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Feminist Solidarity and Experiment in Kathy Acker’s Early Writings

2018; Eastern Michigan University; Volume: 48; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jnt.2018.0013

1549-0815

Georgina Colby,

American Literature and Culture

Feminist Solidarity and Experiment in Kathy Acker’s Early Writings Georgina Colby (bio) This essay takes up questions of the relation between political forms of solidarity and literary experiment as feminist homage as these materialize in the early writings of the late modernist experimental writer Kathy Acker. Many of Acker’s juvenilia, written in the 1970s, remain unpublished and have therefore not entered Acker scholarship until now. Acker, a self-consciously radical, political writer, uses experimental composition throughout her entire oeuvre to critique the narratives of late capitalism and American republican political discourse. This critique is, in part, explicit in the content of all of Acker’s works. Richard Nixon, for example, appears in Don Quixote (1986) as the revolutionary female knight’s rival, and George Bush’s political discourse is explicitly parodied in My Mother: Demonology (1993). In response to her political critique, critics such as Alex Houen have rigorously contextualized and analyzed Acker’s works through the prism of biopolitics and liberationary politics.1 Acker’s unpublished, handwritten notebooks, housed in the Kathy Acker Papers at Duke University, reveal a continuing engagement with revolutionary politics and the question of freedom. Acker kept handwritten notebooks throughout her career, in which she would write sections of prose and life writing, experiment with language, and write on politics and philosophy. In one early notebook, titled “On Freedom and Democracy,” Acker explores the issue of equality.2 She opens the notebook with a statement by the French philosopher Edgar Morin—“Communism is the major question and the [End Page 290] principle experience of my life. I have never stopped expressing myself in the aspirations it expresses and I still believe in the possibility of another society and another humanity.” She then notes, “Fall of communism brought about this statement. then & now.” Citing Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on redefining community, Acker scribbles, “Equality is the foundation of communism in that ‘there can be no community until the needs of man are equally fulfilled’—an immanent humanity according to Jean-Luc Nancy.” Acker’s remarks in her notebooks, which reveal her evident engagement with revolutionary philosophy and politics, are foundational to her final published works. Acker’s published works, such as the section of Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the U.S. titled “Communist Narration,” reflect her interest in communism and imbricate the ideals of equality with experimental form.3 In another section, entitled “The New Life: Pain Diary,” the narrative voice states: I’m talking about ways of being relating to other people you and you I’m talking about the messy way necessary way of creating (political) revolution. Acker gestures here to the relation between solidarity and political revolution. She aligns ontological states, “ways of being,” with “relating to other people,” and understands such a relation to be a pathway to revolution. All of Acker’s works engage with revolution in some form, and often the narrative voice is allied with revolutionary groups. Empire of the Senseless (1988) is set in an apocalyptic world that fuses the Haitian and Algerian revolutions; in Don Quixote, Acker’s female knight is associated with the revolutionary politics and aesthetics of the Russian Constructivists; O, the leader of Acker’s revolutionary pirates in Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996) was born in Algeria and leads the female pirates to the revolutionary Place of Transformations. In such works, revolution is at the forefront of the politics. For Acker, revolution—the ability to bring about transformation—is intrinsically related to experimental form. This essay explores the relation between experimental composition and radical politics in Acker’s early poetic exercises. Many of her works are experiments with poetic form and involve the creation of what she terms in The Destruction of the U.S.: The [End Page 291] Burning Bombing of America “non-language” (173). With political change “begins this dense hardly understandable material” (17). Acker’s forms of writing complement the theory that Carla Harryman has termed non/narrative: “an intervention into theories of narrative insofar as these tend to diminish or ignore the function of non-narrative language in literary works” (“Introduction: Non/Narrative” 1).4 The...