Postmodern writer Kathy Acker once referred to
the Beats as “the first breath of fresh air in [her]
life,” and she stated repeatedly that william s.
burroughs was her strongest influence. One of
her most famous novels is Blood and Guts in
HiGH scHool. She was a product of the poetry
and art worlds but wanted to write fiction. Burroughs became her model of a conceptualist fiction
writer. A self-described literary terrorist, Acker
used plagiarism (or piracy, as she liked to say) as a
formal strategy and attempted to use literary forms,
especially the novel, as stages for textual performance art.
She was born Kathy Alexander and grew up
surrounded by privilege in New York City. Her father deserted her mother before she was born, so
the “father” to whom she refers in her work was
her stepfather. She attended exclusive schools
in uptown Manhattan and as a young teenager
began to sneak away downtown to the bohemian
East Village. At age 13 she met gregory corso,
who was a neighbor of her then-boyfriend, filmmaker P. Adams Sitney. Some 20 years later, she
would invite Corso to visit a writing course that
she was teaching at The San Francisco Art Institute, a course in which the students had refused
to read books that she assigned because they
said all books were passé. None of the students
knew who Corso was, nor did they know about
the Beats. As Acker told it, “Gregory, in typical
Gregory fashion, unzipped his pants while reciting his ‘poesia’ and played with a toy gun. From
then on, all the students read poetry. Gregory
lived for two months with the most beautiful girl
in the class.”
In 1964 Acker was a student at Brandeis University and attended a reading by allen ginsberg
and Peter Orlovsky. She recalled that they performed dressed in towels and that during the evening she “learned more about poetry than [she]
had in years of top-level academic training.” At
Brandeis she met her first husband, Robert Acker,
who was a student of Herbert Marcuse. (She would
later marry and divorce the composer Peter Gordon.) The Ackers followed Marcuse to the University of California, San Diego, where Kathy was
a graduate student in literature and also tutored
students in Greek and Latin. It was there that she
also met two of her most important mentors, David
and Eleanor Antin.
Kathy divorced Robert and returned to New
York, supporting herself by working in a live (simulated) sex show, as her family had withdrawn financial support. She returned to San Diego briefly and
at some point worked as a stripper and had a role
in at least one porn film. She also wrote under the
pseudonym The Black Tarantula, going so far as to
be listed under that name in the Manhattan telephone directory.
She lived in New York City during the 1970s
and was part of the downtown art and literary
scenes, as well as the burgeoning punk movement.
One of her memories from about 1976 was her appropriately punkish tribute-by-heckling of Ginsberg
when he made an appearance at CBGB. Years later,
she explained:
[We] had spontaneously attacked and
praised Allen Ginsberg. Attacked him for
being established, established in a society
which we despised, and for bringing something as boring as real poetry into our territory of nihilism, formlessness, and anarchic
joy. We revered him because he, and the rest
of the Beats, were our grandparents. . . .
The Beats had understood what it is to
feel, therefore, to be a deformity in a normal
(right-wing) world. . . . Ginsberg’s joy, like
our joy, had the sharpness, the nausea, of all
that comes from pain, from suffering.
During this post-San Diego period, Acker
discovered Burroughs; his cut-up technique became crucial to her development as a writer.
In 1989 she told Sylvére Lotringer that she had
Acker, Kathy
“used The Third Mind [by Burroughs] as experiments to teach [herself] how to write.” Acker was
anachronising Burroughs’s and Brion Gysin’s book
because the time frame in which she claimed to
have been using it was the late 1960s and early
1970s. The Third Mind was not published until
1978; however, segments of what eventually composed it were published through small presses
between 1960 and 1973, so she likely read early
pieces. She also possibly had access to the manuscript. Some of Acker’s very early works bear the
unmistakable mark of The Third Mind (for example, see Acker’s “Politics” and diary pieces eventually published in 2002 as The Burning Bombing
of America). Acker sliced texts with abandon, disrupting logic and merging images and ideas at the
sentence and word levels.
Most comparisons of Burroughs and Acker
tend to focus on their experimentation becoming
their technique and vice versa; the usefulness of
the cut-up to demonstrate literary deviance; and
their critiques of established systems that brainwash people so that they become instruments of
the control machine that language represents.
Burroughs’s influence is not as obvious in
Acker’s later writing but is arguably there on politically and socially important levels because she
seems to have gendered Burroughs’s theories about
the relationship among power, language, and politics. The various personae she projected through
her writing, her performances, and her very body
reveal increasingly sophisticated and subtle applications of the cut-up technique. The concept
became instrumental not only in her attempts to
find a language of the body but also in her overall automythographical project as she disassembled
layers of patriarchal “myth” which are the result of
and, in turn, continue to dictate and underlie the
controlling Logos that both she and Burroughs
wished to disassemble. Burroughs’s “reality studio”
was her patriarchal language.
Acker lived in England throughout most of
the 1980s and returned to New York City and San
Francisco in the early 1990s, continuing to write,
teach, and publish until November 1997 when she
died in an alternative treatment center in Mexico
from complications of metastasized cancer. She was
buried at sea—a fitting tribute to a pirate.
Bibliography
Acker, Kathy. “Allen Ginsberg: A Personal Portrait.”
“Magazine Articles” folder. Box 4. Kathy Acker Papers. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. Duke University.
———. “Politics.” In Hannibal Lecter, My Father, edited
by Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) Native Agents
Series, 25–35. New York: Semiotext(e). 1991.
———. The Burning Bombing of America. In Rip-Off Red,
Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America.
New York: Grove Press, 2002.
Burroughs, William S., and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind.
New York: Viking Press, 1978.
Friedman, Ellen G. “A Conversation with Kathy Acker.”
The Review of Contemporary Fiction. 9:3 (Fall 1989).
12–22.
Lotringer, Sylvère. “Devoured by Myths.” In Hannibal Lecter, My Father, edited by Sylvère Lotringer.
Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series, 1–24. New
York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
Bebe Barefoot