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kathy acker, a conversation
acm: Like Shakespeare. Virgil.
ka: Greek Drama. I mean, that’s what classical drama was.
The whole idea of originality is something that came in the novels in the western white world with Samuel Richardson.
With
Clarrisa. And there’s a great deal of class argument about that, because that was the rise of the bourgeoisie—
acm: When things got to be property you mean?
ka: You got it. And the rise of what we call “traditional narrative” in the novel
really came about with Samuel Richardson and the rise of the bourgeoisie. I’m just repeating Barthes. This is the idea of
the “I” as ownership. The reader empathizes with the main character, with the narrator, and the feeling is, I can own knowledge.
I can take knowledge into myself and become a better person, by going through this text and having an epiphany. Which is all
based on kind of owning morality. Right? I’m a good person, I’m a moral person. I’ll become a better person if I learn I
shouldn’t commit adultery or whatever. You know, by going through the novel with this person. And what I call the
“bourgeoisie narrative,” which is very much the traditional form in American Literature, really started at that time.
acm: So, when you find yourself suddenly moved to have your characters become the
characters in
Wuthering Heights, and suddenly your novel turns into
Wuthering Heights, I’ve always felt that part of what you’re
doing is—I don’t want to say revealing the other text because that would be insulting to Emily Brontë—I mean, she knows how to
write her book—but it’s a kind of passionate connection and not at all ironic.
ka: No, the ironic use of other texts only occurred in my early work.
That’s when I used the Harold Robbins, which is what I got in trouble using, but I didn’t really, but that’s another story.
But like, my use of true romance texts.
acm: Yeah, like pornography texts, I suppose.
ka: Right. I haven’t done that in years. Basically, my use of other texts
now is a way of try to have a dialogue with these people. I really feel what I way in
In Memorium to Identity dealt with
a Faulkner text. I really got into Faulkner, I felt I was having a dialogue with the guy.
acm: When a person reads your books, what you do is you find embedded in them this
whole set of the books in the world that are passionately about your stuff. And there’s this whole way in which you connect up
to this whole past. Lady Mirisaki and Genet. For my students, for example, reading
Blood and Guts, you know, they’re struggling
through the first half and then they come to the book reports.
ka: Yeah, that’s a book where I was finding out what I was doing. I had done those early
books which are now reprinted in
Portrait of an Eve. And I was going, in
Blood and Guts, what am I going to do now? I know I have
to proceed, but I don’t know how. And it really took me till that section of the book to figure out, what am I doing? What do I want
to do next? What they’re feeling is what I felt while I wrote the book. So, that makes a lot of sense to me. I grew up in a world of
male writers, where they kept saying, “We know the world, we know how things are.” They were very bombastic and use that male bombastic
voice. And I never wanted to be the Great American Writer, better than everyone else. I just wanted to be a writer who could make a
living writing.
acm: There’s the moment in
Blood and Guts when Janie walks up to Genet and she says, “I’m a writer.”
Whoa. [all laugh] We never knew that before.
ka:Yeah, that was me. That sure was.
acm: There’s a little bit of the autobiographical that slips in, and it comes through despite that denial.
We make our characters out of pieces of ourselves…
ka: Well, we have to in a way, don’t we? Even though we don’t want to? I just wanted to
talk to all these writers that I was in love with. And still am. It’s like, when you read somebody and you go, I want to write that.
I can’t live without that, I’ve gotta have that sense, and I still do it.
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