#postmodern lit

[vapor-bae]

"She was my darling: difficult, morose -

But still my darling."

-Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

[aminesselephant]

Long novel's written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along in its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveller

[oregon--donor]

Has anyone read Don Delillo's White Noise?

[subtextures]

It suddenly seemed that forgetting was just another form of remembering, just as remembering was just another form of forgetting.

Dubravka Ugresic, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

[iam-theplague]

"I have a thousand faces and a thousand names. I am nobody I am everybody. I am me I am you. I am here there forward back in out. I stay everywhere I stay nowhere. I stay present I stay absent."

William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead

[stellardrift]

Lowly, longly a wail went forth. Pure Yawn lay low. On the mead of the hillock lay, heartsoul dormant mid shadowed landshape, brief wallet to his side, and arm loose, by his staff of citron briar, tradition stick pass-on. His dream monologue was over, of cause, but his drama parapolylogic had yet to be, affact. Most distressfully (but, my dear, howe successfully!) to wail he did, his locks of a lucan tinge, quickrich, ripely rippling, unfilleted, ouze of his sidewiseopen mouth the breath of him, evenso languishing as the princeliest treble treacle or lichee chewchow purse could buy. Yawn in a semiswoon lay awailing and (hooh!) what helpings of honeyful swoothead (phew!), which earpiercing dulcitude! As were you suppose to go and push with your bluntblank pin in hand upinto his fleshasplush cushionettes of some chubby boybold love of an angel. Hwoah!

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p474

[lux-says-blog]

'Blood and Guts in Highschool' (1978), the highly experimental, politically ambivalent, and reflexively academic work of Kathy Acker has been described to be a key piece of evidence for the uselessness of theory in The Shape of the Signifier.

"In a garden of forking paths:

Acker's fiction regularly and self-consciously exhibits the traces of her encounters with continental theory. She read—and read carefully—Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Herbert Marcuse, Hélène Cixous, and Georges Bataille. In a "radically postmodern" body of work marked, as one critic puts it, by "plagiarism, parody, pastiche, and other antirealist techniques," Acker's explicit citations of theoretical works often occasion critical commentary (Hawkins 637). Critics are less willing, however, to consider how the narrative strategies of her novels aestheticize and politicize the philosophical texts she consumed so readily. This essay will consider the place of theory and of theorization in Acker's work, taking that work as a case-study, [End Page 88] an example of what highly theoretically engaged fiction written at the cusp of a nascent theory boom might look like. I will read here a text most frequently introduced into the postwar literary survey as an example of the intersection between postmodern formal difficulty and late second-wave feminism, the violently politicized anti-novel Blood and Guts in High School (1978). Various strands of this "postmodern pastiche" regularly interrupt other strands, as the novel folds in on itself, circles back through revised allegorizations of what seem to be the same basic plot, and works itself into nihilistic stasis. The novel thematically replicates a set of arguments drawn from theoretical gender analyses, the interpellations of global capital and "disciplinary society," and theories of subject formation. It plays with avant-garde aesthetics (Jean Genet's absurdist theater, for example), as well as with allegorical romance (Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter [1850] or the folk tale Snow-White and Rose-Red [1812]). And through its radical pastiche of a shockingly wide range of citations, the novel explores both the formal possibilities made available by poststructuralist analysis and the emancipatory political potential of aesthetic innovation.

Thus, Blood and Guts makes itself fertile—and ultimately frustrating—ground for allegorical readings that follow the main "plot" of the novel, a plot that goes something like this. The protagonist (Janey Smith) is involved in an incestuous relationship with her father (Johnny) when her father decides to leave her for another woman. Janey leaves Merida, Mexico and goes to New York where she falls in with The Scorpions (a street gang), engages in all kinds of delinquent behavior, gets pregnant twice, and has two abortions. She becomes a petty thief. Janey gets a job at a "hippy bakery" and is disgusted by bourgeois customers (37). She is raped, falls in love with her rapist, and returns to her life of crime with the Scorpions. Janey and friends get in a terrible car accident; almost everyone dies. Interlude: Janey dreams while (presumably) recovering from her accident. Continuation: Janey is kidnapped and delivered to Mr. Linker, a Persian slave-trader, who trains her to be a prostitute. Interlude: Janey reads The Scarlet Letter, learns rudimentary Farsi, and writes some rough "translations" of Sextus Propertius. Continuation: Janey is "ready to hit the streets" but has cancer and so is dismissed by Mr. Linker (116). She goes to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet. She and Genet swap stories. Genet takes Janey, in hijab, to Alexandria (at this point the novel turns into a rough "translation" of The Screens [1961]). Janey and Genet are jailed for stealing, but they escape and walk through the desert together. Rebels take over Alexandria, Genet abandons her, and Janey dies. Interlude: a narrator has an after-death experience in which she steals a book from Catullus's tomb. Continuation: more Janeys are born, and they "covered the earth" (165). Fin.

Critics have long tended to read Blood and Guts allegorically: Janey is a figure for the woman writer (Acker) in a male-dominated society, and the novel in its entirety is an extended indictment of that society's sexual and imperial politics.7 The interludes in the novel's central plot, then, are failed attempts to liberate the female body and voice. The closing lines of the book—"All I want is a taste of your lips, / boy, / All I want is a taste of your lips"—lines apparently spoken by the proliferation of post-Janey replicas, return us to the same frustration with authority and to the same insistent hetero desire that drives the original Janey's nightmarish existence (165). These lines repeat a series of traumatic returns marking the internalization of phallogocentric sexuality, [End Page 89] the "endless, dreary discovery of Oedipus" at the center of every love affair and every text (Deleuze and Guattari 20). The new Janeys don't seem to have learned anything from Ur-Janey. They are still bloody, sex-crazed high school rebels and will probably carry out the same obsessive sexual abjection, get the same pelvic inflammatory disease, and eat the same shit with Genet. Several critics take this approach: they read Blood and Guts as a failed attempt to think outside patriarchal oppression. Whether they read Acker as exemplary of feminine writing à la Cixous or of poetic language à la Kristeva, they classify the novel as an attempt to think outside phallogocentrist culture; they do so, in particular, by focusing on the moments in which it violently depicts the collision of its protagonist and the male-centered order that simultaneously interpellates and rejects her. The problem with this general approach, however, is that reading Blood and Guts as a roughly linear narrative centered on the liberatory struggle of heroine and author alike (critics regularly conflate them) upholds the very binary we want the novel to undermine. In other words, we tend to classify the genuinely disruptive moments of the novel as politically unreadable.

If we read Blood and Guts for its allegorical content, for the way it uses formal disruption to mirror its thematic engagements, we miss the novel's complex set of meditations on the usefulness of theory in life, in politics, and in art. We miss, in other words, the novel's serious interrogation of praxis, an interrogation that depends on Acker's explicit engagement with the poststructuralist modes of critique her professional readers have frequently read alongside—but not necessarily in—her work. If we focus on the complex machinations of Acker's "anti-narrative" in Blood and Guts, on the interruptions within interruptions and suspensions within suspensions, we end up with a reading of the novel that is substantially more self-conscious than the one that asks whether it does or does not offer a positive model of feminist liberation, whether it does or does not offer escape from the interpellations of late capital. Furthermore, the reading I'll offer here by no means closes off feminist or anti-capitalist interpretation. In fact, by reading the novel's formal discontinuity as theoretical meditation, we make legible a prodigiously synthetic assessment of the ways poststructuralist discourse exposes a culture of inescapably binding social inequity. Further, though, we bring to view a model of reading and writing that opens multiple avenues for critical analysis and political action in the face of that inequity.

Acker's novel incorporates at least three main threads of poststructuralist discourse into Janey's narrative. The first is an exploration of biopower; the second is a reading of the oedipal family as pathology; and the third is an analysis of the gender politics of language. The philosophical counterpart to Acker's vision of sociality and human history is the Foucault of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison andThe History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, both of which Acker read while she was working on Blood and Guts. On the oedipalization of the family, she reads (and explicitly references) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus.8 And on the prison of being-in-language, she could have read any number of writers: her arguments mirror the arguments for phallogocentrism made by second-wave feminists like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray as well as those offered in the work of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Acker's novel is ideal for my purposes for two reasons. First, her work explicitly acknowledges several of its theoretical debts; those it does [End Page 90] not explicitly acknowledge, it reconstructs through Janey's repetitious narrative of oedipalization and abjection. These arguments play out most forcefully, for example, in Janey's "book report" on The Scarlet Letter, a report that mirrors her experience in Mr. Linker's whorehouse. "Teach me a new language, Dimwit," Janey writes in mimicry of Hester Prynne, "a language that means something to me" (Blood and Guts 96). Likewise, as Janey learns Farsi during her imprisonment with the slave-trader Linker, she practices verb conjugation through the following series: "to have Janey, to buy Janey, to want Janey, to see Janey, to come Janey, to beat up Janey, to eat Janey, to rob Janey, to kidnap Janey, to kill Janey, to know Janey" (84). The metonymic string that binds "to have" to "to know" replicates the protagonist's repetitive identification of rape, sex, death, and subjectivity, but, importantly, it binds these abjections to language or to coming-into-language. Janey learns a new language, but that language repeats what she already knows—just as in the sing-song poem that closes the book, the Janeys that "[cover] the earth" repeat the "blood and guts in high school" that are "all I know" for the originary Janey (165). Blood and Guts is a novel that is as much about writing as about politics, a novel in search of the relation between writing, literary history, theory, and politics.

Which brings me to the most important reason Blood and Guts makes a compelling case-study on the relation between poststructuralist theory and aesthetic practice: its apparent formal incoherence. Critics have made of much of Acker's tendency in Blood and Guts (and in her body of work more generally) to refuse the conventions of realistic narrative in favor of a mode of writing that is open to disruption, repetition (occasionally of entire passages or pages), plagiarism, visual art, in short, all the clichés of postmodern experimentalism circa 1977. Blood and Guts contains pornographic drawings, Tantric collages, pieces of The Screens, snippets borrowed from Stéphane Mallarmé, a revision ofThe Scarlet Letter, Deleuze and Guattari's desiring-machines, a satirical "letter" from Erica Jong (which was republished as a stand-alone illustrated book in 1982), a beast-fable, a slanderous grotesque of Jimmy Carter, "translations" of Sextus Propertius, maps placing Catullus's tomb under the East River, Egyptian mythology—and this list only catalogues the more exciting features. The centerpiece of this essay will be a close reading of one particularly strange textual (and visual) feature of Acker's book: a series of dream-maps. The dream-maps, labeled "A Map of My Dreams," "My Dreams Stop, The Visions Begin …," and "Dream Map 2," respectively, are sandwiched within the fantasy "How spring came to the land of snow and icicles," a beast-fable about a cold, hungry bear trying to get shelter in a home shared by a "hideous monster," a beaver, and their pet rat Fritzy (Blood and Guts 44). That parable is, in turn, sandwiched between "Inside High School" and "Outside High School" in the Janey-narrative. In what follows, in order to offer a concrete example of the exasperating object that confronts the reader here, I'll first sketch one of the maps ("A Map of My Dreams") as it appears on the page. Then, I'll look more closely at a single narrative as it unfolds over all three maps. These maps, I argue, both aestheticize a series of poststructuralist arguments and offer a forceful argument of their own for anti-narrative as a theoretically justified response to the insights into subject formation, linguistic belonging, social construction, gender politics, and sexuality poststructuralism offers its students. They do so precisely in the way their formal disruption [End Page 91] replicates the broader formal strategies of Acker's novel. Further, these formal disruptions prefigure a set of theoretical arguments that, for several contemporary theorists, follow from the practical limitations of poststructuralism."

From Postmodern Fiction as Poststructualist Theory: Kathy Acker's 'Blood and Guts in Highschool' - Katie R. Muth 

Narrative, Volume 19, Number 1, January 2011, pp. 86-110 (Article)

[meretriciousish]

can we talk about how my entire bloody academic (both in and out of school) background has led me up to existential thought?

because actually, my life is so philosophically shiny right now i'm having difficulty believing it.

and then i get to write my "I AM A GOOD STUDENT BODY MEMBER YES TAKE ME TAKE ME HARD" essays about belief and knowledge and it's just like a;dslfijad;foiahdg;oaihgadf