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.

Slaughter-House Five

          Time travel and interplanetary travel as both narrative device and critique on Western assumptions of the absoluteness of time and space allow Kurt Vonnegut to interweave and interrelate the two World Wars to the Vietnam War. References to the painting The Spirit of ’76, the novel The Red Badge of Courage (Simon & Schuster Enriched Classic), and the battle for Hill 875 affiliate the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and the Korean War to his deconstruction of political metanarratives of patriotism. Time travel allows a juxtaposition of the lies told to Pilgrim’s (and Vonnegut’s) generation about WWII to be inscribed on the war of his son’s generation, the Vietnam War. Voyages to Tralfamadore also undermine American metanarratives as the aliens provide an outsider’s perspective to the narrative.

The metanarrative of American imperialism calls for the sacrifice of its citizens (mainly young men) to expand its “much-envied” systems of capitalism and democracy to better the lives of those under the “oppressive” system of communism. Vonnegut undermines these presumptions by retelling his experience at Dresden when Americans bombed civilians under false pretences. Americans, not the enemy, are shown to be “a threat to world peace” (142). Even the disjoined paragraph structure of the novel undermines grand narratives, allowing for gaps in memory, enforced and voluntary silence, and repressed memory. These breaks in narrative emulate the absence of the Dresden raid in the Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two, a conscious decision to keep the events “a secret from the American people” (191). Likewise, the inclusion of living people into a world of fictional characters, some of whom appear in the context of Vonnegut’s other novels, causes the reader to doubt the authenticity of the information provided, thereby calling into question the authoritative voice of historians. For instance the fictive Howard W. Campbell, Jr, the protagonist of Vonnegut’s earlier novel Mother Night, quotes an actual line attributed to the American humorist Kin Hubbard in his critique of capitalism, which he calls America’s “most destructive untruth” (129). Capitalism, he claims, has made American prisoners-of-war the “most self-pitying, least fraternal, and dirtiest of all prisoners of war...incapable of concerted action” (131), hence not the exemplars of “truth, justice, and the American way” which the metanarrative presupposes. As the narrator relates, there are almost no Supermans, almost no All-American boy heroes in this story. Throughout the narrative only Edgar Derby stands up for the American ideals of “freedom and justice and opportunities and fair play for all” (164), only to be killed for a petty crime soon afterwards. Hence, the hero does not triumph as in a Greek epic, but is doomed. Even in the commodity of ideas, the best ideas, like those of Kilgore Trout, cannot rise to the top if, like Trout’s novels, the “prose [is] frightful” (110). The packaging and marketing of ideas, heroes, ideologies, etc is shown to outweigh their inherent value, thus undermining capitalist ideals. Democracy, another component of “the American way,” is also ridiculed through Edgar Derby’s election as the leader of the American prisoners-of-war. An Englishman calls for nominations, when there are none, the Englishman nominates Derby for them, after which two or three of the hundreds of soldiers second the motion while “[m]ost of the Americans were in stupors or asleep” (144).

The Traflamadorians’ ability to observe a fourth dimension, allowing for the collapsing of chronological time, attacks the foundation of history and the causal relationships of the metanarratives (example: if you are good, you will be rewarded, if bad, you will be punished).  Their perspective of reality differs greatly from that of the metanarratives propagated by Western societies. Narratives concerning sex and reproduction (114), chronological linear time (114), war and peace (117), free will (151), the form of human bodies (87), Christianity (108-110), conceptions of beauty (113), etc are all shown to be faulty, subject to the same perspective-shifting as changing of a pair of eyeglasses, being blind, or suffering from blurred vision engenders (emphasized by Billy Pilgrim’s vocation of optometrist). In fact the Tralfamadorians’ ability to see the future as a fact already accomplished indicates that the American-centric belief of causing the destruction of the universe is completely unfounded, since a banal mistake made by a Tralfamadorian test pilot will bring its demise. Depthlessness, as Jameson suggests, reigns. Similarly both the “Three Musketeers,” as signifying to Billy Pilgrim the death of three fellow combatants, and the “Milky Way,” as a reality to him in his space travels, are both reduced to commodities: the candy bars his wife consumes. 

The Crying of Lot 49

         After studying White Noise, I was able to identify similar marks of postmodern thought in Thomas Pyn The Crying of Lot 49. For example in both television is pervasive, as in the homes of many Americans at the time. Like Jack Gladney who tries to “[f]ind the codes and messages” in television, Oedipa Maas tries to unravel the significance of Metzger’s/Baby Igor’s film Cashiered and later that of W.A.S.T.E. and The Tristero. Neither is able to make the necessary connections that would make sense of these perceived codes and messages, a reflection of postmodern thought which insists on the absence of absolutes. If even science is suspect, religion a conspiracy to numb/dumb the population, and government to be feared, only paranoia remains. All authorities, such as historians and sacred texts are shown to have no founding. For instance, the recounting of the skirmish between the Confederate man-of-war “Disgruntled” and Russian cruisers is “not too clear”: “One of them may have fired, if it did then the other responded; but both were out of range”. Here authoritative text is also deemed unreliable: “If you believe an excerpt from the “Bogatir” or “Gaidamak”’s log ... now somewhere in the Krasnyi Arkhiv” the “Disgruntled” vanished during the attack. Similarly Maas is never able to find the definitive version of the Courier’s Tragedy. There is no original, only copies of copies like Metzger’s analysis of an actor playing a lawyer who, in front of a jury, “becomes an actor”. In the bio-pic of Metzger’s life, a one-time lawyer plays “an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor”. Although the pilot to the film is in a climate-controlled vault in a Hollywood studio so that it is indestructible, the version they are watching has the reels out of order. Likewise nature is imitated as an “artificial windstorm” blowing a statue’s dress in front of the hotel and the artificial island surrounded by the fake Lake Inverarity.