by
Douglas Messerli
Kathy Acker Literal
Madness: My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Florida (New York: Grove Press, 1988)
Suitably, this Acker has chosen, as her
subject of the first of two novels included in this book, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
the Rimbaud of the 1960s generation, who was bludgeoned to death in 1975 by a
young man who Pasolini may or may not have sought out for a sexual encounter.
In Acker's version it hardly matters. For Pasolini is not really her focus but
serves as an emblem of the position in which she would place herself: a
political-sexual being who writes from a need to express those issues in action
rather than the desire to create an aesthetic object.
As for Pasolini, sex, language, and
violence are Acker's themes, which through a collaging of madcap renderings of
scenes from Shakespeare, an absurdly intense correspondence between the Bronte
sisters, ridiculous parodies of German Expressionist theater of the 1920s and
of the present-Situationist aesthetics, and personal memories and asides, Acker
explores from a multitude of perspectives. Through such radical shifts Acker
prods the reader, as a child might a chameleon, to re-adapt to each new backdrop,
demonstrating his own colors—political and sexual—in the process.
If this sounds like a "profound
experience," Acker means it as such. With graduate seminar precision she
drops statements into her humorous blending of porn and corn such as the
following: "Language is more important than meaning. Don't make anything
out of broken-up syntax cause you're looking to make meaning where nonsense
will. Of course nonsense isn't just nonsense." An interesting concept. But
for those who seek in Acker's writing a true exploration of
"broken-up" syntax, her writing will be a disappointment—unless by
broken syntax Acker means her insistent investigation of jargon, cliché, and
stereotype with language such as "Huh" and, Romeo speaking this time,
"As an upper-middle-class Jewish boy, I'm trying to do what's right by my
wife."
For the most part, Acker's language, in
part because of its constant shift of context, its borrowings—the veneration of
plagiarism she expresses—doesn't allow us to comprehend the values of her
language, good or bad. All becomes equal in this Acker's satiric hands. We are
forced through Acker's devices to comprehend how different languages affect and
manipulate us. But are some languages, some ways of communicating, richer than
others? Are there languages—languages of politics, sex, even of violence—which
we can speak that open ourselves more fully to one another? This Acker doesn't
really seek such answers; her transparent narrative collage of forms and
content merely elicits such questions.
But there is another Acker, a writer of
the late 1960s and 1970s of The Childlike
Life of the Black Tarantula and The
Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, who is represented in Literal Madness by Kathy Goes
to Haiti. And this Acker presents us with another kind of writing, a
writing that shares some of the same methods and concerns, but speaks to us out
of a delightful mock-naïveté that reminds one at times of the Dick and Jane
readers rewritten as manuals for politics and sex. Here Acker presents herself
less as the naughty semiotician lecturing the MLA in leather tights than as a
sort of drugged-out Judy Garland, perpetually announcing, as she does in Kathy Goes to Haiti, "I just want
to see Haiti." And see Haiti she does.
Through the eyes of the various men who
follow her about, each demanding of her that he become her
"boyfriend," Acker explores all the political, social, and sexual
ramifications of this colonial culture. When Kathy falls in love with Roger,
the son of the wealthy land baron le Mystere, we are treated to a wonderfully
insightful portrayal of corruption and power of the world dominated by Papa
Doc. By the time she visits a voodoo doctor to free her of the spell cast over
her, the young wide-eyed seeker of adventure, who throughout the novel keeps
searching for an American to speak to, finds herself singing in a language she
does not understand.
In writing of the sort found in Kathy Goes to Haiti, we recognize that
Acker has been able to fuse languages, to bring different languages together in
a simultaneity that encourages the reader to read everything, as the voodoo
doctor keeps insisting about his actions, as if it was the most important thing
in life. Nonsense isn't just nonsense in this work, and Acker is able to engage
the reader accordingly in a fable that is at once hilarious and terrifying,
that has all the logic of a Caribbean tour and a nightmare combined.
And this is the Acker I prefer.
Los Angeles, 1988
Reprinted
from Los Angeles Times Book Review,
Sunday, February 21, 1988.
