Acker, Kathy

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ACKER, Kathy

Born 18 April 1947, New York, New York

Daughter of Donald and Claire Weill Lehman; married Robert Acker, 1966 (divorced); Peter Gordon, 1976 (divorced)

Often referred to as a punk and, later, a postmodern writer, Kathy Acker is actively involved in the construction of new myths by which to live. Like many of the artists and writers who have influenced her work, she does not draw easy distinctions between life and art, sometimes consciously making up contradicting stories about her past. In this way, Acker becomes as much of a literary construct as any of her characters.

The daughter of wealthy Jewish parents who disowned her, Acker grew up in Manhattan where she wrote poetry from an early age and read voraciously. She was so attached to her books she sometimes performed ceremonies in which she married them. She received a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 1968, having transferred there from Brandeis two years earlier. She also completed two years of graduate work at New York University and City University of New York, studying English, classics, and philosophy. After Blood and Guts in High School (1984) sold well in England, she moved to London for several years, finding it more supportive of writers than New York. Subsequently, she moved to San Francisco, where she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Acker's influences are many and include photographers, filmmakers, and artists. Having grown up in New York's post-Beat art world, it is those writers and poets who had the strongest influence on the early shaping of her sensibility. The explorations of memory and the "madeness" of language through formal styles such as repetition, used in the work of Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson, Jerry Rothenberg, and David Antin, and Beats like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, appear in much of Acker's writing.

Her first privately published book, Politics (1972), came out of her experience working in sex shows on 42nd Street—something of a "test" of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then Acker's work has always had an important political edge. Because labels tend to diffuse that edge, she rejects words like "experimental" to describe her work. Even so, Acker is an experimental writer, in what has become the conventional understanding of the term. She is perhaps best known, and least understood, for her extensive formal use of plagiarism.

To call attention to the already appropriated status of their images and to her refusal or inability to partake in similar, patriarchally determined productions, Acker literally copies from a number of mostly Western, classic literary texts (Freud, Genet, de Sade, Cervantes, Twain). Not a response to a Barthian understanding of the diminished possibilities of literature in its postmodern state of exhaustion, instead Acker's "plagiarism" critiques and rewrites Western cultural myths in ways that consciously disclaim any pretension to originality or mastery. In this respect it can also be recognized as a survival strategy in a world where master narratives of freedom and truth have been exposed as such, leaving these appropriated acts the only ones available.

Although often criticized by feminists for the violent and pornographic elements of her novels, Acker is clearly involved in a project to explore the conditions of living in a society that depends on the economic and sexual dependence of some of its members, including women. Her main characters, who are often on some sort of quest, are always outside of the mainstream; they are would-be pirates, cyborgs, or sex-show workers. In this sense, Acker's feminist sensibility is evident in most of her writing. Her most explicitly feminist novel is probably Don Quixote (1986), in which Acker refigures the title character as a contemporary woman on a search for love. The obstacles she encounters are historical, mythical, and literary patriarchal figures (Christ, Machiavelli, Richard Nixon).

Acker carries out the examinations of power structures and relations on both thematic and formal levels. Her writing occasionally resembles that of Gertrude Stein in its careful and consistent attention to the material qualities of language and the possibilities they provide. Like Stein too, Acker connects these with the materiality of the body, going a step further and, as Ellen G. Friedman notes, locating the body itself as a potential "site of revolution." In Empire of the Senseless (1988) she looks to tattoos, a material writing on the body, as a possibility of controlling the means of sign production and self-representation.

Pussy, King of the Pirates (1995) drew upon the same themes evident throughout Acker's previous body of work. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, the book incorporates references ranging from Antigone to Newt Gingrich, features a chameleon like-first-person narrator, and includes graphic descriptions of menstruation, incest, and sex. The New York Times Book Review noted that, in Pussy, Acker "engages in some of her favorite pastimes: decoding language, debunking culture, deconstructing (if that's the right word) gender (that's not the right word)."

Publishers Weekly wrote of Pussy: "Acker writes a deliberately affectless, deadpan prose, rendering both the absurd and the disturbing…with a declarative nonchalance. Like Acker's other work, this campy and enigmatic novel is self-consciously provocative as she detonates her battery of literary and sexual references in order to illuminate themes of masochism and rebellion—but it's also often funny and invariably intelligent."

When an interviewer in 1996 asked Acker why she writes so many sex scenes, often graphic enough to be nearly pornographic, she said, "I'm sure my privileged background has something to do with it, and the fact that my first jobs were in the sex industry. I think I see the world through a sexual lens, like Genet. The idea that you exist to please men—that is almost relentlessly my subject."

In 1997 Acker published Bodies of Work, a series of essays on topics ranging from fine arts, language, and literature to gender, politics, and postmodernism. In her preface she advises her audience to avoid reading the essays in the book. Since fiction allows more freedom than this form, she says, she questions this volume's content. Yet reviewers called the essays—the structure of which range from conventional to pure description—compelling.

Other Works:

I Don't Expect You'll Do the Same, by Clay Fear (1974). I Dreamt I Became a Nymphomaniac! Imagining (1974). The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1975). The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula (1975). Persian Poems (1978). New York City in 1979 (1981). Great Expectations (1982). Hello, I'm Erica Jong (1982). Algeria: A Series of Invocations because Nothing Else Works (1984). Literal Madness: Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida (1988). In Memoriam to Identity (1990). Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991). Portrait of the Eye: Three Novels (reprint, 1992). My Mother: Demonology (1993).

Bibliography:

Dick, L., "Feminism, Writing, Postmodernism," in From My Guy to Sci-fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World, H. Carr, ed. (1989). Hulley, K., "Transgressing Genre: Kathy Acker's Intertext," in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, P. O'Donnell and R. Davis, eds. (1989). McCaffery, L., "The Artists of Hell: Kathy Acker and 'Punk' Aesthetics," in Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction, E. G. Friedman and M. Fuchs, eds. (1989).