were Descartians, they were Freudians: they weren’t interested in the body. The body deals with narratives. I don’t mean stories. The knee gets hurt and then it gets better.
BODDY: Narrative is about chronology, which was one of the things Surrealism rejected. It was also a rejection of rationalism.
ACKER: Which was really valuable, and a lot of their experiments were certainly behind a lot of the stuff I learned as a kid.
BODDY: Do you see a turning point in your work, from destroying in some way, to building?
ACKER: I think it’s both building and finding meaning. The way I think of it now, and I guess I’m totally influenced by having gone through all this stuff, is that you don’t build—because that puts you in the position of maker—but you find. You free the energy, and i
n that way you build. That’s what literature would do; that’s the old idea of catharsis. That’s one of the well-springs of literature for us: that it’s the healing that’s done prior to the ceremony. That’s what those Greek dramas were. One thing literature can do is healing. It’s the old stuff—prior to the novel.
BODDY: How much is the finding of meaning individual, and how much is it something like the Jungian idea of tapping into archetypes?
ACKER: I’ve been reading Jung all summer. I haven’t put this together theoretically at all. If you’re asking how individuality fits into all this, we’re probably going to posit a whole other idea of what it is to be a self, and the self/other relationship. In this way, the work Blanchot and Bataille did was seminal. Blanchot, talking of Bataille, shows how consciousness comes from intercourse with another person. We’re going to find that we’re related to each other in ways that we didn’t imagine. I certainly don’t question individuality. Reading this book about Emerson and his friends, I was thinking how writers really come in clumps—not that there’s a group soul, but there are certainly times when energy is there, and other times when it doesn’t exist.
BODDY: Do you feel then that you’re part of a clump? Of a group?
ACKER: I do and I don’t. I feel very close to two writers—to Iain Sinclair and to Jeanette Winterson. I feel that we are on the same wavelength. I feel very close to the healing community. There are writers I am close to in America, but they are not novelists.
BODDY: Would you define your books as novels?
ACKER: To tell you the truth, not terribly. There’re big chunks of prose. But are they novels? More groups of stories. Some of them aren’t even that…somewhat philosophical treatises. They’re hotchpotches, aren’t they? I don’t know how you’d define them. They’re romances. They’re really that American strange thing. Melville was always my great hero.
BODDY: You describe yourself sometimes as a pirate—finding things, taking things—but also as an explorer. Explorers discover new places, whereas pirates always go where someone else has been. Are these two roles different?
ACKER: They’re not different for me because everything under the sun starts from stuff that’s left. I don’t see how you go somewhere new without going through detritus, garbage. You have to have ways of understanding the thing or you won’t come back. What did Cixous say about Moses? Most people who go into the wilderness don’t come back; they’re transformed. To come back, there has to be something of the old system of meaning. Otherwise how can Moses talk to the people?
BODDY: What have you taken with you in your explorations into, say, the languages of the body?
ACKER: In my case, I’m really linked to certain lineages. I’m a very traditional writer in certain ways. I come so definitely out of Burroughs and Miller and that group of writers. You can see where I’m coming from. I go my own steps further—added a bit of theory, added a bit of Black Mountain poetry. If you’re asking what I take with me, I couldn’t have done what I’ve done, whatever that is, if I hadn’t come out of those lineages.
BODDY: It’s a very male tradition.
ACKER: Extremely.
BODDY: The only woman you talk about in your book of essays, Bodies of Work, is Colette.
ACKER: Those essays are just what people asked me to write. But it’s true, I do come out of male traditions very strongly. Men have had the power, the language, the voice.
BODDY: Yet there have been many women writers, and women’s traditions. Was there something there that you didn’t want?
ACKER: Well, the feminist sixties and seventies turned me off because it was really strident. What I was given when I was growing up was the women’s tradition of writing…was fairly staid realist writing. Ellen Friedman, when she published that book Breaking the Sequence, about radical women writing, she turned me on quite a bit. Until then I didn’t think it through, but it’s very obvious that the strong radical tradition in America in prose is female. But that’s not the accepted story—especially after The Madwoman in the Attic—because that book was the canon, and everyone thought the most radical you’d get was Willa Cather. I actually like Willa Cather a great deal. But that’s it. I grew up hating that stuff. I’d rather be one of the bad boys than be a good girl. Feminism, when I grew up, was restrictive. I remember going to them in the early days and saying “Hi, here’s my writing,” and them saying “You’re a man, get out of here.” I just didn’t fit at all.
BODDY: Some critics argue that nonlinear writing—breaking the sequence—is particularly female—that women don’t live linear lives, think linearly as men do. Do you agree that a particular way of writing like that can be particularly male or female?
ACKER: I wonder if there is a woman’s experience. I would say that if I thought of anything being a woman’s experience it would be like Cixous taking about the spectre, and the spectre talks about stealing. And she says the thing is to steal and not know you’re doing anything wrong. It would be to just write the way you do and not know how radical it was. What would women’s writing be like? I guess that part of me does feel that there is this flow that’s spiral and undulating and has to do with female writing. It comes down to the question of whether there are essentially women and men. What would non-difference look like?
BODDY: In Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson explored the idea of androgynous language. Do you think there can be androgynous language, language without gender?
ACKER: Actually I don’t think so. I know Jeanette thinks so, and I wonder if she’s preserving certain territory when she says that. I used to think so until last time I was pregnant. I knew it was the last time I was ever going to have a chance to be pregnant. There was no way I could keep the child. It was a very painful abortion, emotionally, and it made me think that like it or not, there is a very deep way in which we are connected to wombs, to childbearing. It’s there. One can’t discount the physical. I have friends now who are changing genders, and I know it’s very big. I know there are probably mid-genders but, in my experience, there is something about having a womb that can’t be discounted.
BODDY: Do you think you can identify a piece of writing as being by a woman?
ACKER: No, I don’t at all. Partly what a novelist does is write in other voices. We don’t write ourselves. Henry James is one of the great writers of women. In that way, I agree with Jeanette that the writer is truly androgynous. The writer is a channeler. In a way, the writer doesn’t exist; you’re as good as what comes through you, and God knows what comes through you. I guess I think both—that there is something about having a certain body and maybe that has its imprint on the writing, but there is also the fact that one isn’t writing oneself. Although in the transmitting, one is writing a self.
BODDY: I was reading an interview in which you described In Memoriam as a turning point in your writing: that before that, form was determined by theory, and that now form was “coming more organically in the sense that it’s based on theme.”
ACKER: I did an interview with Iain Sinclair, and Iain said it very precisely: that what you do when you write is go out and find. You’re looking for the story and you find it. It’s organic in the way that you’re not making the story up; the story is already there and you’re letting it come through.
BODDY: And the form in which the story comes is in some way natural?
ACKER: It’s in whatever it’s in.
BODDY: Do you think your earlier work was imposing forms on stories?
ACKER: No, I think I’ve always written this way. I don’t think I ever imposed a form. I’ve always written organically, except for Kathy Goes to Haiti—that was totally different, there was nothing organic about that book. I just wanted to write a porn novel so I could make money. It was a calculated grab for money, and I lost. There was a porn company which was giving poets $800 for a porn novel. All my friends had done one, and I thought I could use $800. So I went ahead and it was really boring. I got totally bored and I started making joke
s and messing around. But it was planned. By organic, I mean it forms itself as it proceeds, as opposed to you sit down and you plan it out.
BODDY: Do you think you’ve always been more interested in form than content?
ACKER: I’ve always thought more about form than content. I never thought about content. And now? Probably not. It’s hard to think about content. Now it’s just voices, I look for the energy. I’m a process writer; that’s all I’ve ever meant.
BODDY: What’s the new book?
ACKER: God knows. I’m just starting it. I was going to write a book about healing, and I got through the introduction and about fifty pages and thought I really hate nonfiction—I’m totally bored. Why write about what you know already? So I thought it does have to be fiction, but I definitely want to use a lot of the material. It’s great material. I’ve written quite a bit, but the beginning is just starting.
BODDY: The humor in your work is something that I think tends to be overlooked.
ACKER: I think my sense of humor is very black. It’s goofy. For me to write and be satisfied, there has to be something outrageous. I have to have the feeling that nobody could possibly do this, it’s too stupid. And then I feel comfortable with it.
BODDY: So it’s not that you’re trying to shock?
ACKER: No, I don’t have a sense of an audience that would be shocked. I live in my own baby-crib to a large extent. When I first came over here and all these people were shocked, I was in shock! “It’s just words, what’s your problem?!” I had been in New York and I was in a baby-crib with poets and artists, and they’re not shocked. I had no sense that what I was doing was shocking.