Kathy Acker's "Blood and Guts in High School"

Of course just when first flipping through the novel/modern art/pastiche, I was taken aback at the sexual sketches, the Book of the Dead images and typewritten text, the drawn maps of her dreams, handwritten translation notes, and even at the narrative fragmentation morphing from script of a play to diary entries to poetry. Kathy Acker’s work solidly fits within Fredric Jameson’s perimeters of postmodernity’s depthlessness, play, and pastiche even before we start reading it! Once we do, however, we’re immediately confronted with an ambiguous incestuous relationship. I kept questioning, perhaps optimistically, if Johnny really was Janey’s father. After the destabilizing opening sequence, the narration continues the fragmentation of Janey’s identity by referring to Janus, her namesake, the two-faced goddess looking in opposite directions. Even by the end of the work, readers could never piece together a coherent identity or personality for her. This accentuates Jameson’s claim that postmodernity shifts the “dynamics of cultural pathology” from the modernist “alienation of the subject” to the “fragmentation of the subject” (PM 63).

            I was the most interested in Acker’s plagiarism (or resurrecting and revitalizing) of Sextus Propertius’ poetry. The original’s eroticism, masochism, and themes of patriarchal sexual slavery and rape mirror Janey’s love-hate relationship with her pimp. Janey’s versions/translations are surprisingly close to other more authoritative translations, yet include snippets from her own reality: watching TV and writing poems instead of weaving and listening to a lyre, for instance. The overall effect of the poems, the narrative, the imagery, simulates the schizophrenic, incoherent attempts that Janey makes to defy her agony.